From the Gatestone Institute, 4 June 2013, by Malcolm Lowe:
Right Reverend Lorna Hood at the General Assembly of
the Church of Scotland.
Photo Credit: Stuart
Littlewood
The Kirk has committed theological suicide in order to promote political
inanities. The former Church of Scotland is defunct; the Church of Latter Day
Scots has taken over the premises.
At its recent General Assembly (May 18-24, 2013), the Church of Scotland
adopted a pro-Palestinian tract entitled
The
Inheritance of Abraham? Its Preface admits that a previous version
“caused worry and concern in parts of the Jewish Community in Israel and beyond”
and offers “clarification.” The clarification is mere window-dressing, but that
is beside the point. It is rather “parts of the Christian Community in Scotland
and beyond” that should be worried and concerned. To judge from the amateurish
theological absurdities in this document, which passed through all the relevant
levels of the bureaucracy up to the General Assembly, the whole Kirk is adrift.
It has abandoned a glorious past for a dubious future.
We shall look at those absurdities in a moment, but first consider the dire
situation of the Kirk. Its decline in recent decades parallels that of
Christianity elsewhere in the UK. Nearly half the Scottish population still
professes allegiance to the Kirk, but actual membership is below 10%. It was
noted already in 2008 that “The number of new members joining
each year has dropped by nearly 80% since 1981″ and that the average age of
congregations is “maybe even over 60.”
Thanks in part to immigration, for the first time since John Knox there are
more
worshipers on a Sunday in Roman Catholic churches than in the Kirk. The
Church of Rome, despite its recent travails, retains the advantage that it would
never publish a document that had not been vetted by serious theologians.
The State of Israel, on the other hand, is doing very well, thank you, and
need not care two hoots what the Church of Scotland thinks about it. Israel’s
GDP is higher than Scotland’s. The GDP is still lower per capita, but that is
because Scotland has benefited for decades from North Sea oil and gas, whereas
Israel’s immense natural gas reserves are a recent discovery only now coming on
tap. As it is, Israel’s growth rate is far higher than Scotland’s (2.8% versus
0.5%).
The Jewish Community in Scotland and the UK is another matter. As elsewhere
in Europe today, its synagogues and institutions are under intense security
surveillance. Any kind of anti-Israel agitation, whose major sources include
churches and trades unions in the UK, is likely to encourage anti-Jewish
violence.
Theological Absurdities
The sham theology of
The Inheritance of Abraham? begins with its
misunderstanding of the relationship between the Christian Old and New
Testaments. The tract speaks as though the New Testament existed from the moment
that Jesus and St. Paul uttered their words, and it immediately replaced any
previous understanding of the Old Testament. This is the hermeneutic tool, to
give it a name more dignified than it deserves, that the Scottish authors of the
Kirk’s tract employ in their hatchet job on the Bible.
Anyone with a grain of theological education, however, knows that the
original Scripture of the Early Church was exclusively the Scripture of the
Jews, whether in Hebrew or in its Greek version as the Septuagint. It was only
toward the end of the second Christian century that authoritative Church Fathers
began to treat as Scripture the books of what we call the New Testament. In the
mid-second century, for instance, Justin Martyr ignored St. Paul completely;
Justin’s writings refer occasionally to the gospels as sources of information,
but do not treat them as divinely inspired Scripture.
The books of the New Testament themselves show no consciousness or intention
of presenting themselves as Scripture. They do repeatedly refer to Scripture,
but in almost every case they are clearly referring to what later Christians
would call the Old Testament.
Only in the fourth century did the Church Fathers establish a definite canon
of the New Testament, out of the mass of other gospels, acts, epistles and
apocalypses that existed at the time. On their way, they vehemently rejected the
approach of Marcion, a second-century figure who suggested that Christians
should discard the Jewish Bible. In its place, he proposed a new Scripture
consisting of Luke’s Gospel and some epistles of Paul. Even from these books he
selected only the verses that suited him, since they contain many quotations
from or allusions to books of the Old Testament.
