All Things Seen & Unseen

Met another Chinese lady on Valentine's Day. She (S) is a high school pupil with excellent English doing year 11. She has a Christian mother. I asked S about the Christian faith and she said openly that she wasn't a Christian. I t seemed then I got a prompt to ask her about Jesus and she told me she believed he was a good man. A good man? Just a good man? I missed a golden opportunity to follow up here (but the shop was busy and S was there to help for the day).

T he Buddhist religion begins with d octrines known as the Four Noble Truths * . The first noble truth is that human existence is unsatisfactoriness ( dukk ha ), that is, ' things are not as they should be '. (Even the happi est of times will end and hence, they too are unsati sfactory.) And life is that way because we crave and cling to what are the impermanent things and ideas of this life. One author suggests that dukkha is derived from the image of riding in a horse- drawn vehicle where an ungreased axle on one side of the buggy is c ausing occupants to become nauseous through its la ck of pr oper movement. No wonder humans feel uneasy and even despair at times as they ride in the buggy of normal life !

Last time I indicated that I would look at the 'Pauline model' for evangelism of pagan Gentiles that he used in Athens at the Areopagus ('Mars' Hill', KJV) (Acts 17.16-34). As is well known, Paul began his address by focussing on the spiritual state of the Athenians: their 'very religious' nature as evidenced by their altar, 'To an u nk nown g od' (Acts 17.23, RSV).   We can say that Paul's model was to find a 'contact-point' with Athenian worship for the gospel; this contact - p oint was the Athenian acknowledgement of 'an unknown god '.  I want to use this concept of a contact-point with the religion* of those we speak to about the gospel; I do so because it is eviden t that trying to present t he gospel to someone without some sort of contact-point as a bridge between the other and us risks an experience of di sconnectedness and alien ation for both persons. Gospel Contact-Point with Buddhism: Desire