The title of this article should draw everyone into reading it. I did, and now I offer it for your perusal.
This article by Melanie Phillips is long but well worth the read for those who are open minded enough to embrace the truth. With this thought in mind, I offer her article below:
06.01.14 - 12:00 AM | Melanie Phillips
Manger Square was bedecked with huge photomontages of
classic artworks featuring Christian imagery superimposed with images from the Palestinians’
modern reality. Caravaggio’s “Ecce Homo” merged with a photograph of
Palestinians crossing an Israeli checkpoint on their way to Jerusalem, equating
Palestinians with Jesus and his suffering.
—The New York Times, May 25, 2014, reporting on Pope
Francis’s visit to the West Bank
Within the Protestant world, many churches are deeply
hostile to the State of Israel. They present the Palestinians as victims of
Israeli oppression while ignoring the murderous victimization of Israeli
citizens at their hands. This much is generally known. What is less known is
the even more disturbing fact that this perverse animus is increasingly fed not
by the politics of the present moment but by theology.
This is all the more striking because millions of
evangelical Christians are among the most passionate supporters of Israel in
America and elsewhere. These Christian Zionists believe the Hebrew Bible’s
account of how God chose the Jewish people to form a kingdom of priests and
promised them the land of Israel. That religious belief has turned Christian
Zionists themselves into a key target for evangelization on the part of those
churches that have Israel in their crosshairs—and those evangels are bearing
fruit.
The Christian world likes to forget it, but the history of
its relationship with the Jews is terrible. In medieval Europe, the Catholic
Church used blood libels to incite the population against the Jews, converted
them at knifepoint, and murdered them in great number.
These pogroms were driven by a particular demonology called
replacement theology, also known as supersessionism. Going back to the early
Christian father Origen (182–254 C.E.), this idea holds that, because the Jews
denied the divinity of Jesus, all the promises God had made to them now belong
to Christians. Exiled from God’s love, the Jews had become the party of the
Devil.
After Auschwitz, this vicious theology unsurprisingly
disappeared from view. But it turns out that it only went underground. For now
it has returned with a fresh geopolitical impetus furnished by “Palestinian
liberation theology,” itself a fusion of Palestinian political aspirations and
Christian thinking.
It is a variant of liberation theology, the doctrine
propounded in the 1960s to suggest that socialist revolution was the proper
fulfillment of the Christian duty to the poor. In this iteration, Jesus becomes
a Palestinian persecuted by the Jews while Jesus’s descendants—who knew he had
any?—become today’s Palestinians, crucified in the very land that was promised
to them. Their liberation would, of course, require the dissolution of the
Jewish state.
These malevolent concepts, spreading from Palestinian
Christians to churches in the West, are rooted in an audacious strategy adopted
by the Palestinian Authority to deny Israel’s right to exist by changing Jewish
history to suit its own end. Part of this strategy involves denying that Jesus
was a Jew from Judea and turning him into a Palestinian who preached Islam.
Clearly, this is a tall order: Rome didn’t change the name
of Judea to Palestine until 136 C.E., and Islam first surfaced in the seventh
century C.E. Nevertheless, the Palestinian leadership repeatedly claims that
Jesus was a Palestinian.
In his Christmas message last year, the Palestinian
Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, described Jesus as a “Palestinian
messenger.” In the same month, the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who had
described Jesus as “Palestine’s first martyr,” said that Jesus was “the first
Palestinian after the Canaanite Palestinians.”
A Fatah adviser who publishes under the name Adel Abd
al-Rahman wrote:
Jesus, may he rest in peace, is a Canaanite Palestinian. His
resurrection, three days after being crucified and killed by the Jews…reflects
the Palestinian narrative, which struggles against the descendants of modern
Zionist Judaism, in its new colonialist form, that conspires with the Western
capitalists who claim to belong to Christianity.
While Jesus is represented as a Palestinian Arab, the Jewish
people of today are apparently not Jews at all. As Mitri Raheb, a Lutheran
pastor in Bethlehem, said in 2010: “I’m sure if we were to do a DNA test
between David, who was a Bethlehemite, and Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and Mitri,
born just across the street from where Jesus was born, I’m sure the DNA will
show that there is a trace. While, if you put King David, Jesus, and Netanyahu
[together], you will get nothing, because Netanyahu comes from an East European
tribe [the Khazars] who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages.”
