Dear Praying Friends:
A new series
For the past five years, most of these monthly prayer letters have focused on one of the “old strategies for the new reality” that I outlined in early 2017.
In other words, we have been looking at how we can reach out to Chinese people all over the world.
It is time now to shift our attention to the what and why of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with Chinese people. That is to say, what is the gospel, and why should we be proclaiming it to ethnic Chinese in Asia and the West?
You may think that these questions are too basic, and that their answers are self-evident, but the fact is that both the content of our message and the reasons for our mission are highly contested topics among professing Christians today.
As we proceed, I hope to show in what ways the what and the why are inseparable topics, and why it is imperative that we clarify the differences between what the Scriptures say and what many people, including Christians, are teaching.
The Bible
We shall begin with the foundation of our faith: The Scriptures.
Christians have often rightly been called “the people of the Book,” because our message and our mission are grounded in the teachings of the Bible.
Other belief systems have writings that are considered to be sacred and authoritative, but for Christians the Scriptures possess a unique and ultimate authority, based upon their claim to be the revelation of God to his people through God’s chosen messengers. The Old and New Testaments, Christians affirm, are the Word of God in the words given by God.
Protestants further believe that the Scriptures are clear enough to be understood by ordinary readers, despite some difficulties in the text. For that reason, they have promoted the translation of the Bible into local languages and urge all believers to read, study, memorize, and share these words from God with each other and with non-Christians.
They also set aside some gifted members of the Body of Christ to teach the Scriptures, and expect their instruction to adhere to the original and natural meaning of the inspired writings.
Alternate views
Though the inspiration, inerrancy, and unique authority of Scripture was the unanimous affirmation of Christians and their leaders for almost two thousand years, in the past two centuries voices from within the visible church have expressed competing views.
Negative critics began to stress alleged historical errors and contradictions in Scripture. They appealed to “reason” to reject accounts of miracles, and then to “science” to challenge the Creation account. These denials of the full veracity of the Bible now reign both in “mainstream” denominations and academia.
The same is true among Chinese who profess faith in Christ. I have attended several scholarly meetings in which Chinese scholars have discounted the claims of the Bible to be fully inspired, completely true, and divinely authoritative.
The unique and final authority of the Bible has also been challenged by those who grant that status to extra-biblical tradition or to special people such as the Roman Pontiff, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, some extreme charismatic “prophets” and “apostles,” and the elite guild of biblical scholars who dominate the non-Christian academic world and many seminaries.
Mounting an evangelical counter-attack
Evangelicals have not been silent in the face of these competing positions. For more than a hundred years, they have demonstrated the faulty assumptions, erroneous claims, and logical inconsistencies of rival beliefs.
In the twentieth century, Carl F. H. Henry wrote God, Revelation, and Authority (GRA), the first four volumes of which brilliantly expound and defend the traditional Christian belief in Scripture as the Word of God in the words of God. They were translated into Chinese.
Convinced that Henry’s work would greatly strengthen the Chinese church, I made an abridgment of the Chinese edition of Henry’s magnum opus.
In addition, I wrote a book introducing GRA and responding to critics of Henry’s arguments. (Carl Henry—Theologian for All Seasons- Wipf and Stock Publishers). A Chinese translation of my book appeared last fall, published in Hong Kong.
Other volumes in English have explained and applied parts of the Bible to daily life: Worship and Wisdom: Meditations on the Psalms and Proverbs; Christ the King, a devotional commentary on Matthew’s Gospel; Jesus: The Complete Man; and the Lord’s Healing Words. For several years, I have been working on a theological and ethical commentary on the Bible (Truth and Life - Part I: Old Testament — China Institute (reachingchineseworldwide.org)
Would you pray that God would use these books to strengthen and equip both Christians, both Chinese and non-Chinese, to be witnesses of Christ?
Yours in his abiding truth,
Wright