The Unseen World - Part 1: The Past Darkness

1. The Reality of the Unseen World

"For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."

[Ephesians 6:12] 

As a kid, I was always interested in and drawn to things like traditional superstitions of the Old South, stories about my great aunt who lived in a haunted house, even that weird feeling you sometimes get walking alone in the woods, that you've silently entered something else's domain. These always seemed like little doors or invitations into a wider reality, yet one that seemed both confirming of, and not allowed by, my faith. If the Bible is true, and God is real, then for a Westerner it seems like any evidence for the existence of the supernatural is evidence for faith. (A point we'll return to later) Yet at the same time, pursuing knowledge of the more darkly mysterious side of reality seemed to lead quickly in unwise directions, and felt like a kind of secretive lure away from God.

Many years later, after coming to live in Taiwan, I have slowly realized that for the majority of people here, the unseen world was not a mysterious possibility but a part of their daily life. They were surrounded by reminders and habits that displayed this. Spending my youth in the rural American South had prepared me for this perhaps better than most Westerners, but still I had not experienced anything on this level: Daoist trigram mirrors over doors, fear over picking up dropped money that could be a lure for ghost-marriage, incense sticks offered not only at temples but at the front doors of apartment buildings, people burning paper money on street corners in ubiquitous metal cans designed specifically for that purpose, gnarly-rooted sacred trees encircled with red cords, pendants and amulets worn around the necks of both adults and children.

These tables loaded with snacks, incense, and spirit money are an offering
to appease any harmful ancestral spirits which may be in the area 

And this is not some kind of remote tribal area. Taiwan is a technologically advanced island nation with more smartphones than people, with convenience stores where you can pay your bills and buy concert tickets and send packages and pay for it all with a metro card, and where green energy and smart cities are becoming a reality more quickly than for most of the United States.
Life in Taiwan has taught me that the unseen world does not flee just because technology progresses.

Yet most Americans do not consider an unseen world in their day to day life. The excluded middle, the part of reality which touches the spirit world yet remains connect to our own as well, is something many traditional cultures fear and give great importance to, yet remains ignored if not disbelieved in by most Westerners. There are various philosophical reasons for why the West moved away from this, cartesian dualism being one, and others will be discussed below.
But it's a worldview-level difference, which is true for most conservative evangelicals. (Charismatic or Pentacostal churches would be a halfway exception) We leap from our visible surroundings to God on His throne and rarely consider that anything lies in between, and find more or less all parts of the Bible that mention non-scientific phenomenon to be something that has to be taken on faith, as evidence for the unseen world is not exactly a common phenomenon (Not like it is in some parts of the world. When spiritual fear would drive people to Church, the Enemy pretends not to exist. When spiritual fear drives people to ally with darkness, the Enemy is quite active).

For most Westerners, though, with no context of or seemingly much evidence for a supernatural world we inhabit prior to death, our faith becomes focused on a supernatural world which exists after death, but our Christian life in the meantime becomes very intellectualized, a set of propositions to which we give assent and which we defend from attack by means of logic and reasoned debate and the principles of God's revelation to us. Which is good, and necessary, but it leaves out a whole giant piece of reality, which many other cultures are quite concerned about, and which local religions exist to deal with. When we bump into people from those religions, we find that they are not interested in our logical and reasoned debate, since religion for them is a matter of the unseen reality that affects their lives, yet they find Christians have little to say about this.

To be sure, many Americans have inherited, or brought with them from their family's origin countries, certain beliefs or superstitions, perhaps reduced to a rote family tradition, which harken back to an older time. And the older, geographically-established American subcultures, places like rural New England or the Appalachians, have their own local folk culture. Folk culture always knows about the unseen world. It may have confused, exaggerated, or purely fanciful explanations for it, but there is a tacit acknowledgment there that puts them ahead of we moderns who think ourselves clever for disbelieving in evil spirits but talking about "bad vibes."

