Faith, Pattern, and Inheritors of the World

By Zhongjing Liu

Extract: Finally, I am now increasingly inclined to the assumption that what we now regard as enlightened and progressive is not so much a thing that is truly enlightened and progressive, but rather a surplus of assets that the Christian civilization has produced after its splendid development. These remaining assets that we have used have in effect been corroding and destroying the fundamental power that produced the civilization assets, which is still Christianity and the Church now and before. If we take away this core of value and organization, the Western civilization we know now will not necessarily exist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Zhongjing Liu
• Release date: Dec 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463278802

Zhongjing Liu

Historian, ex-medical examiner, author of Canons and Chronicles: China's Historical Construction | 《經與史》作者,曾刀下閱屍、現筆下論史

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Faith, Pattern, and Inheritors of the World

Published by Zhongjing Liu at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Zhongjing Liu

Lecturer: Zhongjing Liu

Time: January 20, 2016

For Chinese version,

Transcriber: Three Horses

For English version,

Translator: Simon of Cyrene

Cover maker: Fuyukawa Mame

Note:

1. In case of any discrepancy between the Chinese version and the English version, the Chinese version shall prevail.

2. For Chinese version, please look at: 信仰、格局与世界的继承者

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/914794

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Q: How did you get in touch with Christianity and even accept the faith?

A: The first time I read things related to the Bible was something like English reading materials, like the 100 Bible Stories or a biblical story digest. At the time, such readings were probably published as part of the auxiliary English textbooks in the name of literature in the 1980s. I remember one of them, which seems to be an excerpt from the 100 Bible Stories. The first one I read was Genesis. The first time I saw the complete Bible was around 1998, on a flyover in Urumqi. I saw someone selling the Bible on the stall, twenty yuan for each. It was a Bible printed by the Bible Society of Singapore. I then spent twenty yuan for it. Before that, I actually bought a Qur'an. By then, it seemed that there were few other bookstores besides the Xinhua Bookstore. Generally speaking, you can only find the higher-taste books in the old bookstores. Basically, you can find Qur'an in all the bookstores, but not so for the Bible. That was the first time I bought the complete Bible, one from head to tail.

While I was reading the Bible for the first time, I was obsessed with the British literature of the seventeenth century, the literature of Thomas Browne or Taylor, such as Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial and Religio Medici. Back then, in my cognitive world, these books were all connected together. When I first read the Bible, the first thing I was most fascinated with was the Proverbs by King Solomon and the Psalms. For me, they represented a world that is very different from the Western literature I was familiar with. I originally thought that I was very familiar with Western literature, but when I came to think about it, the literary styles I used to know seemed to have missed a large piece. Until a long time later, I still considered the Bible as a kind of singular knowledge. My whole cognitive world was mostly the one presented by the books written by people like Chen Lemin or Zi Zhongyun, a cognitive world of humanism. In this cognitive world, the Church is a distant background and plays a negative role in general. Civilization, enlightenment and progress are the mainstream of the world. The West is ahead in the mainstream of this world, but the precondition is to break the original binding of the church on civilization and progress, like the Enlightenment breaching the shackles. That's where modern freedom and civilization come from. Modern freedom and civilization are mainly embodied in liberation. At that time, I was like most people. I didn't know the relationship between the political authoritarianism and their so-called the