The world is cruel. To continue believing in a loving God in the face of a cruel world requires tremendous depth.

But many people choose a shortcut: they close their eyes.

I grew up in the church, and from childhood I knew one thing: Christians are easily frightened. Not by ghosts, but by “the end of the world.” Every few years there would be a wave of end-times prophecy fever—some pastor would see a vision, some book would calculate a date, some international situation would be interpreted as fulfillment of Revelation. Then one group would start feeling anxious, another would start praying, and yet another would start making absurd decisions.

The leap month incident of 1995 was the most absurd I’d ever witnessed.

What Happened That Year

In 1994, America-based author Zheng Langping published the book “1995 Leap Month,” which, based on the ancient Chinese prophetic system of Tuibei Tu (Back-Pushing Chart), claimed that great disasters occur every lunar leap eighth month and predicted that the CCP would attack Taiwan by force in 1995. This book triggered panic upon its release in Taiwan, with four editions and seventy printings in just two months.

If it had remained just a book, things wouldn’t have been so serious. The problem was that churches caught this wave of fear and amplified it a hundredfold.

Some pastors began claiming they had received “God’s revelation”—some said they saw visions, others said they were told in dreams. The core message was always the same: God would use the CCP’s military action to judge Taiwan because Taiwan’s idol worship was too severe. A prominent large church held briefings about this, while Christian-operated immigration agencies distributed flyers outside the church, advertising “seaside villas for only $100,000 USD.”

Then in July 1995, the CCP actually began missile tests and military exercises.

Panic instantly escalated to action. Large numbers of believers sold their homes and liquidated their savings in an extremely short time, taking their entire families to emigrate to Belize in Central America—the place designated by certain pastors as “the refuge God has prepared.” The Evangelical Free Church, with its military dependents’ village background, was particularly severely affected, even having to file lawsuits against the pastors who preached these “revelations.”

The result? The leap month passed. 1995 passed. Nothing happened.

Those believers in Belize faced not God’s protection, but survival difficulties in a foreign land. Some returned quietly to Taiwan with debts and broken families. And the book’s author? Reports say he made over ten million Taiwan dollars and emigrated to North America to live a comfortable life.

What I found most unacceptable was this: not a single one of those pastors who promoted these messages in churches publicly apologized afterward. Not one. To this day, thirty years later, as far as I know, none still have.

Instant Noodle Faith

I spent many years afterward thinking about what went wrong. It wasn’t just “failed prophecy”—failed prophecies are too common in religious history to warrant much surprise. The real question was: why would a faith community so easily lose its collective judgment?

My conclusion: because their faith had never undergone reflection.

Accepting “the world is about to be destroyed” is the easiest faith choice. It saves the pain of thinking. It saves the trouble of dialoguing with different viewpoints. It even gives people a kind of spiritual superiority—“I know the truth while you’re still in the dark.”

I call this “instant noodle faith.” Tear open the package, add hot water, ready in three minutes. Simple, fast, with immediate satisfaction. But no nutrition. And eating too much causes problems.

The characteristics of instant noodle faith: it doesn’t require you to understand anything. You don’t need to understand the historical context of the Bible, the literary characteristics of prophetic literature, two thousand years of theological debate about eschatology, or Taiwan’s geopolitical realities. You only need to “believe”—believe what some authority figure tells you, then act accordingly.

This isn’t faith. This is dependency. And dependency is the most fragile thing when facing fear.

Theology Is Not a Luxury

Many believers frown when they hear the word “theology.” They feel theology belongs in academia and is unrelated to “real faith life.” Some even treat anti-intellectualism as a spiritual performance—as if “simple faith” pleases God more than “thinking too much.”

The 1995 incident proved the danger of this mindset.

At the time, quite a few pastors offered very reasonable rebuttals: “If God wants to judge Taiwan because of idol worship, then since the CCP advocates atheism and even denies God’s existence, why wouldn’t God judge the CCP first?” This logic was very simple—anyone who had taken basic theology courses could think of it. But in the panicked atmosphere, such rational voices were drowned out.

Theology’s task isn’t to tell you “what God will do.” No one knows that answer. Theology’s task is to help you build a framework for thinking, so that when facing uncertainty, you don’t immediately collapse.

