一个美国福音派年轻人的心声
作者:Ben Cremer
(中文版机器翻译自作者脸书:https://www.facebook.com/ben.cremer/posts/866911267384,题目为转发者所加,感谢作者允准翻译及转载)
有人问我,为什么我认为我们这一代人正在离开福音派传统?我开始写回应,然后我开始崩溃。一开始是回应,但后来变成对一个传统,一个我热爱和珍惜的传统的哀叹。
我5岁时就把生命交给了耶稣,后来受洗进入教会。我7岁时被呼召做牧师,即使经历了几次重大的信仰危机,我也无法撼动这个呼召。从2004年到2012年,我在一些我有幸遇到的最伟大的神学大师手下、也在他们身边学习。这使我对基督呼召我们成为的教会的关心远远超过了对一个政党或其意识形态的关心。
我的许多朋友已经离开了信仰。我很想念他们。哀叹他们为什么离开对我是很重要的,我希望能从这些哀叹中悔改和学习,我希望他们和他们的后代能重新加入我们并留下来。
这是我写给福音派的哀歌。这不是写给某个人、某一代人、某个政党或宗派的。这只是把我这一代人对福音派传统本身的哀叹做一个汇编。希望你能以谦卑的精神来阅读它,正如我也以谦卑的态度写下它。
福音派,你们教给我们这一代人基督徒的生活方式,可悲的是你们一直没有活出来。
你们教导我们要先求神的国,但你们却常常先求美国的强大。
你们教导我们要宣扬基督是万物之主,但当谈到真正的权力时,我们听到的却是你们在谈论总统。
你们教导我们要纯洁和尊重,但当我们呼吁政治领袖对妇女和有色人种发表不健康的言论时,你们却对我们大发雷霆。
你们教我们暴力不是解决问题的方法,也教我们爱我们的敌人,但你们却似乎对战争和持枪权如此痴迷。
你们教导我们要传播福音,但我们从你那里听到的却大多是政治意识形态的传播。
你们教导我们要以朋友的身份欢迎陌生人,帮助那些需要帮助的人,但你们却如此轻蔑地谈论移民和难民。
你们教导我们要悔改,然而当我们想从种族主义、军国主义和民族主义中悔改时,你们却把我们当作只是在政治上被误导,而不是因为福音而下决心悔改。
你们教导我们,所有的生命都是神圣的,却说得好像这只适用于未出生的人。我们也关心人类生命存在和被关心的所有其他方式,甚至地球本身,它的气候,它的动物,以及它的未来。
你们告诉我们与上帝的关系是福音的道路,与行为或律法无关。但我们听到的很多话语,都是关于努力让对我们有利的人在政治上掌权,和通过塑造法律制度来支持符合我们价值观的东西。
你们教导我们单单敬拜上帝,视圣经为我们的主要权威,但你们却表现得好像这个国家和它的宪法跟圣经是在同一个层面上具有权威。
你们说我们这一代人懒惰,被权利惯坏,并因为我们离开教会而羞辱我们。虽然你们的批评有些准确,有些不准确,但我们觉得你们自己先放弃了很多你们教给我们的东西,变成懒惰的教会,被政治权力惯坏。
也许我们这一代人在福音派中的空间越来越小,因为比起成为基督的教会,福音派更渴望美国成为一个基督教国家。我们这代基督徒更想成为教会而不是其它。
(附英文原文)
Someone asked me why I thought my generation is leaving the Evangelical tradition. I started to write then I started to breakdown. What started as an answer turned into a lament over my tradition. A tradition I love and cherish.
I gave my life to Jesus when I was 5 and was later baptized into the church. I was called to be a pastor when I was 7 years old and even through I had several major crisis of faith, I couldn’t shake that call. From 2004 to 2012, I studied under and next to some of the greatest theological minds I’ve ever had the privilege of meeting. This caused me to care far more about being the church Christ called us to be than I’d ever care about a political party or its ideologies.
Many of my friends have left the faith. I miss them. It’s important to lament why they left and I hope to repent and learn from those ways so they and the future generations may join us and stay.
Here is my letter of lament to evangelicalism. This is not written to individuals, a particular generation, political party, or denomination. This is just compiled laments from my generation about the tradition itself. May you read it in the humble spirit in which it was written:
Evangelicalism, the way you taught my generation to live is sadly not what you’ve been living out.
