Posts tagged china

I've been so mesmerized by the online coverage of archery and weightlifting (no joke!) that I've yet to delve much into the table tennis archive at nbcolympics.com Though the action's a bit too quick to show up well on my broadband, alas.

re: asia, china, horizons of the possible, olympics, sport, teams

Nate:

Doubles table tennis is so entertaining because it defies the laws of geometry. As anyone who’s played in a rec room fully understands, a Ping-Pong table simply isn’t big enough to accommodate four people. The key skill that every doubles team must master has nothing to do with shot-making or defense. Rather, it’s having the agility to get the hell out of the way of your partner.

In doubles table tennis, partners must alternate shots. That means the goal of any team is to sow confusion in the enemy—to make it so the player whose turn it is to hit has to get through his or her partner to do so. The highlight of a doubles match is when partners kick, trip, or smash into one another. I once saw a Malaysian duo knock heads so hard the match was delayed nearly half an hour. Also fun: when one player swings for the ball and hits his or her partner instead.

Sadly, at the Olympic level, the players are too accomplished for this to happen. Maybe it’s just as well, then, that doubles has been eliminated as an Olympic event.

There is a real danger that Christians' enthusiasm for God's work in human cultures will lead to simply baptizing whatever the culture is doing. Rarely has this been seen so clearly as in this communiqué from the Lutheran World Federation in 1975. As Sanneh describes it, "The communiqué insisted that the time had passed when Christianity could raise questions for China, pointing out that these questions were already settled for Chinese Christians who had long ago reached the conclusion that Christianity was, at best, irrelevant and, at worst, inimical to China's interests." Thirty years later, of course, we would never be so uncritical about culture. Of course not.

re: asia, china, copying, gestures and postures, lamin sanneh, mission

Andy:

“Love your neighbour to the point of denying yourself” is the ethical core of the Gospel. “Fight selfishness; serve the people” is the ethical core of Mao Tse-Tung Thought. “By their fruits you shall know them” is the decisive criterion of the Gospel. Marxism has sworn by the same test of “fruits” or “practice,” and in the case of China at least has both preached and practiced “continuing revolution” in its name. . . .

The social and political transformations brought about in China through the application of the Thought of Mao Tse-Tung have unified and consolidated a quarter of the world population into a form of society and life-style at once pointing to some of the basic characteristics of the kingdom of God. . . .

Christians . . . have to free themselves from the parochial Western context in which many of their Churches have developed and realize that the Gospel might be more powerfully expressed and fulfilled in the new type of society which is promoted in China.