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).
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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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