Livro: Cristianismo Cresce na China Porque pode Explicar o Mundo.

O cristianismo cresce a taxa elevadíssimas na África e na China, o livro acima, de Stark e Wang, tenta uma explicação não-espiritual para isso. Eu costumo achar que Deus usa tudo que é humano para levar o homem a Deus, usa até o mal. Então, não tenho muita preocupação quando alguém explica a evolução de uma religião usando questões materiais e científicas. Apenas acho que essas questões não são mais relevantes do que a sede da alma por Deus.

Os autores do livro dizem que as religiões orientais (xintoísmo, confucionismo, budismo e taoísmo) olham para o passado e não procuram explicar o universo. Enquanto, o cristianismo olha para o futuro e libera a ciência nas análises sobre tudo. Esta característica do cristianismo tem feito intelectuais chineses a se voltarem ao cristianismo.

Isto não explica o crescimento completo, pois é o povo chinês que adere ao cristianismo e não simplesmente intelectuais, mas não deixa de ser verdade o que ele relata sobre as religiões em comparação com o cristianismo. Muita gente antes já disse isso, o cristianismo é melhor para a ciência. Aqui no blog, certa vez, eu coloquei nomes de padres, bispos, papas que foram importantes para a ciência.

O jornal National Ctaholic Register fez um relato do livro de  Stark e Wang, vejam abaixo parte do que relata o jornal.

Why Is Christianity Growing So Quickly in Communist China?
BY CARL BUNDERSON/CNA/EWTN NEWS

FORTH WORTH, Texas — Christianity is spreading rapidly in China, and it could be because of how well the faith fits in with modern scientific technology. According to the renowned sociologist Rodney Stark, the number of Christians in China is growing at an impressive annual rate of seven percent.

Stark and Xiuhua Wang authored the 2015 work A Star in the East: The Rise of Christianity in China. Stark views himself as a social historian and is co-director of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University.

Stark and Wang estimate that in 1980 there were 10 million Ch

ristians in the People’s Republic of China, and that in 2007 the figure was 60 million. These numbers yield an annual growth rate of 7% — which means that last year, there were nearly 100 million Christians in China.

They hold that this large increase in the number of Christians in China is driven by the conversion of the better educated, who are experiencing “cultural incongruity” between traditional Asian culture and industrial-technological modernity, which results in a spiritual deprivation, which Christianity is able to answer.

China’s intellectuals, Stark told CNA Aug. 14, “are very convinced they’ve got to turn West to understand the world they live in … and they’re convinced by my argument that Eastern religions don’t fit the modern world they’re engaged in, and that they need to look to the West to find philosophies and religions. It’s quite amazing.”

Eastern religions like Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, Stark maintained, “are all anti-progress; they all proclaim the world is going downhill from a glorious past, and that we should look backwards, not forwards. None of them admit that we’re able to understand anything about the universe — it’s something we have to meditate on, not something to try and theorize about, as the physicists and chemists do. And that doesn’t fit with the world that modern Chinese are experiencing having happened around them.”

“Industrial society, and all the science it’s based on, doesn’t fit well with those kind of religious views,” Stark reflected.

“But the question of what does the world mean, and how do we live in it, persists — and so that’s a major motor in the Christianization of China, and it explains why it’s the most educated Chinese who are the most apt to join.”

The spread of Christianity in China, he said, has been possible even “during the worst time of Chinese persecution” under Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s because “this process of conversion is invisible; the government can’t see it.”

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Catholic missionaries have been in China since the Jesuits of the 16th century, and in 1949 — when communist forces gained control over the whole of the mainland — there were some 5,700 Catholic foreign missionaries, and a total of nearly 3.3 million Catholics.

The communist government of China expelled foreign missionaries, and later established the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, a government-sanctioned Catholic Church. This has existed in opposition to the underground Church in communion with the Vatican, which is persecuted and whose episcopal appointments are frequently not acknowledged by Chinese authorities

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Stark noted, however, that the Aug. 4 consecration of Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Zhang Yinlin of Weihui is “the most important news from a Catholic perspective to come out of China in years.”

Bishop Zhang was approved of by both the Chinese government and the Holy See — the appointment of bishops has been the two states’ most prominent area of contention throughout the past 60 years, so their agreement is of some import.

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In light of this new openness to Christianity across China as a whole, Stark supposed a continued 7% annual rate of growth of the religion. At that rate, there will be 150 million Christians in China in 2020; 295 million in 2030; and 579 million in 2040.

“The growth might stop: You never know what’s going to happen in the future,” Stark said. “But at the current rate, there’ll be a whole heck of a lot of Christians in China awfully soon.”