Accordingly, the true inheritors of Israel are not the Jews
but the Arabs. As the former Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu el-Assal,
claimed of Palestinian Christians:
We are the true Israel…No one can deny me the right to
inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham
and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew…He is the father of the
faithful.
Such fantastic claims come from interpreting the Bible as a
Palestinian supersessionist manifesto. The crucible of these claims is the
Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, located in East Jerusalem and
founded in the early 1990s by Father Naim Ateek. A major resource used by
Anglican clergy, aid agencies, and companies that bring Christian pilgrims to tour
the Holy Land, this center produces systematic, theologically based lies and
libels about Israel.
Ateek, who is a close friend of many senior Anglican
bishops, has redirected at Israel the ancient charge of deicide. In December
2000, he wrote that Palestinian Christmas celebrations were “marred by the
destructive powers of the modern-day ‘Herods’ in the Israeli government.” In
his 2001 Easter message, he wrote: “The Israeli government crucifixion system
is operating daily. Palestine has become the place of the skull.” In a sermon
in February of the same year, he likened the Israeli occupation to the boulder
sealing Christ’s tomb. With these three images, Ateek has figuratively blamed
Israel for trying to kill the infant Jesus, crucifying him, and attempting to
prevent his resurrection. Ateek’s book Justice and Only Justice inverts
history, defames the Jews, and sanitizes Arab violence. Modern anti-Semitism is
addressed in one paragraph; Zionism is portrayed as an aggressive colonial
adventure. Courageous Jews are those who confess to “moral suicide” and believe
Judaism should survive without a state.
In a similar vein, Jewish statelessness has been turned into
a theological imperative by those using the Bible to delegitimize Israel. In
1967, a group of Arab Christians issued a memorandum entitled “What is Required
of the Christian Faith Concerning the Palestine Problem.” As the Christian
analyst Dexter Van Zile has observed, this document suggested that Jewish
statelessness was a necessary precursor to the salvation of humanity. Stating
that “the vocation of the Jewish people is universal not particularist,” the
document goes on: “It is clear from this that the creation of an exclusively
Jewish state of Israel goes directly against God’s plan for the Jewish people
and the World.” The end of the Jewish people as a political entity was a sign
of the first coming of the Son of Man and the advent of the Kingdom of God.
In 2009, a group of Palestinian Arab Christians published
the Kairos Document—a manifesto named for a Christian resistance statement
published in South Africa in 1985, with the clear purpose of likening Israel to
the apartheid regime. While purporting to be a momentous solution to the Middle
East impasse, the Kairos Document simultaneously claimed that Jewish
sovereignty was an affront to God’s plan for humanity, this time based on
secular notions of human rights.
Increasingly, such claims are making inroads into Western
churches, whose hostility toward Israel has long been fueled by their
relationship with churches in Arab countries. This hostility has been heavily
influenced by the World Council of Churches (WCC), which was founded in 1948,
within months of Israel’s own founding. The Middle Eastern churches that
belonged to the WCC had learned to adapt their message over the years to
placate the Islamic rulers of the Arab countries where they were situated. As a
result, the WCC hardly ever mentions the persecution of Christians around the
world. Instead, it displays an institutionalized obsession with demonizing
Israel. A WCC insider told Paul Merkley, professor emeritus of history at
Carleton University, Ottawa, and a noted authority on Christian attitudes to
Israel, that in general “the critique of some Israeli sin would be severe,
while Arab countries were spared any kind of condemnation in order not to
jeopardize Christian missionary interests there.”
The WCC played a key role in bringing about the UN
Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related
Intolerance—the anti-Israel, anti-Jewish meeting convened in Durban, South
Africa, a few days before 9/11. WCC representatives demanded that the UN
denounce Israel for “systematic perpetration of racist crimes including war
crimes, acts of genocide, and ethnic cleansing.” Merkley observes:
This Durban Declaration was achieved in large part by the
active lobbying of the World Council of Churches serving as brokers between the
Muslim states and Western opinion in August 2001. Today, the Durban Declaration
serves as the source of the mottoes with which respectable people in our part
of the world shape their campaigns to deprive Israel of her right-to-life. WCC
statements on this theme are parroted by the official journals and newsletters
of the major Protestant denominations in the United States and elsewhere around
the world.
