Communism

Should consumers who worry about the origins of their clothing, coffee, and chocolate focus on a more spiritual item: the Bible? Chances are good that your favorite Bible was printed in China. The over-whelming majority of Bibles sold are printed there, said Mark Bertrand of Bible Design Blog. He said: “A lot of people have misgivings about that. Some of it is, ‘Oh, our Bibles are printed in Communist China.’ Others are concerned about the economic situation, about what conditions these Bibles were produced under.”

The Chinese government’s restriction of Bible distribution is also troubling, said ChinaAid’s Bob Fu. “When brothers and sisters are being persecuted and arrested for their beliefs based on the same Bible, what does it mean to purchase an exported copy that says Made in China?”

China’s only legal printer of Bibles, Amity Printing Company, published its first Bible in cooperation with the United Bible Societies in 1987. Since then, more than half of the 100 million Bibles printed every year have been printed in China (50 million in 2019), making China the world’s biggest Bible publisher.

Printing Bibles is more difficult than printing other types of books, and requires a certain amount of expertise. That’s because of the specialized printing requirements for a complex book such as the Bible. Bibles require thin paper that cannot be fed into standard printing equipment, leather covers, stitched binding, color pages and special inserts such as maps. Most printers outside China do not have the range of facilities to manufacture the same Bibles.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Maybe Westerners seeing “Made in China” on their Bibles, can be a reminder to pray for those who made these Bibles. 2) God can use any instrument he chooses to spread his Word, even unbelieving, communist China (Isa. 55:11).

Biochemist Sy Garte shares how he came out of a radical background to faith in Christ:

I had an unusual childhood for an American. Members of my extended family were left-wing radicals, and my parents had even been members of the American Communist Party. My indoctrination in the dogmas of communism and atheism was deep. At the same time, my father gave me a love of science and reason, and the importance of asking questions. These gifts, along with my training in scientific thought and research, eventually cracked open the prison cell that held my soul captive during those early years.

Breaking free was a slow process, akin to chipping away at a dungeon door with a dull spoon. I saw contradictions in some of what I had been taught. If humans were a blind product of evolutionary chance, with no special purpose or significance, then how could the stated goals of socialism—to advance human dignity and value—make sense?

I also began to contemplate other questions. Where did the universe come from? How did life begin? What does it mean to be a human being? What is the source of our creativity—of art, poetry, music, and humor? Perhaps, I thought, science cannot tell us everything.

Then I read the Gospels and had another shock: I found them beautiful and inspiring. So far as I could tell, they carried the ring of truth. ... The door to my prison cell was swinging open, and I stood there gazing out onto a new world, the world of faith. Yet I was afraid to fully leave. And then the Holy Spirit pulled me over the threshold.

It happened one day while I was traveling alone with a long way to go. Turning the radio on, I heard an evangelical Christian preacher, the kind I used to mock and avoid. But this preacher was really good. I listened for a few minutes before turning the radio off. Driving in silence for a while, I began wondering how I would sound if I ever tried preaching. The first thing that came to my mind was something about science—how, if there were a God, he might have used science to create the world.

And then something happened. I felt a chill up and down my spine and could hear myself preaching. I could see an audience in front of me. It was not a vision exactly, but it was intense. I talked about knowing that Jesus loves me. With a voice full of passionate emotion, I assured the crowd that whatever their sins might be, they were no worse than my own, and that because of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross we could all be saved.

At some point during this experience, I had pulled over onto the shoulder of the road, where I sat behind the wheel crying for some time. The only explanation I could fathom was that the Holy Spirit had entered into my life in dramatic fashion. “Thank you, Lord,” I said out loud in between sobs. “I believe, and I am saved. Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ.”

When I recovered my composure, I was aware of a great feeling of joy and release. I had no more doubts, no trace of hesitation—I had crossed over, stepping over the ruins of my prison cell into my new life of faith. From that day onward, my life has been devoted to the joyful service of our Lord.

