A nice piece modeling Christian engagement with a pressing cultural issue

Yesterday I came across a remarkably comprehensive piece at The Aquila Report, titled “Covid-19 Vaccines And Vaccination Mandates: How Should Christians Respond?”, written by apparently retired pastor Dean Davis. For one, I wanted to mention it to you just because some people will find it immediately helpful in their struggles with employers. (Actually I shared it at BeeSocial yesterday and several people replied to say it was excellent.) I’m not going to personally certify every single medical and theological claim in that piece, but he seems to be thoughtful and well researched and you can make up your own mind on that.

But I did think, this is also a piece that models good Christian engagement with a pressing cultural issue.

We have something to say

We the Church have something to say on this topic. I could digress for a while on how annoying it is to me (ahem) that so much of the serious Christian engagement with culture today is coming from Roman Catholic writers. But I think one of the reasons for that is that Protestants, and especially Protestant clergy, are afraid to make statements that go “beyond what the Bible says”, whereas Roman Catholicism (for better and for worse, we might say) has a long history of reasoning (or negatively you might say speculating) past the bare words of scripture. But here’s the problem - to seriously engage with almost any cultural issue today, at least in terms of application, you have to go “beyond the Bible” in a sense. Pull out your Bible concordance and look for “vaccine” and you know what? It ain’t in there. So then there is no Christian perspective on this topic, we have nothing to say? We absolutely do, but you have to apply past the bare words of scripture to do it.

So we should say it

We therefore should speak. As Davis says at the opening of his piece, pastors cannot just preach a vague sermon on Romans 14 with a “so, you’ll figure out how this is supposed to apply to the present situation”. The world doesn’t leave people hanging like that. CNN is going to tell people exactly what they should think. Public school teachers are going to tell people exactly what they should think. Now we in the Church should have more respect for human reason than the previous two, that is appropriate, but we also should not think that merely stating some principles will suffice. You would never teach Physics like that, give students the general principles and just trust that they’ll figure out how they apply to any situation you throw at them. They would be utterly lost! Students don’t really understand what the principles mean without that application.

Saying it well requires understanding information outside of scripture

This is going to be the most uncomfortable point for many people, but there’s simply no denying that engaging well with the culture requires the study of the present “facts on the ground”, and the reasoning being employed on the ground. What Christians should think about the COVID-19 vaccines and perhaps also vaccination mandates does depend upon what those vaccines are and how they operate, and (arguably) upon the sort of threat COVID-19 poses to people. Ergo, while you can certainly inquire of experts you trust, you have no choice but to get somewhat informed on those topics. There is no other way, if you choose not to be informed you make yourself ripe for manipulation by others. So I was rather impressed that so much of Davis’ piece is going through the medical/health information.

This is also a spiritual battle

This is the part I’m most likely to omit myself - there is spiritual warfare going on and that is part of the battle. And so he says upfront there:

We are dealing with an especially sharp and dangerous satanic attack. The ruler of this world is coming against your flock—lambs included—in order to steal, kill, and destroy (John 10:10; 14:30).

Along the same theme, yesterday someone who reads these posts passed along the article “When ‘get woke, go broke’ is The Plan: Self-correcting, 'negative feedback' systems don't apply when demons are running the world”. This could be a long discussion, I do think it would also be inappropriate to become one of those people who, literally any time they see something bad happen or some example of sin, says “demons did that”. You don’t want to err in that way, but you also don’t want to err in the way of entirely neglecting the spiritual warfare aspect of our struggles today. So I appreciate the consideration that “the reason leaders aren’t at all troubled by the destruction they’re causing today is because destruction is part of the goal because demons are pulling the strings”.

I have often had the thought that political and cultural evil, despite being coordinated (certainly today in the US) by humans who seem to be of mediocre intelligence and low competence, is actually superb at doing its evil work. It is highly skilled in the arts of psychological manipulation, really brilliant at it. And it often seems to be building today what it’s not really going to use until ten steps and many decades down the line… and most humans simply don’t scheme over decades like that, the human life is too short, they want to benefit from their scheming right now. You might start work on a cathedral for the glory of God that won’t be finished for 200 years, but humans taking part in evil scheming generally want to benefit from that scheming right now. But spiritual forces of evil, one would imagine, are highly intelligent from long observation of humans, know exactly how they can be manipulated, and would be pleased to work over long time scales. That thought, anyway, has somewhat regularly occurred to me.