July 2, 2008

In a new campaign aimed to bring awareness of religious persecution to the business and industry sector, China Aid Association has begun a fax advocacy campaign today. The campaign is focused on holding businesses accountable for their actions in regards to corporate social responsibility.
The initial campaign will focus on Beijing bookstore owner and house church leader, Shi Weihan. In January of 2008, Beijing resident Shi Weihan was arrested under suspicion of printing illegal Christian material. He has been illegally held in a detention center in Beijing for more than three months without receiving formal charges or trial. Shi’s family members were prohibited from visiting him while in detention. The family was also restricted from delivering diabetes medication to Shi who has suffered seriously from the disease for some time.
1,161 foreign invested companies within Beijing will be faxed first hand accurate information concerning Shi Weihan and his case. The companies’ leaders are urged to take action as part of their corporate social responsibility contract. Companies include:
578 American companies, 442 Japanese companies, 90 German companies, 35 French and 16 Russian owned companies.

It is CAA’s hope that the corporate and business centers within Beijing will respond to local authorities inquiring about the situation, encouraging them to treat Shi in a more humane manor and even call for his unconditional release.

As persecution continues to increase with the approach of the Beijing Olympics, it is time for the corporate and business world to stand against human rights violations and take responsibility for their community. China Aid Association will be quick and accurate to report both the action and inaction of the companies who receive word of persecutions within their areas of influence.

Issued by CAA July 2, 2008

By Mushfig Bayram, Forum 18 News Service <http://www.forum18.org>, and
Felix Corley, Forum 18 News Service <http://www.forum18.org>

The import and production of religious literature in Uzbekistan remains under tight state control, even for texts such as the Koran and the Bible, Forum 18 News Service has found. Defending the practice of not importing Islamic texts, a student at the state-controlled Islamic University told Forum 18 that “I don’t think scholars from other countries are better than ours. We have no need to import from abroad.” Imam Obidkhon Nazarov, the exiled former imam of Tashkent’s Tukhtaboi mosque, told Forum 18 that even books by renowned Muslim scholars were no longer published. Nazarov emphasized that “people have a right to know. If there are good books on Islam and the Koran published abroad, why should people be deprived of opportunities to read them,” he asked. Religious minorities have also fallen foul of the state’s tight web of censorship laws and regulations. Christians are concerned about a shipment of Bibles and related books held by customs since May. Jehovah’s Witnesses are concerned about a shipment held since August 2006. In both cases, there is the possibility of extremely expensive official charges for storage being imposed on religious minorities.

Religious literature in Uzbekistan remains under tight government control, Forum 18 News Service has found. Both the import and production of literature – including texts such as the Koran and the Bible - is strictly controlled, with compulsory prior censorship by the state Religious Affairs Committee. Only registered communities can ask for the state’s permission to import material, all unregistered religious activity being a criminal offence.

Literature about the majority Islamic faith is kept under strict state control, with relatively little allowed to be published in Uzbekistan and none imported officially, Muslims have told Forum 18. Jasur Najmiddinov, a student studying for a master’s degree at the capital Tashkent’s Islamic University, states that more than 800 titles on Islam have been published since 1991. All the titles are, he said, in Uzbek or Karakalpak, a Turkic language spoken in north-western Uzbekistan (a region of the country subject to severe repression of religious freedom – see eg. F18News 17 September 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1019). Najmiddinov said Muslim books are on sale “everywhere”, including at mosques and at markets.

Students and staff of the state-controlled Islamic University are closely monitored by the National Security Service (NSS) secret police (see F18News 5 September 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1014). Najmiddinov has taken part in and defended his part in a programme encouraging religious hatred, which state TV has repeatedly broadcast (see F18News 25 June 2008 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1148).

“Those who write books give the text to the Religious Affairs Committee which conducts the expert assessment on them,” Najmiddinov told Forum 18 from Tashkent on 17 June. He appeared to welcome the Religious Affairs Committee’s power to decide when books can and cannot be produced or imported. “When the Committee says no it means that Uzbek people don’t need a certain book,” he told Forum 18.

Najmiddinov said Muslim books are not routinely imported from abroad, whether from the Middle East or from Russia. “I don’t think scholars from other countries are better than ours,” he told Forum 18. “We have no need to import from abroad.” He said that he could not say whether importing Islamic literature from abroad is banned or discouraged by the government. He said Muslim scholars travelling abroad can import a few books privately “if they don’t contain elements representing the views of extremist sects”. He declined to explain what he meant by this.

Imam Obidkhon Nazarov, the former imam of Tashkent’s Tukhtaboi mosque who had to flee Uzbekistan because of threats to his life, confirmed to Forum 18 from abroad on 1 July that religious literature is severely controlled. “I even know of cases in the past year where the police arrested people claiming that they were terrorists”, he said, “when a Koran written in Arabic was found in their house”.

Uzbekistan’s International Post Office confirmed to Forum 18 in 2007 that imported copies of the Koran in Arabic were censored by the state Religious Affairs Committee (see F18News 24 October 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1039).

