I see that the anti-Jewish semi-official Methodist blog connexions is delighted that some Roman Catholic bishops have jumped on the anti-Israel bandwagon. Having failed to generate a hate campaign against those of us who question the current Methodist stance a return to "mother church" was inevitable.
I don't see similar delighted coverage on connexions of the Catholic church's recent pronouncements on homosexuality, the ordination of women and the failure to address child abuse!
Should we really be surprised that sections of the Catholic Church has taken this position?
For 2,000 years various Christians have been saying that Christ "nullified" the claims of Jews to have a special place in G-d's kingdom. Sections of the Catholic church, together with some enthusiastic assistance from us Protestants, have sought to diminish the Jewish people. Too often it has ended in hatred and violence, some of it very close to home for us Methodists, a story incidentally that connexions refused point blank to carry - very interesting, given that connexions has carried comments ridiculing the Holocaust.
There is a first class response to the Catholic bishops here. It reminds us that Jews have an historic claim to live in the Holy Land.
In the present climate Europeans are running scared of the wave of militant Islam which now threatens our security. Not for the first time some Christians point to the most convenient scapegoat. We truly are returning to the Dark Ages.
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"the anti-Jewish semi-official Methodist blog connexions" ... "connexions has carried comments ridiculing the Holocaust."
Oh, David. Unfair caricature, scurrilous misrepresentation. You really should be ashamed of yourself.
What? Christians thinking they have a direct line to the original meaning of their scriptures - which has been suppressed Da Vinci Code like for 2,000 years - and that sit proud from hundreds of years of their brethren and sistren acting scummily?
~*screams*~
~*has an attack of the vapours*~
Jews are collateral damage, of course, but much of this is an internal conflict amongst the Cretins of Christendom for ownership of their religion. Digging a little deep, I suspect you'll find links to the Sabeel Bible College with its promotion of Replacement Theology (and the likes of Ben White [1] and Stephen Sizer).
My greatest gripe with Replacement Theology is, of course, its inherent Christian antisemitism. Next up is its lack of honesty... Romans 11 told the Gentiles that the Jews remained in their Covenant (often mistranslated as 'Chosenness') with the God despite their not recognizing the Christian Messiah as anything more than a Reform rabbi.
Going back a couple of chapters, we see in Romans 9:25 that all was supposedly foretold in the Hebrew Bible. But, if Replacement Theology holds true, that means G-d was, well, lying in the Hebrew Bible.
Or, if He were unaware of the coming of Christian Messiah (as I got one loony to admit to me), then He wasn't all that omnipotent.
Christian antisemites always have been eager to project their own failings onto [the] Jews (cf. David's suggestion this was a fear of militant Islam)- like a Crucifixion fixation but without the sense of self-sacrifice - but here I think it's the old time religion surfacing again.
Hebrews 13:8 sums it up.
Of course, taken to its logical conclusion, Galatians 4:25 should call for the disenfranchizement of Arabs (maybe the Christians amongst them have saved themselves by accepting Yasu [2]). If youse is going to use 2,000 year old religious texts as verbatim truth, use everything!
[1] An English lit graduate who spent a few years in the sun of Sao Paolo, within sight of the separation barrier for the favelas and doubtless paying a few pennies to servants from there, but scouring the Internet for any article attacking Israel and, later, Jews (he "understands" why others might be antisemites, and called a sting operation which halted an attempt to blow-up New York shuls as a "fully controlled threat to our freedoms").
[2] Stephen Sizer has, I believe, written that Arab Christians refer to their Messiah as "Isa". No! That's the Quranic term!
If this Richard did say that, it strikes as a pretty clear case of Jew-bating.
I mean, if someone suggested that Stephen Lawrence was killed as part of a drug-deal which went wrong, or that he was a wannabe Black Panther, I think we'd all get a feel for what sort of person they were.
I'm especially disappointed 'cos I don't often meet someone who knows the correct spelling of "connection".
No Tony, on July 6 I wrote to Richard suggesting that his light hearted comment that “Methodists are lighting the ovens again" was wholly inappropriate. It ridiculed the Holocaust.
You can find it here http://theconnexion.net/wp/?p=7981#comments at 1.03pm
Since then we have had a torrent of anti-Israel propaganda.