Along the way, I made many discoveries. I learned about the power of the Bible as a guide from God to the central questions of our existence. I learned that the true purpose of science is to describe how things are, not to engage in misplaced speculation about why the world is the way it is. Most importantly, I learned that nothing (has come) through my own merit, but only from the grace of our Lord, whose love and mercy are beyond understanding.

Editor’s Note: Sy Garte is a biochemist who has taught at New York University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Rutgers University. He is a fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation, the largest organization of Christians in the sciences, and the vice president of its metropolitan Washington, DC, chapter.

A high school ethics textbook published by the Chinese government includes a revised version of John 8:3–11. In the Christian version, Jesus is presented with a woman caught in adultery and says, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (v. 7).

In the Communist revision, however, Jesus says the law has to be enforced and stones the woman to death himself.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This false translation represents the malicious teaching that Satan would have the world believe: God is merciless, harsh, and cold towards sinners who come to him. Satan does all he can to conceal the wonderful grace of God freely offered to all in the crucified and risen Christ.

Tony Campolo tells of working with a young doctor by the name of Elias Santana. Campolo says,

This bright and dynamic Christian graduated from medical school (was) living in the Chicago area. He could easily have earned a small fortune by setting up a medical practice that took care of middle-class Americans. Instead, Elias regularly traveled to Puerto Rico, where he performed surgery for those who had the money to pay high fees for his services. He then would return home and, with the money he had earned in Puerto Rico, buy medical supplies. He would then give out these supplies for free to the poor in the slums of Santo Domingo.

One day I went with this servant of God to one of the worst slums in the city. I stood by throughout the day, watching him freely serve those who had no means to pay. He gave away expensive medicines to those who could not afford to buy them. (In the evening) Elias climbed to the top of his truck and yelled for the people to gather around. He preached the gospel story and called people to surrender their lives to Christ. At the edge of the crowd, I saw a young man named Socrates, the head of the Che Guevara Society, the leftist student organization in Santo Domingo. I knew Socrates to be a good-hearted person.

I went over to Socrates, jokingly nudged him, and said, “Socrates! Elias is winning converts! If he keeps this up, he will sway this crowd to being Christian, and there will be nobody left for you to convert to (Marxism).” I will never forget Socrates’s answer, “What can I say? Elias Santana has earned the right to be heard.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Campolo’s story reminds us that we must back up our words with our lives. There is no more powerful sermon than a Christlike life.

Leigh C. Bishop, a psychiatrist and military reservist, was stationed at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 2008. In the dim light of dusk, he watched as a procession of military vehicles approached the airfield, came to a stop, and carefully unloaded a flag-draped steel casket. He knew that somewhere in the U.S., a family was going to suffer a Christmas homecoming that no one wanted. It was a heartbreaking scene for Bishop to take in—and one all-too-familiar in war.

But then, another scene from that Christmas Eve.

In an article for Christianity Today magazine entitled "Christmas in Afghanistan," Bishop writes:

[After watching the casket be unloaded from the military vehicle], I find myself walking along … the main avenue of Bagram Airfield. All is different …. Soldiers holding candles are belting out Christmas carols with gusto. Down the street, luminaries brighten the walkway into the clamshell-shaped auditorium, where cheerful groups of uniformed men and women enter for a Christmas concert. Two blocks away, the chapel is filling for the six o'clock Christmas Eve service.

War, writes C.S. Lewis in the essay "Learning in War-Time," reveals a hunger in human beings for joy and meaning that will not be set aside for even the most difficult of circumstances ….

Jesus did not come just to provide an occasion to sing carols, drink toasts, feast, and exchange gifts. But we are right to do these things, even as soldiers die and families grieve, because he came. And in his coming, he brought joy and peace—the joy that overcomes our sorrows, and the only kind of peace that ultimately matters. It's the peace of which the end of all wars, terrible as they are, is merely one token. It's the peace that means the long war between the heart and its Maker is over. It's a peace treaty offered in Bethlehem and signed, in blood, on Calvary.

