Category Archives: Israel

Israel and democracy

Posted by on April 13, 2010 11 comments

Apparently Israeli bookstores are systematically eliminating a book that criticizes the extremely violent and illegal settler movement in Palestine. Not too surprising, I guess. But the authors raise some utterly undeniable points, such as this one:

Israel is a democratic, Jewish state. If we remain in the territories we will have to choose: either Jewish or democratic. It won’t work together, because in a democracy the majority rules and soon [Arabs] will be the majority between the Jordan and the sea. If we want to remain a Jewish state, we will have to deny the rights of the majority and we will turn into an apartheid state. If we insist on remaining democrats, an Arab prime minister will soon be elected by a majority of votes.

I have no idea how anyone can possibly consider this to be false.

An Israeli View of Israel

Posted by on September 14, 2009 3 comments

Neve Gordon, a third-generation Israeli, resident of the Negev, and professor of politics at Ben Gurion University roused a bit of controversy a few weeks ago with an op-ed piece affirming the need for an international boycott of Israel:

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews — whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel — are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime. . . .

I am convinced that outside pressure is the only answer. Over the last three decades, Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have dramatically increased their numbers. The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren’t citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right.

It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision to withdraw from the occupied territories.

I consequently have decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that was launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005 and has since garnered widespread support around the globe. The objective is to ensure that Israel respects its obligations under international law and that Palestinians are granted the right to self-determination.

The article affirms that this sort of international pressure would be necessary to bring about a two-state solution that would be just and equitable.

Neve has been met with plenty of frenzied outrage on the part of many pro-Israel ideologues since writing this of course. However, his point really should be taken for what it is. This is a thoughtful, intelligent person who cares about the shape of the country his kids grow up in. Whether he’s right or not about what international pressure will acomplish with regard to the state of Israel, any Israeli who dares to be critical of Israel at all, let alone acknowledge it as an aparthied state has what can only be defined as balls.

Judaism and the State of Israel

Posted by on September 11, 2009 12 comments

John Howard Yoder’s The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited is helpful on many levels, but one of the most imporant points he makes therein is the way in which Christianity brought about what we know today as Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism as we know it today was not around in the time of Paul and Jesus. Rather it is precisely the relationship between the church and the Jewish people in the centuries after Jesus that have brought about what we know as Judaism.

Unlike how we have come to think of Judaism, the Judaism that was present in the time of the early church did not automatically consider belief in the messiah a reason to be excluded from the synagogue, nor was it closed off to gentiles. Rather Judaism in the first century was a decidedly missional religion (cf. Matt 23:15; Acts 2:9-11). Only after the church became decidedly identified as a gentile movement did the hardening of the lines between Judaism and Christianity truly take hold and culminate in the sort of ethnic definition of Judaism we know today. Yoder describes the phenomenon in this way:

It may be  that ‘Christians’ progressively differentiated themselves from from Jews in order not to suffer persecution, and thereby diverted the anger of Gentiles toward the non-messianic Jews. Yet this in itself would not explain Jews’ abandonment of their missionary openness. In fact it could well have had the opposite effect. Jews no less than ‘Christians’ could argue that they had no secrets, that thier God was for everyone, that their law was reasonable, open to others, as their thinkers were doing at that time anyway.

In any case the outcome is that Judaism will be an ethnic enclave, less missionary than before, at some points in fact practically discouraging the accession of Gentiles to membership in the synagogue. This abandonment of missionary perspective on the part of Judaism is an adjustment not to the Gentile world but to Christianity. Non-missionary Judaism is a part of, a product of Christian history. For Jews to renounce mission means that they have been contextually ‘Christianized.’ They have accepted their limited slot within a context where telling the Gentiles about the God of Abraham is a function left to others and the Jews are willing to leave it that way. (p. 153-54)

The Christianization of Judaism ends in reducing Judaism to the non-missionary religion of an ethnic group. It turns the formerly universal message of the God of Abraham who created all nations and peoples, to the provincial religion of a sectarian enclave. However, this is only the begining. Yoder describes the culmination of the event of the Christianization of Judaism:

If the abandonment of openness to the Gentiles was the first stage of Judaism’s being influenced by Chistianity, one of the latest is the acceptance of the Jews of their assimilation into western pluralism. Protestants, Catholics and Jews are seen as the three equally legitimate forms of moral theism called ‘the Judaeo-Christian heritage.’ In some cases this has lead to a degree of theological assimilation, but the same tirpartite division of labour within pluralism can also be appealed to by Jews (or Protestants) who are much more orthodox. (p. 154)

The abandonment of missionalit culminates in the assimilation of Judaism into the tapestry of western pluralism, and specifically into the ideological construct known as the ‘Judaeo-Christian heritage.’ Where does this finally leave us?

