OCM Vol27 Page30 Preparing for the Lord

Forty years of hesitation about faith

For over thirty years I have been labeled as Sir or Teacher, and yet it was not until three or four months ago did I start to be called Brother. I have been used to giving speeches to the crowd, but giving a testimony for my Christian belief is my very first.

Having been baptized, I was often asked: "Any ups and downs recently that brought about your enlightenment?" As a matter of fact, for the same kind of Christian belief, some people have to go through all kinds of difficulties first, as a poet described: Run to the end of the creek before discovering the rising cloud; others simply get to it straight up, like: Run to the peak and all mountains become small. God is able to guide different people in different ways, but all who believe will eventually converge.

In fact I have already wasted forty years worth of time. In January of 1956, the year I was 15 years old, I received my graduation certificate from the Department of Biblical Principles of a Bible school in Hong Kong. It was not until I was fifty-five years old did I receive my baptism certificate in Australia and become a little student in church.

Some people readily provided me consolation: "Don't blame yourself too much. God has His own plan. Even though your spiritual life is young, your thirty-three years of teaching experience is at least a good preparation period." Others helped me find an excuse: "It is usually hard for scholars of Chinese culture to believe in the Lord. Confucianism, Buddhism and the like all cause resistance." These two seemingly isolated opinions are really talking about the same thing: as far as people like me are concerned, did Chinese literature, history and philosophy cause negative resistance, or did they provide positive learning experience that in turn prepared for our ultimate belief in the Lord?

Who can understand the mystery of the universe?

Indeed, one of Confucius' famous sayings goes: "How do you know about death while you still don't know about life?" He believed reality was more real than afterlife. Zhuangzi wrote: "A saint lives outside our world and he is incomprehensible." Unfortunately not everybody wanted to be an ostrich. For the past thousands of years, millions of people have constantly been searching about issues of life and death, the mystery of tragedies and blessings, and the key to success and failure. Many oriental scholars go to Buddhism for solutions. The explanation provided by Buddhism is that all things are doomed. I think this explanation is a bit too vague and can't be taken seriously. What is the highest first principle? And what is the final cause for all? In the heavens there are the sun, the moon and the stars; on earth there are mountains, rivers, animals and plants. A poet once wrote: Colorful twilight demands more than a painter's craftsmanship; gorgeous plants can't settle with a tailor's wonder. A computer has a designer, and yet who designs our brains and who is supposed to master our brains? Two years ago I visited an observatory in Hong Kong. I happened to read a line on the wall by Einstein: The most incomprehensible thing in the universe is that it is so comprehensible!

How did the universe come into existence? How did wisdom come into being? Atheism really cannot come up with a reasonable explanation. Agnosticism tries to avoid answering these questions altogether. Materialism maintains that labor created civilization. Bees and ants have been collectively laboring for tens of thousands of years and they haven't changed a bit. Evolutionism shares similar fate. Darwin believed in the Lord at a later age and he was regretful for all his theories. According to a report published in Asian Weekly on June 16, 1996, Brian Gardner, a British archaeologist, recently admitted that the Pilton skull discovered in 1912, which was considered to have provided the evolutionary missing link between human species and apes, was a conspiracy arranged by the former head of the British Nature Museum Martin Hinton, who mounted a human skull on the jawbone of an ape! The fraud was exposed to public in the 1950s and the cheater ceased to exist in 1961. So much so, but even if there is such a thing called evolution, what will the true force of evolution be? The more fundamental question is: what do human beings have that is worth being proud of?

Why all the waste of efforts?

On the subject of hardship and wickedness, neither Taoism nor Confucianism can come up with a satisfactory answer. Domestic problems, national problems, international problems, all problems. The result is we worry about everything. Confucianism runs out of wits; Taoism simply watches; Buddhism runs away from it. I used to live in a formless state for fifty years. A Chinese saying goes: One begins to go downhill at the age of fifty. How discouraging! When one reaches fifty, he really needs to go through tremendous changes both physically and mentally. Fifty years of vanity can come up empty, and the experience of the whole life can end up with nothing. All have become helpless, irritating and tiresome.

There are no new things under the sun… Meaningless, meaningless, like chasing after the wind. What an accurate saying! It exactly describes what I have in mind. I have heard about it a lot and I have thought about it a lot, but from which classical work does the saying come from? It's amazing that Solomon's Ecclesiastes contains all the essence of Zhuangzi's optimism and Buddhist's pessimism. Solomon made a step further by superseding all with faith and transcending emptiness under the sun into faith above the sun! Over the past two thousand years, hundreds of thousands of followers of Confucianism and Taoism made thousands of miles of journey, read thousands of books and even wrote thousands of books—all for making a better life and searching for human destiny. Some cut their left arm to show their determination; others didn't hesitate climbing over the mountains and sailing over the seas… It seems to me they were respectable and yet pitiable. Why all the waste of efforts?

