A group of popular American pastors have warned that President Donald Trump’s release of ‘alien files’ could shatter Christian beliefs, according to the Daily Mail.
They have claimed that US intelligence officials have held a series of meetings with them and told them to prepare churches to hold the Christian community together in the wake of the revelations’ shockwaves.
Popular evangelist pastor Perry Stone said that the alien files could include reports and possibly videos of aliens and extraterrestrial spacecraft.
I have run into this before. Someone insists that there cannot be aliens according to the Bible. They quote Psalm 115:16 which states, "The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD's: but the earth hath he given to the children of men." (KJV) Well, I am glad they know scripture well enough to quote some of it, but what does the subject of space aliens have to do with “the children of men?” Haven’t they ever watched the Bar Scene from Star Wars? (I mean the first Star Wars, you know, Episode Four). I dig that crazy jazz, and I detect a definite Earth influence in it; but those aliens don’t look anything like “the children of men.” The evidence appears to indicate that they all come from outer space, which is why we call them aliens. I mean, I do not want to be accused of being insensitive, but they look kinda weird if you ask me.
I also think that this Perry Stone fellow might ask what “the heavens” really means, and he definitely needs to look up the definition of the word “myth” in the Dictionary. I mean, I hate to break this to him, but many saints and Church Fathers recognized that the Creation Story is a myth, and that the first eleven chapters of Genesis contained, for them, a great deal of spiritual truth by way of allegory. But that is the problem with Fundamentalism. If you do not believe that the Universe was created in exactly six twenty-four hour days, and only very recently - a mere six thousand years ago - as a literal fact, then you are not allowed to believe that God created the universe at all, or that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
“What do you mean it isn’t all one book?”
I have had the regrettable duty of breaking this fact to Fundamentalists many times, and I mean by Fundamentalists both Protestant Evangelicals and those who have moved on from Fundamentalist Evangelicalism to, as is inevitable for many, atheism. The Bible is not a book. It is a library, a collection of ancient writings in Hebrew and Greek that was created over several centuries, and it includes several genres, indeed every literary genre that existed in Antiquity. The opening of Genesis is called, properly, “the Song of Creation,” a poetic telling that has been interpreted in various ways, most often as truth that transcends mere recitation of facts. The original Fundamentalists were members of gnostic sects who believed that an evil god or evil gods are depicted in the story as creating man to keep him as a slave in a garden, and the serpent helped to set the first man and the first woman free to be like the gods in knowledge, for which cause the chief of those gods banished them from Eden (not the Gnostics: There was no one group called the Gnostics). And, if you insist on a literal reading of the story, their interpretation was as good as any. But their interpretation contradicted Judaism and Christianity, and it missed the spiritual truth, full of moral teaching, that Jews and Christians believed.
In his refutation of Gnostic and pagan views (particularly in Contra Celsum and De Principiis), Origen of Alexandria interpreted the fourth day of creation, in which God made the sun, the moon, and the stars (Genesis 1:14-19) not as the temporal, material creation of lights, but as a symbolic pedagogical event within his broader cosmological framework. Gnostics, such as the Valentinians, taught that the material world was created by an evil demiurge (Yaldabaoth) and, according to them, the luminaries were instruments of fate designed to trap souls in matter. Origen, in opposition to that gnostic teaching, wrote that the only true God is the good Creator of both the Old and the New Testaments. According to his Christian doctrine, as stated in Contra Celsum, the luminaries should be seen allegorically. He refuted the doctrine that stars are divine beings ruling by the imposition of fate. He saw them as lights that serve a purpose as stated in the text: “Let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.” (Genesis 1:14, 15) Contradicting the gnostic insistence on what we today would call a literal reading, he also pointed out that if there was no sun before the fourth day, how could there have been evenings and mornings? I have come across atheists who use the same argument against what is, in most cases, their own former Fundamentalist beliefs as an argument against a literal interpretation of Genesis chapter one. Of course, they imagine that by showing the folly of a literal interpretation they are somehow destroying Christianity, oblivious to the fact that earliest known use of that very argument was written by an Egyptian Christian, a Church Father, in Alexandria, who posited it as a defense of the Christian faith.
