Friday, January 24, 2014
Christians Use Their Minds to Glorify God in the World
Since fools made themselves fools by ignoring God--the Eternal Wisdom and fount of every intelligence and all understanding, that is all the more reason why we should be very clearheaded, (we who love Him and walk always with Him, who, indeed, dwell with Him) and teach people about the one true God, Jesus Christ and how to get with Him! (Jeremiah 8:9,11)
"Renouncing the claim to truth, which would be a renunciation of the Christian faith itself, is [in Wittgenstein's fiction] sugared over by allowing faith to go on existing as a kind of being-in-love, with its lovely subjective consolations or as a kind of make-believe world side by side with the real world. Faith is transposed onto the plane of play, of make-believe, whereas hitherto it had mattered on the plane of life itself. Faith that is make-believe is at any rate something fundamentally different from faith that is believed and lived out. It does not help us in living or in dying; at most it provides us with a little change, a little fine appearance--but only the appearance, and that is not enough for living and for dying." Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, pp. 216-217
We find an echo of this assertion in the teaching of Pope Francis in his strong rejection of spiritual worldliness (traditionally called "clericalism"). Click on the word for Russell Shaw's incisive definition of clericalism at all levels today (including laity and the secular world, a complete distortion of Vatican II).