How can Chinese culture be perfect?

I very much agree with many overseas Chinese Christians in saying that God makes us live in alienated countries because He wants to give us a chance to think about ourselves and about our country's culture and history. We never admit our sins and we never repent. Although our artistic vocabulary is full of humble words, we don't really know how to be humble. The Bible said long time ago: "There is no one righteous, not even one." Mencius said: "If a nobleman is unclean, people will walk by him with their nose covered. If a poor man takes a bath, he can serve the king." In fact, even if one takes a lot of baths and applies a lot of perfume, he or she will still be no more than a skin-covered body, whose soul is full of weakness and wickedness.

All the well-known emperors in Chinese history, no matter what nice words they used, and wasted, to name their dynasty, they were all evils like many foreign kings. Like the gentiles, much of the wickedness in thousands of years of Chinese history originated from royal dictatorship, which was a social system where one man applied his lust to many and many in turn applied slavery to one man. Even today, men want to be dictators no matter what they are called. They want to play god, which is the most sinful of all sins. A Chinese saying goes: The right way is to be loyal to the people and be faithful to the Divine. Then a good question to ask is: "If a king has no faith in the Divine, how can he remain loyal to the people?"

Indeed, emperors' judgment and saints' ethics in ancient China were all based on moral intellectualism which, due to lack of faith in the absolute God, lacked commonality and effectiveness. This was Xu Guang-qi's retrospective opinion on Chinese culture, a Catholic in the late Ming Dynasty. The ethics of Confucianism was not built upon any ultimate religion, therefore it does not appear to have any binding force; instead it sometimes becomes a hotbed for moral hypocrisy. In spring of 1996 when tensions between the Mainland and Taiwan were being built up, a friend of mine mailed me a copy of The Original Word, an ideological periodical published by the Beijing Television and Broadcast Association. In the magazine was a good article entitled The Two Principles of Religious Dialogue, which quoted Xu's viewpoint described above. The article also pointed out that Chen Du-xiu, one of the leaders of the May Fourth New Culture Movement and one of the earliest Marxists in China, also maintained in The New Youth seventy-six years ago (February of 1920) that one was supposed to "transplant Jesus' sublime and great personality and hot and deep sensuality into our own blood, so that we may be saved from the cold-blooded, dark and muddy pit."

The death of Jesus was due to human arrogance, greed, malice, cruelty, jealousy, falsehood and selfishness. At the same time, His death further exposed all of these ill qualities.

Because of selfishness, the ruling Roman Empire oppressed the ruled Jews.

Because of cruelty, there was the cross on which a living man was supposed to be nailed and to suffer to death. Before being nailed, the sufferer had to carry the cross and walk a difficult path.

Because of arrogance, there were those who thought they were specially made to execute the law and to rule it all.

Because of jealousy, greed and malice, there was Judas who, being one of the twelve apostles, would betray his own teacher so that they falsely accused the righteous and crucified him for no good reason.

Jesus never counterattacked, nor did He complain. Instead He prayed for those who oppressed Him. Who else in the world could act like this?

God gives mankind the best gift ever through His own incarnation; Christians in turn present the most precious salvation to public as opposed to concealing the privilege to themselves. Ten years ago I wrote a couplet for a Christian friend of mine:

From North to South, love each other because we love God;

Highland cities or deep lakes, Jesus is the foundation of all.

That friend of mine has long become God's servant. Unfortunately I, the one who wrote the couplet, only wrote empty talks and was not even worth sounding the cymbal.

Forty-five years ago, Professor Luo Xiang-lin, a forty-five-year-old Chinese historian, exiled to Hong Kong after being driven from place to place. He was baptized and he believed in Christ as his foundation. I happened to be one of his students, and yet, regretfully, I had never been able to share his feeling until today. And in terms of baptism, I was ten years older than his.

In one of the group meetings after my baptism, a serious and sincere friend said he was doubtful and hesitant, much like I used to be. I said I'd rather be the father of the demon-possessed child described in Chapter 9 of The Gospel of Mark, who said: "I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief!" It's not wise to wait and refuse to say you believe till you feel you believe a hundred percent through your own ability.

Indeed, I am not a patient person, but why did I hesitate with regard to belief?

Therefore when I am asked again: "Why did you believe?"

I will reply: "Why didn't I believe till now?"

The author was a professor in the Hong Kong Chinese University. He is now retired and lives in the east coast of Australia.