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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

A Maori Prophet

A Maori Prophet

Mr Henderson’s sympathetic account of the origins and growth of the Ratana Church makes absorbing reading. Apart from the practice of faith-healing, Wiremu Ratana’s contribution to the life of the Maori people was threefold – apage 678 renewal of the ancient Christian tradition of devotion to the Faithful Angels, as a positive answer to the practices of tohungaism; a communal movement designed to unify the people and make use of the remaining Maori lands; and a political movement by which many Maoris were able to have a voice in the Government which they might otherwise have lacked.

Ratana’s grasp of Maori humour, his ability to know which way the wind was blowing, his use of religious symbols, even his very human thorns in the flesh, combine to make a most challenging and magnetic figure, unmistakeably Maori, himself a meeting-place for the desires of his people. There is one difficulty, however, which Mr Henderson chooses to skate over, as a matter for theological disputation only – the fact that the Ratana Church abandoned the traditional Christian rite of Baptism, substituting a form of its own. Granted enormous variations in the interpretation of Scripture, and equally varying degrees of devotion to the Person of Christ, the one objective factor which unites the majority of the Protestant churches is the retention of the traditional rite of Baptism.

The intense allegiance of Ratana’s followers to him as a prophet was perhaps no more than the natural due of a leader who had brought them hope in a time of darkness and racial humiliation. The founding of a separate Church was in no way contrary to the ordinary process of fission which is a characteristic of Protestant religious development. Politically and socially the Ratana movement did answer and continues to answer some of the real needs of the Maori people. The difficulty lies in another quarter – that what was brought into being as a bulwark against tohungaism could end nearer to what it resisted than to what it defended.

1964 (323)