You taught us to pursue the kingdom of God first, yet you so often pursue America first.
You taught us to proclaim Christ as Lord of all, but when it comes to talk of real power, all we hear you talking about is presidents.
You taught us about purity and respect, yet get mad at us when we call out political leaders for their unwholesome remarks about women and people of color.
You taught us that violence isn’t the way to solve our problems and to love our enemies, yet you seem so preoccupied with war and the right to bear arms.
You taught us to spread the gospel, yet so much of what we hear from you is the spreading of political ideologies.
You taught us to welcome the stranger as a friend and help those in need, yet you talk so disparagingly about immigrants and refugees.
You taught us to repent, yet when we want to repent from racism, jingoism, and nationalism, you treat us as if we are just politically misguided rather than gospel determined.
You taught us that all life is sacred, yet talk as if it only applies to the the unborn. We also care about all other ways human life exists and is cared for; even the earth itself, it’s climate, it’s animals, and it’s future.
You told us relationship was the way of the gospel and it had nothing to do with works or legalism, yet we hear so much talk about working to get the right people in political power and to shape the legal system in favor of what we value.
You taught us to worship God alone and see scripture as our primary authority, yet you act as though this country and it’s constitution is on their same level.
You called my generation lazy, entitled, and shame us for leaving the church. While some of your criticisms are accurate, some not, we feel like you’ve abandoned so much of what you’ve taught us, become lazy as the church and entitled over political power.
Maybe there’s less and less room for my generation in evangelicalism because there’s more of a desire to be a Christian nation than there is to be a Christian church. We want to be the church more than anything.
这是基督徒文字工作者、前《今日基督教》亚洲编辑兼中文主编、前《海外校园》主编基甸(Sean Cheng)的墙外博客,主要发布文化、社会、基督教、神学相关文章。“基甸连线”:https://godoor.net/whjdt/ Sean Cheng (Jidian) is a Chinese Christian writer. He was Christianity Today Asia editor and Chinese managing editor (2022-24) and chief editor of Overseas Campus magazine (in Chinese, 2011-19). His evangelist website is at https://godoor.net/whjdt/
星期二, 六月 30, 2020
星期三, 六月 24, 2020
My Journey of Faith
My Journey of Faith
Jidian
[Author's note] The following testimony was included in the newly published book Heartreach: The Ongoing Project Dengke Story by British Christian adventurer and philanthropist Professor Mel Richardson (Chapter 18, pp. 153-166). It was slightly revised and updated at the end when it is posted here on the author's blog.
It was close to the sunset time. I went out of the Tibetan style “
This was the summer of 2018. A few days earlier I flew from my home in the Baltimore (US) suburb to my hometown of
While listening to the sound of running water in the river, I thought about how the trip to this exact place 28 years ago impacted on me and changed my life. I thought about how it influenced my spiritual journey from an atheist to a Christian. I could not but marvel at God’s grace and providence.
28 years ago, I was a young professional in the city of
I was born into a Chinese intellectual family. Both my parents graduated from the
I was raised by my grandma in the city of
All the education I could get in
After graduation, I went back to
When the June 4th event happened, I was on the street of
I tried hard to escape this feeling of being lost by seeking money and pleasure, but I totally failed to get any real satisfaction from those. Moreover, the surroundings around me were showing me how treacherous and dark human hearts could be every day. I started to realize that “the heart of the problem is the problem of heart”, and how insignificant and pitiful I was myself. With all those incurable weaknesses of myself, I was unable to go beyond myself, let alone to practise the Confucian idealism of “cultivation of personality, regulation of family, order of the nation, and peace and harmony of the world”.
In the spiritual pain and thirst, I began to realize the desperate needs for a transcendent faith. I started to seek philosophical and religious knowledge. I read a lot about things of “spiritual” nature, which ranged from western philosophy to traditional Chinese beliefs, and even included things like Qi Gong and fortune telling. Occasionally I would find a little sparkle of human wisdom in those writings, but they did not give me any significant answers. Some of my readings were related to Christianity, but most of them in were very negative, criticizing and even attacking Christianity as a superstitious religion or imperialist tool. Only a few books were introducing Christian thoughts as one kind of western philosophical or cultural resource. One of books was authored by Dr. Liu Xiaofeng who was later deemed a leading “cultural Christian”. The book was titled “Salvation and Carefree-ness”, and in it Christian worldview was compared with other western and oriental thoughts and cultures. In a strange way, this book created some affinity and good impression for Christianity on me.