Imam Nazarov told Forum 18 that, although many Islamic books are published in Uzbekistan, some of those books are heretical in the view of orthodox Islam. “I have even seen sorcery books in the Uzbek language published as if they were Islamic books”, Nazarov emphasized. He stated that the government would not allow any book not in line with ideology to be published. “Each and every book must go through tight government censorship before being published”, he reiterated.

Nazarov told that Islam does not know boundaries, so limiting Islam to Uzbekistan and Uzbek scholars is “ignorance”. “People have a right to know”, he stressed. “If there are good books on Islam and the Koran published abroad, why should people be deprived of opportunities to read them,” he asked.

Nazarov said that some Islamic books by Uzbek authors are not being published any more. “For instance, the famous Imam Bukhari, who every Uzbek has heard of, is not being published”, he said. Very soon after Uzbekistan’s independence a few thousand copies of Imam Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari’s book ‘Sahih al-Bukhari’ was published in one printing only, Nazarov stated. This is a collection of hadith which Sunni Muslims regard as the most authentic hadith compilation. Imam Bukhari was a renowned Imam from the Bukhara [Bukhoro] region of Uzbekistan, who lived in the 9th century A.D., explained Imam Nazarov. “What is a few thousand copies for 15 million Uzbek speakers in the country,” he asked. However, the “useless” books of Uzbek politicians are published with hundreds of thousands in circulation, Nazarov stated.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov in May 2008 published a book entitled “Morality Is Invincible Power”. Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) reported on 19 May that Uzbek state TV’s coverage of the book launch included participants praising the book as “the best book on philosophy and morality since the times of Socrates.” RFE/RL reported that university students are required to take exams every year on Karimov’s books.

Neither the state Religious Affairs Committee, nor the state-controlled Muslim Board (the Muftiate, or Islamic religious leadership), was willing to respond to Forum 18’s questions on 1 July. In 2006, the then chair of the Committee, Shoazim Minovarov, admitted to Forum 18 that the import of foreign Muslim literature had practically ceased in the wake of the crackdown on the Andijan uprising in May 2005 (see F18News 2 November 2006 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=864).

Censorship of religious literature entering the country was introduced in 1998, when the country’s Religion Law was made much harsher. Article 19 of the Law bans the “manufacture, storage and distribution of printed items, films, photographs, audio and video recordings and other materials containing ideas of religious extremism, separatism and fundamentalism”. It also states that: “Delivery and distribution of religious literature published abroad is done after expert analysis of its contents is carried out in the order prescribed by law.” Publication of religious literature within Uzbekistan is also subject to compulsory prior censorship. Article 241-1 of the Criminal Code makes “harbouring and distributing” such documents punishable by up to three years in jail.

The definition of whether material falls into these categories is carried out by the state’s Religious Affairs Committee or - in provincial areas - by teachers at local university philosophy departments even though this is not legal. Mainstream Islamic theological tracts are often deemed to be extremist (see F18News 12 July 2004 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=361). The authorities have been known to break their own laws on “expert examination” of literature. Protestant pastor Dmitry Shestakov was in 2007 sentenced to four years’ imprisonment, and amongst the trial irregularities was “expert” examination of literature by the Department of Uzbek History at Andijan [Andijon] State University. Under an April 2004 Cabinet of Ministers decree, any expert examination of religious materials must be conducted by the Religious Affairs Committee (see F18News 27 March 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=936).

In 2006, new penalties for the “illegal” production, storage, import and distribution of all forms of religious literature. Some Muslims stressed to Forum 18 that the changes merely gave a “legal” basis to what was already going on, one Muslim noting - as the authorities confirmed to Forum 18 - that since the crushing of the Andijan uprising, all imports of Muslim literature have halted. The state Religious Affairs Committee told Forum 18 that the “illegal” production and distribution of religious literature are “home-produced materials. In any state a publisher must receive a licence to conduct publishing activity and pay taxes,” the then Chair of the Committee stated. The changes were the latest in a series cracking down on activities the state does not totally control (see F18News 29 June 2006 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=805).

There appear to be at least tentative plans to harshen the Religion Law (see F18News 5 November 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1043).

Religious literature is frequently confiscated from communities of a variety of faiths during raids. Courts often rule that such literature – which can include copies of the Bible – be destroyed. Even legally imported religious material is confiscated in police raids (see eg. F18News 30 August 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1012).

Religious minorities are also victims of the state’s tight censorship. Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians remain highly concerned about a shipment of Bibles and Bible-related books that have been held up in customs in the capital Tashkent since 19 May, Protestant sources have told Forum 18 News Service. The shipment was sent from the Russian Bible Society to the Uzbek Bible Society, a registered organisation. However, Forum 18 has learnt that the government’s Religious Affairs Committee, which operates the compulsory religious literature censorship in Uzbekistan, has not yet authorised the shipment’s release. Although the Committee has failed to write to the Bible Society about the shipment, Christians told Forum 18 that the Customs say the Committee has written to them to say the shipment must be removed from Uzbekistan.

