Kwok Pui Lan Summary

In this scholarly article, Kwok Pui Lan, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, explains how culture outside of the Bible view its beliefs. Being from China, she describes the thoughts of Asian views of the Bible. Kwok Pui Lan talks about how Asians believe the Bible is a part of “western domination and cultural imperialism,”(25). They feel as though if God has this great power, then why doesn’t He help the suffering of the world? She explains that “many Chinese Christians reject the assumption that the Bible contains all the truth,”(28), because of this. Coming from a Chinese background, Kwok Pui Lan gives her own opinions on the Bible and how it should be viewed.
When Kwok Pui Lan writes “Foucault's analysis leads me to examine the power dynamics underlying such questions as: What is truth? Who owns it? Who has the authority to interpret it? This is particularly illuminating when we try to investigate how the Bible is used in a cross-cultural setting,”(27) I can’t help but ask myself the same questions. Is the truth what we read word for word in the Bible? Whose job is it to say
In order to create a more diverse religion, the idea of combining different, but similar, cultures would make sense. Kwok goes on, “They tried to show that biblical concepts such as "agape" were compatible to "benevolence" in Chinese classics and that the moral teachings of Jesus were comparable to the teachings of the Confucian tradition,”(29). These are only two of the many examples of how similar these religions are. People sometimes have the idea that religious beliefs have a huge separation between peoples of different cultures, but in fact, they are most likely quite similar, at least in certain