(Ironically, despite disbelieving in this "middle world," the American church still struggles to avoid a Christian folk religion mentality, for which this article is a decent introduction)

2. The Unseen World vs. Fantasy vs. Folk Tradition, for Christians

A close reading of the Bible shows us that this unseen world is both acknowledged and treated critically as well. We have both acknowledgments that behind idols are spiritual forces of darkness, and sarcasm about how an idol is nothing but the other half of the wood the idol maker cooked his food with. (Interestingly, my purely subjective experience in Taiwan has the same dichotomy--some temples feel dark and disturbing on the spiritual level, others like a scam to fool sincere people)

I am not suggesting that Christians are supposed to accept wholesale the claims of various cultures regarding the unseen reality around us. From selkies frolicking in an Irish cove while keeping an eye on their seal skins to the gates of Chinese hell that are thought to open at the beginning of Ghost Month, there are innumerable beliefs about the unseen world across human culture. We don't need to give specific credence to any of them in particular, but we should recognize that the idea of an unseen reality in this life has been something humans always knew, and that every culture likes to make up stories about it does not mean it's not real any more than sci-fi proves that space travel never really happened.

So why did Christendom seem to move away from all this interest in the unseen world? How did Christians follow along with this idea of a material world yet retain a belief in high heaven and God on His throne? Part of the reason may be that the Bible's take on the unseen world is much darker than much of what we find in popular folk culture, or perhaps we could say it is less balanced.

We don't find any mention in scripture of unseen forces doing what C.S.Lewis once called "minding their own business." There are no little sprites or fairies just doing their own thing. If anything like the vast number of folk culture entities and creatures have ever existed, Genesis is almost entirely silent about them (the Nephilim being a sort of intriguing exception), yet it speaks of angels and demons quite straightforwardly. The part of reality that scripture is concerned with, visible or invisible, is a conflict between God and the enemies of God, and how God's redemptive plan plays out from the beginning to end of human history. Lewis and some of his friends actually seemed to mourn this fact, as expressed in his novel That Hideous Strength by Dr. Dimble at one point, that all of reality was getting caught up into the all-encompassing battle between Good and Evil. The old "elf land" or that part of the unseen world which seemed to be an almost neutral territory, was passing away, or had already done so, and now everything was drawing near to the final cosmic battle of Good and Evil; everything had to take a side, in the end. (Current and prolific author John C. Wright's Moth and Cobweb series deals with this as well--his "twilight world" characters begin to find themselves caught up in a war between light and darkness, and it becomes obvious that there is no middle ground to hesitate on for long)

As a tradition, however, even elves--which Tolkien sort of baptized into the noble Eldar--were thought of in a somewhat darker fashion before Tolkien wrote about High Elves, filled with the light of Valinor, and it became a new archetype. Before then elves and other creatures of the "middle world" had been mostly thought of as capricious beings, prone to stealing from people and playing tricks on them; if not fully bent on evil, yet also the sorts of beings which could not endure the sound of a church bell. There is a whole realm of fantasy, derived from folk traditions, of creatures which could not stay in "Old England" after the Church arrived and became established. Rudyard Kipling portrays this with a sort of nostalgic wistfulness in the story Dymchurch Flit, showing that same desire of Lewis, that what of that old world could not baptized need not be entirely banished. (But while I can feel their wistfulness strongly as expressed in their writings, I suspect it's a very sneaky form of temptation that certain well-educated people are susceptible to, rather like our "pet sins" like narrowly-focused gluttony that are so hard to confess and get rid of because they seem innocuous)

Due to this complicated idea present in English-speaking culture (I think the West in general, but I have not studied the question in other languages) that the "grey area" or twilight world, the Old things, must go away when the light of the gospel has arrived, we can see one way that the Church wasn't putting up much of a fight to retain a biblical concept of the unseen world. The entire folk tradition was relegated to anthropological studies as both the advent of the Church and the industrial revolution made it both unrighteous and increasingly irrelevant. Thus in the West, we stopped thinking about the world in terms of even having this unseen "middle" realm. 