Last week he promoted a petition that deliberately misrepresented my position.
Richard appears to blog full time. It clearly takes up a great deal of his working day. I have no other explanation except that the Methodist Church have given him some sort of dispensation.
Please remember Tony that the Jewish people in Israel are fighting for their lives and very existence.
We should than G-d that the suicide bombs and rocket attacks on Israel have now stopped for the time being.
Just to note - I found the exact date and time of the post and slightly altered the comment. Hence Alec appearing to make a comment on a subsequent post.
Yeah, it befuddled me, David.
I see Richard suggested you were accusing Methodists of "lighting the ovens again"... although the explicit reference concerns this Methodist minister you say assisted in the deportations (which I'd be interested to know more about [1]), the flippancy could be presented as someone reacting to complaints about the Met's handling of the Lawrence case by saying "well, it aint exactly To Kill a Mockingbird".
Again, I think we'd all get a feel for that sort of person.
Richard also has responded that most Methodists are appalled by Israeli "treatment of Palestinians". Note the empathy failure in which it implicitly dismisses any Israeli misfortune at the hands of Arabs: thus, Israeli actions are presented as entirely occurred in a vacuum (capricious Israelis against a perfect victim).
And, of course, there's the suggestion of the adage that antisemitism is "hating Jews more than necessary". The Hitlerian period is not the gold standard for antisemitism.
The Shoah is the single most grievous event which can befall any society, and it remains in living memory. Jews are perfectly entitled to remember it and be appalled at others tittering about it, and anyone who disagrees can FOAD (pardon my acronymic French).
[1] There're accounts of FWCC - the Quaker Expeditionary Force - serving refreshments and providing blankets to Jews being deported by train from Marseilles in 1943. No-one spoke out against this, lest they be denied the self-satisfaction of serving Jews their last cup of tea before Belsen.
Paking for hols I don't really have time to enter this one. i have rad Connexions for several years and it is travesty to sepak of it is ant Jewish. That is unsustainable unless every criticism of Israel(not a regular issue there)is anti Jewish. To go down that road is very dangerous.
Re Richard being a "full time blogger", I have visited the church in Sketty where he was a minister before going to his currentpost 16 months ago. They knew about his blog but I can tell you they also very much saw Richard as a committed full time minister.
I have only met Richard the same weekend as you did but I think it is unfair to suggest he is other than a committed minister and certainly I would have been thrilled to have him as my minister when I was a Cornish local preacher.
Thank you Paul. For several weeks now Richard has been leading an internat campaign to support the Methodist church's disgraceful campaign against Israel. The petition which he launch a couple of weeks ago was deliberatly misleading. He knows full well that I do not beleive the Methodist Church was anti-Semitic and racist.
This morning he is endorsing comments which he knows many Jews will find offensive and dangerous:
“We Christians cannot speak of the ‘promised land’ as an exclusive right for a privileged Jewish people. This promise was nullified by Christ. There is no longer a chosen people – all men and women of all countries have become the chosen people."
What is offensive about all being chosen?
Incidentally Richard has not to my knowledge commented on that.
Still I suspect that God values equally the Israeli Jew and the palestinian be the palestinian Christian or Muslim.
Where God has preference it is for those who are mistreated - and I accept that opens up a hige discussion re victimhood in Middle East.
My understanding of scripture is that all have the opportunity.
We are on extremely dangerous ground when we start saying that the Jews are in some way deficient because of what happened to Christ.
We really are going back to a theology of the Dark Ages.
Now all having the opportunity is something I agree with you on.
I don't think anyone in this debate is saying that Jews are in some way deficient. I would condemn anyone who said that and I have no doubt so would Richard Hall.
The issue re Israel/Palestine is competing claims re living in the land. I am sure you have read Elias Chacour's Blood Brothers and we belong to the land. They demonstrate some of the hurt that Palestinians feel about what happened to them in 1948. The big question is how do we move on from that painful history. I can only see the answer being that the land should be shared. My fear is that settlement expansion is fast making this impossible.
BTW what happened to Christ is in my opinion something for which the prime responsibility lies with Rome. Not that for one moment I would give house room to any theology of handing down guilt due to some.
