I was asked to lecture on 2 Corinthians 5:7 in Wenzhou. Half way through the class I restated my thesis and then someone took a picture of it. My translator, a young bilingual English major – very capable teacher in her own right — provided the Mandarin you see. A close look at the board reads as follows: “THESIS”  Part A “Inside faith we suffer two temptations” (1) We try to pull the unseen into the realm of the seen, the future into the realm of the present [now].  (2) We break with the unseen and the future and then fall into the grip of the seen and the pleasures and problems of the now.

Part B “Outside faith the threat is that the seen [felt and immediate experience] and the present, with its pleasures and problems, will swell and becoming the be all and end all  and then will hurt, harm and destroy us. Faith in the NT, especially Paul and the writer of Hebrews, roots and grounds our life in something unseen and something coming.  Thereby protecting us from the overreach of things seen, felt experienced in the here and now. Toxic religion almost always relieves the tension of faith by finding a pseudo-way to get the future into the present and the seen out from behind the veil that hides it.  These of course are not wholly original ideas but they have been building in my mind for several years and now compose 40 hours of lecture discussions. Thanks to my clever and highly efficient translator who recorded my words and her translation many of the discussions are bouncing around cyberspace in China.