Honest to God: Moving towards a more credible language Joseph Mattam S.J.

Honest to God
Moving towards a more credible language
Joseph Mattam S.J.
1. Introduction

Hitler’s Willing Executioners - Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (D. J. Goldhagen, Vintage Books, 1997) is a challenging book. It narrates how ordinary Germans were willingly involved in the execution and near extermination of Jews in the 1930s and 40s. The Jews are considered God’s chosen people; the Bible, especially the OT, attests that God always protects His people. They are never left without his protection and providence, but the events from 1930 onwards did shatter the above conviction. God was significantly absent in these events. If we look back into our history of say, 500-600 years, we are left with further questions. We may mention just a few, out of the many hundreds, of such important events that have happened and are happening in history: millions of Africans were uprooted from their own country, were made slaves and treated in the most inhuman ways; the genocide of millions in America and Australia (it is claimed that more than 80 % of the local inhabitants have been murdered by the invaders from Europe - The Bible and Colonialism, a Moral Critique, by M. Prior, Sheffield, 1997); Colonialism by which most of the Asian and African nations lost their sovereignty and were impoverished, becoming mere source of enrichment for the colonizing Christian nations.