Bully's Blog

Richard Bledsoe has posted an interesting article in two parts on the Biblical Horizons blog.‎

“The great question for the emerging East, for Asia and other awakening third world areas, for an emerging nation like China is, ‘what fate awaits them?’ They are now emerging from an analogous paganism that the West emerged from centuries ago. Here an amazing quotation from David Aikman, the Time Magazine religious editor. He is a quoting from ‘a scholar from one of China’s premier academic institutions, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing, in 2002.’

‘One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.’”

“Mao swept China clean of its old ways, gods and traditions as [the Caesars] did the Persian and Grecian Empires centuries before. They left enormous vacuums that were then filled by Christianity, and so did he. He ironically undid the possibility of his own Communist authority in his quest for modernity by sweeping everything ‘old’ away… he was, unbeknownst to himself, merely the servant of the God of the Bible.”