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December 1, 2021 - January 9, 2022
The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict.
In seeking to do justice we pervert justice, turn it into “poison” (Amos 6:12).
Instead of simply affirming plurality we must nurture an awareness of our own fallibility.
Abdication of responsibility will be tempting to those who only know how to live in a world neatly divided into territories of pure light and of utter darkness. But no such world exists, except in the imagination of the self-righteous
A nagging question still remains, which makes up the third objection: Can we struggle against injustice while engaged in reversing perspectives?
as each side has the chance of being right, neutrality seems appropriate.
Even more than just encouraging inaction, neutrality is positively harmful. For one, it gives tacit support to the stronger party, independently of whether that party is right or wrong.
Second, neutrality shields the perpetrators and frees their hands precisely by the failure to...
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Third, neutrality encourages the worst behavior of perpetrato...
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For those who stand in the prophetic and apostolic traditions of the scriptures, no neutrality is in fact admissible
After all, they are called to seek and struggle for God’s justice, not their own.
It is the justice—even if they are fully aware that they grasp it only imperfectly and practice it inadequately,
The initial suspicion against the perspective of the powerful is necessary. Not because the powerless are invariably right, but because the powerful have the means to impose their own perspective by argument and propaganda,
In part, their power lies in the ability to produce and give plausibility to ideologies that justify their power.
The Jewish prophets—and indeed the whole of the scriptures—are biased toward the powerless.
the relationship defined justice; an abstract principle of justice did not define the relationship.
How does the God who “executes justice for the oppressed” act toward widows and strangers? Just as God acts toward any other human being? No. God is partial to them.
Impartiality,” writes Helen Oppenheimer rightly in The Hope of Happiness, “is not a divine virtue, but a human expedient to make up for the limits of our concern on the one hand and the corruptibility of our affections on the other.”
“Anything short of love cannot be perfect justice,” wrote Reinhold Niebuhr.
The weak, above all, need such protection. Hence they issue demands for justice whereas the powerful extol the justice of the order from which they benefit, as Aristotle observed.
Without the will to embrace, justice is likely to be unjust.
since “justice” is impotent in the face of past injustice, reconciliation is ultimately possible only through injustice being forgiven and, finally, forgotten
God opposed the totalitarian thought that “nothing that we purpose” is impossible (11:6), and interrupted the totalitarian project to centralize, homogenize, and control.
the band of Jesus’s disciples are “all together in one place” (Acts 2:1), like humanity in the land of Shinar.
Instead of working to make a name for themselves, they proclaim “the mighty works of God” (2:11).
The Babylonian ascending movement of piercing the heavens that pulls up everything into a centralized homogeneity has given way to the Pentecostal descending movement of “pouring” (2:17)
The tower at the center that outwardly controls the whole circumference is replaced by the Spirit that “fills all” by descending “upon each” (2:3).
it was a small victory: representatives of the injured party have been appointed to take care of all the widows, their own as well as those of the injuring party. Justice was to be pursued by inverting perspectives and seeing the problem through the eyes of the wronged.
Erase memories of the atrocities and you tempt future perpetrators with immunity.
we recall why Jesus Christ was crucified and what the consequences were. There can be no Christian faith without that memory; everything in Christian faith depends on it.
Rosa Luxembourg is reported to have said: “The most revolutionary deed is and always will remain to say out loud what is the case.”
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith raises his glass and says, “To the past!” I want to join him and say, “To the will to know ‘what was the case’! To the power to remember it! To the courage to proclaim it out loud!”
History is brutal enough. There is no need to fabricate injuries in order to find reasons to hate; real crimes suffice.
What characterized modern historians was not presumed omniscience but belief in objectivity, not the claim to infallibility but to a method designed to counter fallibility.
As Richard J. Mouw and Sander Griffioen argue, if there is an all-wise and all-knowing divine Person whose perspective on what happens matters, then it is difficult to see how Christians could deny that there is “objective” truth about history and that it is important to try to find it out.
Though God knows the way things were and will one day say it out aloud, human beings know only partially and can say it only inadequately.
The belief in an all-knowing God should inspire the search for truth; the awareness of our human limitations should make us modest about the claims that we have found it, however.
As a consequence, we must “balance the hope for certainty and clarity in theory with the impossibility of avoiding uncertainty and ambiguity in practice.”
An alternative to Foucault’s account of the relation between knowledge and power that avoids the problems that beset the idea of “produced” and “imposed” truth, while preserving the insight of the involvement of power in knowledge, would be to suggest that, at least in the realm of human affairs, in order to know truly we need to want to exercise power rightly.
What human way of seeing corresponds to God’s seeing “from everywhere”? Seeing both “from here” and “from there.” Only such double vision will ensure that we do not domesticate the otherness of others but allow them to stand on their own.72
We examine what we consider to be plain verities about others, willing to entertain the idea that these “verities” may be but so many ugly prejudices, bitter fruits of our imaginary fears, or our sinister desires to dominate or exclude. We also observe our own images of ourselves, willing to detect layers of self-deceit that tell us exalted stories about ourselves and our history.
We can never presume that we have freed ourselves completely from distortions of others and deceptions about ourselves, that we possess “the truth.”
Because the “truth will make us free” (John 8:32)? But why should we not prefer “captivity” with power and privilege to “freedom” with weakness and suffering?
before you can search for truth you must be interested in finding it.
To serve life rather than death, the will to truth needs to be accompanied by the will to embrace the other, by the will to community.
When such irrational conflict is unavoidable, however, it is not so much because there is a clash of rationalities (basic rules of evidence and argument), but because the will to truth and to communion is absent.
The narrative itself invites us to draw them out since it moves both on theological and social planes at the same time: in deciding on the truth of the allegations against Jesus and his place within his social world, one decides for or against “the Truth.”
To prevent their own deposition as protectors of a nation and its religion, they plot Jesus’s death and, as rulers often do, couch the desire for power in concern for the well-being of the people
If during the trial Pilate acted as a cunning Procurator, then what mattered to him was not whether Jesus in fact had aspirations to a Jewish throne, but whether people believed him to be the king; in the world of politics, perceived power is real power and ought to be held in check.
And significantly enough, he, the innocent and powerless one, remained alone in his interest in truth. As an innocent victim in search for truth, Jesus is the judge of his judge. In the Johannine narrative we sense a counter trial taking place, in which the judgment will be passed on Pilate.
