many of those
questioned thought that The Boy Who Cried Wolf was a story from the New
Testament. Others knew little or nothing about Christ's miracles, while some
wondered why Jesus could not "fly like Superman".
(Thank you to Paul Sharpe of
Christian Monitor for
alerting me to this story.)
What a difference a couple of generations
makes. Two weeks ago
I wrote of how my local newspaper, The Age, used to provide
readers with moral guidance, based on stories of the Bible. Here are two
excerpts, from Age editorials of 40 years ago. The contrast with
today is startling.
The first is from November 10th, 1962:
This is the test of
friendship, to be constant and unchanging. On this all men are agreed, from
the Hebrew man of wisdom who claims that a faithful friend is the medicine
of life, to the philosopher Seneca, who says that even the most
self-sufficient man needs a friend, and that wisdom and friendship are the
two greatest things in the word: wisdom, however, is a mortal good, while
friendship is immortal….
Friendships are recalled or revived as
memory lingers over the events which tested the quality of men to their
utmost, their ability to endure as well as their loyalty to their mates.
It was a sure insight which led to the
choice of words engraved on the floor of Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance.
For there at its heart where no visitor can miss it, written for all to
read, are the words – “Greater love hath no man”.
Speech sometimes conceals thought or
hides feeling, but those words have in them a sound and depth which compel
silence and reverence. They come from the last conversation between our Lord
and His friends which took place a few hours before His death – Greater love
hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.
In the context of the Shrine, or in the
Upper Room, they have the note of authority; they reveal deeper meanings to
life. They ask us to remember not only the great and good, but the quite
ordinary men whom we knew and liked, who with all their strengths and
weaknesses had this in common – they went out with you in any weather.
And a week later:
Most of us know that life is a struggle.
The parents of a young family find it hard to make ends meet; so also do
those who have grown old….
And because we are under this compulsion
to live by action, we are also compelled to seek guidance, not from the
sceptics, but from the men of faith.
One of the greatest of them had no
illusions about the fact of struggle. Indeed, he lifted the struggle from
the plane of human relations into a cosmic sphere. “For we wrestle not
against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against
the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in
high places.” Yet in spite of seeing life as a battleground of such
dimensions, St Paul could also say, “Your labour is not in vain in the
Lord.”…
Read the paper’s
latest editorials. They’re not bad. By and large they are commonsense
opinions on problems of our society. But that’s all they are – opinions,
based on the intellectual fashions of the day. They are houses built on
shifting sand.
Here, once again – and probably not for
the last time on this website – is a quote from Professor George Lindbeck:
Every major literate
cultural tradition up until now has had a central corpus of canonical
texts.…Without a shared imaginative and conceptual vocabulary and syntax,
societies cannot be held together by communication, but only by brute force
(which is always inefficient, and likely to be a harbinger of anarchy). But
if this is so, then the biblical cultural contribution, which is at the
heart of the canonical heritage of Western countries, is indispensable to
their welfare, and its evisceration bespeaks an illness which may be
terminal.
December 28th, 2002
