Dear Pastor...
BACKGROUND:
In my June 4th Stack entitled “Perhaps Today,” I referenced Peter Van Doodeward’s “COVID-19 Reflection” in the May 29th Aquila Report. I sent this article as a recommendation to a friend and advised he send it to the ministry team at his church which was locked down, I believe, for around 9 months. The pastor responded with positive comments about the author as well as the Aquila Report. He did, however, state that “it would take me a long time to adequately respond to the article” and that he felt the author’s “handling of very nuanced topics is a bit simplistic” [particularly] in how he handled the ‘Love your neighbor’ argument. It’s more nuanced than [the author] acknowledges [and] he makes assumptions that may not be fair. I’m not sure he emphasizes enough the information Christians didn’t know at the time and how that impacted their attempt to protect the body and soul of the congregations…” (comments dated June 15th).
You’ll be interested to know that a response to Van Doodeward’s article was published in the June 23rd Aquila Report entitled “How Should We Then Repent? A Response to ‘COVID-19 Reflection.’” (I would encourage you to stop reading my Stack right now and read this.) You will see that Pastor Yi’s (a friend of my co-author Dr. O’Roark) response is even more hard-hitting than Van Doodeward’s and is not at all along the lines of the “critique” in the paragraph above!
This week’s Stack is a response at large to the pastor in the first paragraph, who will along with the church remain anonymous.
Dear Pastor,
Bill O’Reilly wrote today in “The Decline in Religion”:
Unfortunately, American religious leaders have no answer. Most are frightened, few engage their congregations in meaningful ways. My church last Sunday was 20 percent full for 10:30 mass.
Add it all up, traditional theology-centered lifestyles are disappearing from our country.
God help us.
In his introduction to The Christian Faith: A Systematic Theology for Pilgrims on the Way, Michael Horton references Dorothy Sayers’ outline of the grammar, dialectical, and rhetorical stages of our educational and emotional development. The grammar stage occurs in childhood, where children “delight in simple rhymes and repetitive phrases that increasingly become the stock of basic knowledge on which they will draw for the rest of their lives.” The dialectical stage occurs in adolescence and is characterized by “a period of questioning, testing, and thinking through why we believe what we believe.” Finally, these beliefs coalesce into “form[ed]…habits of thought and expression” in the rhetorical stage of adulthood (p. 21).
Piaget has outlined four stages of cognitive development: birth to age 2, age 2 to 7, age 7 to 11 (concrete operational stage), and ages 12 and up. James Fowler has identified six progressive stages of faith. Israel Galindo writes in The Hidden Lives of Congregations (a required text in a Doctor of Ministry course I started many years ago):
[Fowler’s] Stage 3 appears to be the adult faith stage of most people in our congregations and society. It is estimated that two-thirds of the adults in the United States function at Piaget’s Concrete-Operational level (p. 102).
Translated, this means that the bulk of society—both in and outside the church—appear stuck in perpetual adolescence.
I won’t rehash the lies of Covidiocy that I have written about elsewhere. (I believe the friend referenced above also provided you with a copy of our Coronavirus and the Leadership of the Church: A Sacred Trust Broken.) I will say that nothing I have said, written, or spoken about regarding C19 since April 2020 has been disproven. At a recent choir rehearsal, a friend from a previous church said something which few will say: “Well, everything you said was true.” What I will add is something my co-author Dr. O’Roark recently wrote (June 22nd) in an email—and I quote with permission: “After several years of the benefit of hindsight plus our own extensive research, I’m of the belief that not one single aspect of the official Covid narrative was true. Not one.”
If that is true, then you can understand why it is a complete mystery to us to see pastors attempting to defend the position their churches took on Covid. I see in your comments above three misplaced, faulty, and unbiblical appeals—appeals to adolescence, ignorance, and love. I will deal with each of these in turn.