Christians fear that if the Bibles are not released within the two month period they can be held at customs they will automatically be required to be removed from Uzbekistan, which can be very costly. Sources have told Forum 18 that importers are liable for storage fees while goods are held in Uzbek customs.

Despite the lack of an official written response from the Committee, officials of the Committee appear to have been briefing sympathetic journalists that the shipment is illegal and that the Bible Society tried to break the law by importing them “illegally”. The Azerbaijani news agency Trend quoted unnamed Committee officials on 19 June as stating that the Bible Society had tried to import the books “without agreement and permission from the state authorities”. It said that the Justice Ministry had issued the Bible Society with an official warning about “impermissible, even illegal actions”.

Christians Forum 18 has spoken to reject these allegations, insisting that the Bible Society applied for permission in full accordance with the official procedure.

Forum 18 tried to speak to Begzot Kadyrov of the State Religious Affairs Committee on 1 July about the Bible Society shipment and other literature problems in Uzbekistan. However Kadyrov’s number went unanswered throughout the day.

The Bible Society shipment consists of 11,000 copies of various books in Uzbek (in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets) and Karakalpak. The Society was founded in 1993 by representatives of various Christian denominations, including Russian Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants. It gained legal status in 1994 and remains the only legal interdenominational religious organisation in Uzbekistan. It has already produced Uzbek translations of four books of the Old Testament, with a further seven in preparation. It is planning to produce a full Uzbek Bible translation in 2009.

Uzbekistan’s postal authorities have all but halted the delivery of parcels of books sent to individuals in Uzbekistan from abroad. Such parcels have been returned to senders in recent years with a letter informing them that such literature is banned and telling them not to send it in future. An official of the international post office in Tashkent told Forum 18 in 2005 that a van takes each day’s load of religious books to the Committee for censorship. He claimed that most religious literature is passed, but the high number of rejections suggests otherwise (see F18News 14 November 2005 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=687).

Uzbekistan also operates a system of internet censorship which has blocked access to a number of foreign religious websites, including the Moscow-based religious news website Portal-credo.ru (see F18News 10 April 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=941).

Other religious communities have also faced obstruction in importing religious literature. Jehovah’s Witnesses told Forum 18 that members of their congregation in Chirchik [Chirchiq] – the only one in Uzbekistan that still has legal status – have trying to obtain the release by Uzbek customs officials of a shipment of 500 Russian-language Bibles and 500 Russian-language books “What Does the Bible Really Teach?”. The books have been held in Customs since August 2006. Despite intermittent verbal promises from the authorities in the past, they have not been released (see F18News 24 October 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1039).

A Jehovah’s Witness from Kazakhstan told Forum 18 on 1 July that Uzbek Customs will not release the books. “They told us that the only way for us to get our books back is to pay Customs for storage, which is over 13 million Uzbek Soms [50,000 Norwegian Kroner, 6,000 Euros, or 10,000 US Dollars],” he said. Only then would the books be returned from Uzbekistan, the authorities told the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Jehovah’s Witnesses replied that they cannot pay the amount demanded, as it is much greater than the actual cost of the books.

Uzbek customs also told the Jehovah’s Witnesses that they could not destroy the books, as they were Bibles, and neither could Customs release them to the Witnesses there. “Now every day the storage costs are increasing,” the Jehovah’s Witness complained. “We are afraid that the authorities may even use that against our members in Chirchik.”

Christian literature confiscated from Protestants, including copies of the Bible, has been burnt by the authorities in the past (see F18News 27 November 2006 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=877).

Shipments of religious literature, including literature in transit, have in the past also been blocked by Uzbek customs officials. One Protestant, involved in sending literature requested by Christians in Uzbekistan, told Forum 18 that most shipments never arrived. “This was either through postal inefficiency or because it was rejected at Uzbek customs,” the Protestant stated. “So we have given up trying to send literature.” Many who would like to receive literature are afraid of the consequences of being identified by the authorities as Christians, from their receiving literature by post (see F18News 24 October 2007 http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1039). (END)

by Hoyt Hickman
 

 