At the same time, God also gave me a few opportunities to know some Christian friends, although there were so few of them in
And then the head of a mountaineer group in a Chinese geography research institute came to me and asked me if I would take a temporary job as the interpreter for him and join them to accompany and assist the British expedition team in the Garze-Shiqu area. Garze, Tibetan, medical, polymer…, all these words naturally bring upon my heart connections to my background, and I was more than willing to take the job, although I dared not tell my boss at my research institute (those were the days when Deng Xiaoping just opened China’s door to the world, and the first wave just arose of Chinese intellectuals taking “the second career” to make extra money, which was forbidden before.)
So I went on the journey to Dengke with the British team and their Chinese company. I soon learnt that the British side was a team consisted mostly of Christians, and they had to face a lot of difficulties and challenges in Graze. Not only did they have to face the extremely harsh geographical environment in the areas near the source of Yangtze, but also they had to deal with the most frustrating bureaucracy and materialist greed of the Chinese side. It even made me to lose heart and patience and get angry. However, I saw with my own eyes how these Christians prayed and trusted their God to face the difficulties, and how they showed their Christian love, not only to the people they helped (mostly the Tibetans), but also to those who made it difficult for them, with forgiveness and understanding. I became the team’s friend and in many things I was obviously on their side instead of the Chinese side.
I saw how they worshiped on Sundays in their tents on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (with Mel playing guitar for the hymns). But more impressively, I saw how Dr. Ray gave vaccination to little Tibetan kids, and how the team talked to a few Tibetans with leprosy and prayed for them, much to the dismay and fear of the Chinese side. I saw the British gentlemen physically labored hard to remove rocks that blocked the road. I saw how kind the team members were to the Tibetan villagers and how much they desired to help the Tibetans by building a simple bridge or a humble house… The British Christians’ positive attitude to life and their unwavering faith in God gave me such a wonderful and powerful testimony during the more than one month’s time I lived and worked together with them, even though they did not get much time to tell me about God and study the Bible with me.
The expedition was later broadcasted in
After the expedition, a young friend of mine told me that he had become a Christian, and invited me to one of their house church Bible study gatherings. I was amazed to see a group of young intellectuals with similar background as mine pray, sing hymns, study the Bible and share together. However, at that time, I knew almost nothing about God and the Bible, and my good impression of Christianity was only on the cultural and intellectual level. I did not even think about personal relationship with God and what it means for my life.
In August 1992, I came to the
The first period of time after I arrived in
The Bible studies in the Chinese Christian Fellowship in the small southern college town gave me much-needed opportunities to learn about the basic but accurate doctrines of Christianity. In the beginning I had tons of questions to ask, and was quite a difficult and tough seeker. Fortunately the Bible studies were very open, and the Christian friends responded to my harsh, opinionated and provoking questions with much patience and wisdom. My knowledge and understanding increased quickly with all the debates and discussions. I started to realize that I had a lot of misunderstanding and prejudice to Christianity, and I had to overcome many obstacles out of my atheist and rationalist thinking paradigm. The much profound thinking and discussion on issues such as the true-ness of the bible, creation vs. evolution, faith and reason, and Christianity vs. other religions and cultures, etc., convinced me that the Christian belief is truth and broke my intellectual stronghold bit by bit. The Bible and Jesus’ teachings had even greater impact on my seeking heart.