In Taiwan, the same thing is happening in churches to a problematic degree--people either want to turn off that side of reality which represents their old spiritual bondage, or they found it more natural to become Christians because they never put much stock in traditional religion to begin with. That makes it challenging for many Taiwanese believers to share their faith incarnationally with other Taiwanese who still follow the old traditions.

3. The Unseen World in Scripture: Earth as Enemy-Occupied Territory

When we look at scripture's portrayal of the unseen world, which possesses not an ounce of the (possibly wrongful) sense of nostalgia we find in the authors I mentioned above, we learn that we live in a wider, and darker, world than we have typically been willing to recognize. The Bible was written by people who lived in that world and knew it, and it is full of commands to stop serving those unseen powers and worship God alone. Every idol and pagan altar--and even those "high places and spreading trees" I didn't understand about before I lived in Taiwan, with its divine trees and temples or shrines at every picturesque elevated spot--was a portal to that unseen world which affected all areas of life, and still is considered to do so in many parts of the Old World where traditional folk culture survives.

As I mentioned above, the world peopled lived in was all the folk world, once upon a time, usually before the gospel had been there long. Grimm's Fairy Tales, at least in their original conception, harken back to a time when Germans considered the forest to be full of portals to the unseen world--with its dark silent valleys, mysterious rings of mushrooms, ominous standing stones, and hollow halls beneath the fells. For Celtic peoples, the original feasting and rituals at the end of Autumn, which have partially continued and partially re-emerged as Halloween, were originally an open recognition of the dark side of that other world, and a simultaneous attempt to rebuff and appease it. (That doesn't necessarily mean holidays with an original pre-christian influence are harmful, as I wrote about Christmas a while back)

Once, that dark unseen world reigned supreme on earth. G.K.Chesterton has written powerfully in the Everlasting Man about that Old World, which he identifies with Carthage, the Canaanite superpower finally utterly defeated by Rome (Carthago Delenda Est!) 140 years before the coming of Christ. With its dark rituals and infant sacrifices to Moloch lying underneath all the trading and sea voyaging, Chesterton argues, Carthage was the final culmination of a kind of hellish pragmatism which was happy to cooperate with dark powers of the unseen world to any level of depravity, so long as it achieved the desired results. (This article is a decent brief summary of Chesterton's take on what was hanging in the balance with Rome vs Carthage, and draws a tragic parallel between infant sacrifice and the abortion industry)

We can catch a glimpse of that darker world here and there throughout scripture, often in verses we gloss over or find confusing as modern Americans. One chilling example is 2 Kings 3:27, when Israel's armies have defeated and cornered a pagan king, who in desperation performs a ritualistic sacrifice of his own firstborn son, and summons wrath against Israel, who retreat and head back home.

When the king of Moab saw that the battle was too fierce for him, he took with him 700 men who drew swords, to break through to the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place, and offered him as a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel, and they departed from him and returned to their own land. [2 Kings 3:26-27]

Some well-meaning commentators trying to make sense of the account miss the point and say that since it seems impossible that it could be God's great wrath against Israel, it must have been human wrath, either the Moabites being roused to angry desperation, or even that the invading army was disgusted at the display and changed their minds about attacking. Some translations use different wording on the assumption that this is the case. (I am using the NASB above). Yet this word wrath is associated with divine wrath and not human indignation when used elsewhere in scripture. At least one commentator concludes, as seems the most straightforward interpretation to me, that the sacrifice was a "success" and demonic wrath was summoned against the invading army, who departed as a result. I have heard enough testimonies when learning about spiritual warfare at seminary, and much more so from Taiwanese people about temple healings and exorcisms, and other demonically-motivated "helpful" results, to know that the Enemy will "play by the rules" and offer help on their own terms if it keeps people in spiritual bondage.