The culmination of the Christianization of Judaism is the development of Zionism. Zionism creates a secular democratic nation state after the model of the nation states of the West. It defines Jews, for the purpose of building the state, in such a way that it makes no difference if most of them are unbelieving and unobservant. In America the Jews are ‘like a church’ with a belief structure, lifestyle commitments, and community meetings; in Israel Judaism is a nation and the belief dimension no longer matters. To be born in the State of Israel makes one less a Jew, in the deep historical sense of the term, than to be born in a ghetto. This is of course exacerbated by the fact that the Zionist state has taken on the challenge of governing subject populations who are not even ethnically Jewish. Committed Judaism, i.e. people who visibly order their lives around the Torah, is a minority sect in Israel just as are the Christians. (p. 154)

The upshot of all this is that the form of life embodied in and fostered by the secular state of Israel is the polar opposite of what the deep historical definition of Judaism entails. In fact, it is a betrayal of it. As such, support for the state of Israel cannot be construed as support for the Jewish people, let alone Judaism as a faith. Indeed supporting Israel should be seen as fundamentally anti-Jewish in nature. The state of Israel is, in fact the antithesis of the Judaism from the time of Jeremiah through the second century. To support the state of Israel is to continue the Christian mistake that began with the Jewish-Christian schism. Indeed, supporting the state of Israel is the most anti-Jewish act Christians can take, as it constitutes a hyperextension of the Christian (indeed, Constantinian) disciplining of Judaism. To the extent that the church supports Israel (as much of it rabidly does) the church commits itself to a most despicable form of anti-Judaism that should be repudiated by all.

The Lord of the Rings, Judaism, and Supercessionism

Posted by on March 6, 2009 1 comment

Ken draws some interesting connections in a couple posts between Tolkien’s epic tale in The Return of the King and the Gospel of John’s perspective on Jesus’s messiahship in relation to the institutions of Judaism. Some good analysis here that’s worth a read. Check it out.

Should Jews Become Christians?

Posted by on October 24, 2008 27 comments

In light of some of the recent discussions of supercessionism, I want to probe one key question that I think pertains to the possibilities and scope of a non-supercessionist Christian theology. This question is whether or not Jews should continue to become Christians, or more accurately, be exhorted to themselves become followers of the Messiah.

Clearly, as John Howard Yoder argues in The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited, the early Christians did not see themselves as breaking with Judaism in the sense of starting a new religion, rather they saw themselves as standing within Israel and calling all Israelites to become followers of the Messiah, whose apocalypse had inaugurated the promised kingdom of God. The question then remains whether or how those who remain within ethnic and religious Israel continue to be “God’s people” in some sense “alongside” the church in a way that allows us to affirm the place of Israel and the practice of Judaism within God’s salvific economy. The reason this question is so pressing has much to do with the historical relations between the largely Gentile church and the Jewish people in Medieval and Modern history. In light of the devastating effects of theologies of supercession, is there a non-supercessionist theology that Christians can affirm that allows Christians to view Judaism as in some sense, continuing to exist in God’s salvific economy? This is the question that is being probed in many sectors of Christian theology.

The question, however is not whether or not the fallout of the Jewish-Christian schism has produced a situation in which the call to Jews to become followers of the Messiah has become historically complexified and problematized. Clearly it has. The question however, from the standpoint of Christian theology, is that, regardless of this historical contingencies — including radical Christian unfaithfulness and anti-Semitism — that have ensued in the relationship between the Christianity and Judaism is it still appropriate for the church to call on Jews as well as Gentiles to become followers of Jesus the Messiah? Given the testimony of the early Church I cannot see how we can answer in the negative to this question. An essential element of our christological confession is that the salvation of God, God’s presence is located in Jesus and our covenantal union with God and election as God’s people are tied up with whether or not we are followers of this particular Nazarene. If we want to answer the question “Should Jews be called to follow the Messiah?” with a “no” then I think we need a really good theological reason, and I am at an utter loss to find one

Jesus the New Temple

Posted by on October 23, 2008 3 comments

One of the most interesting features of the gospel of John is its particularly anti-Temple posturing (note Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple at the beginning of the gospel rather than near the end). Moreover, John’s gospel stands out particularly  in the way in which it presents Jesus as the New Temple/Tabernacle. In the gospel of John there is a concerted emphasis on the locus of the divine presence which shifts from the physical building of the Temple to Jesus’ own person (2:20-22, 4:20-24). In John Jesus proclaims himself rather than the Temple as the true locus of God’s presence, God’s place of coming to dwell with his people. Mary Coloe’s book Dwelling the Household of God develops these themes in a fascinating way.

