Christ in China
Louis Markos on David Marshall’s Take on Chinese Religion & Tradition
As the Apostle Paul stood on Mars Hill before a coterie of educated Athenian Stoics and Epicureans, who likely thought there was little of value this babbling barbarian Jew from Asia Minor could teach them, his knees must have been shaking behind his toga. How could he build a bridge between the holy, omnipotent God who had revealed himself in the Incarnation, death, and Resurrection of Christ and the squabbling, decidedly unholy gods of Greek paganism? True, most of the philosophers who smiled condescendingly at him thought themselves above the fanciful myths believed in by the common, credulous crowd, but that would not help him to convince them that his God should also be theirs.
Perhaps he thought of something he would, a few years hence, write to the church in Rome: that though God had spoken directly only to the Jews, he had made known his power and holiness by inscribing it into the created world around us and the conscience within us (Rom. 1:20; 2:14–15). In fact, just a few years earlier, he had explained to a group of excited pagans in Turkey that God had not left himself without a witness among the Gentiles but had filled their fields with rain and their hearts with joy (Acts 14:17).
Whatever his thought process, Paul remembered, as he gazed into their serene but skeptical eyes, an altar he had seen in the marketplace inscribed to an unknown God. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Father of Jesus Christ had, it seems, left a faint but real witness to himself among the plethora of gods and idols that littered the streets of Athens. Paul’s job would not be to speak of a God of whom the pagans had absolutely no knowledge, but to reveal to them the true and full nature of the God they had already been worshiping, ignorantly and falsely, under a different name (Acts 17:22–23).
From that point of contact, Paul explained that the God who had created the heavens and the earth did not dwell in temples built by human hands; rather, through the creation of one man, he had created all the races of men, setting their times and places, though never being far from any of us. Then, to drive his point home, he quoted two pagan poets who, though writing about Zeus, inadvertently spoke of things that were true about the One God revealed in Christ—whose authority God confirmed by raising him from the dead (17:24–31).
As a long-time professor at Houston Christian (formerly Baptist) University, I have devoted my career to building bridges between our Greco-Roman pagan past and the truths revealed in Christ and the Bible. In such books as From Achilles to Christ and From Plato to Christ, I have sought to identify in the literature, philosophy, and mythology of ancient Greece and Rome seeds of the gospel that would only sprout and bear fruit in the light of the risen Son.
I have also challenged Christians with first-hand knowledge of non-European churches to write their own books with titles like From Confucius to Christ or From Buddha to Christ. I have learned a great deal from Don Richardson’s Eternity in their Hearts (Regal Books, 1984), which documents isolated tribes scattered across Asia, Africa, and the Americas that retain a memory of monotheism yet are held captive in fear to spirits they can never fully appease. But I was particularly hoping for some good writer to take up the vast and ancient nation of China. Had the God of the Bible left himself a witness in the Middle Kingdom?
Enter David Marshall, a prolific author and apologist who spent many years traveling across China, studying, praying, and ministering to Christians and non-Christians alike. Sensing my interest in such things, he recently sent me a copy of his True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture (Kuai Mu Press, 2002), a book I have devoured with much enthusiasm and three of whose insights I would like to share here.
I. Worshiping God Without Idols
As he sought, like Paul before him, for a connection point between the gospel of Christ and a seemingly hostile culture bereft of the Scriptures, Marshall did not have to scour the country for an obscure altar to an unknown God. He did not have to look any further than at one of China’s earliest and most impressive sacred structures, the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. “The first emperors of the Ming dynasty,” he explains,
having chased Genghis Khan’s great-grandchildren out of China, built this magnificent worship hall to restore Chinese religion. In it they placed a plaque which united both names of God in one: Huang Tian Shang Di, “Awesome Heavenly Supreme Being.” And in it, they prayed to Tian as the Creator. (27)
Unlike other Chinese temples, this one did not include an idol of the God, for this God dwelled in heaven. As Creator, he was greater than the emperor, yet he was a personal God who cared about human beings and meted out rewards and punishments. The temple itself rests on four red and gold pillars (which Marshall links to the four Gospels), has a tri-level roof (which Marshall links to the Trinity), and is surrounded by two circles of twelve pillars each (which Marshall links to the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve disciples).
Louis Markos , Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Baptist University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities. His 19 books include Lewis Agonistes; Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True, and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis; On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue with Tolkien and Lewis; and From A to Z to Narnia with C. S. Lewis.
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