The following response to a request for help with the issues of placement of the American flag and the Christian flag in the sanctuary was written by Hoyt Hickman when he was a staff member of the General Board of Discipleship. We post it here as a resource for your church.
Answer:
Thank you for your inquiry concerning the use of American and Christian flags in church sanctuaries.
Common as this practice is, there seems to be no way to display both flags together that does not dishonor one flag or the other.
The Christian Flag gives the background of the Christian flag and the reasons why it should always have the place of highest honor when it is displayed. It is not a denominational flag or a church flag, but a symbol of our allegiance to Jesus Christ, who is above all others. It is a cardinal tenet of our faith that our loyalty to Christ comes above all earthly loyalties.
On the other hand, The Flag Code (United States Statutes at Large, Seventy-seventh Congress, Second Session 1942, Volume 56 — Part I, Public Laws) states in Section 3 (k): “When displayed from a staff in a church or public auditorium, the [American] flag should occupy the position of honor and be placed at the clergyman’s or speaker’s right as he faces the congregation or audience. Any other flag so displayed in the chancel or on the platform should be placed to the clergyman’s or speaker’s left as he faces the congregation or audience. But when the flag is displayed from a staff in a church or public auditorium elsewhere than in the chancel or on the platform, it shall be placed in the position of honor at the right of the congregation or audience as they face the chancel or platform. Any other flag so displayed should be placed on the left of the congregation or audience as they face the chancel or platform.”
(Editor’s note: See the updated Flag Code in a downlodable file from the U.S. House of Representatives’ web site.
Both in The Flag Code and in the Bible, it is assumed that placement on the right signifies higher honor than — and priority over — placement on the left and that higher placement signifies higher honor than and priority over lower placement.
One might reason that the Christian flag could be placed in the chancel on the clergy’s right, with the American flag on the floor level of the congregation on the congregation’s right, or vice versa; but this inevitably means that the flag in the chancel is higher than the other and thus has the higher place of honor.
A further difficulty arises from the fact that in many church chancels the clergy presides from various places during different parts of the service — pulpit, lectern, Lord’s Table and baptismal font. The way many chancels are designed, placing a flag to the right of all the points from which the clergy presides would mean placing a flag so far to the side that it is obviously not being accorded the place of highest honor but is shunted off toward or into a corner.
It is important to remember that the Christian flag originated almost a hundred years ago in churches that usually did not display a cross in the sanctuary other than the white cross on the blue field of the Christian flag. Today, of course, most United Methodist churches have a cross in the sanctuary in what is obviously intended as the place of highest honor, on or above the Lord’s Table. Since this cross serves the same function as the Christian flag, it renders the Christian flag unnecessary. It also places any American flag present in a position of relatively lower honor. Given the provisions in the U.S. Flag Code and the fact that a cross serves as a symbol of allegiance just as a flag does, I do not see how we can properly display the American flag in the chancel if there is a cross there. Because of its central and higher location, the cross plainly has a place of higher honor than the American flag.
The same difficulty arises when the American flag is carried in a processional at the opening of a service and the processional cross goes first, as Christians agree it must.
There is still another difficulty in displaying the American flag in the place of highest honor during worship. It is one of the oldest and most universal Christian understandings of worship that when we gather around the Lord’s Table for worship, the gathering consists not only of God and the visible congregation, but also includes (even though invisibly) the whole universal church of all times and all places, in heaven and on earth. Even if everyone visibly present is an American citizen, most of those invisibly present are not.
To sum it up, we in American wisely separate church and state. As American Christians, we honor the cross and we honor the flag; but we keep them separate. An American flag used in the worship of the universal church is no more appropriate than hanging a cross in a civil courtroom used by Americans of all religions.

“Should We Have Flags in the Church? The Christian Flag and the American Flag” copyright © 1993 The General Board of Discipleship. Permission is granted to print this article or quote from it as long as you post the following copyright and permission line:

“Should We Have Flags in the Church? The Christian Flag and the American Flag” copyright © 1993 The General Board of Discipleship. Used with permission. The United Methodist General Board of Discipleship, P. O. Box 340003, Nashville TN 37203-0003; telephone: (615) 340-7073; Worship Web site http://www.umcworship.org