There are a number of interesting literary connections throughout John’s gospel that relate to this theme of Jesus as the New Temple/Tabernacle. One of the most interesting is the account of Mary’s anointing of Jesus’ feet in John 12:1-8. The whole affair is noted to take place “six days before the Passover” which places it on the evening of the Sabbath. The evening of the Sabbath included the Habdalah prayers which involved a transition from sacred time to ordinary time. In the Habdalah the sacred and the profane were distinguished through a ritual of anointing which set aside holy objects, persons, and spaces for God’s service.

This is also connected to the Mosaic regulations for the consecration of the Tabernacle and the priesthood in Exodus:

Then you shall take the anointing oil, and anoint the tabernacle and all that is in it, and consecrate it and all its furniture, so that it shall become holy.  You shall also anoint the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils, and consecrate the altar, so that the altar shall be most holy. You shall also anoint the basin with its stand, and consecrate it.  Then you shall bring Aaron and his sons to the entrance of the tent of meeting, and shall wash them with water, and put on Aaron the sacred vestments, and you shall anoint him and consecrate him, so that he may serve me as priest. (Exod 40:9-13)

Thus, in the context of John’s gospel Jesus is presented as the New Temple, consecrated as the locus of God’s divine presence among the people of God. This forms one of the key  images that characterizes Johannine Christology. In John’s gospel Jesus is the New Temple/Tabernacle, the overabundant, excessive fulfillment of God’s promises to dwell among his people (cf. Exod 25:8, 29:45-46). In the Johannine Jesus we see a sort of radical particularization of God’s eschatological covenant promises in which Jesus interrupts the reality of Israel even as God’s elect people, fullfilling their election even as he particularizes and “catholicizes” it in his own singular reality. In this singular event, it is Jesus, the New Temple/Tabernacle of God who lifts up Israel in a radically apocalyptic event of transfiguration and incorporation into the life of the Trinitarian God even as — in the very same act — Jesus actualizes reality of Israel’s election in a radically new mode, one which particularizes Jews and Gentiles together in and as one body, the body of the Crucified and Risen Messiah.

Church and Israel — Christianity and Judaism

Posted by on October 19, 2008 17 comments

Lately the question of the relation between Israel and the Church and Christianity and Judaism has been raised. What I think is crucial in such discussions is that we not equivocate on the terms employed. What is the relationship between the religion of “Christianity” and the theological reality of “Church”? Or the religion of “Judaism” and the theological reality of “Israel”?

These are, I think the supremely crucial points because they deal with the Barthian issue about revelation versus religion. Certainly the revelation of God stands as judge over all religions, including Christianity. But, can the categories of “Church” and “Israel” be coordinated as subsets of the religions of “Christianity” and “Judaism”? Or do “Church” and “Israel” belong to the substance of revelation itself in a crucial way? I think for Barth the answer is yes, but how that is all shaped is a very complex theological articulation.

All of this is only to note that I think we sometimes skip far too quickly from “Israel” to “Judaism” and from “Church” to “Christianity” in some of these discussions. Clarity on these points is absolutely necessary. In other words, I think that the relationship between Christianity and Judaism as world religions may be something quite different than the relationship between the Church and Israel in God’s economy of revelation and salvation. What precisely that difference is and how it matters theologically is the very stuff of truly theological dialogue between Christians and Jews.

Radical Reformation Historiography

Posted by on July 18, 2008 7 comments

One of the contributions of John Howard Yoder to Anabaptist ecclesiology and ecumenism is the way in which he articulates clearly the sort of historical method that underlies a Radical Reformation orientation. This is precisely the historical method that Yoder puts to work in his book, The Jewish-Christian Schism Revisited. He claims that “There is no error more natural, and perhaps there are few errors more damaging in the reading of history, than the assumption that events had to go the way they did.” His point is that what seems to us to be an inevitable historical development that we simply take as a given –the Jewish-Christian schism– was not always a given and importing its givenness into a time prior to its occurrence is to do historiographical violence.  There was a time when, to the Christian imagination, the separation between the church and the synagogue ”did not have to be.” The fact that it did turn out thusly does not imbue the outcome with normativity.

This is the crux of the sort of Radical Reformation historiography that informs Yoder’s work. For Yoder, the history of God’s people is not simply providentially guaranteed to turn out in a manner that is inevitably faithful or good. Rather, the church is radically defectible.  Radical unfaithfulness is a real possibility; the church is not merely guranteed to move in slowly in the right direction for all time.  It may find itself radically off course. 

For Yoder it is axiomatic that the church is always unfinished, striving towards, sometimes limping towards, and sometimes running away from its eschatological destiny. As such, the church cannot assume, when considering the outcomes of its history, that all has gone according to God’s intentions. Rather, the task of the church is to constantly reach back into the word that evoked the first generation of disciples. “What we find at the origin is already a process of reaching back again to the origins, to the earliest memories of the event itself, confident that that testimony, however intimately integrated with the belief of the witnesses, is not a wax nose, and will serve to illuminate and sometimes adjudicate our present path.”

