Imperishable Inheritance

The Tao that can be told is not the eter­nal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eter­nal name.

Know­ing con­stancy, the mind is open.
With an open mind, you will be open­hearted.
Being open­hearted, you will act roy­ally.
Being royal, you will attain the divine.
Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.
Being at one with the Tao is eter­nal.
And though the body dies, the Tao will never pass away.
Lao Tse, The Tao Te Ching (chap­ters 1 and 16 respec­tively)¹

In Lao Tse’s work, The Tao Te Ching, sprang forth one of the great­est impacts on many east­ern cul­tures. From this comes the philo­soph­i­cally devel­oped con­cep­tion of the Tao. (Note to the reader: “Tao” can also be spelled “Dao.”)

What is The Tao?

The Tao is meant to illus­trate “The Way” (road, means). “In the Tao Te Ching, it is gen­er­ally used to indi­cate, the unseen, under­ly­ing law of the uni­verse from which all other prin­ci­ples and phe­nom­ena pro­ceed.“²

The Chi­nese char­ac­ter for the Tao actu­ally is a com­bi­na­tion of the words “go for­ward” and “head”. “The idea is that your head chooses to a path to go for­ward on. For this rea­son it is used a lot Asian phi­los­o­phy to denote the path or way to clar­ity.“² In sum­ma­tion, the Tao is the force that moves through all. It sim­ply is. The Tao, as a fun­da­men­tal aspect in Asian phi­los­o­phy, gives rise to many other ideas in Asian phi­los­o­phy includ­ing the Yin-Yang (which are oppo­site forces to be in bal­ance; masculine/feminine, light/dark, active/rest, etc and the Yin-Yang serves as their basis for a def­i­n­i­tion of dual­ism) and the five nat­ural ele­ments that give rise to nat­ural phe­nom­ena known as the Wux­ing (wood, fire, earth, metal, water).³

The Tao also super­sedes the Tai­jii: “[i]n con­tem­po­rary terms, the Taiji is the infi­nite, essen­tial, and fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ple of evo­lu­tion­ary change that actu­al­izes all poten­tial states of being through the self-organizing inte­gra­tion of com­ple­men­tary exis­ten­tial polar­i­ties. More sim­ply, it is the co-substantial union of yin and yang the two oppos­ing qual­i­ties of all things.“⁴

“In describ­ing Tao, the fol­low­ing anal­ogy has been used: Imag­ine a per­son walk­ing on a road. A bam­boo pole is car­ried, rest­ing on the person’s shoul­der. On the end of the pole two buck­ets are sus­pended. The buck­ets are likened to yin and yang. The pole is Taiji, the entity inte­grat­ing the two. The road is Tao.“⁵

The Tao, although it has become an impor­tant philo­soph­i­cal ele­ment in the whole of Asian (par­tic­u­larly Chi­nese) soci­eties, found it’s root in Tao­ism (although also men­tioned in the writ­ings of Con­fu­cius). I loved Tao­ism (and still do), because of the sim­plic­ity of their phi­los­o­phy. Basi­cally they say: “Drop every­thing, go into nature, and find the Tao.” (I’ll ask for time off work to do this!)

Reformed Epis­te­mol­ogy and The Sen­sus Divinitatis

To effec­tively reach these cul­tures, I pro­pose that they be reached with a form of apolo­get­ics known as Reformed Epis­te­mol­ogy. This look at apolo­get­ics stresses that with­out evi­dence, some­thing can be ratio­nal to believe. We don’t need to stress upon evi­dence to reach this cul­ture but just to appeal to who they are at the foun­da­tion. John Calvin, in his Insti­tutes of the Chris­t­ian Reli­gion, talked about the “sen­sus divini­tatis” or the inner sense of the divine.

“That there exists in the human minds and indeed by nat­ural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dis­pute, since God him­self, to pre­vent any man from pre­tend­ing igno­rance, has endued all men with some idea of his God­head, the mem­ory of which he con­stantly renews and occa­sion­ally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be con­demned by their own con­science when they nei­ther wor­ship him nor con­se­crate their lives to his ser­vice.“
John Calvin, Insti­tutes of the Chris­t­ian Reli­gion (Book 1 Chap­ter 3)⁶

I have always used, as the great­est proof for the exis­tence of God, the appeal to the “sen­sus divini­tatis.” Before I go on, let me not sound incon­sis­tent in my the­ol­ogy. I do believe that man hath wholly lost the abil­ity to seek, desire, and under­stand God (Ezekiel 16:6, John 8:47, Romans 3:10–12); but I do think that, even though being fooled, the nat­ural man can have a sense of the divine (just ask any new-ager). I always pose the ques­tion, “name for me 1 per­son in all of human his­tory that has not pon­dered and decided on the exis­tence of God, and on top of that, please clar­ify what the great­est ques­tion in all of phi­los­o­phy is?” Now, these are by nature rhetor­i­cal ques­tions, but it is said to serve a point. We all won­der about God, but not all find Him (Matthew 7:14).

