The Problem with Sin
“Zombies are real,” I wrote. “I’m not even sure how to begin to reckon with this.”
That was two years ago, before I broke as many bonds as I could with the brainwashing device I’d so willingly carried in my pocket and gazed upon like a golden cow for the better part of a decade. At the time, I was mostly fluent in movie references. I lived, moved and had my being in images and archetypes planted in me by my favorite pass time, which was escaping into the disembodied waking dreams of industrialized light and magical propaganda, be it video games, the big screen or Netflix.
About the same time it struck me that I knew more make-believe lore dreamed up in the study of J.R.R. Tolkien than I did of that written in the Chronicles of the Old Testament. I wasn’t sure where I was going and I didn’t know what it meant, but I was convicted that this was a problem I couldn’t sit by and ignore. “Fool me once,” shame on you…. I’d been easily deceived about the good intentions of such evidently deplorable cults as the transhumanists of Silicon Valley or the Nimrodists of the N.S.A., but I wasn’t going to let that happen again. I was missing something, a lens, an insight, a framework, and I needed to find it.
Having spent half my life burning the candle at both ends striving to share with the world the insightful distinctions of Lutheran theology, this doubled down on my conviction. I’d proclaimed with an unending voice, “True doctrine is possible!” But how come that doctrine hadn’t kept me from believing the lie? I’d prayed the growth of L.C.M.S. churches everywhere, even as I watched us slip further and further into infighting and obscurity. Why did the COVID crisis split us so drastically, but not upon previously established party lines?
Why did I still live in the nostalgia of Reagan’s “morning in America”? How had I learned to thank God I was born into such leisure-saturated times? As “two weeks to slow the spread” became two months without the majority seeming to notice, as singing in church became forbidden while rioting in the streets became encouraged, as Notre Dame burned down while Antifa established no-go sovereign nations on American soil, I began to wonder if the problem was not more than just a few missed memos here or there. A glaring and growing memory hole, an amnesia of cultural proportions, a whirlpool of shouted ideas screaming, “Don’t think about it: now this!” was actively sucking away our cultural capacity to see.
“Zombies are real,’ I wrote.
But zombies are not a biblical category. They are an entertainment mythology rooted in voodooism. They are a dystopian prophecy buried in the religions of gene-manipulation and eugenicism. They are one more story of the white noise meant to distract human conversation from the real.
They are a meme.
“We do not battle against flesh and blood,” St. Paul the Apostle wrote to the church at Ephesus (Eph. 6:12) where Demetrius the metalsmith did him much harm, and where he wrestled with wild beasts. “But we engage against the archane (ἀρχάς,) against the forces ( ἐξουσίας), against the cosmic imperials of shadow (κοσμοκράτορας τοῦ σκότους τούτου), against the spirits of the evil heavens (πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις).”
I don’t think he was kidding around, nor do I believe the demons have been inactive in the few generations since modern men stopped believing in them. One does not need to intellectually ascent to something in order to worship it. He only need bow down when it says, “Bow,” and stand up when it says, “Stand.” He need only trust what it says and guard what it bids him keep. In fact, it is better for the ghosts on his shoulder if he doesn’t know what he is doing. He is easier to manipulate if he walks in utter darkness. He makes a better pawn when he is sleepwalking.
“Those who forsake the Word (ת֭וֹרָה) ‘Alleluia’ the wicked. Such as cherish the Word (ת֭וֹרָה) fight back (יִתְגָּ֥רוּ).” So King Hezekiah and the many faithful men in Jerusalem remembered (Prv. 28:4) as the Rabshekah stood outside the gates and announced in the name of Jesus that it was too late for them. “Therefore let us not sleep as others do,” the same St. Paul exhorted the faithful in Thessalonica (1 Ths 5:6) where they gathered a mob against him and dragged Jason to court. “But let us watch! Let us be soberminded!” And again, to Rome (Rms. 13:11), where he would give his life for the cause rather than give up the faith, “Know the time. It is high time for you to awake!”
Zombies aren’t real. Not yet. But sleepwalkers most certainly are.
To be continued…