Author: Thomas Alan Harvey
Publication details: Brazon Press, 2002.
 

Reviewed by Chee Siew Hoong

The author, Thomas Alan Harvey, frames Wang Mingdao’s dissent against the atheistic Communist Chinese government and the Social Gospel as key to understanding the spiritual struggle in China for the hearts and minds of the people. Harvey’s book, while being biographical, offers more than a purely personal narrative of one man’s suffering. He provides us with an analysis of the historical, political and social conditions that influenced the growth of the church in China. More significantly, the book analyses  Wang’s theological and biblical defense of the gospel against the battering ram of an atheistic-driven social gospel, thereby highlighting the spiritual issues which divided Chinese believers fifty years ago and continue to influence the church in China today.
 

Wang Mingdao staunchly opposed the social gospel held by modernists, which looked to moral and social regeneration for salvation instead of faith in Jesus Christ. This opposition intensified as modernists aligned themselves to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)when it came to power. Both modernists and liberals attempted to agglomerate Protestant Christians with the party both ideologically and institutionally.  The formation of the Three-Self Reform Movement (TSRM) marked the culmination of these efforts to establish a union of Protestant churches under the banner of patriotism and anti-imperialism. The TSRM merged socialist reformation with the kingdom of God. Christian doctrines of sin, conversion, regeneration and salvation were redefined in terms of nation, not Christ.  Publishing commentaries that reached beyond the shores of the republic, Wang denounced the corruption of the gospel, calling for a return to the pure doctrine of the Scriptures based on salvation in Jesus Christ.
 

Wang received mounting pressure to join the TSRM up to 1954, but it was only in 1955 that he was arrested. From 1924 when Wang began holding house meetings at his Beijing home, till his arrest in 1955, the debate between Wang and the modernists revolved around the central issue of the identity of the church.
 

To this day, liberals still contend that Wang’s brand of the gospel was escapist and individualistic, claiming that such an approach obstructed   dialectics with society and culture. However, a closer look at Wang’s beliefs disproves these accusations.
 

Wang’s dissent stemmed from his conviction that the identity of the church was rooted in Christ. He preached daode , teaching that those who did not believe in Christ walked in darkness while believers who followed the way (dao)  were called to model a life of excellence (de). The church was called therefore to be a peculiar people whose faith had social consequences. The church could only affect society and culture when her identity was rooted in Christ and she remain faithful to the doctrines of Scripture.
 

In contrast modernists and proponents of the TRSM fused the gospel of Christ with nationalism, exchanging sanctification for social and political progress, salvation for personal and social reconstruction. The role of the church was to conform to social and political change or be marginalized as an encumbering hindrance.
 

The discarding of Scriptural doctrines eventually resulted in the deliberate obfuscation of  the distinction between believers and unbelievers, church and society, thereby allowing the government to mobilize  the masses under the a single social movement.  Without these necessary distinctions, the gospel becomes unintelligible as sanctification, repentance and sin dissolve into the political rhetoric of ideology.

Upholding relevance as a principle, the modernists argued that doctrine was shaped by the   culture of the day since Scripture was symbolic and bordered on myth. They held that ‘irrational’ adherence to Scripture be replaced by rational appeals to progress that was based on science and reason. Based on this premise, they argued that the gospel needed to be tempered to science and social theory. On the other hand, Wang held that Scripture was the inspired Word of God and doctrine was authoritative. This implied that the church, theology and doctrine were therefore not subject to the social, philosophical and political tenets of a secular ideological framework. The participation of the church in society occurs when she is faithful to the Scriptures, not when she subordinates God’s will and her own identity to social and political progress. The prophetic power of the church, Wang argued, was supplied by her unswerving faith in the authority of Scripture.

A central focus in Wang’s writings and sermons was the necessity of suffering and persecution for believers. Suffering did not signal defeat but was redemptive, preceding the purification and expansion of the church as evidenced throughout history.  Suffering was the cost of bearing witness to the lordship of Christ.

Wang constantly referred to the apostle Peter who, for fear of suffering, denied Christ initially, but later understood that he needed to “arm himself with the spirit of suffering” and was able to make a stand for his faith after meeting the risen Christ.  The spirit of suffering therefore enables one to overcome fear. Wang’s continuous references to Peter portended Wang’s detention where he would be forced to confess his crimes and publicly denounce his stand against the renamed Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). Like Peter, Wang overcame his fear and humiliation, embracing his own suffering and repudiated his confession in his prison papers while incarcerated in Beijing. He was placed in solitary confinement for four months and then transferred to labour camp in the Shanxi province where he would spend the next five years in prison.

The book reiterates the preaching of doctrine as pivotal in the life of the church. When instruction on doctrine is displaced by “how-to” messages, the gospel that is being preached has shifted from one centered on Christ to one that is centered on man’s needs and wisdom. This leads to an erosion of discernment. When believers are unsure of their stand and foundations of their faith, one cannot help but question as to what kind of a stand they are able to make in the face of antagonism. A more perilous result of this indifference and ignorance is the ensuing inability of believers to discern between lie and truth, and their glad acceptance of other gospels–gospels of peace without brokenness, of confession without commitment and of prosperity without obedience.

Another question that arises is how believers should participate in a pluralistic society  without compromising their identity. Wang’s testimony affirms that in order to engage with society, the church needs to construct culture through the perspective of Scripture. In contrast, the modernists look to the pervading culture of the day as the source of authority and icon of identity for the church.  The church thus, becomes a shell which loses her prophetic witness in society, becoming merely another institution that is shaped by the world .

Wang’s testimony also compels us to reexamine the idea of “relevance” in living out our faith and warns against confusing significance with compromise  where the gospel  is altered in order to garner support for the ‘Christian’ cause. Certainly, it raises questions regarding the identity of believers and points toward the necessity of distinguishing cultural identity from spiritual identity.

