When President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met yesterday morning in South Korea, it marked the first time the two had sat down together in six years. While their advisors and negotiators had spent countless hours laying the groundwork for what took place, and improving markets revealed high hopes that the meeting would be productive, there were also reasons for concern.
Earlier this month, China announced plans to limit access to rare-earth minerals. Given that they control roughly 92 percent of the global output, it’s difficult to overstate the degree of control they have over one of the world’s most important resources.
Micah Tomasella provided an excellent summary of why rare-earth minerals are so important in a recent episode of Culture Brief, but the short version is that they are essential for most of the modern technology we’ve come to rely on.
While those resources can be mined in numerous locations around the world, processing them into something usable is so expensive and toxic that few countries outside of China can do it well. The US is trying to develop its own production facilities, but it will still be years—if not decades—before we can match China’s capacities.
The US enjoys a similar advantage when it comes to the advanced microchips that many of those metals end up becoming. However, Trump’s rhetoric leading up to yesterday’s negotiations left many concerned that he would cede that advantage in exchange for short-term gains.
Fortunately, those fears appear to have been unwarranted—at least for the moment.
Details continue to emerge about the finer points of the deal, but the principal components include China’s agreement to buy “massive amounts” of soybeans and pause its implementation of most rare-earth restrictions. In return, the US reduced its tariff rate on the country by 10 percent, while both nations will pause further tariff escalations for one year. Most importantly, while microchips were discussed, the most advanced remain off the table.
The back-and-forth between Trump, Xi, and their respective advisors demonstrates the difficulty and importance of knowing where to draw the line between what’s negotiable and what needs to remain off-limits. And that principle is relevant to far more than global politics.
Can Christians celebrate Halloween?
Few cultural events tend to divide Christians like the holiday celebrated today. For many, Halloween is an innocent opportunity to watch kids dress up as their favorite characters and meet neighbors you may only see in passing at other times of the year. However, far too often, there’s a darker side to the festivities as well.
As I described in What does the Bible say about Halloween?, the pagan origins of the holiday have led many to conclude that it should be off-limits for Christians today. While they’re not wrong about where Halloween comes from, the full truth of how we got to the modern version of the holiday is a bit more complicated, and illustrates the importance of knowing where to draw boundaries.
The oldest version of Halloween is typically considered to be the Celtic festival of Samhain—pronounced “SAH–win”—that began more than two thousand years ago.
It originated as a pagan celebration marking the end of the harvest season and the start of winter. The ancient Celts believed that it was also a time when the dead could walk among the living. They would light bonfires and wear costumes to either blend in or ward off the ghosts, depending on which accounts you read.
The celebration took on a Christian flair in the eighth century after Pope Gregory III moved the celebration of All Saints’ Day—a time to celebrate the memory and legacy of the saints—to November 1. When the holy day reached the Celtic lands shortly thereafter, it served the important purpose of helping guide the people there to a greater understanding of Jesus.
By this point, St. Patrick, Columba, and others had already led large swaths of Celtic culture to embrace Christianity, often doing so by Christianizing elements of pagan worship to make the transition to the faith simpler. As such, it was largely par for the course to incorporate aspects of Samhain into All Saints’ Day as well. Thus, October 31 became known as All Hallows Eve, which was eventually shortened to Halloween.
While it can be easy to misuse that kind of contextualization as a license to incorporate unchristian ideas into our Christian walk, seeking opportunities to apply culturally significant concepts or moments to help people meet Jesus is a very biblical practice. The difficulty has often come in knowing when we’ve gone too far.
Why people stray into heresy
Across this week, The Daily Article has examined the various ways in which Satan typically attempts to thwart God’s people and the advancement of God’s kingdom. Throughout Christian history, one of his favorite tactics has been twisting the genuinely good motivations of believers to lead them further away from the truth.
Very few heretics wake up one morning and decide they want to lead people away from the Lord. Rather, the vast majority of heresies that have assaulted the church came from the desire to make the faith more understandable or more acceptable. There’s nothing wrong with either motivation—unless it comes at the expense of helping people understand what is biblical.
When Paul charged Timothy to preach the word of God, he warned that “the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths” (2 Timothy 4:3–4).
Even though that word of caution is nearly two thousand years old, it’s as relevant today as it’s ever been. The best solution remains to ensure that, regardless of the subject, the Bible functions as the lens through which we evaluate every aspect of our lives.
So, as we finish for today, take some time to pray and ask the Lord to help you identify any beliefs or areas of your life where you’ve strayed from Scripture. Pay particular attention to those subjects where you feel like you’re on the right side of history, the culture wars, or any of the other divisive forces in our society today.
Whether it’s concerning holidays like Halloween or issues like sexuality, the treatment of the poor and immigrants, or a host of other cultural hot topics, only the Bible is capable of helping us know where to draw the boundaries around how far we can go in our efforts to help people understand and accept God’s truth without it ceasing to be the truth.
Are there any boundaries you need to redraw today?
Quote of the day:
“Nothing less than the whole Bible can make a whole Christian.” —A. W. Tozer
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