Quote:
Originally Posted by Nell
Jesus also loved the people of his day by telling the truth. ... Sometimes, the truth hurts, yet the greatest love is to tell the truth, because, the truth will set you free.
|
What is the truth? A readily agreed-upon set of facts which has been tested by history. It isn't too much to say that once there was a distinct people, the Jews, whose cultural, political, economic, and religious life was centered in a city called Jerusalem. Archeological excavations have shown the various gates and walls used in the city, as well as the aqueducts supplying water. Roman and Assyrian stele prominently show captured Jewish religious symbols, providing independent verification of the existence of this people and its culture.
This people had books, parchments which outlined their religious activities. Recent discoveries in the Judean desert have verified the antiquity of these writings.
https://global.oup.com/academic/cont...?cc=fr&lang=en
Oxford university press is a respected scholarly publisher, and they (among many others) have ample studies on Jewish religious thought and practices of the late classical period. One of those Jewish ideas, looming increasingly large under centuries of foreign domination, was the idea of an Israelite King, or Messiah, who'd rise up to rule unchallenged, and would restore Israel to its former glory. This leader was to be a great religious or spiritual figure, whose power came from a unique and even unparalleled relationship with God, and who was thus to be the clear leader in temporal (earthly, political, or societal) matters as well. With a strong central control, peace and prosperity would be established in the land; God would be glorified and humanity would be restored to a place of promised blessedness.
Isaiah 11:6,7 "And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; And a little boy will lead them. Also the cow and the bear will graze, Their young will lie down together, And the lion will eat straw like the ox..." We can't say it's "truth" that these scriptures fed what a fervent expectation of the Jewish people under Roman rule, but most scholars feel that there was an discussion going on amongst religious, political and social thought of the day, referencing a Messianic Expectation amongst the general populace.
And now we come to the story of Jesus the Nazarene, either a remarkable, multi-part forgery or a narrative with some historical truth woven into it. Did Jesus rise from the dead? Was He really born of a virgin and the Holy Ghost? Certainly there's debate on many quarters, but a consensus remains that a narrative of this Person emerged relatively early in respect to the facts which it purports to convey. In other words we have a number of first-person accounts which are independently verified. The apostle Paul, for instance; nobody that I'm aware of pretends that Paul the actual person or character was a forgery. And Paul in his writing claims to have seen the disciples who were themselves witnesses of Jesus. Certainly some of Paul's epistolary writings may have been redacted or editorialized or even forged (i.e. written by someone else in the name of Paul), but the great mass of evidence points to a real man who was quite active, both in work and in writing, much of which writing survives today (note, by contrast, that his epistle to the Laodiceans apparently didn't survive [Col 4:16]).
All of which says what? To me, it says that there's a lot of truth to work with here. Surely there's grey area around the edges, as well as blank spots, and possible blind alley-ways and gaps. But the great mass of work testifies to a simple narrative: that many people, either concurrent with or close to the event in question, believed that the God who created heaven and earth loved us so much that He sent His only-begotten Son, that we might be saved and have eternal life in His name.
Etc, etc... the rest is just details. Where the 'cult' appellation comes in (and many have come in), is by significantly departing from the agreed-upon narrative, either by inserting something that fundamentally changes its message, or likewise by removing things. So we ask, to what extent did the influence of Chinese culture on the formation of the thought and practice of this particular Christian group contribute to its spectacular growth in Mainland China in the 1930s, its successful introduction to post-war USA, and the various "storms" and "turmoils" and "rebellions" which followed? I think the answer is "quite a bit"; this is of course an opinion, and not buttressed by much objective observation, i.e. what we'd call "facts." But it's encouraging that someone like Teresa Zimmerman-Liu is trying to take this on: how much of this Chinese-flavored Christian narrative, when transposed upon Western society, will seem strange, and alien, or 'cultic' versus 'spiritual' or 'biblically-based'?
I'd encourage our readers to question and to challenge. Don't take the earnest assurance and bland repetition of your source as the equivalent of certitude, or "truth", or "facts". Test
all things and hold to what is good. If your church leaders say that asking questions is akin to rebellion, what is it that they're so threatened by? Why does asking questions constitute such a formidable challenge to the established authority? What is that established authority built upon that it apparently can't survive even the most feeble or tentative probings?
I'd also encourage folks to seek multiple accounts, or sources, before assigning something to the realm of actual existence or reality. And if your source insists that you shouldn't listen to anyone else, because everyone else is either delusional or a liar, what does that say about your source? Why are they so threatened by the idea of independent verification?
For example, if someone says "We have no opinions here in the church", that leads me to wonder, Isn't that statement itself a kind of subjective assessment or opinion? And what's the cultural norm which might engender such opinion, and make it seem equivalent to reality or "truth" itself, and then allow it to be exported and flourish as a social norm? Does group cohesion require such an idea? It clearly didn't emerge in a vacuum - an idea has both a genesis and a history.
This is where contemporary scholars, such as sociologists, can come in and shed light. And I believe it would do a service to us all. We can speculate, and wonder out loud, and even offer hypotheses, but someone has to do the hard work (and it's hard work, even drudgery), to sort through the mass of social detritus and find out what actually happened that brought us all here today.