The American Genius: Masters of Half-Truths

Americans are geniuses at presenting half truths as the whole truth.  Case in point: Thomas Jefferson
 He wrote that all men are created equal but not that all persons must be treated equal.  Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves.  Guess this makes him a hypocrite.

America just celebrated the 4th---lots of freedom talk, but little justice walk.  Americans are more apt to combine freedom, patriotism and oppression than freedom and justice.

What does the Bible say?  All human beings are created in the image of God.  Therefore ALL persons should be treated with love, respect, and justice.  In God's eyes, there are no second-class citizens.  All persons are created equal, to be treated equal, to be loved equally, and experience justice equally.

Elie Wiesel---holocaust survivor.  "Neutrality aids the oppressor, never the oppressed."  Neutrality, silence, inaction allows the oppressive status quo to continue, white privilege to continue.

The concept of oppression in Luke 4:18 has been translated in the following ways:  broken victims, bruised, crushed, treated unfairly, down-trodden.

The following quotations are from Nicholas Wolterstorff:  "The wounds of God: Calvin's theology of social injustice," Reformed Journal, June 1987:

". . .  the modern world is . . . pervaded by social injustice and thick with social misery. . . .  Calvin's theology of the tears of the social victim. . . . help us to hear the cries of the victims.

"To inflict injury on a fellow human being is to wound God himself; it is to cause God himself to suffer.  Behind and beneath the social misery of our world is the suffering of God.  If we believed that, suggest Calvin, we would be much more reluctant than we are to participate in the victimizing of the poor and oppressed. . . .  To pursue justice is to relieve God's suffering."

"The cries of the victims are the very cry of God."

"To see another human being is to see another creature who delights God by mirroring God and who in mirroring God mirrors me."

"Though a person's mirroring of God can be painfully distorted and blurred and diminished, it cannot be eliminated. . . . Calvin grounds the claim of love and justice in this phenomenon of our mirroring God.  Moral reflection can begin either from responsibility or from rights---from the responsibility of the agent or from the claims of the Other.  The degree to which Calvin begins from the claims of the Other is striking."

"For Calvin, the demands of love and justice . . . lie in the sorrow and in the joy of God.  . .  the pathos of God.  If we believed that, . . . we would ceaselessly struggle for justice and against injustice, bearing with thankful, joyful patience the suffering which that struggle will bring upon us."