That is the spiritual darkness that Israel was surrounded by, and repeatedly ensnared by and plunged into, until God would send such severe punishment that they nationally repented and tore down the altars and high places, only to succumb to the lure of darkness once again. To understand the conquest of Canaan and ongoing fighting between Israel and the surrounding nations, one must understand that Canaanites did not merely fear the dark unseen world and try to appease it, but were outright worshiping and allying with it, especially against Israel. Canaan combined advanced cultural achievements, like iron weapons and the precursor to the alphabet we still use today, with dark rites and whatever aid from the unseen world they could muster, whether imaginary or real. (Witness their confusion as they call upon different powers to aid them in their battles, and understand that God was in a sense proclaiming Himself to them as He shattered their armies, as He shattered Egypt and their dark spiritual traditions generations earlier)

That was in the time of Moses, and the generations that followed. Even as Moses led Israel through the desert, they continued to practice rituals to appease the unseen spirit world. The book of Leviticus commands the Israelites to stop making sacrifices to demons of the desert, as they had been prone to do. (Leviticus 17:7)

Going back even earlier, Genesis suggests that the pre-flood world was yet more deeply under the influence of evil, and the unseen world was in fact dominating the world in a rather visible fashion. Evil spirits walked among men and, depending on your interpretation, even took human women to be their wives, and gave birth to men of unearthly power (the Nephilim mentioned above), a crime for which some spirits were imprisoned permanently in "chains of darkness" to await final judgment, referred to in passing in 2 Peter 2.
Noah's flood cleaned the world in more than one sense, then, yet in particular evil locales, enclaves, and time periods of history, wicked people have repeatedly tried to bring back that deeper darkness. Much interesting fiction has been based around the struggle to stop this kind of thing (bad group of people try to make an alliance with evil powers, good guys have to go stop them), and when we feel that somehow it's a true picture of the world even though we ourselves never seem to encounter it, we are subconsciously resonating with a truth about this world, just one that we've never been taught to see with the eyes of a biblical worldview. Yet that is the world we live in; one in which unseen evil power strives against the people of God, against the truth of the gospel, and seeks to keep lost people lost, and draw them more deeply into darkness.

3.5 Note: I am not being dark for dark's sake

I hope the reader will not misunderstand. I am not trying to be lurid or provocative in this post. Living in the spiritually darker environment of Taiwan has helped me to notice that the Bible is pretty straightforward about the darkness of the unseen part of the world we live in. It's easier to miss in some translations which seem to obscure it by choice of wording due to an unconscious cultural bias on the part of some translators or commentators which the writers of scripture did not possess.

It has also made me more sensitive to false and misleading portrayals of evil. When one has experienced the cruel hatefulness of the Enemy, the ruined lives and pain caused by satanic deception and bondage, you realize that whatever somber yet stylish aesthetic the forces of darkness are often portrayed with in Hollywood is a lie. Real evil is fearful and twisted and sickeningly ugly. At best it can temporarily pretend not to be so, but it does not love the beauty or even the intelligence it must use as tools of deception until it has enough control over its victims to drop the pretense.

I live and work in a place where that darkness is less deep than it was generations ago but has still not been effectively lifted, as it once had been in most of the West (as we continue into post-christianity it will eventually return, unless a major revival happens), and that is a burden of doing ministry here. Spiritual darkness is neither an esoteric, "best not to go there" topic to be nervously avoided, nor is it anything to be inquiring too eagerly into. It's just a bitter fact of life for many people in the world, something the freedom of Christ can deliver them from, breaking the sometimes multi-generational chains of fear and misunderstanding that bind them. It's also a reality of ministry, especially in certain parts of the world.

