The world is cruel. Facing a cruel world while continuing to believe in a loving God requires enormous depth.
But many people choose a shortcut: they close their eyes.
I grew up in the church, and from an early age I knew one thing: Christians are easily frightened. Not by ghosts, but by “the end of the world.” Every few years a wave of doomsday prophecies would sweep through—some pastor sees a vision, some book calculates a date, some international situation gets interpreted as the fulfillment of Revelation. Then a crowd begins to grow anxious, a crowd begins to pray, and a crowd begins to make absurd decisions.
And the 1995 leap-eighth-month incident was the most absurd one I ever witnessed.
What Happened That Year
In 1994, the U.S.-based writer Cheng Lang-ping published the book 1995 Leap Eighth Month, which, drawing on China’s ancient Tui Bei Tu system of prophecy, argued that catastrophe descends whenever a lunar leap eighth month occurs, and predicted that the Chinese Communists would invade Taiwan by force in 1995. The moment it was published, the book ignited panic in Taiwan—within just two months it went through four editions and seventy printings.
If it had only been a book, things would not have gotten so serious. The problem was that the church caught this fear and then amplified it a hundredfold.
Some pastors began to claim they had received “revelation from God”—some said they saw visions, others said they were told in dreams—but the core message was always the same: God was going to judge Taiwan through the military action of the Chinese Communists, because Taiwan’s idolatry had become too severe. A well-known megachurch held an informational meeting about it, and an immigration agency run by Christians was handing out flyers right outside the church doors, advertising “seaside villas for just one hundred thousand U.S. dollars.”
Then, in July 1995, the Chinese Communists really did begin missile tests and military exercises.
The panic instantly escalated into action. In an extremely short span of time, a large number of believers sold their houses, liquidated their savings, and emigrated with their entire families to Belize in Central America—the place certain pastors had designated as “the refuge God had prepared.” The Free Methodist congregations with military-village backgrounds were hit especially hard, even to the point of having to sue the pastors who had preached these “revelations.”
And the result? The leap eighth month passed. The year 1995 passed. Nothing happened.
The believers in Belize faced not God’s protection but the struggle for survival in a foreign land. Some, burdened with debt and broken families, quietly returned to Taiwan. And the author of the book? According to reports, he made tens of millions of New Taiwan dollars, emigrated to North America, and settled into a comfortable life.
What I found most unacceptable: among the pastors who had promoted these messages in the church, not a single one publicly apologized afterward. Not one. And to this day, thirty years later, as far as I know, still none have.
Instant-Noodle Faith
I later spent many years thinking about what exactly had gone wrong. It was not as simple as “a failed prophecy”—failed prophecies are far too common in the history of religion to be cause for surprise. The real question was: why would a faith community so easily lose its collective judgment?
My conclusion: because their faith had gone unexamined.
To accept that “the world is about to be destroyed” is the easiest faith choice of all. It spares you the pain of thinking, and it spares you the trouble of dialoguing with different viewpoints. It even grants a kind of spiritual superiority—“I know the truth, while you are all still in the dark.”
I call it “instant-noodle faith.” Tear open the package, add some hot water, done in three minutes. Simple, fast, with an instant sense of fullness. But no nutrition. And eating too much of it causes problems.
The hallmark of instant-noodle faith is that it requires you to understand nothing. You don’t need to understand the historical context of the Bible, you don’t need to understand the literary characteristics of prophetic literature, you don’t need to understand two thousand years of theologians’ debates over eschatology, you don’t need to understand the geopolitical realities of Taiwan. You only need to “believe”—to believe what some authority figure tells you, and then do it.
This is not faith; it is dependency. And dependency, in the face of fear, is the most fragile thing of all.
Theology Is Not a Luxury
Many believers frown at the very word “theology.” They think theology is something that belongs in academia, with no bearing on “the real life of faith.” Some even treat anti-intellectualism as a mark of spirituality—as though “simple faith” pleases God more than “overthinking.”
The 1995 incident proved the danger of this notion.
At the time, quite a few pastors raised a thoroughly reasonable rebuttal: “If God is going to judge Taiwan because of its idolatry, then the Chinese Communists espouse atheism and deny God’s very existence—why wouldn’t God judge the Chinese Communists first?” The logic is exceedingly simple; anyone who has taken an introductory theology course could think of it. But in an atmosphere of panic, this rational voice was drowned out.