But the greatest factor of all was the Christian love that Christians had demonstrated in their actions. It was shocking and very thought-provoking to me. I had grown up in the communist culture of hatred, which taught us to hate our enemy in the class struggle. Mao famously said that “there is absolutely no love in this world without reason”. But by the Yangtze river in the Tibetan village and in the little college town of
On one Sunday in October 1992, I was attending worship with friends in a local American church (
A few years ago I was surfing on the Chinese Q&A website of Zhihu (which is similar to Quora, but arguably better, and influential among Chinese intellectuals). One answer to the question “under what circumstance did you believe in God?” caught my attention. It was written by a Chinese man in film-making industry, who called himself Mr. Luo Deng (pen-name). Mr. Luo said in his answer that his spiritual journey was influenced by a group of British Christians he came across in Garze. He said that the British team was going to Dengke to do charity work, and he was so moved by their love and faith. I immediately realized that he was talking about the same group as the 1990 expedition team, because I knew Mel had led teams to Dengke after the first expedition for many years. I was very excited to see another guy with the same experience as mine. I contacted Mr. Deng privately and also answered the same question sharing my own story. Later another netter commented under my answer and said that she had the same experience too when she worked with the team as an interpreter. In the 2018 Dengke trip I met more interpreters for the team who have become Christians. Apparently serving as an interpreter on the Project Dengke team has been used by God greatly as a means of evangelizing Chinese young men and women!
I was very moved by the stories on Zhihu. Luo Deng’s answer got tons of likes and people appreciate one sentence in it most. What he said can be literally translated into English as the following: “I believe that the best evangelism is the lifestyle of a Christian.” During the 2018 Dengke Project trip, I had opportunity to share with the team my conversion story and encourage the teammates using the Scripture ( I used Matthew 5:13-16 that calls Christians to be salt and light of the world) as well as Mr. Luo’s words to make the point of what significance the Project has that is related to evangelism.
Back to my own journey of faith. Baptism was only the beginning of my new spiritual journey. My life was greatly changed after I became a Christian, even though I was not always fully aware of it. My worldview and value were transformed by the Word of God. The self-centered-ness, self-righteousness and denial of God’s existence were replaced by the repentance of my sins, obedience to God and a thankful heart. I had sought the meaning of life with such pain, and now I am able to know the true and only God, the Creator of the universe and Keeper of our lives, through Jesus Christ. I am able to have a close relationship with God through prayers and studying His Word, and experience His guidance in my daily life. I can now experience the peace and joy that transcend the surroundings and the more abundant life that Christ gives us, just as the British team did. My wandering heart has found the ultimate anchor, and my lost soul has found the eternal home.
That does not mean that my journey after conversion was all smooth, or my spiritual growth did not take time. After I graduated from the
But the Lord is faithful and his grace is sufficient. Many things happened in my life. I learned in my career and in my family life, as well as my serving on the Internet and in the Chinese churches (I have worshiped and served in a number of Chinese churches in the
One example is my writing “career”. I started writing about Christianity on the Chinese Internet in 1995 (when the Chinese Internet was just starting with very primitive technologies) because I felt the need for apologetic involvement, and I have since been active on the Chinese cyberspace and new media (Zhihu is but one example), dialoging with global Chinese intellectuals and evangelizing with my writings and podcast. In 1996 I joined the Chinese Christian Internet Mission as one of its earliest core co-workers. In 1998 I created the evangelist and apologetic website “Jidian’s Links” (“Jidian”, the Chinese pin yin for “Gideon”, is my pen-name), which provided resources of apologetics and Christian culture to Chinese netters.
In 2009 I published my first book in Chinese (a collection of apologetic dialogs with non-believers) in the U. S. In 2012 I published my second book (a collection of my blog essays on Christian culture and belief) in
I also became a core author for Overseas Campus (OC), a well-known evangelical magazine for Chinese intellectuals founded in the
My work at OCM went much beyond writing, recording, editing and project management. I gave evangelist talks in Chinese churches in North America and Asia (
Near the end of 2019, I responded to God's new call and joined a mission organization to serve God and diaspora Chinese in the U. S. In my local church (a Chinese church in Maryland), I serve by leading bible studies and teaching Sunday school. I am studying theology at the Reformed Theological Seminary Global, working towards an MAR degree while working full time. I also serve in the TGC (The Gospel Coalition) Chinese team. During the COVID time I started my evangelist livestreaming on YouTube: http://tinyurl.com/JidianYT, and continued to preach, teach and train Chinese Christians using the Internet tools. I look forward to many more years of serving our Lord.
Looking back on my spiritual journey, I am with great awe and thankfulness for God’s Grace on me. I believe that it is not by any “coincident”, but by the leading of God’s own loving hands, that I have become what I am today. My story is just another testimony of God’s amazing Grace, infinite Love and great Power. I pray that I will be endowed the faith and strength to serve God and follow Christ all my life.
Browse Jidian's multi-media evangelist website
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