So my goal is not to creep anyone out, much less leave you with a morbid fascination, but to point out that the supernatural world is not something you only experience after you die, you live in it now, even if you close your eyes to it. And remember the Bible nowhere says that the devil is on a throne down in hell, that is not a scriptural teaching. (The lake of fire after judgment is punishment for Satan too.) He was cast down to earth, not to some volcanic inferno realm of Dante, and remains here, and wherever people live in spiritual bondage and serve the unseen world by following its rules, evil is behind it. When you see news articles about about weird and disturbing stuff that powerful people are caught doing, that's all part of it too.

4. But now...

We do not live in the same era as the the old Canaanite alliances with evil. Something has happened. A light has shined in the darkness, and it became our light. Our King has come, and conquered.

When the Son was born into this world as a human, he was coming to be a sacrifice for sin, but in the doing of it He was also literally invading the world, both seen and unseen. Demons were terrified of Jesus for a reason, then, and the legion possessing the Gerasene man begging not to be sent into the abyss make sense in this context. They had not expected this kind of divine invasion, not before the judgment that they knew was eventually coming. Satan seems to have more or less panicked and tried everything he could think of to stop Jesus: temptations, slander, and eventually betrayal and murder, though of course he only succeeded in doing exactly what God had already intended from the beginning. (Check and mate, God wins.) And when Christ died and rose again, He proclaimed victory over death, and over the powers of darkness in the unseen world, and His name now carries the ultimate authority:

9 

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations... [Matthew 18:18-19a]

Sometimes we skip over or rush through verse 18 to get to the "missions part." But verse 18 is what predicates the Great Commission that follows. We can carry on the mission of disciple making and kingdom growing because Jesus initiated it and it proceeds on his authority. We can take the gospel as a light into dark places, because the darkness still has strength and malice, but its authority has been taken away. Christ has won, and now His kingdom advances. And we are the servants of His kingdom, with His authority.

Let us be not oblivious to the unseen world, nor overly fearful, nor pridefully incautious, but go forth and shine in dark places, that unseen chains shall be broken and those who have dwelt in darkness may see a great light.

(Thanks for reading. We'll continue this discussion of Christ's victory and the unseen world in the Church Age later in Part II)

Chinese Religion, and the Excluded Middle

1. Intro - How we explain the World

Hello, tonight I'm writing about a topic that has been the source of much misunderstanding and miscommunication between Westerners (especially missionaries or those whose work involves them with Eastern religion one way or another). It's called the "Excluded Middle." (For those interested in more reading on this topic, here's a link to an essay by the late missiologist/anthropologist Paul Hiebert, to whom credit for the concept of the excluded middle is typically attributed.)

In the West, we have a more or less binary view of the universe/all-that-is:

Blue: Unseen/Supernatural world, dealt with solely in a religious context.
Green: Seen/Natural world, dealt with by science, etc. (Light Green: Mysterious, but not religious)

Notes:

1. I'm talking about 2015
It was not always so in the West; pre-christian/pagan Europe would have looked a lot more like the Chinese Religion chart we're covering later. Up until modern science, the light green area would have included things like alchemy.

2. This is the West as a Whole
I've drawn the blue section that small to demonstrate how for much of the modern-day West, religion is considered extraneous to normal everyday life. Those of us who grew up in the Bible belt sometimes don't realize how secular most of the West is. By the same token, yes there are a few westerners running around who espouse hinduism or some other non-western-origin worldview. But they'd probably be the first to tell you what a non-typical-westerner they are, so we don't need to consider that kind of outlier here.

3. This is Showing how We Explain Reality
As believers we know God is not separate from His creation, nor is He uninvolved in our day to day lives. However, this chart is referring to how we explain the world around us, not our teleology. (The "how," not the "why.") When you encounter repeated car trouble, you may pray about it and wonder what God is teaching you through it, and you may try going to a different auto mechanic, but you do not blame it on your deceased Uncle Joe who's angry you didn't put flowers on his grave this year, or a rival at work secretly stealing some of your hair and attacking you with voodoo.