I repat no contributor to this debate within UK Methodism has the slightest time for what you rightly call a "theology of the dark Ages."
Paul I agree entirely that we have to find a basis upon which to move on. It does look at though there may be some sort of land swop as part of the (hopefully) forthcoming settlement.
However giving the impression that Christians do not accept the legitimacy of the Jewish people to settle in their homeland is hardly paving the way to peace.
When we indulge in the sort of talk of the Catholoc bishops and some section of the Methodist Churchwe are not talking about "illegal settlements" (built on land that had been sold) but about the whole land of Israel.
We are quickly moving to the position when Christians will be siding with groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah who want to see the liqidation of Israel and its people.
Peace is doable, but it won't be helped by pronouncements and attitudes that are deeply anti-Semitic.
Many of my Jewish friends are coming to the conclusion that Israel can only rely on itself for its security.
>> What is offensive about all being chosen?
As the sardonic response goes, "please, G-d, why could you not have chosen someone else?".
I am largely unfamiliar with Richard and The Connexion, so I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. Those comments of his I have seen,however, are problematic; and I am familiar with some of those people moving in the shadows (cf. Psalm 23, and a term which Stephen Sizer has used) around the pro-boycott movement.
There never was a Chosen People (as Richard's comment today suggests). That was a confection from the Church Fathers who, in an attempt to reconcile their believe in the universalism of their religion and the sanctity of the Hebrew Bible with the continued rejection of the Christian Messiah by Jews, projected their own universal believes onto texts such as Amos 3:2 [1].
Thus, a central plank to Christian antisemitism was laid... "oh, look at them, don't they just think they're the cat's pajamas!".
To suggest, disparagingly (as Richard surely is doing) that Jews consider themselves to be the Chosen People arguably is anti-Judaic. If he takes such an evangelical reading of the Christian Bible, he should consider Galatians 4:22/31 and the picture painted on the group which is accepted to have become the Arabs.
If he interprets this metaphorically, he shouldn't interpret other parts of the Hebrew/Christian Bibles literally.
The notion of lex familiaris (granting fast-track [2] Israeli citizenship to defined groups based on parentage) exists in many other countries, including Britain.
[1] This was from a time when the existence of other deities in addition to the Hebrew one was accepted. The Medianites had hundreds of them of them, and the hilltops mentioned in places like Psalm 121 or Jeremiah 3:23 refer to hilltop shrines for one or more different deities.
... like football supporters, the Hebrews chose to big-up their side. Our men are better runners, our women are better looking, our God had a bigger willy... that sort of thing.
[2] Non-Jews can and do become citizens)
Rom 15:8 For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcision on behalf of God's truth, to confirm the promises made to the patriarchs
Confirm, not nullify!!!!!
Indeed, Anonymous. Now, where is that bit about the effeminate abusers of men in the Christian Bible?
>> The issue re Israel/Palestine is competing claims re living in the land.
Perhaps inadverently, you've hit on the crux of the matter, Paul.
It is primarily a territorial conflict, the like of which exists across the globe. The problem comes from the prurient curtain twitching being practiced by weighty Methodists, and others, which see what are effectively zoning violations and planning permission disputes as of insurmountable injustices.
Our country's Government recently threw its support behind France's treatment of migrant Romani, which is a reasonable comparison to the Bedouin of the Negev (and, in cases both in France and Eastern/Central Europe, qualifiably worse than the Bedouin). Perhaps its time for Western agitators to stop projecting all their self-loathing onto Israel.
Israeli Jews, believe it or not, have had enough of the 'philo'semitism which holds them to a higher standard than the speaker is prepared to demand of their society/country.
No matter how much someone may babble about the illegality of West Bank Settlements, there is no international framework to justify this. The simple reason is that no high-negotiating power exists in the West Bank or Gaza because of the Arab League's rejection of the UN Partition Plan.
At the worst, Settlements are similar in status to Romani and Traveller settlements in Europe... but how would you feel if your local council sent in the bailiffs and diggers to evict one? Add to that that Israeli Settlements arguably provide much more employment and services to both Arabs and Jews than such a Traveller settlement in your locale (not passing judgment, but I suspect it would be a bit welfare-dependent).
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