Thursday, January 30, 2025

Part I

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Devastating Tragedy at Reagan National Airport: American Airlines Flight 5342 and Military Black Hawk Helicopter Collide

The headlines came last night in a flurry telling us of the collision of two aircraft near Reagan National Airport in Washington DC. We now know that close to nine o’clock last night, an American Airlines regional jet carrying 60 passengers and four crew collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter carrying three military personnel. As the news came in last night, there seemed to be the inevitability of a very significant loss of human life. And even as a search and rescue operation is still underway there in the waters of the Potomac, it was made more complicated last night by the darkness and the cold. So there were several complicating factors.

But what you see in the aftermath of that crash, a crash so close to the nerve center of the American government. What you see is the fact that even in such a highly technological age, where just about everything happening anywhere near Washington DC is tracked so carefully, something like this can happen. And on the one hand you do have a sense that someone knows exactly what happened, but it takes a while for the details to come out. Obviously, there are a good many additional details to come out. This is one of the most highly complicated, one of the most highly concentrated, highly trafficked areas in the nation’s airspace. And there had been a sense for some time that an increased likelihood of some kind of conflict, if not collision, was becoming more likely, especially as the traffic was on an uptick at just about every level.

Now, exactly how the accident happened last night, we do not know. We do know that the first concern are the human lives at stake. And even as the video from security cameras and as the information and images came in, it was clear that this was a devastating crash. We are looking at a total of about 67 human lives that are at stake in this incident. The American Airlines flight had originated in Wichita, Kansas, and it was in effect on final approach there at Reagan National Airport. An airport that is extremely important and very popular, and especially with government personnel including legislators, precisely because of its proximity to the nation’s capital and to the nerve centers of American government. But just consider how much that airspace is complicated by the special security needs and the defense needs of Washington DC and its surrounding regions.

You look at all of this and there’s also very high commuter traffic, including commuter helicopter traffic, and you can see how that airspace becomes so concentrated and so complicated and why something like this has been avoided for years by a very highly complicated and technical air traffic control system. But we are looking at the fact that something went wrong. One of those aircraft was where it didn’t belong, potentially both of the aircraft were in some sense where they didn’t belong. But at least at this point, it appears that the airliner was on final approach. It’s a CRJ, that’s a regional jet, there are of course larger aircraft that could have had a far larger death toll in terms of the passengers aboard, but it’s also true that Reagan National Airport has a limited capacity on the size of the jets that can take off and land at that facility.

A very highly technical, very sophisticated system known as TCAS, or the Traffic Collision Avoidance System, has been in place and it has been, for the most part, trustworthy in terms of separating aircraft one from the other even under very complicated circumstances. That TCAS system, when it detects a likely or even an urgently possible collision, it deploys a human voice and a warning to the pilots. That tells us something. It tells us that we as human beings respond to flashing lights, we respond to ringing bells, but we respond perhaps most urgently to a human voice. One interesting question, one urgent question out of this tragedy is how the TCAS system did or didn’t work. And of course there are questions about the air crew on both of these aircraft. But the bottom line is we are talking about a horrifying tragedy when it comes to human life.

At this point, it would be irresponsible to speak of what we know about who lived and who died or what the eventual death toll will be, but it is quite clear that this was a deadly accident. And you have to expect that when you are talking about a passenger aircraft with 60 passengers and four crew on board. You add the three military personnel, and as I said, we’re at almost 70 human lives. Almost immediately, and this is very interesting, perhaps it’s unavoidable, in the media there were questions about how this could be or how it could have been avoided. And there you understand that’s an urgent human question. There’s an urgency that comes just from the fact of being human, that when we have something like this happen with all of its danger and horror before us, we want to know what we can learn and how to avoid it.

This also gets to something in a fallen world that Christians understand, that some of the hardest lessons in life about how to avoid something bad happening come only after that bad thing has happened and upon reflection we’re able to say, “Well, that shouldn’t be done again. We have to avoid that happening again. Here’s how we learn from that tragedy in order to avoid a subsequent tragedy.” Just about everything in terms of, say, the safety equipment on your car comes exactly from that process. Whether it’s the seat belt or the airbags or the compression bumper systems on the front and the back.

