If he had shown the slightest smidgen of pastoral concern, or even just human sympathy for a man now facing 10 years of what Lamb faced for 20 years for his beliefs, I might not have felt so taken aback. But no. Xu was a heretic, and Samuel Lamb's normally soft demeanor had turned steely and cold in response. He may have loved his congregation, but if Xu were to appear he would get a fierce earful...John Knox style!

Perhaps his reaction meant more to me because I had a similar feeling a few days before, reading about the Church Fathers. I stared aghast as the great Tertullian lays into Praxeous, the heretic, in the most uncharitable terms imaginable. I read with disappointment the downright ungraciousness of the so-called Doctor of Grace, St. Augustine, as he calls for the Donatist sect to be punished by military force.

It seems to be a fact that many of the great heroes of the faith burned with as fierce a hatred toward those they perceived to be the enemies of God, as they were inflamed with love for God.

Not that all this made much sense to Samuel Lamb when I explained my reaction. He had never heard of Tertullian, and although he knew of Augustine, he had never read him. He said his attitude was quite biblical, and listed some New Testament passages where the authors were equally tough on heretics. Paul calls them "conceited, understanding nothing, with a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words" (1Tim. 6:4). Peter is more direct, less academic, calling them "dogs that return to their own vomit" (2 Peter 2:22). And Jude waxes lyrical in his dismissiveness, likening them to "wild waves of the sea, casting up the foam of their own shame; wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever" (Jude 11).

Say what you like about Samuel Lamb. His language about Xu Yongze is positively mild compared with his biblical and patristic forebears.

Setting aside for now the question of whether Xu deserves to be labeled a modern-day Diotrephes or not, the issue is Lamb's language and attitude. Many Western Christians have gone to China, intent on adulation at the feet of men such as Lamb, only to find them negative and intolerant. Indeed, the intransigence and belligerence of this elderly house church cadre has helped cause many Western church leaders, including prominent Evangelicals, to reject the house churches as stubbornly fundamentalist and build bridges instead to the more sophisticated sounding Three Self leaders (except they soon sound the same too).

In partial mitigation for Samuel Lamb and others like him, let me make the following points.

1. INFLEXIBILITY OF ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGICAL DEVIANCE IS A COMMON YET UNDERSTANDABLE CHARACTERISTIC OF MOST PERSECUTED CHURCHES. Dr. James Bradley, church historian at Fuller Seminary, reminds us that "you will usually find a rigorous, penal attitude towards [church] discipline whenever people are suffering for their faith." Speaking of 16th century Anabaptism and the 20th century Russian and Chinese churches, he warns, "It is a persecuting environment which produces rigidity of thinking, because definitions and borders are absolutely essential. You need to know who is true and who is false because you trust your very life to those who are true."

It is easy for us to be judgmental of their attitudes, whether of latter-day Tertullians or modern day Lambs, but our hindsight should give us generosity, not censoriousness. In the trench-like conditions of persecution, where betrayal and infiltration are rife, and false teaching is often deliberately sponsored by enemies of the faith as a spoiling tactic, it is no wonder church leaders in such a besieged situation tend to draw the dividing line between true and false with a fierceblack-and-white vigor. Would we not do the same if our lives depended on it?

2. THE CHINESE HOUSE CHURCH LEADERS ARE JEALOUS FOR THEIR GREAT REVIVAL TO HAVE REAL STAYING POWER, AND KNOW HOW DEVASTATING HERESY CAN BE. Says Lamb, "Over 30 years ago there was a great revival that swept Taiwan, but now there is little to show for it because the new disciples were not grounded in truth, and they slid quietly back into the old religion." It is hard to express how overwhelmed many house church leaders feel with the task of discipling so many new converts with so few resources. And they are worried too that peasants--among whom the growth of the church is fastest--are in it for the thrills and healings, and may move on if they find a "new, more improved" version. Said a Henan leader, "The peasants care little for orthodoxy. They do not realize the connection between truth and power." Thus Lamb's attitude to Xu and his kind is based on a protectiveness of the gains of revival, which they feel could be reversed by peculiar and eccentric teachings. They may not be right in rejecting Xu, but they are surely right in their general analysis.

3. THE OLDER HOUSE CHURCH LEADERS HAVE ALL WITNESSED PERSONALLY THE CHAOS AND DIVISIVENESS THAT XU'S BORN AGAIN MOVEMENT HAS WROUGHT IN THE BODY OF CHRIST. While Xu should be exonerated from the charge of heresy, as those who know him like Jonathan Chao affirm his soteriological integrity, there is a seamier side to his movement that has split many churches. Evangelists from his movement blatantly target other house churches, splitting congregations and teaching that all other groups are false. They tend to target young teenagers to be their primary evangelists, especially females, insisting they keep their vocation a secret from their own kin. There is no doubt that with such a huge movement, there is much that is manipulative and divisive. One thinks of a Western parallel in the over heated rhetoric of conservative evangelical leaders to the first flowering of the charismatic movement, especially among those who saw their church memberships decimated.

Anyway, all this is not to excuse away the high-handed dismissiveness of Xu by the elderly house church leaders, none of whom have met him or interacted with him. But it is to say their reaction--given the conditions in which they live, their well founded desire to protect the gains of revival, and the fact that their own personal encounters with Xu's movement have been extremely negative--is understandable and demands at least our appreciation, though not, of course, our cooperation.

Perhaps in this whole episode God is teaching us not to make an idol of the Chinese revival, but to realize afresh where great outpourings of the Holy Spirit always end up, namely, where they always do, in cracked old clay jars!


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