The Ideal Religious Culture:.!?

In pursuit of the truth, http:www.cinopsbegoneblogspot.com - Tuesday, January 14, 2014

By John Winthrop and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

 

John Winthrop: Winthrop, Papers, I, 196, 201

    

    On this day in 1588, John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, was born. Recognizing his exceptional leadership abilities, Oliver Cromwell pleaded with him to return to England and join their Glorious Revolution. But Winthrop believed God intended the little colony in the New World to be "a city upon a hill" - a living example that it was possible for Christ to reign in the affairs of men. In his journal he wrote:

"I will ever walk humbly before my God, and meekly, mildly, and gently towards all men ... I do resolve first to give myself - my life, my wits, my health, my wealth - to service of my God and Savior, who by giving Himself for me and to me, deserves whatsoever, I am or can be, to be at His commandment and for His glory."

 

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI: January 10 meditation, Co-Workers of the Truth, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992

 

    "Respect for human dignity and regard for the human rights of every individual - these are the fruits of belief in the Incarnation of God. Anyone who renounces belief in Christ for the sake of a supposedly higher value renounces the basis of human dignity.

    It is from this Christian humanism, from the humanism of the Incarnation, that the uniqueness of Christian culture has evolved. All its specific characteristics are fundamentally rooted in belief in the Incarnation and disintegrate when this belief is lost ....

    Christian culture can never be exclusively a culture of possession. It can never measure an individual's greatest worth in terms of material possessions and pleasures. It does not despise matter. After all God's Son became man.

    He lived in a human body, he rose from the dead in a human body, and in a human body he ascended into heavenly glory. That is the highest imaginable honor to which matter can aspire. That is why Christian culture is careful to let each person live in dignity and receive his proper share of the material goods of this earth.

    But man's highest good is not material possessions. We in the West know from experience how worship of consumer goods can rob a man of his dignity. He falls prey to egoism. But self contempt is the almost inevitable concomitant of contempt for others.

    If man has nothing higher to look forward to than material things, the whole world become loathsome and empty to him. That is why Christian culture prefers moral values to material one. That is why reverence for God is publicly endorsed in Christian culture.

    The great Cathedrals and Churches are an expression of this conviction that the worship of God is a public and universal good of mankind, and in fact, it is precisely in showing reverence for God that the human being reverences himself."

 

January 12th, meditation:

    "What we fear nowadays is the darkness that emanates from man, ... because the law of the sharper elbow is now the only law that prevails in the world, because the tendency in the world is to judge in favor of the violent, the brutal not the saintly. For we see it: what rules the world now is money, the atom bomb, the cynicism of those to whom nothing is sacred. ... Will the good continue to meaning and power in the world? ... Yes! For the Child, God's only-begotten Son, is set as a sign and a surety that in the end God will have the last word in world history and that he is truth and love.

   GEORGE H. KUBECK