Bishop concludes: "So joy to the world, and to every celebrating or grieving or hurting soul in it. The Lord has come. Let heaven and nature—and even those who stand watch with lighted candles in the land of the shadow of death—sing."

The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history. In Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century, Jonathan Glover estimates that 86,000,000 people died in wars fought from 1900 to 1989. That means 2,500 people every day, or 100 people every hour, for 90 years.

In addition to those killed in war, government-sponsored genocide and mass murder killed approximately 120,000,000 people in the 20th century—perhaps more than 80,000,000 in the two Communist countries of China and the Soviet Union alone, according to R. J. Rummel's Statistics of Democide.

The Kremlin, the old, walled fortress that was the political center of the atheistic Communist regime in the Soviet Union, is filled with spiritual symbols. The showpiece of the Kremlin is— unbelievably —Cathedral Square, which is composed entirely of ancient churches and cathedrals. Each Russian Orthodox Church has two murals over the exit door on its western wall. The mural on the left depicts paradise; the one on the right depicts hell. Between them, above the door, the Lord is shown on the Great White Throne.

Stalin, Lenin, and other atheistic Communist leaders must have passed this square a thousand times. They were no strangers to its visual images, but apparently were blind to the images' spiritual significance.

We don't need to travel to the Soviet Union to find people who have ignored symbols pointing to God. Virtually every town in America has a church steeple topped by a cross. How many people who see the cross each day stop to consider what it really means?

The Marxist promise that utopia will follow the abolition of private property is merely one of the more naive versions of the Enlightenment's secular humanism. Christians know this is dangerous nonsense.

Socialists usually offer an optimistic view of mankind, and so Orwell's 1984 ends surprisingly pessimistically evil conquers. Some have suggested this pessimism came because Orwell was dying as he wrote. Actually he was merely expressing a dilemma he had seen for some time. He knew that man's central problem was the death of Christian belief.

In 1944 he wrote, "Since about 1930 the world has given no reason for optimism whatever. Nothing is in sight except a welter of lies, hatred, cruelty, and ignorance, and beyond our present troubles loom vaster ones which are only now entering into the European consciousness. It is quite possible that man's major problems will 'never' be solved. ... The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final. Men can be happy only when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness."

Before then, in 1940, he had written of Europe's rejection of God which he approved this way: "For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake: The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire. ... It appears that amputation of the soul isn't just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic."

In spite of the conflict between them, the two ideologies that officially operate on the two sides of the Iron Curtain have this in common: they are both atheist. The one attempts without success to enforce atheism in the private as well as the public sector. The other permits belief in God as an option for private life but excludes it from any controlling role in public life.

In the 1920s, on the heels of the Bolshevik Revolution when Joseph Stalin was extending his chokehold over all of what became the Soviet Union, he sent political speakers out to Russian towns and villages to brainwash the people about Marxism and the Russian form of Communism. Peasants were forced to hear the harangues telling them what they must believe. It was made clear that the teaching of Christian faith was to come to an immediate end. The church was no longer to be active.

What none of them realized was that hundreds of years of Russian Orthodox teaching about the resurrection couldn't be rubbed out of people's souls just like that.

One large crowd of people sitting in a public auditorium listened for three hours to the speech of a Russian commissar as he tried to convert them to Marxism and the glories of the Communist party. When he finished, he was exhausted, but he had taken his best shot. He was sure he had convinced the crowd, so he invited questions. Here and there people rose to ask questions, but he was satisfied he had done his best.

Just as things were about to end, and he was to sign his success seal over what he had done, a Russian Orthodox priest stood up at the back of the hall: "I just have one thing to say to you. Christ is risen!"

Instantly the entire crowd responded, "Christ is risen, indeed!"

This is the third time I've told that story this morning. At the end of the second worship hour, a couple came up and introduced themselves. The women said to me in a heavy accent, "I am from Russia. Thank you for telling your story; it moved me greatly. But I must tell you one more thing about that story, which you did not tell. You need to tell people that when the crowd said 'Christ is risen indeed!' they knew for certain they would all go to jail."