An Appeal to ADOLESCENCE
Prior to C19, few if any had heard of terms like social distancing, 6 feet, asymptomatic spread, mask/vaccine mandates, my mask protects you, or stay home/stay safe. Now, unfortunately, they are part of our international parlance, and they seem here to stay. Everybody—church leaders included—got really comfortable throwing these terms around and being “in the know” on the latest CDC recommendations. Hymnals were swiped from pew backs. Plexiglass cordoned and corralled churchgoers through the appropriate “chutes and ladders” to get to their designated locations. The bread and cup of Communion was replaced with impossible-to-open “prepackaged elements” which tasted like Styrofoam. (I grew up in a church where we all drank from the same pewter cup, wiped down by the bishop with the same cloth in between congregants!) No mask was required in a Sunday School class which didn’t exceed 20 people, but masks were required in hallways and auditorium—all because this was protecting and loving your fellow believer. (I know this only from reading about it, because I refused to attend any church which instituted such foolish policies.) Few questioned these bizarre and unprecedented practices.
This represents Sayers’ pre-adolescent grammar stage of development where everyone got used to parroting the same repetition. It doesn’t even rise to the level of the dialectical stage, which, I repeat, involves “questioning, testing, and thinking through why we [do] what we [do].” Those of us who did question were dissed and dismissed by church leaders who told us we were in a minority position, in deference to the unbiblical principle that the majority is always right. Some of us were even visited “professionally” by the Department of State, threatening legal action and medical license suspension for refusing to surrender our principled convictions of patient care. Suddenly, in a profession which for centuries shunned new ideas (after all, the Hungarian physician Semmelweis lost his medical reputation and was mocked by the Royal Colleges for insisting doctors wash their hands; he died in an insane asylum at the age of 47), new and unproven ideas were propagated and enforced en masse by the medical community.
And pastors followed suit. There were few Daniels during C19.
When Daniel knew that the document had been signed, he went to his house where he had windows in his upper chamber open toward Jerusalem. He got down on his knees three times a day and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as he had done previously (Daniel 6:10, ESV).
Gone were the days of “dare to be a Daniel/dare to stand alone” that we sang about in Sunday School when I was a boy. Locked, shuttered, and sequestered in fear, churches cowered like scared adolescents. Gone were the days of the Apostle Paul, who went right back into the city where he had been stoned for preaching the Gospel and did it all over again (Acts 14)! We heard plenty from pastors about obeying and respecting our government and being a witness to our community by our obedience, written by the same Apostle who defied the authorities in the name of the Gospel. Why did we hear about the one but not the other during C19?
This was only possible as churches followed the peer pressure of an adolescent mentality. It would not have been possible in churches with a Berean mentality who examined the Scriptures daily (Acts 17:11), who sought to understand the “secret and hidden wisdom of God” in contrast to the “rulers of this age” (I Cor. 2:7-8, ESV), and who fed on the solid food or “meat” and not just the “milk” of the Word (I Cor. 3:2, Heb. 5:11ff). In the Hebrews passage, milk is for children and meat is for the mature (cf the developmental stages above).
An Appeal to IGNORANCE
You mention the information we didn’t know at the time.
But we did know it at the time. Some of us saw it immediately and implored others to do the same. Our emails, our essays, and our books were offered to church leaders. But they were largely dismissed. Let me be clear. I do not claim superior knowledge regarding C19. But I do believe that the Spirit of God gave us insight to see through the deception of the C19 narrative from the very beginning. That is a work of the Spirit and not of my own intellect.
I heard well-meaning church leaders say early on, you don’t know who to believe. I begged to differ. You believe what is true. LuAnne and I have said from the beginning that C19 was always about what was true; it was not about perceptions or opinions. Masks either worked or they didn’t. C19 was either the deadliest virus to hit the planet or it wasn’t. There was asymptomatic spread or there wasn’t. Vaccines either prevented you from getting C19 and transmitting it or they didn’t. mRNA jabs didn’t change your genetic code or they did. Lockdowns and social distancing either worked or they didn’t. Forced mandates against people’s consciences either were constitutional or they weren’t. Removing hymnals from pew racks either helped to prevent spread or it didn’t. And on the list goes.