4. Most People Do Leave Room for the Mysterious
I've included a little band for the "unexplained," those mysterious phenomenon which lots of people find fun to think about and talk about. Go out far enough into the American countryside to encounter folk culture, and this gap widens considerably. I did this to show that really in the West we have our own category here, the big difference is that we draw a firm line (represented by the thicker black line) between that kind of thing and anything religious. If, in certain churches, as I mentioned in a previous post, you start getting blurry lines there (believing in God but also carrying "lucky" tokens, putting a cross over your door not just as a sign of faith but also to keep "evil" out, etc.) then you are descending from orthodox doctrines into the slippery slope of folk theology, which typically leads towards an increasingly fear-based way of thinking with less and less resemblance to orthodox, scripturally-based faith.

So that's the West, in general. But in strict Modernism, and today for both atheists and the "science replaces god" people, you have the most simplistic possible view of the universe:

I could reduce it even further by simply writing "Synapses firing to no purpose."

Looking at this chart, perhaps it becomes apparent why it's so difficult to have conversations about the existence of God with those who hold to this way of thinking. To them, there is only the dark green part steadily filling up the light green part, no need for any blue at all. They must have life experiences or realizations of some kind that totally shatter this too-narrow illusion of reality to open up to the idea of a supernatural world, otherwise they simply ascribe anything "weird" to that buffer category as one more thing science will eventually explain. (This is what I call the "Science of the gaps" theory)

2. Chinese Religion - A Different View of the World

So that's "The West." When approaching "The East," a lot of Western people expect some mystery, some things that operate according to different rules than they're used to. Asia is that place where odd, inexplicable things can happen. However, and this is important, for westerners all those inexplicable things typically go into the "Mystery" category that is not religious and not really supernatural. Though it's not politically correct now, you've perhaps heard or read about various tribal/traditional religions described in older literature as "superstition," "mumbo-jumbo," and similar deprecating terms. The implication is that they aren't based in any kind of reality, that between the scientifically explainable world (creation, for believers) and God in heaven there is no "middle world" that civilized, educated humans need take into account.

Outside of many churches we might describe as charismatic, even Bible-believing Christians are usually very hesitant (in the West) to ascribe anything they observe to those kinds of spiritual forces the Bible clearly teaches exist, let alone those on which it does not comment.

Contrast this with how a typical Taiwanese person might view the world:

So here you can see, the world for a Taiwanese believer in traditional religion is a much more complicated place. The majority of Taiwanese would look at the world in this way to a certain extent, even if they do so by rejecting parts of it. ("I don't really believe ancestral spirits come into our world and bother people" is a statement only someone raised in and recognizing this worldview can make; a Christian Westerner does not believe that either, but they wouldn't ever say it because the question itself does not exist for them.)

Note the "Gates." In a folk/traditional religious world view, there are portals of various kinds between this world and the unseen/spirit world. Some of these may simply be natural objects of significance- a notable boulder, an impressive tree- that are "linked" to the unseen world (thinking of them as having spirit-wifi access might be a good analogy), as certain kinds of animals are considered to be as well (especially the "tricky" ones, like foxes). In Chinese traditional religion, however, there are "higher" portals or gates between this world and the spirit world that are open at various times or in various ways. One very notable example is during Ghost Month, when the gates of hell are said to open to let spirits of various kinds come into our world and potentially trouble the living in various harmful ways. (There is a long list of activities deemed "risky" during this time due to possible attack or negative influence from the spirits)

In the West, we might think of something like an Ouija board as a similar kind of "portal," and often Christians who lack a robust understanding of "spiritual warfare" -really just the wider reality the Bible clearly teaches that we live in- will instinctively revert to a very folk religious way of thinking when confronted with the occult. That might be the easiest way to visualize Taiwanese traditional religion for a Westerner, however- imagine if you lived in fear of the occult every day, and your culture lacked a "highest God" who could hear your prayers and who cared about you. Your only option would be to invoke what powers you knew of to protect yourself. Throw in the very strong mandate regarding ancestor worship, and that's basically how religion works in Taiwan.

