Two professors at the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan, Teresa Reeve and the dean, Jiri Moskala, have issued a statement in response to the killing of George Floyd, entitled, “NO EXCUSES.” The statement is as follows:
No excuses. Treating a person as less of a human because of skin-color (or social class, gender, job description, education, etc.) is wrong, a sin in the eyes of God. Likewise inexcusable is a Seventh-day Adventist Christian observing such acts and turning away, thinking this doesn’t concern me (like the priest or Levite of Lk 10:30-32), is not a major problem, or that I am not a part of it.
Anyone who carries the love of God in their heart is grieving this week as we learn of new acts of violence and prejudice against our black brothers and sisters, which evidence the perpetuation of the long and deeply grounded history of racial injustice in North America. Every individual on this earth, is created in the image of God, and is our neighbor whom we are commanded to treat with love and respect. No one should have to wonder if they are safe in stepping out of their house.
Real love turns recognition and grieving into Christ-founded action. God’s kind of love means we will connect with our brothers and sisters and seek to understand life through their eyes. It means allowing God to reveal our own erroneous hidden assumptions and misconceptions and attitudes, and repenting of them. It means speaking out when we witness an act of injustice. It means caring enough to act with compassion and do what is in our power to stop these things from happening.
We have visited enough countries in the world to know that because of our sinful nature, every society has groups they unjustly marginalize, whom culture has cultivated in us through stereotypes and false myths, to believe from the time we are born are somehow less than us and deserving of being treated as such. Thus we are all implicated. God help us each to put His kind of love into practice today.
Jiri Moskala
Teresa Reeve
Spectrum’s headline says, “Seventh-day Adventist Seminary Issues Statement” but, although Moskala is the Dean, there is no reason to believe that Moskala and Reeve are speaking for anyone other than themselves. No one else has appended his or her name to the statement, and the statement does not, in fact, purport to be made on behalf of the whole seminary.
Regarding the substance of the statement, something needs to be said not only about this statement, but about all the others that have assumed we were witnessing racism when we saw the video-recorded killing of George Floyd, to wit: we do not, in fact, know that Derek Chauvin’s killing of George Floyd was motivated by racism. A lot of folks are jumping to that conclusion, but there are indications that racism might have had nothing to do with it.
First, not every crime that involves a perpetrator of one race and a victim of another is motivated by racism. If every interracial crime was a proof of racism, it would indicate that the black race has a terrible problem with race hatred toward whites. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white violent crimes. That works out to 540,360 felonious assaults by blacks against whites during that three-year period. Whites committed 14.4 percent of all interracial violent victimization, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. A black was the killer in 70% of black-white interracial homicides. What are we to make of this? Do blacks have a lot of racial hatred toward whites, or is the disparity due to higher rates of criminality in the black community? I think it is probably more the latter.
Second, Derek Chauvin’s wife, Kellie Chauvin, is a woman of the Hmong race of Southeast Asia. Her maiden name was Thao; she is an immigrant to the United States from Laos. (Hmong immigrants feature prominently in the 2008 Clint Eastwood film Gran Torino.) Chauvin’s squad-car partner, Tou Thau, is also a Hmong. [This article originally said that Tou Thau is Kellie Chauvin’s brother, but that is not correct.] That Chauvin married someone from another race, and that his police partner is also of the Asiatic Hmong race does not necessarily prove that he harbors no ill will toward blacks, but it certainly is not something we would expect of a white supremacist, either.
Third, there is a lot of evidence that Chauvin and Floyd might have known each other. They both worked security at “El Nuevo Rodeo,” a Latin dance club in Minneapolis. The owner, Maya Santamaria, told KSTP, a Minneapolis television station, that, “Chauvin was our off-duty police for almost the entirety of the 17 years that we were open. They [Chauvin and Floyd] were working together at the same time, it’s just that Chauvin worked outside and the security guards [i.e., the bouncers, which included Floyd] were inside.” Santamaria did not know whether they knew each other, but said, "We all worked together certain nights and they would have crossed paths."
Andrea Jenkins, one of the Minneapolis City Council’s two transgender members, told MSNBC, “they were co-workers for a very long time.”
There is much evidence that, to Derek Chauvin, George Floyd was not just an anonymous black man. To the extent that the killing was not purely accidental, another motive may have been in play. We do not know that the motive was racism.
It is neither prudent, nor Christian to assume the worst. “Judge not that ye be not judged,” said Christ. (Mat. 7:1; Luke 6:37; Rom. 2:1) We are admonished not to try to determine what is in another’s heart, but to leave that to God: “Man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart.” (1 Sam. 16:7) God knows men’s hearts (Acts 1:24; Prov. 15:11), but men are often a poor judge of other men’s motives.
God is omniscient. No sin escapes His notice. He has given to no human being the work of judging the hearts and motives of His blood-bought heritage. He has given all judgment into the hands of His Son . . . {21 MR 271.2}
We do not know what was going through Derek Chauvin’s mind.
I am troubled by this part of the Moskala/Reeve statement:
Likewise inexcusable is a Seventh-day Adventist Christian observing such acts and turning away, thinking this doesn’t concern me (like the priest or Levite of Lk 10:30-32), is not a major problem, or that I am not a part of it.
If I was traveling through a wilderness and came upon George Floyd bleeding and in need of help, I would hope that I, like the good Samaritan, would help him. But this isn’t that case. This is a crime in a far off state involving two people I don’t know that is being dealt with appropriately by the authorities. A man has been killed, the local authorities are prosecuting the killer, and the federal authorities may also prosecute if an investigation shows that the crime was racially motivated (which would give the feds jurisdiction).
As we noted above, we do not know that racism was involved. I am completely at a loss to know why I should go march in protest of . . . what, exactly? Quite frankly, “it doesn’t concern me, it is not a major problem, and I am not a part of it.” There are 15,000 homicides every year in the U.S., or 41 a day; if I stopped to “protest” every one of them, I could do little else with my life. There will continue to be homicides every day until Jesus comes; my most effective strategy for ending them is to hasten the Second Coming, which does not involve making myself a tool of Marxist agitators.
The most dangerous racists in this incident are those Marxist agitators who, for revolutionary purposes, promote ideas like collective racial guilt, the idea that all white people are guilty because of this or that crime that occurred somewhere back in history. The Bible rejects this notion:
“The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.” Ezek. 18:20.
Unfortunately, Moskala and Reeve have come up with their own twist on the Marxist doctrine that everyone must be divided up into oppressors and oppressed:
We have visited enough countries in the world to know that because of our sinful nature, every society has groups they unjustly marginalize, whom culture has cultivated in us through stereotypes and false myths, to believe from the time we are born are somehow less than us and deserving of being treated as such. Thus we are all implicated.
So they’ve traveled around, observed original sin in action, and concluded that we are all guilty racists. But they’re wrong. It is not true that all white people are racists. It certainly is not true that our culture is systematically racist and is inculcating racism in all of us from birth. Our sinful nature does not manifest in everyone having the same besetting sin. The idea of entire-race racial guilt is a false, non-biblical idea, and a Marxist construct that Christians should have nothing to do with. Some people in the United States do harbor racial hatred, but most do not. And those who do harbor racial hatred were outvoted, and lost their ability to make their racism public or corporate policy, about half a century ago. Their private racism is not our national problem.
I wish I could say the same of the Maoist revolutionaries who have taken this opportunity to riot, loot, trash the past, tear down statues, conduct “struggle sessions” where white people have to denounce ourselves, try to destroy everyone who isn’t sufficiently prostrated before the new doctrine of racial self-hatred, and generally institute a new Cultural Revolution. They are our national problem.