{"id":34333,"date":"2025-09-16T12:51:06","date_gmt":"2025-09-16T17:51:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=34333"},"modified":"2025-09-15T16:51:43","modified_gmt":"2025-09-15T21:51:43","slug":"book-report-martial-arts-and-christianity-by-keith-d-yates-2010","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/16\/book-report-martial-arts-and-christianity-by-keith-d-yates-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: Martial Arts and Christianity<\/i> by Keith D. Yates (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"BookI got this book a week ago Saturday<\/a> at ABC Books, where it was the entirety of the martial arts section (wow, has it been over a year<\/a> since I was last at ABC Books? That cannot be right, but it might–it has been a while–no, I got the latest Wilder book around Christmastime, but apparently did not note it with a Good Book Hunting post). And I jumped right into it.<\/p>\n

So: This is a bit of an apologetic that says you can be a Christian and do martial arts. It starts by saying that thirty years ago (which is not forty-five years ago) that a number of people thought that maybe the martial arts were a gateway to Zen Buddhism or Taoism–as a matter of fact, one of the other students at the seminary with the author reported him to the dean for being a martial artist.<\/p>\n

The book starts out by defining a martial art, which then leads to the inclusion of Greco-Roman wrestling, boxing, and other non-eastern Asian forms. It offers a high level history of the development of martial arts in China, Japan, and Korea. It also goes into Biblical passages which encourage Christians to be able to defend themselves.<\/p>\n

All in all, it’s a pretty good book that makes a compelling case for defending martial arts from being demonic, or at least not being a bad influence. I would have thought that this issue was well-settled before the 21st century, but I guess some dojos and schools might still have a Zen element to them. Mine is taught by a seventh degree black belt (three gold stripes fewer than the author) who is an active member of his church. So perhaps this book relitigated the past a little.<\/p>\n

But it does make one (me) reconsider how much I defend, or at least understand, the perspective of some Christians who remind everyone that yoga comes from a Hindu background (see this<\/a> and this<\/a>).<\/p>\n

As a matter of fact, a friend reposted a similarly themed post just last week:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So although the martial arts are the devil!<\/em> cultural battle has been won, the yoga one rages on.<\/p>\n

Oh, and as a scholarly book, it has a number of references and end notes. And one of them is to Zen in the Martial Arts<\/a><\/em> which I read in 2022. More of a popular book than a scholarly work, but I’m starting to see some cross-referencing in my martial arts reading. Ain’t I smart? Maybe I should drag my carcass to a martial arts class and prove that it’s not so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got this book a week ago Saturday at ABC Books, where it was the entirety of the martial arts section (wow, has it been over a year since I was last at ABC Books? That cannot be right, but it might–it has been a while–no, I got the latest Wilder book around Christmastime, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34333"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34334,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34333\/revisions\/34334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}