The fact that few were unable to sort through these lies and discover the truth bespeaks a very sad theological state of church and society. One could forgive society, but it’s hard to forgive the church! The fact that few church leaders were unable to decrypt the daily deception that masqueraded as news tells us that we are woefully unprepared for the beasts of persecution, deception, and seduction outlined in Revelation 13 and 17. (I owe this understanding to John Stott.) In fact, those three beasts were all over the C19 narrative: seduced by Happy Meals and million-dollar sweepstakes to get the jab, deceived by government and medicine into believing the lies in the above paragraph, and persecuted for refusing to be complicit. Unable to buy or sell unless one has the mark. Regardless if one is pre-, post-, or amillennial in eschatological understanding, it’s hard to not see a connection! Those who suggest it is a coincidence are deceived. One would expect the Enemy to masquerade as an angel of light and to use the church as a conduit for that deception.
So what we didn’t know at the time (to use your words) is really interpreted as what we failed to or didn’t want to see at the time. And even if one honestly didn’t know (that’s hard for me to believe), I know of no place in Scripture where we’re given a pass for our ignorance. Pastors won’t get a pass to stand before the Judge and say that at the time they didn’t know that salvation was by grace through faith in Christ alone. I don’t believe they’ll be given a pass for being deceived “at the time” either. On the contrary. Rather, we read:
Wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy time (Isaiah 33:6, KJV).
My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee… (Hosea 4:6, KJV).
Pastors who became like false prophets, urging “peace, peace when there is no peace” (Jer. 6:14 & I Thess. 5:3) or comply with government narratives will be held to the highest account for their deception. And they will not be able to appeal to adolescence or ignorance.
An Appeal to LOVE
Nor will they be able to appeal to love. This is probably the most disturbing of the three to me personally. You reference it above. I have written about it before and so I will be brief.
Let me be blunt. I don’t believe it was about love at all. I believe it was all about fear. The Scripture is clear: “Perfect love casts out fear” (I John 4:18). As I pointed out in “Perhaps Today,” the Pope, the Archbishop, the Anabaptists, and others all used this same argument. From where I stand now and in hindsight, urging complicity with the C19 narrative in the name of love is akin to encouraging someone to run across the road in front of an 18-wheeler because it’s the loving thing to do. It’s insane. It makes no sense. Certainly we’re called to love. The two greatest commands are love of God and love of others. However, we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the mind (along with the other three) was sorely missing in this argument.
The love argument has been used to justify almost any aberrant behavior in society—from abortion to homosexuality to transgenderism and more. In light of what is true, appealing to the love argument is akin to twisting (wresting) the Scriptures to one’s own destruction (2 Peter 3:16) and “handling the word of God deceitfully” (2 Corinthians 4:2, KJV). It must stop and it must be repented of!
In summary, I don’t believe Van Doodeward missed any nuances. Pastor Yi certainly didn’t either! I believe the extent to which we do believe there are nuances corresponds to the extent to which we’ve become comfortable with deception, which is exactly the place where the Enemy wants us.
We used to sing a hymn entitled “Faith of Our Fathers.” It’s in most Mennonite hymnals. It’s also in the Trinity Hymnal of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Presbyterian Church in America. I don’t know that it’s sung in many churches these days outside of the Anabaptist context. Perhaps it’s too embarrassing. The first stanza will suffice:
Faith of our fathers, living still/In spite of dungeon, fire, and sword;
O how our hearts beat high with joy/Whene’er we hear that glorious word.
Faith of our fathers, holy faith./We will be true to thee till death!
Worshipping in caves and dens of the mountain in defiance of authorities, these heroes of the faith were willing to be racked, quartered, sawn, drawn asunder, have their tongues pulled out, and be burned at the stake—all the while dying with the name of God on their lips.
Contrast that with modern day churches shuttered and doors bolted, with preachers “preaching” to an empty audience live-streamed on YouTube or to parishioners seated in every other bench with elbow bumps over handshakes. What an anemic, vanilla faith!
Even if C19 had been the deadliest virus to hit the planet, if we really believe the Christian story, then we’re transported to be with Christ, which Paul says is far better (Phil. 1:23)! What better way than for the saints to die while worshiping God and be simultaneously transported into His Presence. Talk about a grand entrance!
But oh, how glorious that will be!