Marcionism was perhaps the oldest Christian heresy. Marcion’s approach is
also that of the Scottish authors of
The Inheritance of Abraham? They
have put the Bible through the shredder, picking out for their purposes only a
few verses from the New Testament that suit them, but giving them perverse
interpretations that ignore the context as well as other statements in the New
Testament itself.
We shall not bore readers with a comprehensive list of examples but confine
ourselves to one paragraph that consists of three assertions. At any
self-respecting university, a student would flunk the exams by writing such
stuff.
Assertion One: “John’s gospel speaks of Jesus being lifted up and drawing all
people to himself (John 12:32). Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple means not just
that the Temple needs to be reformed, but that the Temple which by its order,
kept some people separate from others is finished.” The Scottish authors are
referring to John 2:13-22, which tells how Jesus drove out of the Temple
money-changers and vendors of animals for sacrifice. Here Jesus says exactly why
he did it (John 2:16): “Take these things away; you shall not make my Father’s
house a house of trade.” Obviously, this verse
does describe a reform of
the Temple wanted by Jesus, and, since Jesus did it because the Temple is “my
Father’s house,” the Temple was
not finished for Jesus. The Scottish
authors have done a Marcion on this verse.
Assertion Two (punctuation error as in the original): “Stephen’s speech in
Acts 7 makes it clear that God is no longer confined to the place of the
Temple., God is in all places and for all people.” Here the words “no longer”
are a manifestation of gross ignorance. The Old Testament makes it clear in many
places that God is not confined to the Temple and that God is in all places and
for all people. The relevant part of Stephen’s speech (Acts 7: 46-48) indeed
quotes the Old Testament to that effect (Isaiah 66:1): “Heaven is my throne and
earth my footstool. What house will you build for me, says the Lord, or what is
the place of my rest?”
Also, when Solomon dedicated the Temple, he already said (1 Kings 8:27): “But
will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot
contain thee; how much less this house which I have built!” The Scottish authors
have committed the folly of seeing a New Testament innovation in something that
had been familiar to Jews for centuries.
Moreover, Acts portrays the Apostles as constantly frequenting the Temple; it
is the geographical center of their faith just as with other Jews. In
particular, Paul recounts (Acts 22:17-21) that it was when he was praying in the
Temple that Jesus appeared to him and sent him to the Gentiles.
Assertion Three: “Temple and land give way to a new understanding so Paul can
say that all the barriers that separated people one from another are down –
‘there is neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male or female, but all are one
in Christ Jesus.’” The Scottish authors quote this verse (Galations 3:28) as if
unaware that Paul contradicts each of its three clauses elsewhere.
Paul says explicitly that Jews have been given privileges by God that
Gentiles do not have (Romans 9:4-5) and that these gifts of God to the Jews are
irrevocable (Romans 11:29). He sends a runaway slave back to the latter’s
master, albeit with a plea to treat him as a free person (Philemon). And he
tells women to be silent in the church, to be subordinate to their husbands, and
to consult those husbands at home if they wish to know anything (e.g. 1
Corinthians 14: 34-35). Are the Scottish authors ignorant of those other
statements of Paul or do they just want others to be ignorant of them? They are
doing a Marcion again, but a big one.
What Paul meant by his “neither-nor” in Galatians need not be pursued further
here, because Paul’s own meaning is of no interest to the Scottish authors.
Rather, let us ask them to be consistent in their misuse of Paul for their own
political purposes. What they want to claim is that, according to Paul, Jews no
more have any claim to the Land of Israel than Palestinians, if they have any
claim at all.
So let us apply this principle to the upcoming referendum on independence for
Scotland. According to their understanding of Paul, the Scottish authors should
be telling their countrymen that “there is neither Scot nor Sassenach, but all
are one in Christ Jesus,” so forget about Scottish independence. Currently, as
it happens, Scots are about two to one in favor of maintaining the union with
England. But we suspect that they would be very angry if the Kirk told them that
to do so is a Christian duty.
The pretense of the Scottish authors that the New Testament says anything new
about the Land of Israel is a vain one. The Old Testament is replete with
passages that emphasize the permanent connection of the Jewish People with the
Land of Israel, not just the handful of quotations from Genesis mentioned by the
Scottish authors. In the New Testament, nothing is added to the Old Testament
and nothing is changed; it is simply taken for granted that this is the land of
Jews and Samaritans, where they worship at their respective sites.