The WCC is particularly influential over progressive Western
churches, which subscribe to its advocacy for the world’s poor and dispossessed
and which have therefore also absorbed its narrative about Israel. As Van Zile
has observed, for many years now a group of five American Protestant
churches—the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ, the
United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, and the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America—have legitimized the increasingly virulent anti-Israel
movement in the United States. The general narrative presented by these
churches is that Israel could unilaterally bring an end to the Arab–Israeli
conflict but chooses not to because of flaws in its national character.
Some of their adherents have protested their attacks on
Israel. At the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in June 2006, three
bishops tabled a resolution calling on the church to apologize for its
“consistently unbalanced approach to the conflict in the Middle East.” An
explanation accompanying the resolution stated that “virtually all General
Convention resolutions concerning the Middle East—and all public policy
statements by Episcopal agencies—have relentlessly criticized the State of
Israel, portraying the Jewish state as an oppressor nation and the Palestinian
people as victims of Israeli oppression.”
In July 2005, the General Synod of the United Church of
Christ passed a “Tear Down the Wall” resolution that called on Israel to take
down its security barrier but did not call upon the Palestinians to stop the
terror attacks that prompted its construction.
That same year, the Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America passed a resolution affirming a “Peace Not Walls”
campaign. While exhibiting less animus toward Israel than other Protestant
churches, it still placed the onus for ending the Arab–Israeli conflict on
Israel.
There have been repeated attempts to get these churches to
withdraw their investments from companies connected to Israel. In 2005, the
Virginia and New England conferences of the United Methodist Church passed
resolutions calling for divestment. In 2004, a divestment resolution singling
out Israel as a target was passed by the general assembly of the Presbyterian
Church (U.S.A.). That resolution also claimed that Israel’s “occupation” had
“proven to be at the root of evil acts committed against innocent people on
both sides of the conflict.”
Although the Presbyterians subsequently rescinded their
policy of singling out Israel as a target for divestment, in 2012 they voted
for boycotting products manufactured in the West Bank.
This June, the PC (U.S.A.) biennial general assembly will
feature yet another attempt to divest from Israel in the wake of a document
called Zionism Unsettled, a “study guide” published earlier this year by the
Israel-Palestine mission of the Church. It attacks “the theological and ethical
exceptionalism of Jewish and Christian Zionism, which have been sheltered from
open debate despite the intolerable human-rights abuses rooted in their core
beliefs.” Zionism, it suggests, has destroyed both indigenous Palestinian lives
and Jewish communities across the globe in a supremacist misinterpretation of
God’s word on par with “Christian exceptionalist beliefs [that] contributed to
the Nazi Holocaust, the genocide of Native Americans, and countless other
instances of tragic brutality.”
As for the Church of England, Canon Andrew White, formerly
the archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy to the Middle East and now the vicar of
Baghdad, is a Christian Zionist. According to White, Palestinian-influenced
replacement theology has now gone viral within the Church of England. The
biblical God is viewed as the God of the oppressed; the Palestinians are the
oppressed; and the Church must therefore fight for justice against their
oppressor, the Jews, so the Palestinians can enter their promised land. This
analysis, says White, in which politics and theology thus became inextricably
intertwined, has influenced entire denominations, the majority of
Christian-pilgrimage companies, and many of the major mission and aid
organizations.
The British theologian Colin Chapman’s highly influential
2002 book, Whose Promised Land? sets out the theological delegitimization of
Israel. Chapman wrote: “The coming of the kingdom of God through Jesus the
messiah has transformed and reinterpreted all the promises and prophecies in
the Old Testament.” Jews and Christians had become, in his phraseology, one
“new man” made of both Jew and Christian, and so this new category of person
therefore did not warrant a Jewish state.
“Christian Palestinianism” is spearheaded in the UK by
Stephen Sizer, the vicar of Christ Church, Virginia Water, in Surrey. Sizer’s
book Christian Zionism: Road-Map to Armageddon? has been endorsed by many
leading British and American bishops and theologians. In it Sizer wrote: “To
suggest therefore that the Jewish people continue to have a special
relationship with God, apart from faith in Jesus or have exclusive rights to land,
a city, and temple is, in the words of John Stott [a leading British
evangelical], ‘biblically anathema.’”
