City upon a Hill
City upon a hill (literally "city on a hill") is a trope that comes from John Winthrop's sermon A Model of Christian Charity from 1630. The statement refers to the metaphor of salt and light from the Sermon on the Mount of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew ( Mt 5,14 EU ): “You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden ”(in the King James Bible : Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. )
Winthrop impressed the Puritan colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony that their new colony was a "town on a hill" watched by the whole world:
"For wee must consider that wee shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us"
“We have to assume that we should be like a city on a hill. Everyone's eyes are on us. "
history
For a long time it was believed that the sermon was given shortly before the arrival on board the Arbella that brought the Puritans to America. However, recent research has shown that Winthrop is very likely to have given this speech before he left England. Winthrop believed that all nations had a covenant with God and that the Puritans would have to leave England because the country had broken its covenant. He assumed that the Puritans had a new, special covenant with God, similar to that between God and the people of Israel .
In American history, the term city upon a hill has often been used to express American exceptionalism . Many politicians used the term to show that the United States must be a special role model for the rest of the world. An example of this is the question The City upon a Hill by John F. Kennedy on January 9, 1961 in front of the Massachusetts State Legislature a few days before he was sworn in as president.
Ronald Reagan also used the term frequently, but in the short version of the Shining City . For example, in his Farewell Address he made explicit reference to John Winthrop and the image of the Shining City :
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still ...
“I've talked about the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever conveyed exactly what I saw when I spoke about it. But in my mind it was a big proud city, built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, blessed by God and inhabited by people of all kinds who lived in harmony and peace, a city with free ports, full of commerce and creativity, and when city walls were needed, those walls had gates, and the gates were open to anyone with the will and courage to come to us. This is how I saw her and still see ... "
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbaco (eds.): The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology , Cambridge, Mass. 1985, p. 89-92
- ↑ The City Upon a Hill, Address to the Massachusetts State Legislature , Boston / Mass., January 9, 1961, in: Let The Word Go Forth , The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy, ed. By Theodore C. Sorensen, New York 1988, p. 56 ff.
- ^ Transcript of Farewell Address to the Nation, Oval Office, January 11, 1989 ( Memento of October 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Video of the Farewell Address on C-SPAN
- ^ Based on the official translation of the US Embassy in Bonn
