The unlikely has happened. A deep streak of British ethnocentrism, nationalism, racism and anti-immigrant ideas have surfaced, widespread enough to win an election.
In the U.S., the unlikely has also happened. No political pundit, no mainstream Republican saw it coming. With significant evangelical support, Donald Trump is the Republican nominee. The Trump stance: a bold and blatant American ethnocentrism, nationalism, racism, anti-immigrant platform. This should have killed his nomination, but it didn't.
Up until Brexit, I would have said that Trump would not win the presidency. Now I am not so sure.
Will we learn from the Rwandan genocide? John Martin, managing editor of the Church of England Newspaper, wrote the following in 1996, "Rwanda:Why?"
"There is no escape from the truth that the Christian Church has been a major player in the tragic events in Rwanda which have horrified observers throughout the world in 1994. . . . Churches have been the scene of massacres and church leaders have acquiesced to hideous cruelty. . . . There must have been serious inadequacies and failings in the theology and spirituality of the church in Rwanda." How could this be in a highly Christian country that had experienced revival?
Possibly two fine Christian scholars who have studied justice in some depth can help us. First, Emil Brunner, a European theologian who wrote Justice and the Social Order, 1945, right after World War II. Brunner asserts that the Roman Catholic Church "possesses an impressive systematic theory of justice, but Protestant Christianity has had none for three hundred years. . . . Protestant statements . . . are so haphazard and improvised that they fail to carry conviction." Therefore, the Protestant church cannot stop ethnocentrism and oppression; far too often it remains silent or actively participates in ethnocentrism and oppression.
Karen Lebacqz, a Christian social ethicist, wrote Six Theories of Justice. In this recent book, she analyzed the best Western thinkers on justice. She concluded that all they had produced were "fragments of justice."
Why is the Western world, even Christian church, plagued with shallow thinking and action on justice? Lebacqz thinks that the main reason is that these scholars do not begin with oppression/injustice. Our theology on biblical oppression is even less than fragmentary; it is almost non-existent.
Without a solid biblical theology of oppression, ethnocentrism and justice, the church is powerless to release the oppressed, to do Jubilee justice. In the Latin Vulgate, there are around 100 references to justice in the NT; in the KJV NT there are no references to justice.
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