by Guy Brandon, of The Jubilee Centre
Posted: Monday, June 30, 2008, 15:18 (BST)
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Who are we to tell others what they should feel, or how they should act on those feelings? What consenting adults do in private is none of anyone else’s business. As Woody Allen observed when he married his former girlfriend’s adopted daughter, ‘the heart wants what the heart wants.’
Legally speaking, my sexual relationships are my concern only. We live in a free country and, so long as I am not hurting anyone else, I can pursue my individual rights in this area without interference from government or the law. Similarly, society allows me to follow my desires and cannot judge me for them. Friends, family and others are frequently good enough to encourage me to take the choices that I think will make me happiest.
This mentality is so taken for granted that we barely dare question it any more. Yet it is a cultural blind spot you could drive a truck through. On personal, family, and national levels, we can no longer pretend that what people do in private has no effect on others, just because they don’t see it happen.
Ken Livingstone tried to claim in April that the fact he had fathered five children by three women was irrelevant because ‘no one in this city cares what consenting adults do as long as you don’t involve children, animals or vegetables.’(1)
However, one of the country’s most senior judges showed greater insight when he warned the following day that family breakdown has now reached catastrophic levels, that family courts are overstretched to the point of collapse, and that the ‘never-ending carnival of human misery’ witnessed there is the source of ‘almost all of society’s ills’.(2)
Two years ago a report by Iain Duncan Smith quantified some of the financial costs of these ills. Family breakdown alone costs the UK taxpayer somewhere in the region of £24 billion per year, largely in benefits payments; include the educational underachievement and crime that so often go hand-in-hand with this and the price tag spirals to over £100 billion.
The cluster of consequences of relationship breakdown – a stark reminder that our cultural mantra of ‘consenting adults in private’ is hopelessly inadequate – requires a rethink of our understanding of social deprivation.
One journalist described the confusion of relationships, low-level neglect and emotional instability that is so common, but that only raised eyebrows when it was the backdrop to nine-year-old Shannon Matthews’s disappearance in February, as ‘emotional poverty, poverty of the soul’.(3)
This is the subject of the Jubilee Centre’s forthcoming book, Just Sex? Why it’s never just sex.(4) In our pursuit of individual freedom, which encompasses sexual liberty, we have lost sight of something more profound. The networks of relationships that once gave us our identity and support have become stretched and redefined. In many ways – as advertisers and the media so often exploit – sex has become a substitute for real intimacy. In reality, the chaos that results usually serves only to undermine those relationships further.
We argue that Judaeo-Christian standards for sexual morality are an antidote to this relational chaos. With its concerns for stable marriage, justice, and awareness of third-party impacts, the Bible’s prioritisation of a healthy society above individual rights – sexual or otherwise – has never been more relevant.
1 Metro, 4 April 2008.
2 Sarah Womack, ‘Breakdown in families “as harmful as global warming”’, The Telegraph, 5 April 2008.
3 Melanie Reid, ‘Shannon Matthews is the new face of poverty’, The Times, 17 March 2008.
4 Scheduled for February 2009, IVP.

By Guy Brandon at the Cambridge-based Jubilee Centre www.jubilee-centre.org. Printed with permission.

Beijing- CAA has learned that Christian rights activist Hua Huiqi was evicted from his home at 8:30pm Beijing time, on July 2. Hua and his family were resting in their rental apartment at 633 Unit 6, 6th floor of the Dushixinyuan apartment complex Chongwen District, Beijing when PSB officials led by officer Yang Jian used a 10lb hammer to break down the doors and locks of Hua’s apartment. Hua’s brother was beaten by police officers and suffered severe eye damage Hua and his family, including his 90 year old father, were forced onto the street with their furniture at 11:10pm. Hua and his family are in search of a new home and are currently being hosted by a Christian family in Beijing.

The Chinese Government has expressed its intentions to either detain Hua until September 20, a date well after the Olympic Games, or to remove Hua and his family completely out of Beijing during the Games. The CPC has branded Hua and other human rights and religious activists as “troublemakers” and is adamant about keeping such people from attending the Games in August.
In the morning of June 28, Saturday, as Congressmen Wolf and Smith left the Washington Dulles Airport, they were greeted by Ambassador from China Mr. Zhou Wenzhang. Instead of a pleasant farewell from Zhou, the ambassador slyly remarked “We hope there are no surprises.” Without hesitation Congressman Smith replied, “Life is full of surprises”.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.) and Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R-Va.) flew to Beijing in order to gauge the situation concerning China’s pre-Olympics human rights and religious freedoms records. The congressmen were set to meet with human rights lawyers, activists, victims and family members of persecution, individual religious believers as well as US Embassy officials. Through the facilitation of China Aid Association the two congressmen along with two senior aids were set to have dinner with a group of Chinese human rights lawyers on Sunday evening at hotel but were unable to meet with them due to interference by Chinese Government officials. The 8 lawyers scheduled to meet with the congressmen were:

Fan Yafeng
Li Baiguang
Li Heping
Li Fangping
Jiang Tianyong
Teng Biao
Zhang Xingshui
and Li Dunyong

Li Heping, Li Baiguang and Ten Biao were all recipients of the NED’s award for human rights defense in Washington DC of this year. Tiang Biao was scheduled to receive the award in DC in mid-June, but was forbidden by Chinese Government officials from traveling out of the country after the CPC confiscated his passport.

“Surprises” did happen quickly.
Hours before the meeting with Reps. Wolf and Smith, Li Heping, Jiang Tianyong, Li Fangping, Zhang Xingshui and Li Dunyong were warned not to attend the meeting or they would face severe consequences. They were either followed by PSB or forced to ride with PSB cars in order to be “protected”. Teng Biao and Li Baiguang were given the opportunity to take a “forced vacation” in the suburb of Beijing accompanied by 4 PSB officials.

In a separate incident two PSB officials waited in the lobby of the apartment building of independent writer Yu Jie, as he left for Sunday worship service they escorted him into their car and maintained that he stay with them until the Representatives had left. Ironically the policeman complained to Mr. Yu that he had to use his own car due to the lack of police vehicles available in Beijing b.

With a last minute’s arrangement, the Congressmen were fortunate enough to have dinner with Pastor Zhang Mingxuan, president of the Chinese House Church Alliance, and his wife. Early Sunday afternoon, the Reps. also visited Beijing Showang House church which was raided by PSB in May (and they were welcomed by church members), and later attended a Mass service at a Government sanctioned Catholic Church.

