Once upon a time I announced in this column that the Packer clan, though unspectacular, had at least proved harmless. “No major criminal,” I wrote, “was ever called Packer.” Maybe I was getting a bit above myself when I said that, for I have had to eat my words. A letter from Vienna, Austria, cut me down to size.
“One of the most famous criminals of Colorado—nay, American—history bears your name,” I read.
“Alferd E. Packer is the only man in American history to be tried and convicted of cannibalism. He was a mountain guide who took three men into the Rockies for dinner (literally).”
Well, chase my Aunt Fanny round the gasworks, as British vaudevillians used to say.
“Why,” continued the letter, “you probably didn’t know that there is an ‘Alferd E. Packer Memorial Dining Hall’ on the Colorado University Denver campus!”
No, sir, I didn’t; and frankly, it is not something I would have expected.
“Hope this enlightening tidbit brightens your next family gathering.” Thank you friend, for your kind thought.
It is indeed wrong to eat people, whether literally or metaphorically. In Scripture, “eating up” people is a picture of ruining them, not physically killing them, for personal gain. God chillingly portrays this as cannibalism on the part of leading citizens “who tear the skin from my people and the flesh from their bones; who eat my people’s flesh, strip off their skin and break their bones in pieces; who chop them up like meat for the pan, like flesh for the pot” (Mic. 3:2–3). The direct reference is to brutal economic exploitation. But people can be eaten up in other ways, too.
A brilliant man I know regularly eats people in debate. He practices overkill, destroying not only arguments, by logic; but opponents, by ridicule. That is bad. As we should hate the sin yet love the sinner, so we should love the errorist, however little we like his views (even trying to allure that person out of those views). Zeal for truth on other fundamental matters will seem hollow and carnal if we are not equally zealous to love our neighbor even when he errs, as Christ requires us to do.
Other ways of eating people include character assassination (watch your gossip); the big squeeze, whereby you pull strings to push out someone whose place you want to take, or whose power you want to grab; and the vendetta, in which you work to destroy someone who has displeased you, or whom you feel to be a threat. (Have you ever been the object of a vendetta? I have; it is no fun.)
Are these ways of eating people found among Bible-believing Christians, in faithful, gospel-preaching churches? Are there pastors and ex-pastors whose ministries have been ruined through being eaten—eaten alive, they would say—by members of their congregations who behaved in one or other of these ways? I think you know the answer. Does such behavior adorn the gospel and honor the Savior? I think you know the answer to that question, too.
One of the most revolting things I ever saw was one of our children’s hamsters eating its young. Abortion, whereby a mother-to-be uses medical personnel as her agents to “eat up” the small person of whom she gets rid, is the human equivalent. The immorality of the Supreme Court decision of 1973 that gave American women the right to do this particular wrong has often been pointed out. The Supreme Court of Canada has just declared that our fledgling constitution gives Canadian women the same immoral right. To me, as a new Canadian, this also is revolting.
Certainly, neighbor love requires us to care for women in trouble, and as all Christians know—pastors, in particular—some pregnancy troubles are truly horrific. But a pregnant woman constitutes two neighbors to be loved, not just one, and it is not neighbor love to help one eat up the other. Even when the law scandalously allows it, eating people remains wrong.
When will North America see this? O Lord, how long?