Notes for the Chart:

1. This is a general attempt at contrast, not a highly accurate parsing of Chinese belief
It would require a hugely complicated chart to even begin to explain a vanilla version of the world according to Chinese folk religion, and to some extent it would be impossible because many people embrace multiple conflicting belief systems, feeling logic is inadequate to deal with the divine and it's better to be safe than sorry if one turns out to be true. This is a rough sketch, and if you want to find fault with it, it would be easy to do so. (If you feel I've really made a basic error, please leave me a comment and explain how so.)

2. "Grey Areas"
Another Western thing to do is place things in clearly divided categories. Things like Qi/Chinese medicine (somewhat related topics) and even business profit are not purely natural, scientifically explicable phenomenon, but are connected to the invisible/intangible and spirit worlds. More on this later...

3. I'm not clear on the Chinese pantheon, but few are, even adherents
What I have observed is that few people try to grasp the recognized hierarchy of gods and approach them accordingly. People in different walks of life and from different families and ethnic backgrounds worship different collections of big and small gods. There are gods associated with certain places/areas (The city of Taipei has a patron god, for example, every patch of rice fields has a little earth god shrine, and some say every house has a little spirit), gods associated with certain trades (the sea goddess Matsu, very important in Taiwan, is connected to anything that has to do with the ocean, like fishing, and much more besides), and gods associated with certain roles. (Guanyu is a warrior god of justice and protection, worshiped variously by those who wish for protection for their business, and by both police and triads/gangs)

4. Chinese "Heaven" is hard to explain
In Chinese thought, the idea of 天 (Tian, "heaven," but that's a misleading translation, it's not a place people go after death) is more like the divine order which maintains the universe, decides justice, decrees fate, and is over all things. Apparently Tian varied and still varies between being thought of more like a highest God (getting close to a transcendent monotheistic God, which some claim it originally represented), and more like an impersonal divine force, depending on the time period and the variety of Chinese religious thought/philosophy. "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world," might be getting a little bit closer to the idea for Westerners, if you imagine that the terms God and Heaven were identified closely enough to be interchangeable. But this all gets confusing because at the same time there's the diverse pantheon of gods, as mentioned above.
How those gods and Tian divide up responsibility for governing the affairs of men (not even to mention various Chinese flavors of Buddhism with Buddha/manifold Buddhas being present as well, alongside Chinese traditional religion) is far beyond the scope of this post, but I think I'm not entirely wrong in say it's rather like a Roman Catholic idea of the Saints and Archangels and Mary doing a lot of the helping, protecting, and blessing for individual people, while God can of course also be prayed to directly, but is farther away and less accessible, ruling and sustaining all, and taking care of managing the big picture. (I hope I have not falsely represented Roman Catholicism by that description, but that's quite orthodox compared to what I observed in Mexico...)

 3. The Excluded Middle

Now think of the conflict in worldviews we have. On the one hand, you have science handling the task of explaining anything we can reliably observe and a transcendent Christian God who cares about and engages in the affairs of men, and on the other hand you have a whole "middle world" of spirits and the spirit world which plays an intimate role in the affairs of men, with a Creator or Highest God far off and not practically involved. The Western worldview, based partially on the revelation of scripture itself but also on other secular factors, simply discards the "hidden" reality of this world and also any "lower" divine realm altogether. Most of the rest of the world does not. Sharing the gospel effectively in a traditional/folk religious culture may require understanding this fact.

