The Forgetfulness of the Gentiles
I returned to my hometown to spend the Qingming Festival with relatives, perhaps this is also the final farewell. The title of this article has been sitting in my draft folder for over half a month, until these past few days when I read some chapters of the Book of Romans and reflected on myself, prompting me to write.
But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?”
Lord, indeed I have had very childish complaints, both towards you and towards my ancestors —
Why did you send Paul to preach in the West, and not in the East? Why did the Greeks go to Jerusalem to see the Son of Man, but the ancient Chinese did not? Lord, why did you let me to grow up in a country as hardened in heart as China?
As a Gentile among Gentiles, I observe a widespread phenomenon of forgetfulness when it comes to our spiritual realm. This forgetfulness manifests mainly in two aspects: forgetting the love of God and forgetting our own past.
I once forgot the love of God and, midway through life, fell into a deep sleep because of forgetting God. This forgetfulness stemmed from my arrogance, or rather, my inability at the age of twenty to perceive my own weakness and ignorance of sin. I remember making a final prayer when I abandoned the Christian faith: “Thank you for seeing me through childhood and adolescence, now I want to venture into this world.” I was truly foolish, just forgetting God like that.
Fortunately, the Christian faith was my primordial concept, a miracle of the Holy Spirit. Even if it was only an unshaped faith I established in my childhood, stumbling and fumbling alone, it had enough vitality. So later, as long as I sincerely sought it again, activating the memory was not too difficult.
But for those who have never been involved in the biblical tradition and the Christian faith from the beginning, the initial concepts instilled in them and the continuous reinforcement of these concepts by their environment can submerge them in the most thorough forgetfulness and numbness. Short-sighted and unwilling to reflect, they give up the ability to think deeply, and the most basic questions of the origin of creation and death lead them astray, further away from God.
This primordial concept is equally powerful, so much so that those who later come to believe in Christ cannot be renewed in their Christian faith without completely shattering their own primordial concepts. This is also why, whenever I went to any church, I felt like I wasn’t believing in the same thing as they were, and could only connect with a few people there.
So I have no clue for them; I only hope that I can still maintain honesty and courage in this environment — believing in my heart, speaking with my mouth.
So I turned my gaze to the West instead, for they, like I once did, have fallen into a deep sleep forgetting God midway. Christianity is their primordial concept, and the feasibility of restoring this memory should be much higher.
The Gentiles of the West have forgotten how their ancestors embraced the Bible and created true civilization, while we Gentiles have chosen to forget our own barbarism, striving to clothe ourselves in the garb of civilization.
Every barbaric Gentile is trying to turn away from God and revive their traditional culture alone. China pretends that its ancient tradition is all about benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness, the benchmarks of human civilization, so it wants to be unilaterally confident. This country really insults my intelligence. But I think this phenomenon is probably not unique to the Chinese.
Since modern times, we have hated the Western powers, as if there had never been cruel infighting before the invasions, as if the people had never been treated as inhuman. Blacks resent whites because of their history of slavery, as if Africa had never trafficked or massacred slaves before the arrival of whites. And the Native American Indians, before they went to war with the Puritans, as if they had always lived in harmony with nature, and the tribes had never slaughtered each other…
I believe that outside of Christ, there is no difference in human hypocrisy.
When we finally glimpse civilization, what we see first are the manifestations of technology, economy, industrialization, democracy, freedom, constitutional governance, human rights, charity, and so on, rather than Christian faith. We mistakenly believe that these manifestations of civilization are solely achieved by the efforts of Westerners themselves accidentally, rather than driven by God’s revelation.
Therefore, we desperately climb onto the moral high ground, condemning those who brought us civilization; we loudly shout seemingly correct slogans, desperately trying to adorn ourselves with the cloak of civilization, even resorting to plagiarism. Civilization seems to be nothing more than a simple moral indoctrination, with the only issue being who has the qualification to indoctrinate whom.
We never understand that true civilization actually begins with humility, with repentance before God.
We Gentiles have indeed enjoyed too many benefits of the Gospel, yet we owe too much debt to the Gospel.
So what do I have to complain about?
I am like that wild olive branch, receiving the fatness of the olive root, trying to grasp your mercy against my nature, fearing that you will abandon me in this wilderness.