QUOTE : This is the time for Christians to be drumming home some fundamentals as part of our witness in the larger world. Whatever fine points we express or even fight over in our own Christian communities, on the larger scale we should be hammering away at a few basic points. It is painfully disappointing to find many clerics and Christian gurus, on the few occasions they find themselves asked for a Christian outlook on this or that question, unable to deliver themselves of more than a few ethical platitudes veneered with Christian vocabulary. We must constantly say that we were made by God and for him; that all of us will have to give an account to him; that our Creator is our Judge; that the grace we ourselves have received in Christ Jesus impels us to good works, but that our ultimate hope for the future is the end of history, a new heaven and a new earth that only God himself can bring about; that human hubris stands humbled not only before our individual deaths, but before the deaths of civilizations and finally of the world itself; that a society that does not recognize these points finally becomes grotesquely self-serving and exposed to the judgement of God.