On Monday morning, the Congressmen delivered a list of 734 Chinese political and religious prisoners when they met with Mr. Li Zhaoxing, the Chairman of Foreign Affairs Committee of People’s Congress and former Foreign Minister. They urged Mr. Li to help immediately release those Chinese rights defenders. On Monday afternoon the Congressmen met with the wife of Pastor Zhang Rongliang. Zhang, or Uncle Z, was sentenced to 71/2 years in prison before a criminal court for his involvement with the House Church Movement in China.
One final surprise was from the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao who criticized the congressmen’s attempt to meet with those Chinese “troublemaking” citizens. Liu told reporters in a regularly scheduled news conference Tuesday. When asked what law or regulations prevented foreign officials from such meetings, Liu refused to discuss. Well, one officer of Beijing Municipal PSB revealed the answer when asked the same question by a foreign reporter, ‘it’s an internal top secret.”
The actions taken by the CPC during the Congressmen’s visit shows a brazen and apathetic attitude toward the improvement of its human rights record. In light of the Beijing Olympics less than a month away, China remains deaf to the international community’s outcry to stop its persecution of religious groups.

Issued by CAA July 2, 2008

UPDATE: Frank Turk hits it into the upper deck on this story. I’d welcome other links as well. Areopagitica had the first post I saw on it.
UPDATE II: Six months ago, Restless Reformer and BHT fellow Travis Prinzi was on this story. Jeff Sharlet says he will post the whole story at his site soon.

UPDATE III: A video promo of one of Luce’s youth camps. It speaks for itself.
Reading the summary of Rolling Stone magazine’s coverage of the Battle Cry Youth Event (and watching the linked videos of last year’s events), I find myself feeling strangely torn and uncomfortable.
Part of me- the part that has worked with teenagers for three decades- knows and feels the kind of brokenness and moral chaos that the event speaks to. I continue to work with many students who have found themselves in drug abuse, abusive relationships, crime, sexual promiscuity and all the consequences of those behaviors. I’m on the front lines of the failure of families, public schools and the community to come to terms with the destruction of young people by a corrosive culture. I see, firsthand, the degradation of the human mind, body and spirit that our consumeristic, voyeuristic, technologically mad society has produced.
It makes me mad, and I’m not ashamed of my anger. It’s part of what keeps me going (though not the center or all by any means.) I can put names and faces with the stories that I’ve seen in my ministry. I’ve lost good student friends to the vices and appetites our society promotes in its endless and insatiable appeal to youth culture. We are truly a culture willing to sacrifice our children for economic survival, and we shamelessly blame the young people lost in this maze for being what they are.
But as I watch and listen to the rhetoric of Battle Cry, I’m feeling something else as well. I’m uncomfortable. I’ve felt this before at youth events and in the presence of youth speakers who headed down this road of anger.
It’s the feeling I get when Jesus has left the room and something else has taken his place. In this case, anger.
When you read the New Testament, you never see the name Zealots, and there is some scholarly discussion over how definable the Zealot movement was in Israel in the first century. What’s not arguable is that there were people in Israel in the time of Jesus who were angry and believed that their anger was redemptive if channeled into a response that would overthrow the existing order. In other words, they were culture warriors.
These were Jews who felt their culture had been corrupted and violated by Greeks and now Romans. They resented what had happened to their children in a Hellenized, Romanized world. They weren’t surprised that God seemed to be letting things get worse and worse, leaving them in “exile,” because God’s people were compromising and “wimping out” when the times demanded strong action. These were people who were mad at culture, entertainment, moral standards and religious compromise. They despised those who preached tolerance and cultural diversity. They had their own rhetoric of anger. From time to time, extremists acted on these views and paid the cost.
These were people who wanted to purify Israel, march on Jerusalem, overthrow the corrupt political puppet regime of Herod and set the God of Israel against the pagan idolators from Rome. This was a culture war, a religious war and eventually, a real war.
Jesus was surrounded with this kind of anger from the time he was a child. He heard the Zealot voices in the synagogues, in the shops, and in the village square. He heard those who applauded John the Baptists direct attack on the immorality of the Herod family, and he felt the pressure to declare his movement a servant of that larger culture war.
