Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria University College, Wellington N.Z. Vol. 20, No. 10. July 19, 1957
Coats on? — Good-Bye to Dogma
Coats on?
Good-Bye to Dogma
Your article, "Christians Should Take Their Coats Off". contained some provocative statements; putting my coat on.
The life of a community, indeed a nation, is the product of the lives of its individual constituents. Universal corruption within the members of a nation implies a corrupt nation and universal "goodness" within, a good nation. The ethics that govern an individual—govern a nation. The ideas of the people have their roots in those of the individual.
". . . In spile of the great importance we attach to the triumphs of knowledge and achievement, it is nevertheless obvious that only a humanity which is striving after ethical ends can in full measure share in the blessings brought by material progress and become masters of the dangers which accompany it. To the generation which has adopted a belief of an imminent power of progress realizing itself, in some measure, naturally and automatically, and which thought that it no longer needed any ethical ideals but could advance to its goal by means of knowledge and achievement alone, terrible proof is being given by its present position (world war), of the error into which it had sunk."
"... It is impossible to imagine the height to which may its carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, learn to deprive large masses of their gravity . . . for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labour and double its produce; all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured, not excepting even that of old age . . . . O that moral science were in a fair way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to each other and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity."
—Benjamin Franklin (1780).
We should not expect the fruits of contemporary labour to be immediately forthcoming. Just as the prolific farms of the present day are the expression of the hard labours of the bush-clearing, scrub-cutting pioneers, so must the truthful, practical and productive social ethic be the expression of the contemporary work done on the wilderness of ideas, of part truths, uncertainty and insecurity that characterises modern "Confusionism".
As a preliminary to the establishment of improved ethical and moral foundations, especially within the Church, we might first endeavour to open ourselves and our ideals to criticism to ascertain their inherent strength under adverse conditions. We must attack our own beliefs with a vigour which half les the most ardent Church critic and leaves him at a loss for further words. We might realise that we are as much the slaves of subtle prejudice, conventional hates and habits, shallowness, narrowness, as we have ever been. As Christians we fall so far short of the standard set before us by our no-good (in that he denies his own goodness and sets us an even higher standard than his own definitely exemplary life) Master, that even the best of men cannot truthfully claim to be much better than the least!
Political activity in the religious community is continually under the surveillance, though still allowed sensibly restrained freedom, of ethical principles which are deeper than the action, whether or not such an action affects The direction of nation or person.
". . . On these two laws, hang all the laws and the prophets."
—Observer.