The reality is that cars weren’t made with any of those things for a long time and they wouldn’t be made with them because they’re all very expensive if it were not for the fact that the lessons learned in horrifying automobile crashes was that lives could be saved by deploying this technology and using this equipment. It’s very telling that the national media conversation so quickly turned to, who was at fault here? What policy is going to be changed here? A part of that is because with the cameras on them and with the necessity of constant conversation about a tragedy like this with news just trickling in and the story unfolding, rather ridiculous things are said and things can get quite quickly out of proportion. We as Christians have to do our best to put them back into proportion. And that means that we ponder the meaning of almost 70 human lives. We understand that there are now dozens of families who are concerned with loved ones. We understand that there are communities including Washington DC and Wichita, Kansas, where it is likely that there is a concentration of those who are so deeply concerned.

We also understand that every single human life on that plane was a human being made in the image of God and thus they are not merely an aviation collision statistic. No doubt within the next several hours over the next couple of days, we’re going to know a lot more about the death toll and the result of this crash. In the meantime, it does point out and underline once again in tragic but indelible terms, what is at stake in the difference between life and death. And just how quickly, in the space of an instant the difference between life and death can be just about everything. The passengers on that airline were preparing to get off the airplane and get on with their business. The crew was concentrating on landing the plane safely. The military crew had their own assignment. The fact is all of that changed in an instant and that is a humbling realization for us all.

Part II

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It Must Never Happen Again — Reflecting on the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz

But now I need to go where I intended to go with today’s edition of The Briefing and we are talking about another horrifying event in human history. The scale on this one is far different, the Holocaust, with the death of over 6 million Jews. We’re also looking at the fact that this week marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp. And that demands our attention. Aging death camp survivors, political leaders, and others gathered there in Poland for the commemoration of this very sad 80th anniversary. Some of those there were just very young children when they were transferred to the Auschwitz camp and when the camp was liberated in 1945, it was liberated by advancing Russian troops. And even now as it’s considered a part of Poland, it was then under the portion of Eastern Europe that became occupied by the Soviet Armed Forces.

But the most important thing that happened 80 years ago this week, Allied Forces did liberate the camp. But what did that mean? It meant that the advancing Russian forces both scared away, captured and killed the German forces in the region and there directly in the camp that were in control. But that doesn’t mean that 80 years ago the Jewish people, few as they were given the scale of the Holocaust, who were alive when that liberation day happened, it wasn’t as if they just walked out of the death camp, many of them were so frail that they would die shortly thereafter. They had been starved, they had been deliberately made, “Emaciated walking skeletons,” as some American observers said, and the Allies did not know exactly even what to do with the liberation of the survivors of the death camps. But let’s just remind ourselves how this happened and then we’re going to look at some very important foundational theological issues.

How did it happen? Well, for one thing, the Germans were warned that it would happen. The entire world was warned that it might happen. They were warned, if nothing else, in Mein Kampf, the book by Adolf Hitler written in 1925 in which he basically called for a resurgence of a German nation and for the elimination of the Jewish people. Now, you add all of this together and you recognize that even when the Third Reich came into power with an openly and deadly anti-Semitism, it didn’t yet plan on what would eventually become the death camps. The death camps became the official policy of the Nazi government on January the 20th of 1942. And here’s something horribly, horribly important about that. It was a group of German officers, it was a group of German bureaucrats with military officers who met together in an elegant home there in Wannsee, a very rich enclave near Berlin. And they met to decide on a final solution as they called it for the Jewish problem.

And at that point in 1942, the German Nazi government decided on an official policy of the extermination of the Jewish people. It’s hard even to say these words. It’s hard to imagine how a group of cultured and educated German people could meet in that elegant home and come up with such a deadly plot. And deadly not only in the numbers, but deadly in the intent to eliminate the Jewish people from the face of the Earth. By that time, the Jewish people, not only in Germany but in German occupied lands, had already lost their property, they had already been gathered together, gathered together into what became called concentration camps. Not all of the concentration camps after 1942 became death camps, but the entire Nazi regime became a part of the apparatus of the culture of death. Human beings were separated between those who deserve to live and those who deserved to die.