Patriotism, zealotry and faith were never separated in Jesus’ world. To be a traitor to the cause of a renewed and liberated Israel was to be a traitor to God. There were plenty of people doing nothing, plenty of people to blame and plenty of targets for action and revolution.
Of course, Jesus profoundly disappointed this angry current in his audience. He was non-violent. More than that, he talked about loving and praying for those who were the persecutors and the oppressors. Jesus said that when the oppressor exerted power, the way of peaceful nonresistance and active love were the right responses. To the Zealot, Jesus said turn the other cheek and go the second mile.
This was not what the culture warriors of Jesus’ day wanted to hear. They wanted to bring change by anger and action. Jesus said the Kingdom was here, and those who were born again could see it. He knew the corruption of his times, but he said that it came from within, not from without. In fact, nothing outside of a person could make them unclean. Such a view undercut the rhetoric of the culture war. Yes, Israel was a covenant-breaking people, but they didn’t need the Romans or the Greeks to make them idolaters. They had been idolaters from the beginning because their hearts were far from God.
God’s people had been ordered to fight against the Canaanites in the past, but Jesus did not come repeating the rhetoric of the book of Numbers or Judges (which Ron Luce could use at one of his rallies without any.) The attempt to draft Jesus into a “war” mentality was going on in the first century. The movement and community Jesus began wasn’t military in nature, as he told Pilate. It disarmed rulers and authorities at a deeper level, through a more substantial kind of victory.
When Jesus wept over Jerusalem, he was weeping, in part, over militant Pharisees and Zealots who wanted transformation by politics or even bloodshed. He wept over a city that saw its culture war in terms of how God would vindicate human agendas, not how God would vindicate his own righteousness in the cross and resurrection. The Christian community formed by Jesus and empowered by his Spirit is in conflict with some in the culture, but it declares its intentions to BE a renewed Israel in the Spirit of Jesus, not bring about a renewed Israel by way of culture war weaponry.
Ron Luce says that Jesus is angry. He says that resentment is a good fuel for the life of discipleship. The anger of children makes for a better revolution. He wants a renouncing of the secularism that pollutes a godly generation. Luce sounds like the Zealots, the Pharisees and the Essenes all rolled into one…and Jesus pronounced them all wrong.
Luce would have us believe that Jesus rejection of the Sadducee compromisers and their pollution of the temple with secularism is the whole truth about Jesus anger. But Jesus was stopped Peter from using the sword. He denounced the Pharisees- whom N.T. Wright believes were often much more sympathetic to zealot type political action than we suspect- as corrupt and under judgment. He said to the Pharisees that the Kingdom wasn’t going to come with armies or revolts, and he announced to the Zealots that a withdrawal to an alternative community in the desert missed the entire point of God’s suffering, redemptive, amazing grace.
Jesus’ anger was generally toward the culture warriors and their co-opting of God as the sponsor for their angry agendas. Jesus presented, in the Kingdom and in the cross, a new agenda entirely, brought about without the bitterness, manipulation and violence that always accompanies the Zealot project.
Barabbas was a brigand; likely a Zealot who had cut a few throats. He is the choice of a crowd that rejects Jesus. Judas may have been a frustrated Zealot, angry that Jesus would not use his power in the cause of a Godly revolution.
You will hear a lot about Jesus at a Battle Cry event, and I am sure a good bit of it is on target. I know many people who think highly of this movement and believe in its version of discipleship. It’s true that Jesus is a true revolutionary who demands far more of his disciples than a Che t-shirt. But much of the rhetoric of the Battle Cry movement doesn’t sound, or feel or act like Jesus as he’s shown in the New Testament. Jesus turned over tables, but that wasn’t his way of changing people or the world.
There is no redemption in proclaiming your victim status, even if thousands of Christians proclaim it loudly and repeatedly in stadiums. The Christian movement is centered around Jesus, the cross and the Gospel, not around the culture war. The Kingdom community doesn’t look like the Battle Cry movement, and all the venting of resentment in the world won’t bring about the power of the spirit of the risen Jesus.

