Virginia Tech Massacre, April 2007

From Neoredemptive

The Event

See wikipedia:Virginia Tech massacre

Neoredemptive Observations

(Some points derived from a message given by Doc at C3 Seattle, Sunday, April 22, 2007)

• The massacre is a tragedy, and we should not countenance diminishing its significance to the victims, their families, and the Blakcsburg community. Our hearts should go out to all of these as a reflection of Jesus' compassion for us.
• Neither should we countenance elevating the victims of the massacre to heroic status or elevating the massacre as an event to epic proportions. The death toll on the Virginia Tech campus that morning pales in comparison to the ongoing daily death tolls from any of the tragedies of heart disease, traffic deaths, HIV/AIDS, rape, genocide, infanticide, fetucide, warfare, hepatitis, and countless others. There is something deeply corrupt about a culture which callouses itself toward everyday death tolls while indulging in endless self-adulation over its ability to mourn one-off tragic events.
• Our hearts and compassion should go out to the deceased shooter and his family as well, because Jesus Christ loved us when we were still his enemies, nailing Him to the cross.
• The strength of the public and personal reactions to the massacre flows out of a memory God has providentially preserved in most sane people -- that death is not a natural part of the "circle of life", but is our enemy, an invader who was never meant to participate in the human experience.
• A sinful human habit in the face of tragedy is to immediately begin fault-finding and erecting rules and legal/civil structures to "protect" us from the evil that was visited upon us. A discussion of gun-control laws is not of itself a bad thing; however, we must remember first that the source of events like this is the malice and sin that festers in the human heart. We must also be mindful that legalism tends to produce societies which are a thin facade of what they want to be, populated with people who look "okay" on the outside while on the inside they become extremely brittle; it then becomes progressively easier for such people to snap, and progressively harder for those burdened to help such people to find them.
• A providential human habit in the face of tragedy is to look for heros, because the tragedy of our own sinfulness, death, and enslavement has been met by the ultimate hero, Jesus Christ. However, this need to find and adulate (worship) heros can be contorted when we do not remember that Jesus is the only hero who can ultimately crush Satan, sin, and death, and instead we begin to sublimate the actions of participants in the day's events who may have acted selfish and cowardly by calling them "courageous" simply for having survived. Legitimate stories of heroic acts have since emerged, but we should be mindful that not everything which a shocked and/or ratings-starved television reporter calls "courageous" actually is.
• Tens of colleges were subject to threats of copy-cat crimes in the days following the massacre. This may have something to do with people's desperation to feel significant; in a culture which is characterized by brutal anonymization and dehumanization (from education to industry to entertainment, we are constantly pressured and driven away from our Imago Dei as creative indiividuals in community toward our mechanized roles as cogs in the ubermachine of modern economic productivity), the most detestable of acts produce the most desirable of outcomes -- differentiation and attention. That such efforts are both derivative of the original massacre and largely undifferentiated from one another only accentuates the irrationality and desperation that the threatened perpetrators (and, to a lesser extent, all of us) are awash in.
• Local churches should take this opportunity to assess whether and how they would be able to respond to a sudden tragedy of this kind in their own area, not because of emotional opportunism to win converts, but out of a genuine concern for the lives that have been ended, torn, and bruised by evil, their desire to do so being a natural product of Jesus' loving compassion for us. Do we, as an organizational church and as individuals each embodying and representing "the church" in our day-to-day lives, have the nerve to engage with tragedy counter-culturally -- lovingly and compassionately engaging with the reality of the event without compromising the unflinching truth of the Gospel? Can we honestly say we are ready to step into such a situation and talk about a truly good God in the midst of excruciating tragedy?

Other Fallout

• Emmanuel College in Boston fired accounting professor Nicholas Winset for how he conducted his class in reflecting upon the massacre. His vlog reaction to the firing can be found at http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=AW222018