There is no peculiarly Christian element even in the indications that Jesus
feared that the Temple would be destroyed (while wishing that it could be
otherwise). The Talmud recounts that Rabbi Zadok, too, had such fears at the
same time; it is said that he fasted for forty years in the hope of averting the
destruction of Jerusalem (Gittin 56a-b). A story is also told by Josephus
(
Wars 6.5.3) about another Jew, Jesus son of Ananus, who made such
forecasts. So, no difference here either between Jesus of Nazareth and other
Jews.
Having dismissed the Old and mangled the New Testament, the Scottish authors
let the real cat out of the bag with the following statement: “To Christians in
the 21
st century, promises about the land of Israel shouldn’t be
intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical
territory; they are a way of speaking about how to live under God so that
justice and peace reign, the weak and poor are protected, the stranger is
included, and all have a share in the community and a contribution to make to
it. The ‘promised land’ in the Bible is not a place, so much as a metaphor of
how things ought to be among the people of God. This ‘promised land’ can be
found – or built – anywhere.”
What the Scottish authors are saying here is simply: “In the 21
st
century, we don’t actually care what the Bible says in either Testament. We just
decide what we want to think and turn any inconvenient verses in the Bible into
metaphors for expressing our made-up minds.”
Here we have the source of the Kirk’s decline and Roman Catholic survival.
The Bible is no longer a source of inspiration for the Kirk; it is merely a
storeroom of rhetorical flourishes, taken wildly out of contest, for political
agendas. Now, Catholics have many sources besides the Bible: Church Fathers,
medieval scholastics, canon law, the rules of monastic orders. A Protestant
church that has scrapped the Bible has nothing.
Yet the Scottish authors have not given up the idea of Scripture. Rather,
they have invented their own new Scripture made up of two kinds of books. One is
books by marginal Jewish figures, such as Mark Braverman and Mark Ellis; the
criterion for their selection is conformity to the anti-Israel attitudes of the
Scottish authors themselves. The other is books by self-styled Palestinian
Christians, above all the so-called Kairos Palestine Document (KPD). I wrote
about the pretensions and deceptions of the KPD
when
it came out and also
more
recently, so there is no need to repeat that here. What is remarkable is
that extracts from the KPD are scattered about
The Inheritance of
Abraham? in exactly the same way as verses from the Bible used to be set
forth in old-time Protestant tracts: they head or conclude sections and they are
treated as unchallenged statements of authority.
Thus, besides Marcionism, the Kirk has succumbed to Mormonism, the creation
of a new Scripture. Only whereas the Church of Latter Day Saints does no harm to
anyone but the vendors of tea, coffee and alcohol, in the Church of Latter Day
Scots the KPD functions as their Scripture and
The Inheritance of
Abraham? is its exegesis.
In Gemany, by contrast, the KPD has come under intense scrutiny; both leading
theologians and official church statements have taken issue with it. But then,
the Germans have learned where agitation against Jews can lead. Not that the
Scottish authors have forgotten the Holocaust. They just want Jews to forget
about it. Rather than say that themselves, however, they prefer to let it be
said by quoting from the Jewish authors of their new “gospels of Mark.” In the
original version of
The Inheritance of Abraham? this was done via a long
passage quoted from Mark Braverman. This was so disgusting that the superiors of
the Scottish authors decided to cut it out of the final version. Here, instead,
they invoke Mark Ellis to the same effect. Both passages will be found in the
Appendix to this article.
Political Delusions
The Inheritance of Abraham? only makes a pretence of being a
theological document; its real purpose is to mobilize Scots for a series of
political aims. Apart from some window-dressing, such as rejection of
anti-Semitism and terrorism and admitting “that Israel is a country which is
recognised within the international community of States,” all of the Kirk’s
demands could have been written in Ramallah by the Palestinian Authority. Many
of them consist of urging “the UK Government and the European Union” to do
something. Here the Kirk is deluding itself. Whether in the UK or in Europe,
today governments pay no attention whatsoever to the opinion of churches.