A previous post on surveying some Marcus Borg resources is here. My previous post on Wright’s views of Borg are at this post.
On my bookshelves, I have nearly all of the books of Marcus Borg. That won’t surprise those of you who are already concerned about my theology. I enjoy reading people in their own words rather than having their positions explained to me by their critics. I think it’s fair, and it’s often rewarding.
I don’t read Borg because I agree with him about the resurrection. I don’t agree with him at all. In fact, I think Borg’s naivete’ about the significance of the resurrection is stunning. (Read the fine dialog between Borg and N.T. Wright in The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions to gain a fascinating contrast.)
I like Borg’s writing. Of the new radical Jesus Seminar scholars, he is the most accessible, and in many ways the most helpful. Borg’s work on Holiness and Politics is very good, and I find many of his insights into the ministry of Jesus to be useful.
Primarily, however, I am fascinated by Borg’s journey from orthodox Lutheran Christian to one who rejects the standard orthodox meanings of much of the Christian story, yet remains in the church. Borg is never a ranting, carping scholar looking down his nose at fundamentalists. He calmly recites his loss of one kind of faith as the birth of another kind. In the process, he seldom does more than say “I simply could no longer believe the orthodox version of the story.”
Borg believes that he represents millions of people who will never be able to believe what orthodox Christians routinely believe. For him, everything in the New Testament is a metaphor of the New Age, scholarly heralded message of a God who does not discriminate on versions of truth, is immediately available to all, and who is mostly concerned with a social and political renewal familiar to anyone who listens to NPR.
Borg’s version of Christianity is, in its way, rather compelling and attractive in this contentious day and age of postmodern Christianity. He is a Don Quixote to a world of evangelical Apologists and outspoken defenders of the faith. He can still say the Apostle’s Creed, sing the great hymns, worship in the ancient Christian liturgy…all without pangs of conscience, and all the time meaning almost nothing that traditional Christian believers mean when they say or sing these same things.
Borg, and many other scholars and writers like him, believe they are saving the Christian faith from a kind of fundamentalism that will most certainly doom it to irrelevance in coming generations. They perceive, I believe correctly, that fundamentalism’s popularity is a house of cards, ready to collapse. Evangelical sociologists have been telling us this for years in surveys about the particular and general beliefs of the people who call themselves “Christians.”
I am thinking about this because Borg has famously said the discovery of the bones of Jesus wouldn’t disturb his faith at all. He reads, as J.D. Crossan says, “hope, not history” in the pages of the New Testament resurrection appearances, and whatever Christians call the resurrection is a continuing encounter with Jesus that does not require a physical resurrection.
This is a very convenient and appealing way to deal with the attacks of historians, DVC advocates and skeptics of every kind. It is not argumentative, and it retains as much of the Christian faith as one wants to retain. Its cost? Historical reality, at least as common sense realism understands it.
Borg usually asks how much of the Biblical story could be videotaped? For instance, could the resurrection appearances to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus have been recorded on video by one of those disciples? Or, as Borg says, was it simply “not that kind of story?”
In a day of scientific skepticism and an abundance of junk-based, cable tv inspired, pseudo-science journalism, it doesn’t surprise me to hear someone like Borg say they are tired of what they have to go through to substantiate that an event is “believable.” For Borg, the belief factor isn’t about events in history, but about “the Christ who comes to us again and again.”
Will challenges like the current assault of aggressive atheism or the “Jesus Tomb” make options like Borg’s “existential leap” into a faith disconnected from history more popular? Possibly, but I tend to believe there are far more common sense realists among Christians than Borg suspects. These are people who read the Discovery Channel’s website saying that the Christian belief in the resurrection or ascension isn’t challenged by the bones of Jesus in a box and shake their heads in amazement. These are people who hear Borg say that his belief in the resurrection wouldn’t be affected by the discovery of the still occupied tomb of Jesus, and they laugh.
Christianity isn’t mysticism or gnosticism. It is forever tied to real world events, real occurrences and an “either/or” epistemology. Dropping the resurrection into the category of “personal encounters disconnected from real world events” may solve some problems for some people, but it makes a mockery of Biblical texts that go out of the way, over and over, to tell us that these events are true, real and very much “either/or.” A person who says they had dinner with Jesus when they only had a personal sense of his presence is a liar.
When John says in 1John 1:1 “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—,” he is claiming a post-resurrection knowledge of Jesus that is continuous with the pre-resurrection experience of knowing Jesus. Seeing and touching the post-resurrection Jesus is critical. The exact nature of that encounter is largely beyond our categories. (Borg often points out the tensions in I Corinthians 15 between the physical body and the resurrected, spiritual body.) But there is no question what Paul means when he says if the resurrection did not happen, we are fools to believe in Jesus as Lord: the bones of Jesus in a box would zero out the resurrection as described in the New Testament. There may be much we don’t understand about the resurrection body or experience, but that it occurred in the shared “real” world of the senses is not one of them.
Borg’s “third way” approach is saying that a dead man can be the “raised on the third day” Jesus described in I Corinthians 15 and throughout the gospels. I say that one must need a Ph.d and the wisdom of the Jesus Seminar to make such a extra-historical leap, because most ordinary people couldn’t sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” if they knew the bones of Jesus are in a box.
[Many of my readers will remember the flap regarding N.T. Wright’s admission in an Australian interview that he considered Borg to be a brother in Christ. There is no doubt that Borg has a faith that strives to be faith in Christ, but the plain truth is that Borg- nicely- reinterprets the central tenet of the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds in such a way that most Christian communions would say he rejects the resurrection. If Borg believes Jesus is “alive” and is the “son of God” who “died for our sins,” but gives metaphorical meanings to all these terms, is he a Christian? In my opinion, Borg has rejected much of what is essential for a “good faith” belief in the Christian gospel. What remains is real faith, but is it true faith in the true Christ?]

Beijing–Series of arrests and harassment involving civil rights activists,dissidents,and Christians have taken place to meet a so-called harmonious society upon and during Beijing Olympics. Hua Huiqi, a Christian in Beijing was assaulted and severely wounded by the state security officers at about 10 pm. on July 1st. They broke into Hua’s house and kept out his family. Hua immediately became homeless. Meanwhile, human rights defender Zhouli was detained in custody along with her 6 months old baby. According to Boxun reporters, they will either be held until September 20 after the end of Olymipics or ordered to leave Beijing.

Sources in Chinese:
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2008/07/200807012336.shtml
http://news.boxun.com/news/gb/china/2008/07/200807012304.shtml