JBU Bible Study & Social Justice, Postmodernism & Holocaust Denial

From Photos for Blog

Picture of the bus I road part way home from the bible study last night. Almost exactly the same kind of bus I road to & from school in Kenya back in the 90s.

I'm glad to say that last night's bible study with the JBU crew went much better then last week. We were down 4 or 5 students, probably just from desire for personal time or assignments - however, if it was because last week was a disappointment, I wouldn't blame them, I may have skipped this week for that reason alone.

I put into practice my lesson from last week and we spent the whole 45 minutes in Scripture. We determined that the phrase "social justice" is a hard one to define - being used as a descriptor for a wide range of things in today's society. The question followed then, what should it mean for us as Christians? We went to Matthew 22 (the Greatest Commandment and the 2nd) and used this as a basis for looking through out the NT (Matt 5:43, 19:19, Rom 13:8-10, Gal 5:13-14, James 2:8, etc.) and the OT (Deut. 5:9, 6:5; Lev 19:9-18, and Ex 22:22:27) to look at the idea of "loving your neighbor" as something God calls his people to throughout Scripture. In closing, we came back to Matt 22:38 and the reminder that in order to truly love our neighbor, we must fulfill "the first and greatest commandment" - to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind - that this was the a priori condition to meeting the second calling.

[Something that was neat for me was to realize that Jesus' answer in Matt 22 was expected, as the Jewish prayer, the Shema, prayed twice daily, affirmed this. It was the second part that was the "nudge".]

"probably the biggest friend the Jews had in the Third Reich, certainly
when the war broke out, was Adolf Hitler. He was the one who was doing
everything he could to prevent things nasty happening to them."
- David Irving, from Richard Evans book Telling Lies About Hitler

I'm beginning to pull together the assignments I have to turn in between now and January 13th and one of them is an essay on a historiographic topic from the last century (i.e. Marxist history, cultural history, post-colonial history, postmodernism, etc.). I've been very impressed and very, very happy with perspective and the take of Queen's faculty on these topics. I decided to do my topic on postmodernism and specifically, the case effect of postmodernism on David Irving and holocaust deniers. In looking at grad school, I was cautioned to be careful of revisionist history. The example given was of those that want to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. So, it seemed like David Irving and Holocaust denial would be an appropriate topic to tackle for a 3,000 word essay.

I'm just into the first of five books on the topic, but so far really interesting - and really bizarre all at the same time. I'll try to remember to post a link to the paper here after I turn it in (it's due December 12).