The task of theology is not to tell you “what God is going to do.” No one knows that answer. The task of theology is to help you build a framework for thinking, so that when you face uncertainty, you don’t immediately collapse.
Concretely, theological training teaches you a few things. To discern the nature of prophecy—the prophetic literature in the Bible (such as Revelation and Daniel) has its own specific literary rules and historical context; it is not a codebook to be matched point for point against current events. To understand the plurality of conceptions of God—“judgment” is not God’s only mode of interacting with humanity, and not even the primary one; the Bible speaks just as abundantly of grace, of companionship, of presence amid suffering. To question the legitimacy of authority—when a pastor claims to have received “revelation from God,” you have both the theological grounds and the responsibility to examine that claim.
Fifteen years of theological training gave me one most important capacity: the courage to face “I don’t know.” Why does God permit suffering? I don’t know. When will the end come? I don’t know. But “I don’t know” does not mean “anything goes.” The blank of not knowing should be filled with humility and continual reflection, not with fear and careless answers.
The Antidote to Fear Is Not Certainty
After the 2016 Tainan earthquake, some church figures once again linked natural disasters to the “sin” of specific groups, declaring it to be God’s judgment. The same logic, the same playbook—twenty years after the leap-eighth-month incident.
This made me realize that the problem is not just one failed prophecy, but a deeply rooted mode of thinking: using “certain answers” to combat fear.
When people face uncertainty, they instinctively crave certainty. With tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the certain answer is “God is going to judge Taiwan.” With heavy casualties from an earthquake, the certain answer is “the sin of such-and-such a group has brought retribution.” These answers are all terrible, but they share one “merit”: they make people feel that the world can be understood, even if that understanding is distorted.
What faith offers should not be this kind of cheap certainty.
In “The God Beyond Definition” I tried to explore this problem—when we use human language and concepts to “define” God, we are in fact diminishing Him. Likewise, when we use a simple cause-and-effect narrative to “explain” suffering, we are not understanding the works of God; we are cramming God into our limited cognitive framework.
True courage of faith is not “I know what God is going to do,” but “I don’t know, yet I still trust.” Not unafraid because there is a certain answer, but choosing—in the absence of any answer—to live out justice and mercy.
Rebuilding After the Collapse
I am not trying to negate faith—quite the opposite.
The reason the leap-eighth-month incident took me so many years to digest is not that it made me doubt God, but that it forced me to seriously confront one question: what, exactly, is my faith built upon?
If it is built on “what some pastor said,” then when the pastor is wrong, the faith collapses. If it is built on “the world is about to be destroyed so believe quickly,” then when the world is not destroyed, the faith becomes meaningless. The utilitarian bargain of “believe in Jesus and stay safe” is the same—the day safety disappears, the faith goes bankrupt with it.
These are all foundations of sand.
In my later process of rebuilding faith, the core shift was this: from “faith gives me answers” to “faith gives me the ability to face problems.”
Theology is not a system of answers. It is a kind of training—training you, when facing a complex, contradictory, painful reality, to still be able to think, to dialogue, to stay open, rather than to flee into simple answers. Micah 6:8 puts it clearly: “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” There is nothing here about “knowing what will happen in the future.” What there is, is a way of living—choosing, amid uncertainty, to do the right thing.
In the course of making all sorts of business decisions, I have repeatedly come to appreciate the value of this faith training. Facing the uncertainty of markets, the uncertainty of technology, the uncertainty of people, what proves most useful is not some prophet telling you how the future will go, but whether you have a tested framework of judgment that lets you still make responsible choices when the information is incomplete.
This is, in fact, the same thing I discussed in “Taste in the Post-Code Era”—the essence of taste is “making good judgments amid uncertainty.” The essence of faith is the same. The only difference is the coordinate system: one is the coordinate system of business and technology, the other that of existence and meaning.
Open Your Eyes
Thirty years have passed. Taiwan was not bathed in blood, but the narrative of fear within the church has never truly disappeared. It has merely changed its packaging—from “Communist invasion of Taiwan” to “end-times persecution,” from “the leap eighth month” to various new dates and events.
Each time, I want to ask the same question: can your faith hold up when you open your eyes and look at the real world?
If it cannot, then the problem is not the world; the problem is the faith. Or more precisely, the problem is that the faith was never seriously examined.
Faith should never be an escapism that withdraws from people. It should be the courage to walk into the crowd, to face the real, to bear the weight.
And this courage does not fall from the sky. It grows slowly—in reflection, in dialogue, in collapse and rebuilding, again and again.
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