Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
An interesting thing about the LC experience is that it began as a reaction to Western imperialism, which came to Asia alongside the gospel imperative. Eventually, WN and the indigenous Chinese church threw off the yoke of the running dogs of the West, i.e. the denominations.
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I'm wary of hijacking
Indiana's thread, and wanted to continue my discussion here.
If you think my writings are flowery hyperbole and unrelated to reality as it occurred on the ground, I googled some words in the quote above, and the first link was a discussion with Xi Lian, professor of world religion at Duke University, who got a Christianity Today book award in 2011 for his book "Redeemed by Fire" on modern Christianity in China.
https://www.faithandleadership.com/q...op-its-own-way
Quote:
For decades after Protestant Christianity was first brought to China, it was resented and rejected by many people as a foreign religion, as part of this Western imperialistic expansion into China.
[In] the early 18th century, Christianity was banned, and missionaries were not allowed into China. It was only after the Opium War of 1839 that China was forcibly opened to the outside world. As China opened to Western trade and Western missions, Christianity spread into the interior of China, so it came as part of the Western expansion.
Unlike in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries came to China with no gunboats backing them, in the 19th century you have gunboats backing these Christians working in China, and that’s why the Chinese resisted and resented Christianity.
(Indigenous Christianity) is behind the current flourishing of Christianity in China. The roots can be traced to the early 20th century, when independent groups emerged outside of the missions, in some cases very antagonistic to Western missions.
Those indigenous movements were able to respond to the spiritual, emotional and other needs of the Chinese population during a period of much chaos -- of warlords, of foreign aggression, of so much suffering. Their message met the Chinese people’s needs in various ways. In terms of the nationalistic sentiment, they separated themselves from missions, so they could say, “No, we are not the running dogs of Western imperialists. God directly speaks to us. We have a revelation from God.”
They also developed a form of Christianity that resonated with elements in the Chinese culture -- a kind of charismatic, Pentecostal worship with speaking in tongues, visions and trances. It was intelligible particularly to Christians at the grassroots level, and it was that kind of Christianity that survived the Communist persecution through the 1950s and into the chaos and the ravages of the Cultural Revolution and emerged after Mao died in 1976.
It emerged from all of this chaos and the persecution of the Cultural Revolution in a way that has really surprised people.
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My point was that in the 19th century Western economic, military, political and cultural expansion forced China to open itself to the (European) gospel, and that eventually Witness Lee returned the favor, and exported Asian cultural imperialism to the USA in 1960, subsequently to Europe, in the form of Watchman Nee's "Normal Christian Church" model, and with his own "high peak theology", contrasted to the "low", "dark", "fallen", and "degraded" condition of non-LC (read: Western) teachings and practices.
Once you start to connect the dots, the cultural connections and forces become so glaringly obvious that you really have to be willfully obtuse not to see them. Everyone please repeat after me, "I'm proud to be an ostrich with my head stuck in the sand!"