Those who deserve to die in the view of the Nazi regime were sent to the death camps. The most notorious of these was a twin set of camps known as Auschwitz-Birkenau. And it’s the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp that led to the commemoration that took place in Poland on Monday. The hard questions coming out of the Holocaust and in particular just to invoke one name, Auschwitz, the name of that death camp. The questions loomed so large in the conscience of the 20th century. This is the problem of moral evil. As we think about the challenge of evil, how to explain evil in theological terms, we recognize that we divide evil into two major categories. The two categories are natural evil, that’s like an earthquake. And moral evil, that’s like homicide. Those are very different things. They are different in the cause and in one sense they’re different in the effect.

Now, the effect of death or injury is something that’s the same whether something happened by accident or by intentionality. But the moral context of the act, the moral context of the event is significantly different. We don’t hold the Earth criminally culpable for an earthquake. We do hold the Nazis criminally culpable for the Holocaust. Now, by the way, I would not normally add this third category, but today it’s unavoidable. A third category is evil, that is to say evil effect a tragedy that involves both natural and moral aspects. And an example of that would be say, a plane crash. When you look at a plane crash, it isn’t just nature at work, there are human decisions, human involvements that are at work, but there was not almost assuredly any intention, moral intention to bring about the tragedy. So there’s a third category in which there is human moral involvement, but without any incentive or any motivation to bring about a deadly effect.

Nonetheless, there is still some level of moral responsibility. That’s just the assumption with which we address a tragedy like this. But in the case of something like a plane crash, a mid air collision, we don’t ask why did he do it, but how did this happen? But now we go back to the Holocaust and we remind ourselves this was the deliberate strategic genocidal murder of 6 million human beings, simply for the fact that they were Jewish. Now, why did this happen? Well, for one thing, there was a deep anti-Semitism throughout European history, but that anti-Semitism in European history doesn’t explain the uniquely deadly and toxic anti-Semitism of the Third Reich.

That reminds us of the very deadly combination of raw political ambition and political scapegoating as took place with the rise of the Nazi regime. We also have to deal with something else. When people say about the Holocaust during the Third Reich that they were shocked by the fact that it was discovered to have happened, you have to realize there were many Germans in proximity to these camps. There were many people involved in driving the trains and for that matter, equipping the engines of death. They had to know.

One of the hardest questions in terms of the reflection among the Allies after their victory in the war, in the discovery of the death camps was, how did you have these German officers who were involved directly in the intentional murder of millions of people? How did they go home to their wives and children, play with their children and read them stories and put them to bed? How could they live with that dissonance? Over the course of the next several decades, the moral questions just grew in significance. One of the very interesting patterns in moral terms that emerged towards the end of the 20th century is that you had younger Germans come to the inevitable conclusion that even though they might not have been born during the war or they were little children during the war, their older relatives either knew or were actively complicit in the culture of death.

One of the things that happened after the war is that the German people did their very best not to talk about the Holocaust. Now, I’m not just separating the German people as if they are a separate ethnicity. I’m simply saying that having been in the regime in which Nazism had been in power after the fall of Nazism and the tragedy of the horrifying war and then the challenge of rebuilding Germany, the Holocaust became something that just wasn’t talked about. There were those, especially in the Jewish community, who wanted to talk about it. But on both sides of the Atlantic, frankly, there just wasn’t adequate attention given to the Holocaust. A lot of that didn’t change in Germany or on this side of the Atlantic until the 1970s and even into the 1980s. And that’s when, as is now a recognized pattern, the children of those who had lived through the war years began to ask hard, inevitable, unavoidable moral questions.

And then the question was, how do we assign responsibility? What do we do now? The emergence of Israel as a nation in the period 1948 to 1949 with the support of the United Nations, that action, especially by the United Nations, is inexplicable except for the sense of responsibility of the world to help protect the Jewish people. And the Holocaust was a graphic underlined message of why the Jewish people needed a Jewish homeland. It also explains why the phrase, “Never again,” is one of the most motivational statements in Israel and among the Jewish people. When you look at the strength and the commitment of Israel today, understand that that was forged through centuries of anti-Semitism, but in particular in the death camps of Nazi Germany. Ronald J. Lauder, the President of the World Jewish Congress, he’s also the Chairman of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Foundation, told The New York Times, “This is the most important anniversary we’re going to have because of the shrinking number of survivors and because of what is happening in the world today.”

