Over the Christmas break my family and I visited one of the most popular destinations in Washington D.C.—the Steven F. Hudvar Hazy Air and Space Museum. It’s an impressive place. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The Hudvar Center, along with another building on the National Mall, showcases the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world.
Toward the end of my visit I overheard something that I won’t forget. As I stood in front of a Bell UH-1H Iroquois, one of the most effective helicopters ever created, I overheard a little girl ask her dad a question. She was probably about five or six years old. Both of them stood about two feet away from me. While holding her dad’s hand and looking curiously at the massive Vietnam copter, the little girl asked, “Daddy, what is that for?” With little hesitation, and without taking his eyes off the copter, the father replied, “It’s to defeat the enemy.” The little girl then asked, “Who is the enemy?” “Well, at that time,” the father explained, “it was the Vietnamese.” The little girl didn’t answer and they continued on to the next display.
I couldn’t help but think of how a Christian ought to respond to such a question. Who is the enemy, really? What does the Christian religion say about the identity of the enemy? Touring the Hudvar Center, one cannot help but be impressed by the incredible technological advances our country has achieved in the last hundred years. At one end of the museum was a small glider built in the early part of the twentieth century; a symbol of the simple achievements of the first aviators. At the other end of the museum sat a massive space shuttle, used to experiment with entering and exiting the atmosphere. It was surrounded by numerous other rockets, satellites, and space suits. The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Sixty six years later Neil Armstrong is walking the surface of the moon. The rapid pace of technological advance is astonishing.
What is more astonishing is that, regardless of such a Herculean advance in military technology, human beings remain incapable of stopping human hatred. Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be the perfect example of how technology submits to the will of its creator. Unfortunately, technology is inhibited by the moral shortcomings of the human condition. Don’t get me wrong, technology maintains peace for millions each day, through the force of military coercion, and this is a political good. But technology cannot get at the root of the problem with human beings: it cannot conquer evil.
This is where the Christian view of evil provides a more realistic and nuanced account of what is actually wrong with the world. Unlike the father’s answer to the little girl, the enemy is a much larger and menacing reality whose defeat requires a power that military might cannot produce. The enemy is not the Germans, the Vietnamese, the Russians, or even the Wahhabi Saudis of the Middle East. The enemy, according to the Christian religion, is evil with its expansive kingdom of unruly characters: Satan the father of what is false, and the instigator and tempter of man; human persons, with their disposition inclined toward the domination of others and the exaltation of the self, barely able to see what is true and good. The children of evil are those who buy its program of lies and therefore become full of hatred and fear. Hatred and fear causes people to perceive their fellow humans as the ultimate threat. This makes us race to create bigger and better killing machines. If our country is to firmly grasp the hand of peace and justice, especially in a war on terror, the "enemy" must first be recognized as the evil that it is. This vice-producing evil is what we must speak of when asked by the little boys and girls, “Who is the enemy?” To not do so is to ignore the overall illness of man and treat its symptoms of hatred and fear as the primary problem
Matt
Toward the end of my visit I overheard something that I won’t forget. As I stood in front of a Bell UH-1H Iroquois, one of the most effective helicopters ever created, I overheard a little girl ask her dad a question. She was probably about five or six years old. Both of them stood about two feet away from me. While holding her dad’s hand and looking curiously at the massive Vietnam copter, the little girl asked, “Daddy, what is that for?” With little hesitation, and without taking his eyes off the copter, the father replied, “It’s to defeat the enemy.” The little girl then asked, “Who is the enemy?” “Well, at that time,” the father explained, “it was the Vietnamese.” The little girl didn’t answer and they continued on to the next display.
I couldn’t help but think of how a Christian ought to respond to such a question. Who is the enemy, really? What does the Christian religion say about the identity of the enemy? Touring the Hudvar Center, one cannot help but be impressed by the incredible technological advances our country has achieved in the last hundred years. At one end of the museum was a small glider built in the early part of the twentieth century; a symbol of the simple achievements of the first aviators. At the other end of the museum sat a massive space shuttle, used to experiment with entering and exiting the atmosphere. It was surrounded by numerous other rockets, satellites, and space suits. The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Sixty six years later Neil Armstrong is walking the surface of the moon. The rapid pace of technological advance is astonishing.
What is more astonishing is that, regardless of such a Herculean advance in military technology, human beings remain incapable of stopping human hatred. Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be the perfect example of how technology submits to the will of its creator. Unfortunately, technology is inhibited by the moral shortcomings of the human condition. Don’t get me wrong, technology maintains peace for millions each day, through the force of military coercion, and this is a political good. But technology cannot get at the root of the problem with human beings: it cannot conquer evil.
This is where the Christian view of evil provides a more realistic and nuanced account of what is actually wrong with the world. Unlike the father’s answer to the little girl, the enemy is a much larger and menacing reality whose defeat requires a power that military might cannot produce. The enemy is not the Germans, the Vietnamese, the Russians, or even the Wahhabi Saudis of the Middle East. The enemy, according to the Christian religion, is evil with its expansive kingdom of unruly characters: Satan the father of what is false, and the instigator and tempter of man; human persons, with their disposition inclined toward the domination of others and the exaltation of the self, barely able to see what is true and good. The children of evil are those who buy its program of lies and therefore become full of hatred and fear. Hatred and fear causes people to perceive their fellow humans as the ultimate threat. This makes us race to create bigger and better killing machines. If our country is to firmly grasp the hand of peace and justice, especially in a war on terror, the "enemy" must first be recognized as the evil that it is. This vice-producing evil is what we must speak of when asked by the little boys and girls, “Who is the enemy?” To not do so is to ignore the overall illness of man and treat its symptoms of hatred and fear as the primary problem
Matt
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