I just finished scanning and PDFing (a new verb, yes...) a very difficult to find book by Joe E. McCaffree, published in 1967 in a very short run of 1100 books, hand stapled and with stiff boards. It was published by Miniverse Services and I've been looking for information about them and could not find much other than references to this work, and another related book, in Yi related bibliographies. Soooo, I decided to do something similar to what Brad did with the Hammerslough's book: Scan it and share it. Hopefully, it will not be something that would come back and bite me in the butt... Any grievances by the author's family and/or publishers and I will take the link down with my apologies.

The entire title and link is:

Divination and the Historical and Allegorical Sources of the I Ching, The Chinese Classic or Book of Changes

This book is an early prelude to a book he published in 1982, still available in some places, where he finds relationships between the Yi and the Bible. Regardless of the tangents and forced topics, I find both books very interesting.

Beware though, the scan consist of some 80 pages and even at the smallest file size given by Photoshop, it is a file of almost 9MB

Gracias Luis!
I'll read it and send you a comment.In the meantime,thank you very!.
Sergio

You are welcome. The other book is also very interesting. Even if I don't agree with connecting such dissimilar works as the Yijing and the Bible.

Hi Luis

sparhawk said:

Hopefully, it will not be something that would come back and bite me in the butt...

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I hope you didn't miss page 2: you must grant AT LEAST 25 cents per person receiving your transmition. mmm, for 10 cents I won't tell anybody that I received your PDF version :bag:

How many people use to visit this website? Oh my...
Best

Oh, crap!!

jesed said:

for 10 cents I won't tell anybody that I received your PDF version :bag:

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Here. Now, keep our secret!

Spar, this was a while ago, but I was not thinking at the time,well really thinking of something else (happens often).But I think have the more recent form of the book, given to me by someone who didn't care to keep it.Though it was not callled The Bible and I Ching or anything--so it may be another one I'm thinking of?
Anyway,whichever this is what I found to my astonishment:I am not a Bible reader and while I wasn't offended by the connections, I was surpised.I didn't think it would have much meaning for me.
O gosh though--it really did.
Even sometimes down to my receiving a line that was exactly the words I'd asked...odd thngs like that.
It was also strangely comforting.
I don't even look at it much(which is part of why I did'nt recognize it at first)but I saved it and read it occasionally to compare and contrast with another, for example.
It's old, and all loose pages now, held together by a rubber band..
Anyway--my point was that I found it to be oddly meaningful, despite there being no logical reason at 1st read.
And thanks again for sharing what you found with us.

Thanks Luis-

I've been unable to lay by grubby little paws on this one.

Always amazing how the Christian "mind" works, huh?

bradford said:

Thanks Luis-

I've been unable to lay by grubby little paws on this one.

Always amazing how the Christian "mind" works, huh?

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Heck, that's the little book!! If you want some REAL insights into the "mind" of a Christian, try his bigger and better "Bible and I Ching Relationships"... See, THAT's a roller-coaster!

sparhawk said:

... Even if I don't agree with connecting such dissimilar works as the Yijing and the Bible.

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Thanks for the book. I get a message "This file is damaged and cannot be repaired." ? Adobe loaded only the title page.

Watch what you wish for: "Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese."

Chinese Calvinism Flourishes
ANDREW BROWN - The Guardian (U.K.)

John Calvin was a Frenchman, but he is being remembered in Geneva this week because it was here that he built Calvinism. Invited to reform the city in 1541, almost as what would now be called a management consultant, he formed an alliance with the city fathers. Over the next 20 years of preaching and pastoring they turned this tiny city, with a population then of only 10,000, into a model of church government and theology which has changed the world.

His followers now form the third-largest Christian grouping in the world. The world alliance of reformed churches claims 75 million members, and while this is a lower headline figure than the Anglican Communion's 80 million, it is not inflated by 25 million nominal Anglicans in Britain.

Although Calvinism is shrinking in western Europe and North America, it is experiencing an extraordinary success in China. I spent some time on Monday talking to the Rev May Tan, from Singapore, where the overseas Chinese community has close links with mainland China. The story she told of the spread of Calvinist religion as an elite religion in China was quite extraordinary. There may be some parallels with the growth of Calvinism in South Korea, where the biggest presbyterian churches in the world are to be found, but it's absolutely unlike the pattern in Africa and Latin America. There, the fastest growing forms of Christianity are pentecostal, and they are spreading among the poor.

