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Sep

21

The ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy

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is Christianity and nothing else…according to renown secularist Jürgen Habermas. 

“Christianity, and nothing else,” he wrote, “is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.”

So much of what we associate as “secular” have been “secularized” versions of Christian innovations.  The Social Gospel movement brought us the modern liberalism in the US, with its good and bad features often reflecting the imperfect manner in which it reflected the true integrated Gospel. 

What I like about Habermas is that he seeks the comprehensiveness and integrity of Thomas Aquinas.  This is not surprising, as Aquinas wrote before the Protestant-Catholic schism and the thirty years war.  He wrote from a position that was relatively autonomous and not seeking to buttress his group over and above the others. 

I believe very much that we USChristians are still dealing with longstanding problems stemming from corruptions of Christianity due to the conflagrations of the past, particularly the aftermath of the thirty years war.  Hopefully, Habermas and other’s willingness to acknowledge the historical significance of Christianity may help us to move forward along more productive lines that will be of benefit to manifestations of Christianity and “civilization” throughout our world.

dlw

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