Now, here’s something very interesting. As you look at the commemorations, for example, of D-Day, the D-Day invasion, even though we had a commemoration just a matter of years ago about that Allied invasion in 1944, the youngest persons involved as personnel in that invasion were about 17 years old. There were also some 16 year olds who lied about their age in order to get into uniform. But we are talking about the fact that those survivors of D-Day who are still around to commemorate that event, their ranks are thinning year by year. And especially when you have these observances about every five years, five years is a very long period of time when someone is in his or her 90s. There were survivors of the death camps who were younger than 16 or 17, and that has explained why their numbers have been a bit more robust in terms of these kinds of commemorations.

But Ronald Lauder’s absolutely right, five years from now, you’re looking at the 85th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. You go five years after that, I think we can pretty clearly understand that time is running out to recognize those living among us who experienced this moral horror. Two additional Christian theological insights seem to be absolutely necessary here. One is the question as to how this kind of evil could come to reside in individual human hearts and then in a human culture or society. And there I think we have to think of the terms that you find in cripture where it is clear that God sometimes gives people over to their sin. Human beings, individually and corporately, we are responsible for our sin. But it is possible for human beings to give ourselves so much to a particular pattern of sin that God simply gives us over to it.

But it is also very important we recognize that a moral horror on the scale of the Holocaust, which defies all imagination, it certainly humbles us and reminds us of the fact that there is no adequate human court to try the guilt of this particular kind of horrible event, of this particular kind of homicidal, genocidal effort, of this kind of moral evil. And this underlines why one of the most important facets of Christian truth, one of the most important dimensions of biblical theology, one of the clearest teachings of scripture is that a human court of justice can go only so far. Absolute justice, perfect justice, and that means not only the determination righteously and perfectly of guilt, but it also means the application perfectly and comprehensively a punishment. And in this case, only the judgment of God will do. Only that dreadful day of judgment can explain how the kind of horror we see in the Holocaust can be adequately dealt with by an absolutely righteous and all-powerful God. And as for human beings, the Holocaust reminds us we need constantly to pray, God save us from ourselves.

Part III

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‘How Could We Let This Happen?’: The Anniversary of Roe v. Wade Reminds Us of the Horrific Moral Evil of Abortion

Just coming to a conclusion, I’m speaking today from Atlanta, Georgia. Big news here has to do with the events of the last week and in particular, the collision between pro-life events and pro-abortion events on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the 52nd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision handed down by the US Supreme Court January the 22nd of 1973. To state the bottom line, pro-life forces see the reversal of Roe as a great victory. Pro-abortion forces see the reversal of Roe as a great tragedy. Both are politically motivated, both are motivated to further their aims and purposes. A headline in The Atlanta Constitution makes the point, clearly, “Abortion events show divide remains.”

I just want to say that at this point, from a Christian worldview perspective, it is not true merely that the divide remains. It is true fundamentally that the divide is even greater. The chasm between the two positions is even deeper. The stark alternatives between the culture of life and the culture of death, they are absolutely transparently clear. Both sides know it. And that’s why The Atlanta Journal-Constitution could publish a headline saying, “Abortion events show divide remains.” And everyone knows what the divide is. And you have organizations on opposing sides of this divide. Planned Parenthood shows up in this story as one of the major institutional representations of the pro-abortion position. There were, of course, numerous representations of pro-life organizations as well with events such as Georgia Right to Life’s Stand for Life Memorial and Silent March. All of this serves to underline our Christian understanding that ideas have consequences. The deadly ideas have the deadliest of consequences.

The distinction between life and death is not a mere political issue. It is a matter of life and death. It is a matter of our human responsibility. It is reckless to put two moral realities alongside one another and say, “Look, this is exactly like that.” But you know, cannot help in the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp from understanding that the same questions that pressed upon the human conscience then such as how could this have happened? The questions coming from the children to their parents, how could you have let this happen? Those same questions are one day going to be asked about this generation of Americans and Americans alive in the second half of the 20th century into our own times. How did this happen? How did you let this happen?

I think it’s very telling that some of the hardest of these questions in the 20th century toward the end of the century came from the children of the Germans who were adults during the Third Reich. The question, how did you let this happen? You have to wonder whether our own children or the children of our children will one day turn to their parents and to us and simply ask, how did you let this happen? What did you do to avoid this happening? How did you stand for the sanctity of unborn life? What did you do? It is healthy for us all to know that question is coming.