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Old 10-21-2007, 01:37 PM
Splendour Splendour is offline
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Default Re: what do christians say about chinese people

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Don't Christians think its strange that God choose not to spread his word to the entire human population?

does this suggest that Christianity is actually a man made invention and thus only exists in region it was invented?

Also, if a Christian has a Chinese friend, isn't it his duty to this person to do absolutely everything he can, including physical abuse and torture to convince the Chinese guy to save his soul and believe in Jesus?

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A lot of people in this forum can not seem to get the idea that God is transcendent. He's not bound by earth's rules. He made everything and does everything according to his own purpose. He doesn't see things the same way that people do.

The OP's question just shows how superficially he has researched this question himself.

1. Pearl S. Buck was part of a missionary family to China.

From Wikipedia some excerpts on Buck:
The Boxer Rebellion greatly affected Pearl Buck and her family. Buck wrote that during this time, “…her eight-year-old childhood … split apart.” Her Chinese friends deserted her and her family, and there were not as many Western visitors as there once were. “The streets [of China] were alive with rumors- many … based on fact- of brutality to missionaries …” Buck’s father was a missionary, so Buck’s mother, her little sister, and herself were “…evacuated to the relative safety of Shanghai, where they spent nearly a year as refugees…” (The Good Earth, Introduction) In July 1901, Buck and her family sailed to San Francisco. Not until the following year did the Sydenstrickers return back to China.

From 1920 to 1933, Pearl and John made their home in Nanking (Nanjing), on the campus of Nanking University, where both had teaching positions. In 1921, Pearl's mother died, and shortly afterwards her father moved in with the Bucks. The tragedies and dislocations which Pearl suffered in the 1920s reached a climax in March 1927, in the violence known as the "Nanking Incident." In a confused battle involving elements of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops, Communist forces, and assorted warlords, several Westerners were murdered. The Bucks spent a terrified day in hiding, after which they were rescued by American gunboats. After a trip downriver to Shanghai, the Buck family sailed to Unzen, Japan, where they spent the following year. They then moved back to Nanking, though conditions remained dangerously unsettled.

2. There are Chinese people throughout the world. You find large clusters of them especially throughout Asia in the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, probably every country in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong. These people have been evangelized and some may or may not have linked back to other Chinese in mainland China. Hong Kong used to have economic dealings with Macau on mainland China.

In the U.S. I have several friends who are Chinese Christians some of them went to Christian schools all the way up from elementary school and they tell me they thing religion in education is very important.

In one U.S. city I regularly drove down the street and used to see a sign that said it was a church for "Chinese Christians". Do you think there aren't any Christians among the Chinese in San Francisco?

At one time the Chinese had naval ships and power sometime around the time of the Renaissance but China for its own political reasons opted not to continue its navy. They have designed ship features, I think it may have been the rudder, which was considered state of the art for centuries. At the time of Columbus they had better ships than the Europeans but for internal political reasons didn't lift their own isolation from the world. China chose to be isolated. China built its own Great Wall. Maybe China had enough internal unification and warlord problems that it didn't focus on anything outside of itself.

If you study the Crusades besides the religious zealotry of Christians to reclaim the Holy Land there was also a need to defend against the Muslims "colonization". The Moors were in Spain. Doesn't anyone recall that?

From Wikipedia on the Crusades:
The immediate cause of the First Crusade was Alexius I's appeal to Pope Urban II for mercenaries to help him resist Muslim advances into territory of the Byzantine Empire. . In 1071, at the Battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine Empire was defeated, which led to the loss of all of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) save the coastlands. Although attempts at reconciliation after the East-West Schism between the Catholic Western Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church had failed, Alexius I hoped for a positive response from Urban II and got it, although it turned out to be more expansive and less helpful than he had expected.


Another excerpt:

The papacy of Pope Gregory VII had struggled with reservations about the doctrinal validity of a holy war and the shedding of blood for the Lord and had, with difficulty, resolved the question in favour of justified violence. More importantly to the Pope, the Christians who made pilgrimages to the Holy Land were being persecuted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_crusades

This type of Crusade is not unlike the 1950's Domino Theory the U.S. operated under. The U.S. tried to take an active stance in stopping communism. Thinking if they didn't fight or hold against it that it would spread. We never anticipated that communism would fall apart from internal economic causes.

You can't constantly point to the past as the reason for your conclusions if you don't know the reasons/motivations behind the history.

Take a look at this link: http://www.cjvlang.com/Dow/mission.html
It list several attempts of missionaries to get into China.
Here's the first one:

Christianity came to China not once but on several occasions.

The first was during the Tang dynasty in AD 635, when missionaries from the Church of the East (the Persian branch, cut off from the main church due to political tension between the Roman and Persian empires) came to China via the overland route. This church is normally referred to as 'Nestorian' as it follows the doctrines of Bishop Nestorius, declared heretical in AD 431. Nestorianism flourished for a while in China but did not outlast the Tang dynasty owing to the adoption of anti-religious measures in AD 845. Meanwhile, the religion had been transmitted to peripheral areas such as Mongolia

This article continues outlining multiple attempts to evangelize in China.
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