Church of England bishops and archbishops systematically
present Israel as brutal oppressors and the Palestinians as their victims. In
June 2005, a report by the Anglican Peace and Justice Network—which underpinned
a short-lived divestiture move—compared Israel’s security barrier to “the
barbed-wire fence of the Buchenwald camp.” In 2012, the General Synod of the
Church of England voted overwhelmingly to strengthen ties with the Ecumenical
Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI), a group that supports
the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Israel and brings
people to the West Bank to experience what EAPPI calls “life under occupation.”
The chief Christmastime decoration this year at St. James’s
Church, Piccadilly, in the heart of central London, was in front of the
building: a wall 24 feet tall and 100 feet long. This, the church informed the
public, was a replica of the Israeli wall that surrounds Bethlehem.
But there is no wall that surrounds Bethlehem. Israel’s
security barrier, much of which is a simple chain-link fence, takes the form of
a wall merely along the area where the risk of terrorist infiltration into
Jerusalem is very high. Indeed, the sole purpose of the security barrier is to
prevent terrorist attacks on Israelis. The wall is credited with having
significantly reduced attacks while attempts to perpetrate them remain
persistent.
Yet this key consideration was all but obliterated by St.
James’s Church, whose wall was the centerpiece of a two-week-long presentation
about Israeli oppression of the Palestinians called Bethlehem Unwrapped. The
progressive churches have turned Bethlehem, that iconic Christian town, into a
symbol of Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel.
This shows breathtaking disregard for the facts. Located a
few minutes’ drive down the road from Jerusalem, Bethlehem was once
predominantly Christian. In 1948, some 80 percent of its population was
Christian; now, it is estimated at between 20 and 40 percent. According to
Justus Weiner, a legal scholar at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, the
number of Christians in Bethlehem declined precipitously under Jordanian
occupation from 1949 to 1967, when thousands of Muslims were settled in the
town.
“Christian Arabs have been victims of frequent human-rights
abuses by Muslims,” Weiner has written. “There are many examples of
intimidation, beatings, land theft, firebombing of churches and other Christian
institutions, denial of employment, economic boycotts, torture, kidnapping,
forced marriage, sexual harassment, and extortion. Palestinian Authority (PA)
officials are directly responsible for many of the human-rights violations. The
situation of these Christians has become grim.”
Naim Khoury is the pastor of Bethlehem’s First Baptist
Church. He and his family have been systematically harassed and attacked by
Muslims. The church has been firebombed 14 times, and Khoury has been shot at
several times in the last decade. Bethlehem’s Christians believe this hostility
has worsened in recent years. “People are always telling them, ‘Convert to
Islam. Convert to Islam,’” Khoury has said. “’It’s the true and right
religion.’”
The one place in the Middle East where Christians are safe
and are thriving is Israel. According to Merkley, the Christian population of
Israel rose sixfold from about 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 180,000 in 1998. It is
the only country in the Middle East where, over the last half century, the
number of Christians has grown in absolute numbers and has remained stable as a
proportion of the whole population. Everywhere else Christian populations are
in decline, in many cases precipitously.
And yet, astoundingly, the churches blame Israel for this
decline. Shortly before Christmas 2006, the then archbishop of Canterbury,
Rowan Williams, assigned responsibility for the flight of Palestinian
Christians from Bethlehem to Israeli policies and the security barrier. He
asked rhetorically: “I would like to know how much it matters to the Israeli
government to have Christian communities in the Holy Land. Are they an
embarrassment or are they part of a solution? That’s a question.”
This scapegoating of Israel is all the more astonishing
considering the persecution of Christians at the hands of Islam. According to
Open Doors, a nondenominational Christian group, about 100 million Christians
are currently being persecuted around the world in more than 65 countries. Of
the top 10 countries on the list—North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Somalia, Maldives, Mali, Iran, Yemen, and Eritrea—eight are majority-Muslim
states threatened by what Open Doors called Islamic extremism.
In Egypt, Coptic Christians have been attacked, murdered,
and driven out. In Syria, whole towns have been emptied of their Christian
populations. In December 2013, at least 1,000 Christians were killed in clashes
with Muslims in the Central African Republic. “They are slaughtering us like
chickens,” one Christian said. In the same year, seven Christian churches were
torched by Muslims in Russia.
