Today I had lunch with a Missionary / Pastor who spent three years in Honk Kong Pastoring a Church there. He had several fascinating insights concerning the Chinese Church and Chinese culture, one of which really caught my attention.

He was saying that the Chinese government desire the moralism that is found in Judeo-Christianity in order to support their turn to capitalism. He said that many of them have come to learn that Communism does not give the moral underpinnings that is necessary to successfully pull off a expanding Capitalism.

However he also suggested that Chinese government officials realize that this is a dangerous game they are playing. While on one hand they desire a Judeo-Christian moralism, he also said that on the other hand they also understand that the Bible is a anti-statist book.

When he said this I was dumbfounded. Here he is testifying that Chinese Communist government officials understand that the Bible is a anti-statist book and I can’t seem to get large swaths of Reformed people in these united States to understand that the Bible is a anti-statist book. Quite to the contrary large swaths of the Reformed community seem to either think that Christianity can walk hand and hand with statism, or that Christianity doesn’t care one way or another about centralized government. The Chinese Communist government officials understand the Bible better than American Christian ministers and laymen.

Other interesting insights from his conversation were his explaining how many Chinese have completely lost categories and vocabulary to talk about an extra-mundane supernatural God. He says that for 60 years the Communists have beat into their heads that there is no God and so now they have lost the capacity and ability to talk God. He was not denying that the these sense of divine has been lost but only that the ability to communicate that sense has been largely lost. He noted that being back in America he is seeing the same thing in many “post-Christian” Americans.

He noted that in one of his studies with College age Americans he was teaching on God cutting covenant with Abraham. He was trying to communicate God’s goodness in making covenant with Abraham. He said that several of the students said that they, “didn’t want anything to do with a God who cut a heifer and birds in half.” I thought when he said that, “man, I need to get out more often.” If they are offended when God cuts a cow and birdies in half how much more are their heads going to spend when they get to the part where God puts His Son on a Cross?

Can it really be the case that the West has deteriorated so far that it will have nothing to do with a God who cuts cows and birdies in half because that is mean?

Pray for China. Pray for the West. If we completely throw off Christianity we will enter into a Dark Age the like which mankind has never known.

The following excerpts are pulled from this link,

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33807907/ns/us_news-the_new_york_times/

The shooter in the Fort Hood incident, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan’s exchanged e-mail with Anwar al-Awlaki, once a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia where Maj. Hasan worshipped. Those e-mails indicate that the troubled military psychiatrist came to the attention of the authorities long before last Thursday’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but left him in his post.

Mr. Awlaki, an American citizen born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, wrote on Monday on his English-language website that Mr. Hasan was “a hero.” The cleric said, “He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.”

He added, “The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.”

At another site we learn,

Several former colleagues have come forward to say Nidal would tell them: “I am a Muslim first and an American second”.

The reason I note these snippets are as follows,

1.) Mr. Awlaki, Major Nidal’s former cleric insists that the inconsistency of a Muslim fighting against Muslims is what pushed Major Nidal to resolve the contradiction in the direction of killing Americans at Ft. Hood instead of killing Muslims in Afghanistan.

Major Nidal understood there was a contradiction between being a Muslim and being an American soldier in a war killing Muslims. Now, what Major Nidal did was reprehensible and justice will only be served if he gets the death penalty but it does cause one to ask why American Christians in military can not see about themselves what Nidal saw about himself, and that is that they proclaim to be adherents to a faith but they are in an organization dedicated to snuffing out the faith they say they adhere to. Christians by being in the US military are supporting an institution (US government) that is committed to snuffing out the Christian faith. I’m saddened that Christians can serve in an army that is a instrument of a government that is at war with the individual Military Personnel’s own Christian people, without the slightest pangs to their Christian consciences.

The truth of the matter is that most American Christians don’t feel the contradictions that Nidal felt because they have compartmentalized their faith. For example, did any Christian serviceman feel the contradictions between being a Christian and bombing into oblivion Christian Serbia? For example, did any Christian servicemen feel the contradiction between their involvement in Iraq and the reality that that involvement led to the necessity of the indigenous Iraqi Christian community having to flee from Iraq for their safety due to the oppression they were suffering — an oppression that had official US government sanction? For example, did any Christian servicemen feel the contradiction between serving in Afghanistan and knowing that their Chaplain corps were destroying Bibles so that their usage wouldn’t be offensive to their host Muslim country? Instead the American mindset is, “Jesus saves my soul and that being so it doesn’t matter that I am one of those that the State uses to implement its humanist agenda in order to build an anti-Christ globalistic tower of Babel.”

2.) Is it really so surprising that Major Nidal would say, “I am a Muslim first and an American second?” What would we expect any true son of Allah to say? I would hope that Christians in the military would say, “I am a Christian first and an American second.” The difference is, is that Nidal saw the contradiction between being an American and being a Muslim while most Christians, being imbued with a kind of “Civil religion Christianity,” never pause to consider the things that Nidal considered.

I shouldn’t have to write next what I’m going to write, but just so as to ward off the kooks, I’m not saying that Christians in the military should start shooting up the place like Maj. Nidal did. I am saying that Christians should think long and hard about joining the US military as it is the enforcement arm of a government that is four square in favor of building up a anti-Christ globalist humanist Kingdom.

It’s just a shame that Maj. Nidal didn’t have a Muslim version of R2Kt that he could have used to resolve the contradictions between being a Muslim and being an American. A Muslim version of R2Kt would have allowed to be at peace with being Muslim while acting in a non Muslim fashion as he followed the magistrates orders.