The Kirk’s aims also include demands that ignore reality. It claims, for
instance, that “the current situation is characterised by an inequality in power
and therefore reconciliation can only be possible if the Israeli military
occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the blockade of Gaza, are
ended.” Then it urges “the UK Government and the European Union to use pressure
to stop further expansion of in Israeli settlements and remove existing illegal
settlements in the Occupied West Bank” (“of in” as in the original).
There might seem to be an oddity here: “East Jerusalem” is missing in the
second sentence. But actually it makes no difference. The large new Israeli
housing estates that have been built in Jerusalem since 1967 are not in East
Jerusalem but in the north and south of Jerusalem in what was previously the
West Bank of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. This is because Jerusalem lies on
a mountain ridge that runs from north to south, so there is room for expansion
only in those directions. Like most people outside Israel, the Kirk has no idea
of the geographic reality because of the misleading chatter in the media about
“Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem.”
Anyway, the upshot is that the Kirk demands the removal of 40% of the Jewish
population of Jerusalem, namely, the Jews who now live north and south of the
ceasefire lines of 1949-1967. In other words, the Jewish majority in Jerusalem,
which has existed for about 150 years, should be changed instantaneously into an
Arab majority.
Obviously, not just Israel, but also no European or US government, could take
that demand seriously. For some two decades now, the tacit understanding of
those governments has been that Israel and the Palestinians should agree on land
swaps that give the Palestinians the same amount of territory, but place all but
scattered smaller Jewish settlements within the final borders of Israel. In
April 2013,
the
Arab League itself indicated its openness to the idea of land swaps. So the
Kirk has aligned itself with those Palestinian hardliners who are furious with
the Arab League’s demonstration of flexibility.
The Inheritance of Abraham? also recalls that the Kirk has repeatedly
called for “the right of return and / or compensation for Palestinian refugees.”
The original version helpfully notes that it did so in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004,
2006, 2007 and 2012. In the meantime, the Kirk had time to learn that it was
calling for the creation of an Arab majority inside the State of Israel, another
impossible demand. In short: the Kirk has committed theological suicide in order
to promote political inanities.
Historic Disconnect
The funniest part of the Kirk’s tract is its fulminations against “Christian
Zionism.” Funny, because they are denouncing what was for long the default
viewpoint of the Kirk’s ministers.
As the Kirk’s tract puts it: “In the early 19th century, some influential
Christians, encouraged by the mores of the colonial and imperial age which
pervaded all aspects of life, including the Church of Scotland led to the
development of a political idea to create a new homeland for Jewish people in
Palestine. It may well have been a Kirk minister, the Rev Alexander Keith, who
coined the phrase ‘a land without people, for a people without land.’ This view
of the land of Palestine was linked from the 1840s to a literalistic view of
Hebrew Biblical prophecy being fulfilled and the widely held attitude that
European colonialism meant that a land was ‘empty’ if western power and culture
was not present.”
Here is a basic fact: that in the 19
th and early 20
th
centuries the Church of Scotland was permeated with Christian Zionism. Only the
Scottish authors have obscured that fact with ideological nonsense. European
colonialism was a movement of territorial expansion inspired the example of
ancient Rome, that is, by the Latin classics that formed the curriculum of
grammar schools. The idea of resettling the Jewish People in its ancient
homeland was precisely an exception to that: Christian Zionists held that there
was one corner of the world, the Land of Israel, that Europeans must not take
for themselves, and their inspiration was not Rome but the Bible.
Moreoever, when Keith spoke of an “empty” land, he was just stating an
obvious fact. Demographers of
Palestine in the
19th century differ, but their estimates of the population put it
at 300,000 plus or minus 50,000. That was the population of
Glasgow alone (c.
280,000) when Keith published his famous remark in1844, after traversing the
land from Gaza to Syria. The Land of Israel was as empty as Scotland would have
been if nobody lived anywhere in Scotland outside Glasgow.