Specifically, theological training teaches you several things: Discerning the nature of prophecy—prophetic literature in the Bible (like Revelation, Daniel) has specific literary rules and historical contexts; it’s not a codebook for matching current events. Understanding the multiplicity of God’s nature—“judgment” isn’t the only mode of God’s interaction with humanity, nor even the primary mode; the Bible equally discusses grace, companionship, and presence in suffering. Questioning the legitimacy of authority—when a pastor claims to have received “God’s revelation,” you have theological grounds and responsibility to examine that claim.

Fifteen years of theological training gave me one crucial ability: the courage to face “I don’t know.” Why does God allow suffering? I don’t know. When will the end times come? I don’t know. But “not knowing” doesn’t equal “anything goes.” The blank space of not knowing should be filled with humility and continued thinking, not with fear and arbitrary answers.

The Antidote to Fear Is Not Certainty

After the 2016 Tainan earthquake, some church figures again linked natural disasters with specific groups’ “sins,” claiming this was God’s judgment. Same logic, same routine, twenty years after the leap month incident.

This made me realize the problem wasn’t just one failed prophecy, but a deeply ingrained mindset: using “certain answers” to combat fear.

When people face uncertainty, they instinctively crave certainty. When Taiwan Strait tensions rise, the certain answer is “God will judge Taiwan.” When earthquakes cause casualties, the certain answer is “some group’s sin brought retribution.” These answers are all terrible, but they share a common “advantage”: they make people feel the world can be understood, even if that understanding is distorted.

Faith shouldn’t provide this kind of cheap certainty.

In “God Beyond Definition,” I explored this problem—when we use human language and concepts to “define” God, we’re actually diminishing Him. Similarly, when we use simple causal narratives to “explain” suffering, we’re not understanding God’s work; we’re stuffing God into our limited cognitive framework.

True faith courage isn’t “I know what God will do,” but “I don’t know, but I still trust.” Not being unafraid because we have certain answers, but choosing to live out justice and compassion even without answers.

Reconstruction After Collapse

I’m not trying to negate faith. Quite the opposite.

The leap month incident took me so many years to process not because it made me doubt God, but because it forced me to seriously confront a question: what exactly is my faith built on?

If it’s built on “what some pastor said,” then when the pastor is wrong, faith collapses. If it’s built on “the world is about to end so hurry up and believe,” then when the world doesn’t end, faith becomes meaningless. If it’s built on the utilitarian exchange of “believe in Jesus for peace and safety,” then when we encounter insecurity, faith goes bankrupt.

These are all sandy foundations.

The core transformation in my later faith reconstruction was: from “faith gives me answers” to “faith gives me the ability to face problems.”

Theology isn’t an answer system. It’s training—training you to still be able to think, dialogue, and remain open when facing complex, contradictory, painful realities, rather than escaping into simple answers. Micah 6:8 puts it clearly: “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” There’s no “knowing what the future holds” here. There’s a way of life—in uncertainty, still choosing to do what’s right.

In various business decisions I’ve made, I’ve repeatedly experienced the value of this faith training. Facing market uncertainty, technological uncertainty, human uncertainty, what’s most useful isn’t some prophet telling you what the future holds, but whether you have a tested framework for judgment that lets you make responsible choices with incomplete information.

This is actually the same thing I discussed in “Taste in the Post-Code Era”—the essence of taste is “making good judgments amid uncertainty.” So is the essence of faith. The difference is only the coordinate system: one is the coordinate system of business and technology, the other of existence and meaning.

Opening Our Eyes

Thirty years have passed. Taiwan wasn’t bloodied, but fearful narratives in churches have never truly disappeared. They’ve just changed packaging—from “CCP invasion” to “end-times persecution,” from “leap month” to various new dates and events.

Each time, I want to ask the same question: can your faith withstand opening your eyes to see the real world?

If it can’t, that’s not the world’s problem—it’s faith’s problem. Or more precisely, it’s the problem of faith never having undergone serious reflection.

Faith was never meant to be world-escaping isolationism. It should be the courage to enter crowds, face reality, and bear weight.

And this courage doesn’t fall from heaven. It grows slowly through reflection, through dialogue, through repeated collapse and reconstruction.