In fact, Jesus Him­self affirms that some—who are never saved—think that they know God (Matthew 7:21). What does all of this have to do with Tao and reach­ing Asian cul­tures with the gospel?

It is impor­tant to under­stand where some­one is cul­tur­ally to effec­tively reach them through apolo­get­ics (please note I am not imply­ing the gospel by itself is not suf­fi­cient). East­ern cul­tures, with pan­the­is­tic reli­gions such as Bud­dhism and Tao­ism feel very strongly on the “force” of God. Now, the pan­the­is­tic god is an imper­sonal “force” that is in all at all times; that is to say, he is as much in you and I as he is in a table. Even though you’ll find an abun­dance of athe­ists (to which Bud­dhism and Tao­ism are by large mea­sure athe­is­tic reli­gions in that they don’t wor­ship God or a god), reach­ing them through the “sen­sus divini­tatis” can prove to be very effective.

Reach­ing Through The Sen­sus Divinitatis

As quoted above from the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tse writes: “Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.” This excerpt runs as a causal chain such as in Romans 8:28–30. Lao Tse iter­ates a sys­tem that is based upon human merit that we trans­form from con­stancy to an open mind to roy­alty to divin­ity to know­ing the Tao. The goal of this is to “…be at one with the Tao.”

Please Note
It is impor­tant to notice that just your knowl­edge of the Tao and your desire to reach them through their cul­tural “lens” will do won­ders for open­ing up hon­est com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I’ve had a few pos­i­tive expe­ri­ences when a Chi­nese per­son attempts to try and explain the Tao, until I explain I already know what it is, and they get very excited on your con­sid­er­a­tion of their ideas. It’s been my great­est asset in reach­ing the lost from dif­fer­ent cul­tures (behind God’s prov­i­dence of course).

Talk to them about divin­ity. What is it? Who is divine? Lao Tse says any­one can be divine; here the Hypo­sta­tic Union (the doc­trine that Jesus was both 100% man and 100% God simul­ta­ne­ously) and incar­na­tion are great ways to inter­lude into the topic of divin­ity. Using exam­ples of piety and respect of elders, oth­ers, and God are also great ways to relate to them (I think it’s safe to say the Bible speaks about that a lit­tle bit). This is impor­tant due to the empha­sis that is placed on those ideas in Asian cul­tures. Share with Christ with them as the ulti­mate man­i­fes­ta­tion of piety and under­stand­ing. Many of these cul­tures which stem from a philo­soph­i­cal foun­da­tion of ideas such as the Tao are look­ing for this ‘force.’ Say, ‘hey, I know who the ‘Tao’ is; I know who ‘The Way’ is; I know who will help you bal­ance every­thing, and He is not an imper­sonal force!’

Do all this while keep­ing in mind this uni­ver­sal human incli­na­tion and desire to know where this thought of a Cre­ator came to them from (sen­sus divini­tatis). This method is not to be used exclu­sively for East­ern indi­vid­u­als; I use it every time I evan­ge­lize whether they are Chi­nese, Euro­pean, or American!

Con­clu­sion

Although there is some con­sen­sus in the faith that to share Chris­tian­ity we need not to under­stand the cul­tural con­di­tions, philoso­phies, and ide­olo­gies sur­round­ing that an indi­vid­ual lives in (which is most often iter­ated by a white Amer­i­can); but the knowl­edge you attain of another view­point will bring you much sat­is­fac­tion in real­iz­ing the majesty of your sal­va­tion in Christ. As you study peo­ple wor­ship­ping stat­ues, the ground, 3 mil­lion gods, and the like—the true real­iza­tion and appre­ci­a­tion of the grace of God will con­tinue to man­i­fest itself for you.

Most impor­tantly, no mat­ter how you choose to evan­ge­lize, be sure to con­tin­u­ally remain in rev­er­ence and respect that only God can change their minds (Ezekiel 11:19). And remem­ber that even if no one were ever to be saved, God would be glo­ri­fied all the same.

For the gospel has for this pur­pose been preached even to those who are dead, that though they are judged in the flesh as men, they may live in the spirit accord­ing to the will of God.
1 Peter 4:6