In the meantime, the population of Scotland has increased threefold, but that
of the Land of Israel close to 33 times. The
case of
Jerusalem is even more acute. Two hundred years ago, Jerusalem had some
9,000 inhabitants; it now has 90 times that number. But the authors of
The
Inheritance of Abraham? are no more interested in historical facts than in
the Bible.
Rather, the Scottish authors have disconnected themselves from the history of
their own church. A recent Scottish visitor to Jerusalem made a notable remark
to us: “Forty years ago, the Kirk loved Israel and its churches were full; today
it loves the Palestinians and the churches are empty.” That emptying is a fact,
as was noted above at the beginning. His remark is also confirmed by the history
of the Kirk’s presence in Israel.
Here the Kirk calls itself “
The Church of Scotland in
Israel / Palestine,” but it has only ever been present in what became Israel
in 1948: in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Nazareth and Tiberias. Down to the late 1980s, St.
Andrews Church in Jerusalem was staffed by Scottish Protestants of the old
school, innately friendly to Israel. The change came with the appointment of
Rev. Colin Morton. He was an amiable chap, but followed the policy dictated by
his American wife, Carol.
Mrs. Morton immediately set up a gift shop on the premises of the church’s
guest house for handicrafts from Gaza. She rejected the suggestion that she
should include handicrafts from disadvantaged groups in Israel, so as to
maintain a balance. On the contrary, she insisted that the shop’s purpose was
not just commercial but “educational.” By that she meant the PLO propaganda
leaflets that were now spread out for visitors. Since the State of Israel grants
tax exemptions to places of Christian worship, she utilized them to avoid taxes
on the sale of those handicrafts.
Curiously, Colin Morton’s
obituary
ascribes the creation of the gift shop to him alone, although we who witnessed
it saw that his role was to acquiesce. The obituary also describes him as “the
Church of Scotland’s leading apologist for the Palestinian people” and recalls
his constant question: “How can we blame the Palestinians for being mildly
aggressive if the Israelis constantly flout international law?” Mildly?
Previously, the congregation had included just four Arab Christian members,
the rest being foreign residents who were engaged either in Israel or with the
Palestinians. All had happily worshiped and cooperated, giving each other help
whenever needed. Now everyone connected with Israel drifted away. Also many
Israeli Jews, who had previously felt welcome, were driven off by the PLO
propaganda. It was now Jews working for the Palestinian cause who were warmly
embraced. A later minister (not the current one) kept an online pro-Palestinian
blog. It was the same change that has overcome the Kirk in general.
What has happened is similar to what the world of business calls a “hostile
takeover.” A business has been successfully making certain products for its
clientele for a long period. Then some group manages to buy up the business
despite opposition from the management and many shareholders. The new management
changes the products, or at least their quality, and the old clientele vanishes.
Either a new clientele is found or the takeover leads to the demise of the
business.
This is what has happened to the Kirk within living memory. Since the 1980s,
a new management with new products has established itself. Much of the old
clientele has disappeared, while the rate of acquisition of new clientele has
dropped by four-fifths, but the new management persists in its little-loved
course. Yet the assets, in
property
that can be sold off, are still considerable, so the new management can
waste resources on unwanted products for some time to come. The former Church of
Scotland is defunct; the Church of Latter Day Scots has
taken
over the premises.
Appendix
Below is the passage from Braverman that was included in the original version
of
The Inheritance of Abraham? but dropped in the final version.
Nevertheless, the final version commends the book of Braverman from which it
comes. Thus, indirectly, the Kirk continues to encourage its members to embrace
the lies that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing, etc., as well as
Braverman’s call to revoke the repentance expressed by various churches for
their role in facilitating the Holocaust.
