April 8, 2008
Henan Province, China
SiowFong and I occasionally call Lydia a “Fengcheng girl”, which generally brings a smile to her face. Although Lydia has now resided in America nearly fifteen months, which is slightly longer than her twelve months of life in China, her beginnings will always be in China for she was born there.
Speaking of China, I have been reading about Henan Province, which is part of a chapter called “He Has Spoken” in a book entitled The Faith: Given Once, For All -- What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and Why It Matters. Charles Colson, an internationally known columnist and author, the founder of Prison Fellowship (the largest nonprofit organization serving prisoners worldwide), and the winner of the 1993 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, and Harold Fickett wrote the book, and the following is the part about Henan Province, China:
“During Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China another Christian community faced a hostile empire. Red Guards, mostly university and high school students, flooded into cities, towns, and villages and systematically persecuted anyone they believed in violation of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought. As many as 100 million people were victimized through torture and imprisonment in forced labor camps; 1 million were executed. To be caught in possession of a Bible meant torture and imprisonment at the very least.
A visitor to Henan Province in those days would have seen scrupulously quiet villages with women outside of ramshackle homes doing the washing or sweeping away the dust. A few of these women were actually lookouts, as groups of Christians risked death by studying the Scriptures together. The house church of a village in Henan Province was blessed if it had one copy of the Bible. The texts used for Bible study were hand-copied sheets. The community’s Bible was often protected by being broken into several portions and distributed among different houses. If one house was raided and its Scriptures confiscated, the community would not lose the entire Bible. To secure more copies, the entire Bible was frequently hand copied, sometimes by teams of people who worked around the clock. When confiscating raids seized their Scriptures, the people of Henan would in desperation dig up the graves of Christians who had been buried with their Bibles before 1949. These copies would be mostly illegible from damp and decay, but the Christians of Henan longed even for fragments.
During the years of Mao’s rule the patriarchs, or ‘uncles,’ of the Chinese house church movement were imprisoned. Perhaps the greatest among these Chinese patriarchs, Wang Mingdao, was arrested for a second time on April 29, 1958. He spent the next twenty-two years in prison. During the Cultural Revolution his treatment became especially brutal. He wore handcuffs for four months straight and was beaten daily. When ask how in old age he had endured, he said, ‘The Word.’ The same could be said of the entire Chinese Church.
In 1949 when Mao came to power, there were about 4 million Christians in China. Today, there are reportedly over 100 million. Henan Province, once considered an ‘atheistic zone,’ was said by the authorities to have caught ‘Christianity fever.’ Other provinces, including Anhui and Hebei, came to be known as ‘Jesus nests.’ There are probably as many evangelical Christians today in China as there are in the United States. In the last thirty years China’s Christians have triumped through suffering much in the way the first Christians did in Rome. . .
Arrayed against the faithful in their evangelical house churches and the underground Catholics were state-church collaborationists. What did they preach? A theological liberalism ‘infused’ with Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse-tung Thought. These collaborators decried the ‘fundamentalists’ and mocked their love of the Scriptures.
I asked a China expert why Christianity took its genuine great leap forward during the darkest days of the Cultural Revolution. He said, ‘Light shines in darkness.’ . . .
So what is it about this book, the Bible, that causes people to give their lives for it, causes oppressors to try to destroy it, and so infuriates the cultural elite today?
Clearly, the Bible is unique. Over the centuries many great books have been written, including those by Aristotle, Plato, Shakespear, Cervantes, and on and on; they have had an influence, of course. But no book. . .has ever caused the controversy aroused by the Bible or invited such severe resistance or inspired its followers to such extraordinary actions.
The reason is what the Bible claims for itself. Although it is in many aspects a book like many others, a collection of ancient writings that includes a variety of genres from historical narrative to introspective philosophy, it is much more; it purports to be the Word of God itself. Through this book God speaks, giving us an understanding of reality that transcends anything that can be envisioned by the human mind alone. The Bible, written by men but through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, gives us God’s eternal perspective on the world – truth not bound by any time or place (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
This is why Christians defend the Bible with their very lives. And since the Bible calls followers to an allegiance higher than the state, tyrants seek to destroy it.
Christians find that the Bible’s authority, its textual integrity, its historical accuracy, and its transformative power attest to its unique status as God’s Word.” (Source: Charles Colson and Harold Ficket. The Faith: Given Once, For All. Zondervan: 2008. pages 44-47.)
After I finished that section of the book, I thought about the lifelong privilege and responsibility that SiowFong and I have to teach and to show Lydia that God is real, God is personal, and God has spoken through His Word, the Bible.
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