Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) is one of the well known Roman Catholic theologians that have devoted considerable scholarly attention to the question of the relationship between secular political eschatologies and Christian eschatological hope. Drawing on eschatological discussions in Augustine’s City of God, Ratzinger’s approaches to eschatology has focused significantly on how understandings of the relationship between kingdom of God and the kingdom of Man shape approaches to political liberation in secular visions of worldly redemption. This paper adopts Ratzinger’s differentiation between the goals and orientations of these two kingdoms in enunciating how the search for hope on the secular horizontal plane cannot proceed without the recognition of the “guiding light” of the vertical dimension of eschatological hope. Without this recognition, politics and political liberation theologies will be overreaching themselves in ways that will ultimately lead to serious abuses of human freedom.