This is what I have seen many times. After they cease to believe in Christianity, they still insist on interpreting everything to do with God and the Bible as Fundamentalists. There are, to be sure, former Catholic, former Orthodox, former Anglican, former Lutheran, etc. atheists who tend to think the same way. In their case it seems they, while not formerly Evangelical, were, nonetheless, somehow also fundamentalists - “f” in the lower case. No doubt that is partly because television preachers and other cultural forces have caused confusion on a massive scale. Of course, when dealing with real Protestant Fundamentalists, I notice that their Readers Digest version of the Bible, a mere sixty-six books, never existed in that abridged form before the nineteenth century.
The very term “Bible believing” is problematic. What they mean is that they believe what their own Fundamentalist Magisterium (located perhaps in Chattanooga or somewhere) has infallibly declared. As my friend, an Orthodox priest named Patrick Henry Reardon has said, “I feel sorry for my Catholic brethren, because they have only one infallible clergyman.” I was reminded of his words when I came across the infallible utterance by Ken Hamm that space aliens do not exist, but that even if they did “they cannot be saved.” Well, I am glad we have that serious theological question resolved. Obviously, if God had made the mistake of creating other intelligent biological beings in His universe, He would certainly lack the imagination to come up with a way to save them from the effects of…Adam’s fall? It looks like we are back to that “the children of men” issue. (I mean, do these guys look like the children of any men that you know?)
I think that Mr. Spock would fail to see the logic of Ken Hamm’s ex cathedra declaration. But poor Spock is eligible to be no more than only half-saved; Doctor Who and Martin O’Hara are screwed.
The good thing is that most of the Christians in the world are not of the intellectually deprived Fundamentalist stripe. It is a relatively new gnostic sect that serves mostly to churn out angry atheists. Having no authority to interpret the Bible according to a received authoritative Tradition, an ancient Tradition that provides a large enough room for an authentic faith that cannot be overthrown by recognizing mythology and allegory in service to truth, what they call “faith” might indeed shrivel up and die if “alien files” are released (though I think it more likely that the White House announcement was to distract attention from certain other files). For them, unless you believe that the flood of Noah literally covered the entire planet Earth (even though the Bible says no such thing inasmuch as the word usually translated “earth” is eretz, meaning the land - kol h’eretz: “the whole land”), because that literal belief in a world-wide flood is what their American Fundamentalist Magisterium requires if you want to qualify as “Bible believing,” then you are unable to believe that “God is Love,” or that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. After all, it’s all one book you know, just like the local library is all one book rightly divided over many shelves, that is, if you are a library believing reader.
This is the problem with a complex system of faith. The more a structure depends on each and every part to hold it together, the more vulnerable it is. Fundamentalist “faith” cannot escape desperate fear because it is fragile. It takes only enough of a jolt for one domino to fall over, and everything comes crashing down. I know of one man who lost his entire faith because he noticed that the Gospel According to Saint Matthew mistakenly attributes a prophetic oracle from the Book of Zechariah to Jeremiah. How come the Universal Church, having that obvious human error in front of its eyes has continued to exist for two thousand years, and no Church Father, no bishop, no pope, ever saw it is as a problem? Maybe it is because it is not a problem: The point that was revealed is this: What happened on the first Good Friday was foretold by the prophets. Would realeasing “alien files” contradict the infallible Fundamentalist interpretation of Psalm 115:16? Yes, it would. Would it destroy Christianity, or overthrow the faith of any authentic believer? Of course not. Do they have “alien files?” If so, I say, Bring’em on. Show us the aliens themselves. I am among those who will have only a greater appreciation of God’s handywork in all of its variety.
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