Getting Better All the Time?

History is littered with the inhuman. That is, when we seek to take an honest look at those who have gone before us, we find what we manage to think is something different from us. We look at Nazi Germany as if it were some bizarre aberration, the cultural equivalent of a snowstorm in August. Even cultures we might otherwise admire have warts we think we’ve grown beyond. Whether it was the open sexual perversion and abuse of boys that marked the ancient Greeks, or witch hunts of our Puritan forebears, the skeletons do not hide in the closet but dance across the stage. Trouble is, we miss the family resemblance.

I have argued before that to compare the German holocaust with the abortion holocaust is unfair- unfair to the Nazis. The German people had some measure of plausible deniability- you couldn’t find Buchenwald in the yellow pages. The German high court did not publicly rule that any restrictions on killing Jews in the first third of their lives were forbidden. Their holocaust in the space of less than a decade took six million lives. Ours has lasted nearly fifty years, and taken more than sixty million lives.

We take comfort in comparing ourselves with ourselves, but only because we’ve muddied up the mirrors. Those Nazis we like to demonize, they were people just like us. The same is true with the Greeks. To be certain we have built a wall of protection around our children, naming it consent. But do we really believe consent has a sufficiently solid foundation to last? Every other wall we have built has been toppled by the hunger of desire. Already this happens with the children in private. Already people are advocating for the legitimacy of this perversion. I suspect it will not be long before Epstein’s fall will be revered like Stonewall.

Of course we shouldn’t expect much from those outside the kingdom. We are excused from seeing ourselves in them because we are indwelt by the Holy Spirit. Just like the Puritans before us, those who drank deep of hysteria and gave substance to the expression “witch-hunt.” What was possible for them is not just possible, but likely for us. We may not be on the lookout for witches, but we still fall for hysteria, we still throw biblical principles of evidence and justice out the window, because, SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

We have not evolved past the wickedness of our fathers. We have instead inherited it. And we in the church have not put to death the old man, but continue to struggle with him, fighting battles we too often lose. There is no wickedness in our past that is not wickedness in our present. Which brings us back to the one needful thing- repentance. We, like our fathers, are a wicked people. We believers, like our fathers, are still in ourselves, wicked people. The world, however slowly, is more and more recognizing the authority of our Lord. But it still has a long way to go. Even as we are growing in grace, but still have a long way to go. We will progress better, however, move further, the more we recognize how far we have to go. We have met the enemy, and he is us.