Superman Down!

A man-eating plague will always be the great equalizer on earth as it culls our populations, strangles our economies, and trims our militaries down to size. In exchange for our habit of warfare and our insatiable lusts for show-and-tell travel, we get a steady stream of pathogens, viruses and germs crisscrossing between us and the animal world.

Some eight billion of us, in fact, make perfectly busy hosts for global trafficking in various communicable diseases. With all our sophistication, however, we’re still not sure we’ve won the battle with the “bug,” especially as hints of a “superbug” are rumored around laboratories scrambling to get ahead of it and the millions of deaths a year predicted to outsmart our medicines.

Timidly crawling from under the crush of our third pandemic in the last three hundred years, we’re emerging less cocky, now, almost forgetting that moment one of our more ambitious evangelical preachers aimed to dispose of it by “blowing” it away with “the wind of God.”

History has a different side: Beginning in 1817, at least seven pandemics of Cholera and multiplied millions of deaths began their march even into the 20th century. In 100 years the so-called “Spanish Flu” of 1918 came and with it some 40 to 50 million deaths. In another century, while super-spiritual preachers used it to grandstand and to mock protections against it, the Coronavirus claimed more than 4 million lives, many of which were not even adequately grieved.

Still hidden beneath that painful carnage is the indelible image of a superstar televangelist puckering up to literally blow COVID-19 “back to the pit of hell.” Worse than comical, the gesture was a metaphor for the perpetual contention between an eternal God and mortal men, who often appear to be more intent upon certifying their equality with God than anything (Isa. 14:14).

Short of achieving this feat, false teachers of the Christian faith settled at least for certifying their spiritual and racial superiority over others. If it was true, it was true because “the God of the universe has chosen whites to civilize and dominate the earth; and (because) the separation of the races, particularly white and black…is unquestionably God ordained” (White Too Long, 2020).

Add to these exaggerated doctrinal distortions and “private interpretations” what Robert Jones called “an unassailable sense of religious purity.” It not only protected “white racial innocence,” it created the space for this “wind of God” and its unaccountable “superman” to coexist for centuries without challenge in the American church.

But he’s not alone. There is an elite cast of them now, having grown up under the carnal influence of so-called superpreachers and “word smiths,” striving, as members of the Corinthian church did, over whether they are “of Paul or Apollos,” bickering over their unique revelations, or whether their status as a “super” prophet outranks the biggest Bishops and most astute Apostles.

The next generation of them has been ascending through the ranks of the Church having gotten drunk on lies of the past. Ostensibly, they serve Jesus, “strong but tender, a warrior…a man-god ordinary men will follow as He conquers the world in order to conform it to his angry love” (The Family, 2008, No.) They serve themselves, amassing fortune and fame, exchanging it all for time at the mic and the opportunity to blow the next big Goliath away with the power of their own breath.

Their obsession with these spiritual gifts lowers them to little more than superpowers of some video game character. They are otherwise presumed to signify status and power with God. That, naturally, is presumed to translate into influence, if not within Church hierarchy, at least within the mind. It’s at least what “Simon the Sorcerer” wanted, hoping that, after he’d purchased this “power” from the disciples, upon whomever he laid his hands, or upon whomever the sound of his voice might have fallen, God was thus obliged to empower (Acts 8:18).

In the worst-case scenario, we’ve seen what happens when the church ignores keen discernment and lays hands too suddenly upon a renegade political operative who then attempts to overthrow the government. Among so many other discoveries we made in hindsight, COVID may indeed have been the great equalizer, trimming the fat in American Christianity, exposing false teachers, their gimmickry and shenanigans, and taking down the so-called super man.

They may not have died from COVID or from some other kind of kryptonite pestilence. Rather, after their exposure to the light, they may simply die the slow and quiet death of obscurity. After abandoning the simplicity of the principles of the doctrine of Christ to carve out a niche for their own greatness, prominence, and power, the super man may find himself adrift; barely kept afloat once by the bluster of his commotion. Now he’s not able to leap tall buildings at a single bound or blow away the Coronavirus. As part of the work of the equalizer, the super man of this era may now be adrift to simply fade away into oblivion.