Given this view of reality, by way of analogy, a "vanilla" western approach to sharing the gospel to a traditional religious adherent might sound similar to one janitor at an overseas Microsoft office telling another janitor to call Bill Gates and ask for a promotion (in a culture that doesn't reward such audacity). You are telling someone who believes in a whole tiered hierarchical system in which even dead relatives must be appeased and in which the gods, if they be willing, provide assistance purely on a transactional basis (worship and sacrifice, in exchange for blessings or protection), that the God higher than the entire hierarchy wants to have a personal relationship with him. If the Holy Spirit has not already been preparing their heart, it may take some time for them to wrap their head around that notion. They will be more interested in knowing whether your God is more generous or powerful than their current gods, what kind of benefits He's offering in exchange for their loyalty. (Thus, sadly, the prosperity gospel is rampant and popular in Taiwan. In one sense, it's simply monotheistic idolatry)

Western missionaries are often put into a difficult position, therefore, of being asked to explain how Christianity as a belief system handles situations which we have never previously acknowledged as existing in the world. And sometimes it can be unnerving. Exorcisms are already shaky ground for most of us, but at least any Biblically-literate Christian knows they were happening in the New Testament, though their life in the West is not likely to have provided them with experience in that sort of thing. But what happens when entirely alien scenarios unfold? "How will your God protect me from ancestral spirits bringing bad fortune to my business if I don't set out the spirit offering tables?" is probably not a question for which most American pastors have a quick answer. The knowledge does not fall into one's head the moment one lands in one's ministry field, I can tell you that much for sure.

Thus, the default quick answer, very often, is "I have good news: there are no: [ancestral spirits, gods, evil spirits, curses, etc...] who can harm you, because they don't exist." (Or worse, "because the Bible says they don't exist.")

"Ok, now let's figure out a culturally relevant way to share the gospel."

Even if it's true that no spirits of the dead are roaming around the town waiting to inflict misfortune on those whose rice offering is too scanty, this reply does little for the inquirer. That's because he wasn't asking you about his world, he was asking you about your God. If the question is whether God can and will protect him when he needs protection, the answer is yes, God can and will do that according to His will, and no spirit- evil, ancestral, or any other possible kind of spirit- is outside the will of God. Teach him to read the Bible for himself and he can decide whether his cultural opinions regarding the afterlife are reconcilable with Scripture. And it's likely he'll do a much better job of explaining the gospel inside his culture, having accepted it inside his culture, than you would. Taiwan is full of Christians who never understood the gospel until they lived in the West. There the gospel made sense, but returning to Taiwan, they find it difficult to share with people not similarly familiar with western ways of thinking. There are many reasons for that, not only the one we're talking about here. But it seems something must be done to share the gospel inside Taiwan's traditional culture that seemingly has not yet been done.

4. Then, What?

Must we avoid syncretism? Yes we certainly must. I am not advocating in any shape, form, or fashion blending Biblical truth with traditional beliefs or confusing the two. But we can recognize that everyone comes to Christ from where they are, not from where we are. A step towards Christ from within Chinese traditional religion, or any local religion or different world religion, will not necessarily look like a step towards Christ from within your own background.

As I shared in a previous entry, everyone comes to Christ within their own cultural context. So if we want to take the gospel across cultural divides, we have to go to them not only geographically, but step inside their context and point the most direct path to the Kingdom we can, not one that snakes back away through our own cultural context beforehand.

This is just the basic idea, there are vast arrays of subcultures from which people believe on Christ

If we need for a local person to be educated regarding our Western worldview so that we know how to share Christ with them, we'll never really take Christ into that culture, only take people out of it. We have to continuously point them to Christ from wherever they currently are, even if that means their walk towards Christ looks much different from what we saw in our home culture

That's much more challenging than just translating our favorite gospel presentation into their language. But we have the Holy Spirit, and we have discernment, we have Christ Himself and His life in us, we have special revelation in Scripture which can keep us in the right path if we keep it in heart and in mind, and we have a calling from God to reach every culture with the gospel. That's sanction enough to figure out a few things along the way.

I increasingly feel our job is not to educate, but to introduce.