In February 2014, jihadists bombed churches in Zanzibar for
being “dens of non-believers.” In March 2014, members of Somalia’s Al-Shabaab
militia publicly beheaded a mother of two girls and her cousin after
discovering they were Christians. The same month in Nigeria, more than 150
Christians were butchered in a massacre in Kaduna, one of innumerable attacks
on Christians there. In Sudan, Christians have been hacked to death for
refusing to convert to Islam or burned alive inside their churches. In Eritrea,
more than 3,000 Christians are in jail. There are innumerable similar
instances. Yet on all this carnage among their own flock, the churches are
almost totally silent.
There are two main reasons that progressive Protestant
churches have adopted an anti-Israel narrative. The first is the hemorrhaging
of their base. Churches that were once in the forefront of social reform in
both America and Britain have seen their influence dwindle along with their congregations.
Championing the “poor and oppressed” Palestinians seems to offer a significant
role in the national conversation.
The second reason is the eclipse of faith among the
progressive clergy. Increasingly unwilling or unable to preach the literal
truth of scripture, they have turned themselves into campaigners for the poor
and oppressed. As a result, the sociological and theological positions struck
by the WCC penetrated the Western churches and became their orthodoxy, too.
This was the context that allowed both Palestinian and Western Christians to
fuse the political and the theological and revive the murderous calumny of
deicide against the Jews, with Jesus resurrected as the ultimate suffering
Palestinian.
Now there is an even more alarming development. The latest
Christians to succumb to this delegitimization of Israel and the return of
replacement theology are among the evangelicals, the very bedrock of Christian
Zionism. This is all the more devastating precisely because these Christians
take scripture very seriously. Whereas the progressive churches have absorbed
the Palestinian theological calumny against the Jews almost as an afterthought,
some evangelicals are rewriting the theology that inspires their every action.
They are not just anti-Zionists. They are religiously inspired, anti-Jewish
supersessionists.
An early harbinger of this change was a meeting in London in
1986 hosted by John Stott. The Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization set up
a group called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding to oppose the view
that Israel was the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Such people subscribe to
a movement that the Christian analyst Paul R. Wilkinson has termed “Christian
Palestinianism.”
In his book Who are God’s People in the Middle East?, Gary
Burge recounted how he converted from Christian Zionism after being told by
Father George Makhlour of St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Ramallah: “The
Church has inherited the promises of Israel. The Church is actually the new
Israel.” Burge came to believe that “followers of Jesus were the new people of
God. And they would inherit the history and the promises known throughout the
Old Testament…Whatever the ‘land’ meant in the Old Testament, whatever the
promise contained, this now belonged to Christians.”
In March this year, some 600 or so evangelical Christians
attended a four-day event in Bethlehem called Christ at the Checkpoint. The
subtext of this conference was a fusion of theologically based Christian
Jew-hatred, Palestinian victimology, and a wholesale rewriting of history. One
witness, Brian Schrauger, wrote: “Except for explicit calls to violence, every
part, every aspect of rhetoric by Islamic Fatah and Hamas was brilliantly,
horrifically ‘Christianized.’ In the aftermath of attendance, I find myself
nauseous, shocked, and soiled in my soul.”
This was the third high-profile conference under the title
of Christ at the Checkpoint (or CatC, as the organizers call it). These
gatherings bring together evangelical Christians from around the world,
according to its manifesto, to “reclaim the prophetic role in bringing peace,
justice, and reconciliation in Palestine and Israel.”
What this actually means is that participants tell each
other about the “brutal Israeli occupation” and “oppression” of the
Palestinians, which they cast as a living reenactment of the suffering of Jesus
at the hands of none other than the forerunners of those very same Israeli
oppressors, the Jews. They then return home and spread the word among
evangelical churches. Some dismayed observers have dubbed this the “evangelical
intifada.”
For many Christians, both evangelical and progressive, this
particular demonization of Israel is irresistible. Through the suffering
Palestinians, they can live Jesus’s story in the modern world. They don’t need
to believe in God. They merely need to see the Palestinians as suffering as
Jesus suffered.