But in China neither of those things are to be true.

Calvinists despise pentecostalists. They shudder at unbridled emotion. If they are slain in the spirit, it is with a single, decorous thump: there's to be no rolling afterwards. And in China, the place where Calvinism is spreading fastest is the elite universities, fuelled by prodigies of learning and translation. Wang Xiaochao, a philosopher at one of the Beijing universities, has translated the two major works of St Augustine, the Confessions and the City of God, into Chinese directly from Latin. Gradually all the major works of the first centuries of the Christian tradition are being translated directly from the original languages into Chinese.

All of this is happening outside the control of the official body which is supposed to monitor and supervise the churches in China. Instead, it is the philosophy departments at the universities, or the language departments and the departments of literature and western civilisation that are the channel.

"The [officially recognised] churches are not happy with universities, because it is not within their control. And their seminaries are not at the intellectual level of the universities," says Dr Tan. "Chinese Christianity using Chinese to do Christian thinking has become a very interesting movement."

Many of the missionaries who tried to bring Christianity to China before the communists took over where presbyterians, and other sorts of Calvinist. But that does not explain why Calvinism should be the preferred theology of the house churches and the intellectuals now. Dr Tan suggests that this is because it is Protestant: that is to say it can be made much more convincingly native than Roman Catholicism, since presbyterian congregations choose their own pastors. This is, I suspect, enormously important at a time when China is recovering from a century and a half of being the victim of western powers; the pope's insistence on appointing Catholic bishops is unacceptable to the government and perhaps to the people too.

If she goes to preach at an official church, she says, "There will be perhaps 1000 people and 95% of them are over 65. So it's a sunset church. But if I went to house church – there would be 1000 people; perhaps 20 of them in their 50s, and all the rest are youngsters. The older ones will all be professors at the universities. So these are the future of the churches. They have registered pastors, and no access to seminaries: But they have youth, and future, and money."

Calvinism isn't a religion of subservience to any government. The great national myths of Calvinist cultures are all of wars against imperialist oppressors: the Dutch against the Spanish, the Scots against the English; the Americans against the British. So when the Chinese house churches first emerged from the rubble of the Cultural Revolution in the 80s and 90s "They began to search what theology will support and inform [them]. They read Luther and said, 'not him'. So they read Calvin, and they said 'him, because he has a theology of resistance.' Luther can't teach them or inform them how to deal with a government that is opposition."

And, though the communists stigmatised Christianity as a foreign religion, they also and still more thoroughly smashed up the traditional religions of China: "The communist, socialist critique of traditional religion, and of Confucianism has been effective", she says: "The youngsters think it is very cool to be Christian. Communism has removed all the obstacles for them to come to Christianity."

The most conservative estimates of the new converts to Christianity is 500,000; there is a new church built every month. Calvinist Christianity has a culture of phenomenal industry. Calvin himself, in his time in Geneva, preached every day and twice on Sundays: shorthand writers at the foot of his pulpit took down 108 volumes of his sermons, though most of these have been lost and his reputation rests on the books and pamphlets that he wrote himself. In China now, this kind of Christianity is seen as forward-looking, rational, intellectually serious, and favourable to making money.

"Very soon", said Dr Tan, "Christians will become the majority of university students … that could happen."

It would be astonishing if China were to become a great power in the Christian world, as well as in the economic one. But things just as strange have happened in the past. Who could have foreseen, when Augustine was writing those huge books now translated into Chinese, that barbarous Europe would become the centre of Christian civilisation, and his homeland in North Africa would become entirely Muslim?

pantherpanther said:

Thanks for the book. I get a message "This file is damaged and cannot be repaired." ? Adobe loaded only the title page.

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Hi there,

I just downloaded it to test it and it is fine. Perhaps you should update your Acrobat Reader version. O you could try right-click/save file and the double click to open it. Don't know, but the file is OK as of 2 minutes ago.

Mille Grazie. From the 2002 English re-make of "Solaris'": "I could tell you what’s going on here, but I don’t know if that would tell you what’s going here."