Learn to Suspend Knowledge
This was one of the old articles that I initially written to a fellow Christian. It was written earlier in January 2024, or maybe December 2023. I was still blind and very indifferent to myself, but this is probably the starting point of my serious self-analysis.
Actually, the best thing you can teach a child is the Gospel. Why do Chinese Christian parents feel ashamed of the Gospel? Even for a Christian, the greatest respect you can give to others is to share the Gospel with them.
Many people feel they came into this world pure and blameless, but Christians insist on tagging you with “original sin” and then morally blackmailing you with a man from two thousand years ago on a cross—how can that be acceptable? “In this world, I am only subject to my own servitude! Oh no, I am my own master!” Some even mistakenly think that sharing the Gospel is about guiding you to accumulate virtue and goodness.
What I’m really telling you is: You’re just human, with limitations and the seamy side, but you’re also so important that even God became flesh and suffered to save your life. Just treating you as a human, teaching you to see yourself as a human, is that simple.
Isn’t this much more wholesome compared to telling a child one moment, “Heaven and earth treat all creations as straw dogs,” and then another moment saying “you should stand tall and upright, with a heart as vast as the heavens and earth,” only to tell them when they grow up, “You’re just a cog in the machine, a commoner, a corporate slave, a screw, a brick”? Even though I never managed to share the Gospel with my mom from childhood… It’s very difficult for one person to change another, unless that person had God in his head in the first place and someday received the revelation. So, it’s best to understand the faith well from childhood. As for whether you’ll remember it later, that’s another story.
I know you are worried that children who take Christianity seriously won’t fare well in this pagan society. Don’t worry, that’s for sure. But before we see that narrow gate, there’s another extremely narrow gate: “Honesty.” In an environment where you can’t survive without lying, cultivating the habit of self-deception is the norm, and once formed, it’s hard to break.
My dad believes in Laozi, my mom in Confucianism and Buddhism, and there’s a circle of CPC members around. My dad had me reading the Dao De Jing and Zhuangzi (Taoism) since I was barely ten, praising those ancient philosophers of the Axial Age. But fortunately, he cheated after establishing my reading habits. If God prevented my parents from divorcing, my mind would have been in eternal darkness. Both sides made me feel torn in the middle, making me want to escape to wherever was peace and quiet. By my teens, I was pushed to the brink of skepticism about human nature through my own relatives, and I also happened to read some good stuff during that time.
I felt very fortunate as a child, and now looking back, I’m even more convinced of how blessed I was. I won an essay competition in my third grade in primary school, writing about if I were the officer of education. And it became a big deal in my grandparents’ circles for years. Now, thinking about it makes me sick. And those low-level debates between my dad and my uncle, with my grandmother feeling proud, thinking our whole family were intellectuals… I dare not think what I would have become if my parents hadn’t divorced, some self-righteous lunatic perhaps.
This is something others can’t understand; I feel lucky, but they insist on seeing me as pitiful. There’s just no way to communicate. Even when I returned to Christianity at 27, it was because after witnessing so much moral decay and cunning in this country for three years, including my own. When I happened to read, “Kant believes that God is the presupposition of practical reason, and the existence of God constructs the rational coordinates of humanity, preventing people from falling into nihilistic fantasies about humanity; this is the premise of classical rationalism,” I immediately realized that after abandoning Christian faith, I was gradually deteriorating.
It’s almost impossible to explain these things to people who only understand one-dimensional positive energy, and it’s even more frustrating to explain them to you Christians in particular. The Bible is full of absolute skepticism about human nature; why is it harder for you than for others to face the darkness and insist that I must be in need of some soul-lifting? You are like the Zophar in the Book of Job…
As I’ve sorted things out these days, I’ve realized a major mistake I’ve been making all along: I haven’t been distinguishing between religion and faith. I didn’t have this problem when I was a child; back then, I was once in a state of pure belief, but there’s too much garbage in my head now. I don’t understand why, after joining a church fellowship in college for a while, I was foolish enough to pour the baby out with the bathwater.
I was foolish enough to crawl in the darkness for six years, even though I realized I needed Christianity, I didn’t truly return to it. I just understood that human nature is corrupt and cunning, so there must be a higher being above humans, and there needs to be an ultimate judgment. I just understood the order relation of how theology, philosophy, and various disciplines emerged. So, I judged this to be the best religion, out of experience and practical considerations, the shallowest instrumental reason. I actually had no faith.
So much so that many of my thoughts and words in the past two years have been foolish. First, I thought that choosing a faith is like students taking different courses and entering different classrooms, each facing their own final exams. Deep down, I knew this idea was ridiculous. This was me compromising with reality, deceiving myself, partly because my grandmother was a devout Buddhist before she died (but after dispelling this compromise, what I criticize most is Buddhism); on the other hand, with human freedom of thought and choice, there must be religious pluralism. This statement is more “correct.” But this puts me in a position where values are not unique, a position that humans as subjective beings cannot stand, and faith is therefore irrelevant.
The subsequent mistake was that I regarded Christianity as in competition with other religions, thinking that Christianity could be revived by asserting dominance through war. The battlegrounds of the world are battlegrounds of ideas, and since the Bible is flawless, “faith and disbelief cannot carry the same yoke” cannot be mixed, so “bring a sword” is inevitable. But the battleground of ideas is not the same as religious warfare, and the targets of condemnation are far more ambiguous than they were hundreds of years ago. I didn’t think deeply about this; I just focused my problem-solving awareness on church reform. When I seriously wanted church reform, I lost even the basic common sense; I had completely equated religion with faith, or rather, I had no faith at all.
In the end, I’m still a traditional Chinese intellectual, a self-righteous lunatic. Kant said, “Humanity must learn to suspend knowledge and make room for faith,” and that’s what I’m going to do next.
I need to go back to when I was in my early twenties and pour out the bathwater again: everyone is just human, no one can usurp God’s authority, I won’t elevate anyone’s authority, and I don’t have that authority myself. What remains is “Emmanuel”. This world is not a playground or a coliseum; it’s a monastery, and all I can do is have a little more faith and courage.