And of course the geography is crucial. Those promoting
Palestinian liberation theology play on the fact that the “Holy Land” is the
most important place in the world for Christians. As Van Zile says:
They bring Christians in to walk the Via Dolorosa; they feel
they are walking in the path trodden by Jesus as a suffering Christian. The
Palestinians fawn over them, but the Christians feel they are living the
Gospel. They get off on Palestinian suffering and Jewish misdeeds. Even though
Israel is the one country in the Middle East where Christians are increasing,
they find Israel intolerable because the Jews are supposed to have been wiped
off the moral map. So they have to turn them into Nazis.
For the young evangelicals lapping up the lies at the CatC
conference, there is an additional dynamic. They hate being tarred with the
same uncool brush as their parents’ generation. In their book UnChristian: What
a New Generation Really Thinks About Christianity, David Kinnaman and Gabe
Lyons conclude that young evangelicals, just like their secular peers, find
conservative Christianity to be too anti-homosexual, too judgmental, and too
political. Like John Lennon, they imagine a world with no barriers to peace and
love. They don’t think of themselves as anti-Israel, because to be “anti-” is
not very loving. They tell themselves they are instead pro-Palestinian,
pro-peace, and pro-love.
According to Robert W. Nicholson, a young Christian who has
written bravely about the turn among evangelicals: “Love now trumps all amongst
the millennials at CatC. The young don’t want to be seen in the same hateful
light as their parents. They say in relation to same-sex marriage, I just love
everyone. So, at CatC Israel is represented as a killing machine. It’s such an
easy jump to make. Jewish wrongdoing played a big role in the early Christian
story—so if you give people a sense they are targets of Jewish wrongdoing, they
feel like Jesus.”
The young CatC participants are taken on field trips to the
“segregation wall,” the checkpoints, and the Palestinian areas of East
Jerusalem. They are not taken to Jewish neighborhoods. They do not meet Jewish
victims of Palestinian terrorism. And they do not visit hospitals where Arabs
and Jews are treated alongside each other by Arab and Jewish doctors.
The CatC conferences are run by the Bethlehem Bible College
and Holy Land Trust (HLT). Sami Awad, founder and executive director of HLT,
has said the trust has “done training in nonviolence for Hamas leaders and
other militant groups” and that nonviolent demonstrations are “not a substitute
for the armed struggle.” In an interview with Nicholson, Awad’s uncle Alex,
pastor of the East Jerusalem Baptist Church, a professor at the Bethlehem Bible
College, and a prime CatC organizer, said:
The message of Christianity is a universal one that is not
interested in ethnicity or territory. The new covenant ushered in by the coming
of the messiah made the old covenant obsolete…What happened in 1948 and 1967
was not moral, and I personally don’t believe it had any divine significance.
Anyway, there doesn’t necessarily need to be a “state” of Israel for the
re-gathering of the Jews to be fulfilled… I am not anti-Semitic whatsoever. God
saved me from that long ago. The Jews are still special to God… But so are all
people.
Sweeping Jews out of the land of Israel also means sweeping
them out of their own history.
According to Nicholson, there were claims at this year’s
CatC conference that the “first naqba” was in 587 B.C.E. when “Palestinians”
were “exiled to Babylon,” and the “first intifada” was in 70 C.E. when Titus
destroyed the Temple. But, of course, it was the Jews who were exiled from the
land of Israel in those years. He says he also heard claims that the Jews of
today were really all Khazars, and that it was morally and theologically wrong
to say Israel was a Jewish state.
Nicholson was distressed by the reaction of the conference
participants to these absurdities. “You look around and you see well-meaning
Americans nodding along,” he said. “They don’t know what did happen in history,
they don’t know what it means so they just go along with it.” When someone
linked terrorism with either Yasir Arafat or Israel’s security barrier, people
started booing.
What so deeply alarms close observers such as Nicholson and
Van Zile is the insidious, mind-bending manipulation of this approach and the
bizarre and poisonous beliefs that are being swallowed as a result. Prejudice
against the Jews, a negation of Jewish suffering, and the demonization of
Israel are carefully disguised by a mantra of peace’n’love. This, the
idealistic, naive, and ignorant CatC participants are told, is what
Christianity is all about.
Hand in hand with Christian Palestinianism has come the
steady Islamization of the Church. Increasingly ignoring its Jewish roots, the
Church has reached out instead to Islam. In a paper published in 2007, Margaret
Brearley, a British scholar of interfaith relations and former adviser to the
archbishop of Canterbury, wrote that Anglicanism as a whole seemed to be
gradually uprooting itself from its Judaic heritage. It was no longer normative
for Anglican clergy to know Hebrew, and, if clergy studied another religion at
theological college, it was now more likely to be Islam than Judaism.
