Larry Hart
I hardly ever pay attention to Newsweek (too much conservative propaganda), but this one did get my attention: Pastor Rick Wiles Says “Backers of COVID Vaccine Are New Nazis and We Need to Go to War.” In spite of his claim to be a pastor I doubt that Wiles (a name meaning deceptions, deceits, lies, cons, etcetera) possesses any higher or perduring religious or human values.
It is perhaps simpler to lump Wiles in with all those people the Pew Research Center found adopting the evangelical label because of its association with conservative Republicanism, and as a declaration of support for Donald Trump rather than because of any theological or spiritual affinity for Jesus Christ. In fact Pew Research noted that many Americans who embrace the evangelical identity hardly ever attend the religious services of any denomination.
Among the things that fascinated me in this short story is that Rick Wiles believes that both Nazis and Jews want to vaccinate billions of people in order to kill them. To quote a famous football player I will leave anonymous, “Who would have thunk it?” Jews and Nazis working together. Actually Rick, unlike Jesus of Nazareth, is only concerned with the suffering and death of certain people––the people of whom he approves. His suggestion to Donald Trump was that Donald shoot protestors to death with hollow point bullets.
Wiles is correct. He and I are at war (2 Corinthians 10:3-4; Ephesians 6:11-19; Romans 12:21), but it is a war whose etiology is in something far larger than differing opinions on the efficacy of vaccines––all that is merely symptomatic of the blind self-will that is the root of all human evil. I think that Ricks Wiles is not merely crazy (though that is one possibility) but an agent of something sinister beyond imagination. I am doing my best, or a least want to do my best, to counter that each day; that is, I want to be part of the cosmic struggle for the triumph of beauty, truth, and goodness. I believe that the work of caritas, to use the old Latin word for Biblical love, is why I am here on this earth.
Now to think that I am an agent of beauty and truth could simply mean that I am suffering from megalomania. In Perelandra, the second book of C. S. Lewis’s science fiction/fantasy trilogy, a middle aged Oxford professor of Philology, Dr. Elwin Ransom, is confronted by his good friend Lewis with that very question. Dr. Ransom Responds like this:
When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomaticbeings at great heights it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting.
Of course, you may think Wiley and I, and The Apostle Paul, and C. S. Lewis are wrong––that there is no great cosmic struggle. In which case I guess you might as well relax and enjoy the spectacle of terminal human stupidity.