We Have No Memory

Jaded Secularism and Its "Tricks"

This year New Zealand will "mark" the 200th year since the Gospel of Jesus Christ was first proclaimed in New Zealand (as far as we are able to tell).  Our Lord had commanded that we, his servants, proclaim to the farthest reaches of the earth, His death on behalf of all men for the forgiveness of sin.  New Zealand is about as far away from Jerusalem (where He laid down this command) as is possible to get.  Thus, in terms of biblical theology and Christian eschatology, the first coming of the Gospel to this far flung country is of great symbolic significance, at the very least.

For that reason alone all Christians everywhere should take a great interest in the coming of the Gospel to a far-away land, where the inhabitants were lost in the dark night of sin.  But the nation as a whole will barely notice this bicentenary.  That's because New Zealand is officially a secular country, which means that the religion of secularism is its established religion.  To our official, established religion, the coming of Samuel Marsden to New Zealand to preach the Gospel on Christmas Day 1814 is more of an embarrassment than anything else.  It reflects a former, benighted age when people superstitiously believed in gods rather than stochastic atoms. 

Paul Moon, one of our leading historians of the period, laments the present studied ignorance of the event.