Ok, so we have a network of house teaches who preach a “Gospel” dictated, via negativa, by the People’s Republic of China. Great. Meanwhile Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the original Christian church in China until the genocide of the Uzbek Muslim warlord Tamerlane, the Assyrian Church of the East, are not allowed in the country, nor is anyone allowed to teach their doctrines. Also, among the doctrines the registered Chinese churches aren’t allowed to teach: the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association is restricted from discussing papal supremacy or infallibility, which are uniquely Catholic doctrines. So the idea that these churches would turn out well because they teach a list of doctrines prohibited by the PRC is absurd; when it comes to dogmatic theology, the PRC has no idea what its talking about and therefore prohibits the teaching of whatever doctrines it perceives, rightly or wrongly, as a threat to state power.
Our best hope for these house churches is that some semblance of religious freedom remains in Hong Kong and Macau despite the illegal crackdown the PRC has implemented there, and that members of these house churches are able to covertly travel to Hong Kong and Macau to obtain religious instruction. Then on that glorious day when the PRC goes the way of the USSR and Communism in general, or alternately, better yet, the Premier has a conversion experience like St. Constantine, the house churches will form the parishes in a new network of dioceses of Chinese churches currently operating unrestricted in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
Right now there is a beautiful Russian Orthodox cathedral in Harbin, but it is a museum; if you are one of the many descendants of Russian missionaries such as St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, your only options are a church behind the closed gates of the Russian embassy, churches in Hong Kong, or house churches following Orthodox doctrine which actually is illegal. And likewise, perhaps even more so, if you are an Anglican; the Book of Common Prayer, like the Orthodox service books and personal prayer books, very plainly expresses things which would infuriate the Chinese, and is from a country which has developed an enmity with China, but had cathedrals all over the country before the Japanese invasion and is still present in Hong Kong. Faithful Orthodox and Anglican Chinese Christians who are persecuted become martyrs and confessors for Christ as much as anyone else.
And the suggestion that we burn books that many Anglicans and Orthodox and Catholics regard as holy in the sense of being set aside for worship, for example, the Book of Common Prayer, the Orthodox service books which are not leather bound but are permitted to be on the Holy Table, the Roman Catholic missals and breviaries, and especially the liturgical Gospel Books and other lectionaries of these churches, which in the Orthodox Church are specially consecrated, and consist of the Gospel Lessons for each day of the year, is horrific. In fact, the idea that we should burn any books strikes me as being deeply offensive, considering the last people who did that were Mao in the Cultural Revolution and the Nazis in the build up to World War II.
There are eight books anyone considering burning books ought to read, the ten commandments, in Exodus and Deuteronomy, which prohibit stealing, including of books, the Gospels, particularly the Summary of the Law, and two more recent books, Fahrenheit 451 and better yet, Nineteen Eighty Four (Bradbury’s book deals more specifically with book burning, hence the title, because books will catch fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, but Orwell’s classic, completed shortly before his death from throat cancer in 1949 and in many respects a mea culpa for his earlier work for the brutal British Imperial police in Burma, and retraction of his support for a totalitarian English Socialist state, akin to the latter writings of St. Augustine where he withdrew earlier teachings he came to believe were incorrect, is about the immense power wielded by those who have the ability to alter or destroy information. At one point, a member of the Inner Party when sentencing the protagonist to death says “You will be destroyed in the path as well as the future.” And if the idea of reading said literature offends you, watch the film adaptations (the classics with John Hawkins, and the 1984 production of the same book with Richard Burton and John Hurt).
Then it might become clear to you, and by you, I mean any Christian who thinks book burning is a good idea, why members of the early church when persecuted by the Roman Empire protected the books with their lives, not specifically the Bible, because the Bible as we know it did not yet exist, but rather the Gospels, the books of church order, the epistles, the accounts of the martyrs, the books of the Old Testament; these by the way are called “books” for a reason and it wasn’t until Constantine converted to Christ that high quality codices containing the entire Bible began to be produced by scribes in Alexandria and Caesarea (which in turn led to the debates about what to include in the New Testament which were settled by St. Athanasius).
