"A Model of Christian Charity" is a sermon of John Winthrop delivered somewhere on the ocean before the puritans arrived in America. In the sermon, he illustrates the reason behind the Puritans' unwillingness to accept the need for state and church separation. Moreover, Winthrop acknowledged a natural existent of separation between social classes. He believed that God created the separation for a reason, to bring the classes all together and they can help each other.
I was really confused when I first read it. I couldn't understand the thesis and had no clue what why he wrote this. However, after the discussion with the class, I realized the background differences between now and then; the church was everything back to the time. They were much more into religion, so they believed that god created everything in the world.
Although I am still not 100% sure about the context, I get the main idea of Puritans' world in the 17th century-the god and the Christianity are everything.
Howl vs. Leafs of Grass 5/18/11
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The major shocking similarity I see almost immediately is that the
formatting is very much the same in both of these works. It gives an
initial idea, and t...
14 years ago
I think that you do have some understanding of the sermon. Winthrop actually delivered the sermon while the ships were just offshore before they actually began the journey to the new world. There is some confusion about whey these folks were called Puritans and the Pilgrims were called separatists. Separatists thought that church and state should be separate; at the time they were not. It is also true that the Puritans thought that they could clean the 'popish' ideas out of the Anglican church (which was headed by the king of England). Separatists thought that the bad aspects could not be corrected within the system as it existed, so they left.
ReplyDeleteThe core of Winthrop's sermon has to do with the practice of Christian love within a society. He says that such love must be made real because nothing else will work without that understanding. Most of the sermon, once he has explained that God has made things as you have explained in your post, is concerned with examples of how that love is to be exemplified in all aspects of the behavior of the members of the colony.