This book should be on the required reading list of believers because it raises issues regarding the identity of the church and provokes questions regarding accepted ideas of relevance and engagement with society and culture. In addition, Wang’s suffering bears witness to the call of the church to “embrace suffering”: and retain her integrity to the faith even as she refuses to allow human powers to censure her identity and calling.

Review previously published in a Kairos monograph entitled Understanding the Modern World Through Christian Eyes, February 2005.
  

Authors: Carmen McGuinness and Geoffrey McGuinness
Publication details: Fireside, New York, 1998
 

Reviewed by Samantha Siau Ching Sin
 

To date, there have been two major contending methods of teaching children how to read. The whole-word method, generally preferred at schools, assumes that reading is an automatic process which children pick up without much effort. Children are expected to recognize whole words like “house” as referring to, well, a house, and at the same time remember to say it as, well, “house” –  no question asked; no explanation given. Meanwhile, a more traditional method called phonics sensibly divides the “whole word” into readable parts or sound entities connected by a set of rules. However, it may be developmentally inappropriate for young children to learn such a great number of abstract rules, especially if they are learnt out of the context of meaningful words and narratives.

The Phono-Graphix method, pioneered by the founders of Read America, Inc, and authors of Reading Reflex, attempts to find the golden mean between the rigors of phonics and the naïve, simplistic confidence of the whole-word method, teaching the rules in the context of words. The term Phono-Graphix can be interpreted as the pictorial (“Graphix”) representation of sounds (“Phono”), or sound pictures. In this book, Carmen and Geoffrey McGuiness offer a step-by-step, “fool proof” guide for parents to teach their children how to read using the Phono-Graphix method.

The process of learning how to read is divided into four levels. In the first level, called the basic code, the child is taught how to read words with three sounds, with the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) pattern (eg. cat, jig and bun). Each word is divided into its constituent phonemes, presented to the child as “sound pictures.” For example, the word “cat” is presented as   c - a - t  , and the child learns that each “sound picture” represents a sound. In this case, the sounds represented are /k/, /æ/ and /t/. The vowels sounds are taught alongside several other consonants. A very important basic rule learnt here is NOT to pronounce the sounds according to their letter names – aye, bee, see, dee and so on. Apart from recognizing letters as sound pictures, and articulating them correctly, the child also learns the skills of blending (connecting the sounds /k/, /æ/ and /t/ to read /kæt/) and segmenting (recognizing that the word “cat” can be separated into the sounds “c”, “a” and “t”). 

In the next level, the child encounters more complicated words with adjacent consonants, or words with consonants placed side by side, with the word patterns VCC (eg. ant), CVCC (pump) and CCVC (flag). Here, the advantage of presenting sounds as concrete, separable pictures becomes evident as the young child works through visually challenging and hard-to-pronounce words like “slug” and “silk.” To reinforce their ability to hear and read just any combination of sounds they have learnt so far, the child goes through an exercise called auditory processing or phoneme manipulation, which works like a guided spelling exercise. For example, the child is given the nonsense word “sip.” Then, he or she is asked to change the word to “sisp.” The child should be able to locate the addition of the sound “s” between “i” and “p” and come out with the word “sisp.” The train of words may go on with “stisp,” “stis,” “stip,” and so on. The book provides templates of sound picture cards and wordlists for the parents for this purpose.

When the child has mastered the basic skills of reading, he or she proceeds to the advanced code. Several goals are targeted in this level. First, a child should learn that “two or more letters can represent a sound,” such as the sound picture representing /k/. The child also learns about variations and overlaps in the code. Variations refer to the fact that there are many ways to represent one sound – the sound /k/ can be represented by “c,” “k” or “ck.” Meanwhile, overlapping sounds are sounds which look alike, but are actually pronounced differently. For example, the sound picture can be pronounced as either the /aυ/ sound (“house”) or the /Əυ/ sound (“soul”). This is the most difficult level for a child to master, as it grapples with the complexities of English phonetics.

The final level to master before a child graduates from this book is multisyllable management, where a child learns to “chunk” or separate multisyllable words into digestible syllables. The child is given the freedom to either chunk the word “water” as wa – ter or wat – er, as long as he or she is able to make two syllables. This technique of chunking will enable a child to see complex words as being composed of relatively simple and manageable parts, and apply their reading skills learnt beforehand to read these parts. Various refinements to reading are also introduced in this last section.

The simplicity of the Phono-Graphix method, as taught in Reading Reflex, can be seen as a stepping stone to encourage a child to start and enjoy reading. It introduces some method to the madness of English phonetics, and yet not dampening the child’s enthusiasm through tedious, abstract rules. The concept of concretizing sounds as pictures that can be shifted and manipulated is also effective for children with learning difficulties and those who are more visually than verbally inclined. Phono-Graphix is a method that would work well for both the young child and the parent. Reading Reflex supplies templates useful for teaching, and detailed instruction as to how to teach them using the materials supplied. This user-friendly book also provides various reading materials for children which are simple yet fun to read.

However, its very simplicity can also be its weakness. Children can be confused by the large number of sounds to be mastered in the advanced code level. Those who think that reading can be systematically learnt with the least effort are suddenly bombarded by confusing variations and overlaps to be learnt, as it were, by rote. Again, the advice of whole-word practitioners, “read and read as much as you can” is reiterated as the solution to differentiating “ghoti” from “fish.” One could almost say that while the first and second levels are mostly phonics, the rest of the book is decidedly more biased towards whole-word. While this seems to be a logical progression (from sound to word), it lacks a certain effectiveness to make phonics elements work better in the latter chapters.

Samantha Siau has been involved in a reading programme for slow readers.