Cannibal Christianity

If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. – Galatians 5.15

        In 1874 a prospector named Alferd Packer headed across the Rocky Mountains for the California gold fields along with five companions. When the winter snows stranded them and supplies ran out, Packer killed and ate his companions. The University of Colorado now boasts an Alferd Packer Memorial Grill in its student union. They also celebrate an annual Alferd Packer day with a raw meat-eating contest.

        Polite human society frowns on cannibalism; the animal kingdom seems to get into it. Under certain conditions, chickens engage in a “pick-out,” where the dominant birds devour their lower-cast cousins. It is the rare species of fish that doesn’t devour the eggs or larvae of its own kind. Sand tiger sharks snack on their siblings in the womb. Polar bears, lions, vultures: all belly up to the intra-species smorgasbord. Gary Polis, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis says that many invertebrates don’t recognize their own kind as anything other than a food source.

        Animals eat their own kind; human beings don’t. Well, at least not for the most part. Turns out the practice, in addition to being really icky, has consequences. The Fore tribe of New Guinea used to eat ritual portions of their deceased relatives, a practice which led to the spread of the Kuru virus, a sort of mad cow disease for primates, that had killed off their kinfolk in the first place.

        Paul gets at this idea when he warns the Galatians against Christian cannibalism. His verbs – bite, devour, consume – carry the idea of National Geographic-style chow-downs replete with the crack of bones and rip of tendons. Galatian gossip took on the overtones of a feeding frenzy as they chummed the living water of the gospel with chunks of shredded reputations.

        We should watch how we talk about one another. The psalmist laments those whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. Such verbal switchblades are the un-Christian cutlery of a diseased fellowship that threatens to bring about its own doom. May God grant us grace to speak life, that our speech might always feed, and never feed on, our own spiritual flesh.