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....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....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....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.
Posted on: Sun, 15 Jun 2014 12:43:17 +0000
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