When the survivors of the Holocaust speak, the rest of us would do well to listen. Telling the story of their liberation, one of the survivors told of how their SS guards changed into civilian clothes and tried to hide. The GIs had the survivors point them out so they could be dealt with. And then he said something I will never forget as long as I live. He said: These men were not human. Human beings don’t do what they did.

And I wondered how literally we should take that. Was he speaking figuratively, saying that the men responsible for the camps were lacking pity, kindness, or mercy? Or was he speaking literally, suggesting a non-human class of beings? And the question arises naturally: Are there non-human beings? Oh, I know there are dogs and cats, but we don’t describe them as inhuman, do we?

I realize in raising this question that I am stepping out into metaphysics, but I’ll take a chance. Understand, though, that I am not going into flying saucers and visitors from another galaxy. I am simply going to the Bible and the spirit world. Jesus himself had an encounter with a nonhuman being immediately after his baptism. We find the account in Matthew, chapter 4.