While looking for a book I bought recently for the Pastor Fu who’s leaving the church. My father is packing his books. He’s in the process of seeing which books he can donate to a local seminary and what to keep, so I thought maybe he put it in his box of books to donate. While going through his boxes of books, I bumped into 羅秉祥 Lo, Ping-cheung‘s Christian Ethics: Principles and Applications 黑白分明. Lo is a professor of religion at the Baptist University of Hong Kong.
I picked it up and it’s a good read. In Hong Kong, there is more and more dissatisfaction with the government and its policy. The mentors and leadership at my fellowship strongly advocate that Christians should keep quiet and submit totally to all authority and not protest (we do peaceful protest quite often in Hong Kong).
Hong Kong is in a pretty tight spot right now. I work at a school and we had an alumi who works as a Chinese correspondent journalist. He told us about how there are people who give Beijing the message that Hong Kong is getting out of control and being very rebellious against the Beijing Government for their self-benefits. The effect is that Beijing is tightening its control over Hong Kong in all aspects from freedom of speech, education, human rights, freedom of press and our political systems. We at Hong Kong feel it as well. It used to be underneath and subtle but now it’s becoming very obvious and I can say all informed Hong Kongers know.
Many Hong Kongers are thinking of migrating to other countries.
All in all, I really like Lo’s book because it’s written by Chinese in the Chinese context. In US, or the English world, we have a lot of these books on how to apply Christian principles in society, politics and etc, but we lack these kind of books by Chinese authors that talk about what the Chinese are facing. We have Chinese translations of western books on this topic but there’s nothing like having your own people who understands you and the situation address those issues in the native Chinese language.
I wish we do more of this at our local Chinese church in Hong Kong, Hong Kongers and Christian Hong Kongers are facing some tough issues that are affecting our lives constantly. We need to know how to respond to them in a Christian manner, at least a framework on how to think and start the discussion instead of merely saying, “God allows this, so let’s wait for God and let God take care of it. Just ignore what’s going on, don’t get involved.”
I don’t think that’s the answer. That’s just being lazy and making yourself ignorant and uninformed.
The other book I am going to read is Lo, Ping-cheung’s Freedom and its moral boundary. Hong Kong: Logos, 2010. (Chinese) 羅秉祥：《自由社會的道德底線》（香港，基道，2010）。I don’t have to buy it, it’s actually in the public library. That’s actually a great thing about public library in Hong Kong, they have a lot of Christian books as well as books of other religions. That is something I don’t see in American public library.
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