PROGRESS

PROGRESS, REGRESS, EMPHASIS AND PERFECTION

Rev. Dr. Robert E. Donaldson

Published by World Wide Web Witness Inc.

June 2013

ISBN 978-0-9875948-2-2

PREFACE

Progress used, in the 1930s, to be a catchcry. We, the human race, so very scientific, clever, prospering in a new understanding, looking forward to a concertina type of new destiny, amazing in potential, increasingly robust in strength, clever, savvy, learning from past errors, would promote ourselves into glory. Science would astonish; knowledge would amend; power would not corrupt. Man would become so civilised that one would wonder, and the past would be mere shadow as the present prospered and the future beckoned.

Whether in art, philosophy or literature, there has been a repining from those dreams, a sourness becomes as with old milk, very unsavoury to the perceptions, and a misery becomes headline news, as nation and tribe and group and body and race, and civilisation and culture and aspirations and computations and computer fraud and invasion, and ill-will grow into an interminable seeming brew. Indeed, it becomes so manifestly hostile and infantile, in a sort of compulsive brooding in sibling aggressiveness among the nations, that lying appears more and more, a mere preliminary to conflict, and words become but emblems of savvy sophisticated silencing of criticism, while power or pollution or philosophy or race or nation is sought to be pre-eminent, exalted, admired or feared.

Progress did not prosper.

Regress has done exceedingly well, and if it were a share registration, as of a Public Company, named say Downward Dynamics, it would be high among the best achievers. Debt and over-spending on the one hand, and belligerent massing of new weapons on the other, these new waves are being introduced like compulsory vaccination with some type of AIDS virus.

Emphasis continues on human glory, even if amid the gory, which is supposedly for many, a necessary cost for progress, even though it manifestly does not work. Strife begets strife. Force begets force. Folly begets folly. The midwifery departments in the hospitals of men, the philosophic hospitals, are full and overflowing. Man is learning NOTHING, because he is departing from his commencement, ignoring his creation, desecrating its functions, ignoring its realities, breaking minds, slaying millions, seeking revenges, striking new notes of pomposity, new depths of the malapropos, as if the very use of ugliness in dress or feature or cartoon or literature is the new ideal; as if ideals were to be based in the base, and no vision were to be allowed, on pain of fine or imprisonment. This already is the case, for selected ancient visions, in many countries, if death and torture are not used instead.

Emphasis on survival joins hand with ignorance of both destiny and its deserts, till the very air, as in Peking, becomes a sort of souvenir of pollution, a reminder of deeper pollutions, not only to lung, but to heart and mind as well. It is not alone.

Perfection was a major issue when Denton wrote his Evolution: A Theory in Crisis. In much, it appeared to fascinate him. There is a good supply of it in the mathematical, miniaturised marvels he uncovers in much detail in micro-biology and other facets of his work. It is even more prominent in the yearning of the heart of man, for much cynicism is little more than a wail for the failure to find where it is sought, what is perfect, at the pain of it, the frustration from it and the sense of censure because it is so often and so needlessly and so obviously is averted, as if it were a plague (cf. SMR Chs. 3, 4, and 4 Extension).

It remains a desire of the heart, when not submerged or immersed in self-pity, man-loathing or sin-seduction. It is to be found instead of cynicism, where it belongs. That like creation, repentance and reality is the point. It is useless to dream in inconsolable grief, or vapid imagination. You need vision, vision of truth, the truth back of vision, in fact the Lord who being Creator has taken love as the motive, man as the format, salvation as the offer, resurrection as the new ban available on mortality and its horrors, and has offered grace.

In how much and how often are such things to be seen! In Christ is to be found the solution to sin, both in its sovereignty and guilt, deception and its guile, to the desire for goodness and its beauty, majesty in its reality, humility without hypocrisy. Here is perfection so that progress can only be towards it, both drawn to it and appreciating it as coming (Philippians 3:12-21), seeking more and more conformity to His ways, now before His perfection is paramount before the very eyes (Revelation 21-22), becoming visible in the heights of salvation in its complete exhibition in heaven. Even now, regress can measure its gap, in that it is discernible in distance from Him who made us; and emphasis can seek brakes, when it compares the plight of mankind with the object from whom it flees, and emphasis can be where light is available, rather than on the precise configurations of deeds in the dark.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

A Matter of Summoning Heights and Depths

Chapter 2

THE ENCOMPASSING ROCK OF SALVATION

Chapter Three

The Self-Consciously Splendiferous

and the Simple Splendour

Fame through the Grant of the Splendour of Christ's Celestial Beauty

and Corruption of Man's Wisdom for the Sake of his own Splendour

Progress into Disaster, Regress in Repentance,

to Find Unfailing Brightness where Sin has No Place