The Church, she wrote, had taken major steps to affirm Islam
as a fellow “Abrahamic faith.” The most important of these initiatives was a
Christian-Muslim seminar called Building Bridges, convened by the archbishop of
Canterbury in January 2002. The proceedings of the inaugural meeting stressed
“the shared journey of Christians and Muslims” and the “importance of deepening
our dialogue and understanding,” especially following 9/11. Papers presented by
some Muslim and Christian scholars suggested equivalence, even unity, between
Islam and Christianity. Bishop Kenneth Cragg, for example, stated that the “Magnificat
and Allahu akbar are the sure doxologies with which our two faiths begin” and
that “in the mystery of our created human trust…two faiths are one,” while
Professor David Kerr explained radical Islam “as a form of liberation
theology.” Brearley wrote: “The rapprochement of Anglicanism and Islam has
encouraged a process in which any critique of Islamic nationalism or Islamism
is either extremely muted or completely absent.”
The essential problem, says Canon Andrew White, is the lack
of will in the church to face the difference between Judaism and Islam. “They
don’t want to recognize that their faith comes from Judaism,” he said. “They
talk instead of the ‘children of Abraham’ as if we are all in it together. The
reality is, however, that although Islam and Judaism have a lot in common in
terms of customs, they are as far apart as Christianity is from heathenism.”
As a result, the Church of England is conniving at an
obnoxious historical revisionism. Muslims claim not only that they inhabited
the land of Israel before the Jews but also that Islam was somehow the real
Judaism before the Jews corrupted their own religion. The Koran says Islam came
before Judaism and Christianity, and was the faith practiced by Abraham, who
was a Muslim (3:67–68). It refers to Islam as the religion of Abraham many
times (2:130, 135; 3:95; 4:125; 6:161). Islamic tradition teaches that it is
Ishmael, not Isaac, whom God orders Abraham to sacrifice. It teaches that Jews
and Christians corrupted their scriptures, so Allah sent a fresh revelation
through Mohammed. This cancelled out Judaism and Christianity and brought
people back to the one true religion of Islam that Abraham had practiced.
The existence of Israel as a Jewish state is thus anathema
because Islam teaches that the Muslims are in fact the real, authentic Jews. As
Osama bin Laden declared in his “Letter to the American People”:
It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be
upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed.
Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and
Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of
Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims
are the most worthy nation of this.
Christians would seem increasingly to agree.
The really difficult problem is that supersessionism is not
some fringe theology but is deeply rooted in Christian thinking. At the most
basic level, the Church believes that Christianity superseded Judaism. The
Holocaust caused Western churches to rethink this, although those in Eastern
countries remained unmoved. But whereas in the 1965 Papal encyclical Nostra
Aetate, the Catholics tried openly to face up to and repudiate their own
anti-Jewish thinking, the Protestant churches quietly brushed supersessionism
under the carpet.
This failure to address the theological roots of Christian
anti-Jewish prejudice left the Protestant churches open to the politically
opportunistic and revisionist Palestinian application of the doctrine and its
use as a weapon against the State of Israel.
In all the uproar over the boycott, divestment, and
sanctions movement and the campaign to delegitimize Israel, the role of
Protestant churches has received scant attention. This is a terrible mistake.
The return of replacement theology is of the greatest possible significance to
the way Israel is regarded in the West. The Church still has great influence
over Western culture. Even in Britain, people think Christian clerics embody
integrity, conscience, and truth-telling; when they assert that Israel is a
racist, oppressive, aggressive state, they are believed. And in the United
States, such is the centrality of Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that if
this theological and political slide into untruth and hatred is not stopped,
there will be drastic consequences—not just for support of Israel but for
American society.
As Christians are murdered by Islamists across the world,
some of their churches are directing their passions elsewhere. They are busily
rewriting history, constructing a theology out of gross political distortion
and lining up once again with historic forces of unfathomable darkness. It is
not just the State of Israel that is being threatened as a result. Stamping
upon its parent, the Church is embracing its own assassin—and the West’s
potential nemesis.
About the Author
Melanie Phillips is a columnist for The Times (London) and
the author of The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth,
and Power (Encounter).