“Braverman is adamant that Christians must not sacrifice the universalist,
inclusive dimension of Christianity and revert to the particular exclusivism of
the Jewish faith because we feel guilty about the Holocaust. He is equally clear
that the Jewish people have to repent of the ethnic cleansing of the
Palestinians between 1947 and 1949. They must be challenged, too, to stop
thinking of themselves as victims and special, and recognise that the present
immoral, unjust treatment of Palestinian people is unsustainable. Braverman
challenges, too, what he calls ‘revisionist Christian theology’, more widely
known as Western post-Holocaust theology, i.e. theology which takes away Jesus’
radical critique of Jewish theology and practice in order to provide no excuse
for Christian anti-Semitism. In this approach, he claims, the Jewish people are
and remain God’s chosen. This gives them the right to land, to triumph over
enemies and a sense of specialness. Other people’s part in this is limited to
being pushed aside to make way for occupation, being agents of God’s punishment
of the Jews for their disobedience and witnessing to God’s glory through Jewish
survival and prosperity.”
The final version of
The Inheritance of Abraham? replaced that passage
with one from Mark Ellis, which uses less obviously revolting language but
achieves the same aim.
“It seems late in the Israel / Palestine political game – and it is late
indeed – but the mainstream Churches are breaking what I have called the
interfaith ecumenical deal. That deal is usually referred to as the interfaith
ecumenical dialogue, the post-Holocaust place where Jews and Christians have
mended their relationship. Israel was huge in this dialogue. Christians
supported Israel as repentance for anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. Then as
Israel became more controversial with their abuse of Palestinians, Christians
remained silent. Non-support and, worse, criticism of Israeli policies, was seen
by the Jewish dialoguers as backtracking to anti-Semitism. That’s where the
dialogue became a deal: Silence on the Christian side brings no criticism of
anti-Semitism from the Jewish side.”
The aim of the exercise has been paraphrased by Ben Cohen, writing on “
The Church of Scotland’s War on Judaism.” He says: “Let’s
translate the above lines minus the academic, ostensibly reasonable tone in
which they are couched: ‘Jews! Stop whining about the Holocaust. Stop making us
feel guilty about the Holocaust. Repent, every single one of you, for the evil
you have committed against the Palestinians. And, oh yeah, enough of the “Chosen
People” thing—you people are so arrogant, no wonder nobody likes you. Even Jesus
himself ran out of patience with you…’”
The original version of
The Inheritance of Abraham? contained other
outrageous passages that were removed in the revision . They led
one
commentator to remark facetiously that “in the view of the Church of
Scotland, Israel has a right to exist, just not in Israel.”
To date, the original version is
still available on
another anti-Israel church website and also
here.
It shows what was truly going on in the minds of the Scottish authors. The Kirk
should have realized that the whole document was a disgrace to its reputation,
one that could not be redeemed by cosmetic surgery. By merely removing selected
passages, the Kirk allows the remainder of the document to achieve the same ends
in a better disguised manner.
The Kirk’s revised employment of Braverman is paralleled by its endorsement
of the KPD. The increasingly aggressive successor documents to the KPD are not
mentioned, but Scots are encouraged to find them and become radicalized by them
on their own.
On this, one can do no better than quote the
excellent
document issued in May 2013 by the International Council of Christians and
Jews (ICCJ) and entitled
Reflections on the Role of Religious and
Interreligious Groups in Promoting Reconciliation about and in the Troubled
Middle East. After trying to conduct a discussion with the KPD’s authors,
the ICCJ was disappointed to discover the following:
“Whereas the original
‘Kairos Palestine’ had offered ‘a word of faith, hope and love’, a December 2011
statement, ‘The Bethlehem Call – Here We Stand, Stand with Us’, began in a
strikingly different tone by instructing readers to ‘Read and interpret this
text with a Kairos consciousness and gaze of prophetic anger’. More recently, a
December 2012 text called ‘Kairos Palestine: A Strategy for Life in a Steadfast
Way towards Liberation’ called ‘for the rejection of the idea of a Jewish State
of Israel …’ This phrasing can be interpreted in several different ways,
including urging the dissolution of the State of Israel as it has been defined
since 1948.”
The ICCJ adds: “ICCJ believes that one-sided or unclear declarations –
whether composed by Israelis or Palestinians; by Jews, Christians, or Muslims;
by people in the Middle East or elsewhere – provoke only insecurity and fear,
and so do not increase the likelihood of peace, either for the Middle East or
for interreligious relations elsewhere in the world.”
The Inheritance of
Abraham? is a case in point.