The church must always be open to radical reformation, the the thoroughgoing reevaluation of what have come to be its historical givens and assumptions on the basis of the apostolic witnesses to Jesus. To do this, of course, is not to be guaranteed a safe and secure theological method.  Rather it is to thrust oneself into the agony of striving after the Truth that lies beyond us in the risen and ascended Christ, trusting that he will not leave us like orphans, but will come to us, even in our radical deformation as his broken, scattered body.

States of Exile: Great New Stuff From Herald Press

Posted by on May 2, 2008 4 comments

Herald Press continues to grace me with a steady supply of their new and excellent books.  The most recent one is the third volume in the incredibly good Polyglossia: Radical Reformation Theologies series.  States of Exile: Visions of Diaspora, Witness, and Return by Alain Epp Weaver is a potent analysis of the nature of exile, both in the Bible and the contemporary world, and its theological implications.  One of the things that Epp Weaver shows very well is that diaspora and return should not be held in binary opposition to each other.  Rather there are ways of being “at home” in exile and ways of retaining and “out of control” consciousness when living in the stability of place.

The book is anchored in Epp Weaver’s experience of spending more than a decade living among the disenfranchised Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza strip.  The reality of Israeli-Palestinian relations serves as a potent example of the reality of exile in our world.  However, Epp Weaver’s concerns are not simply to provide pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli polemics.  Rather, his discussion of the exilic state of the Palestinians is couched in the broader context of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, and the implications of the shape of all three religions for how we understand exile, both theologically and politically. 

Following Yoder’s account of the “Jewish-Christian schism”, Epp Weaver offers some great critiques of contemporary theological ways of narrating the relationship between Jews and Christians.  Theologies in which the church replaces Israel and theologies where Israel and the church represent different communities on parallel paths to God are both equally problematic in that they both represent a distinctly non-exilic theological mode.  In other words, Christian theologies of Israel that either supersede Judaism or grant it autonomous validity both alike are attempts to maintain control of the theological encounter between Judaism and Christianity, thereby eliminating the possibility of experiencing “disruptive difference” between the two traditions whereby Jews, as Jews may teach Christians how to be Christians in new and vital ways.

A full review will be forthcoming, but I wanted to make sure to recommend the book as soon as possible.  This book embodies the best form of theological politics, being intimately atuned both to the empirical realities of our world of exile, and the interruptive narrative of Scripture which offers possibilities for new life in “seeking the peace of the city.”  For communities seeking to recover a theologically appropriate exilic vision this book will doubtless be quite challenging and helpful.

The Church and Israel: An Exercise in Category Mistakes

Posted by on March 25, 2008 8 comments

In most discussions of Jewish-Christian relations the questions are generally posed in a manner that suggests that the key question for Christians pertains to how the church is related to Israel.  The key assumption here is that whatever the theological entities named by “church” and “Israel” are, they are the same kind of thing, and their theological relation must be narrated in a way that is theologically acceptable.  Thus, the notion of the church “superseding” Israel is highly problematic to members of the Jewish faith.  Christian theologians then try to deal with this problem by constructing a “non-supercessionist” theology within which Israel and the church both continue to have a form of salvific relationship with God, in light of which both should be able to affirm the self-understanding of each other, at least in some significant fashion.

The glaring problem with such approaches lies in the assumption that the church and Israel are two entities of the same type.  However, biblically the entity to be juxtaposed with Israel is not the church, but “the nations.”  Israel is distinct as a theological entity from other ethnoi, from other national peoplehoods.  The church, however is not an ethnos in the same sense as Israel and the nations, rather it is composes of persons from all nations.  The church, then cannot be seen in the kind of binary opposition to Israel as the nations.  The church, at least according to her own self-understanding is not a nation alongside other nations, but a fundamentally new reality, a mystery which has been established by God in which the old antinomies of Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free no longer hold true.  The church’s self-understanding insists on that she is the site at which the communion of God (the God of Israel!) is realized with all humanity, from all nations, be they the chosen nation of Israel, of the nations of the Gentiles.

My point in all of this is simply to call for a refocusing of the terms in discussion of Jewish-Christian relations.  Too often it is assumed that Jewish-Christian relations are somehow the same thing as “church-Israel” relations.  This however is not the case, at least not if we are being careful in our theological speech.  The church’s self-understanding is that she is the body of Christ into whom all persons from all nations, be they Jew or Gentile are called into communion with the one God.  To deny that the church should understand herself as such is to deny something that has been utterly central to the church’s self-understanding from the very beginning of the church.  This, of course may be seen as a supercessionist theology.  However, this is not the case.  The church supersedes nothing.  Rather, Christ, through the church interrupts everything.  The church is not a static reality which comes along and replaces Israel, rather it is the apocalyptic aftermath of Christ’s invasion of the world which has cosmic implications.  The church does not crowd out, take over, or overrule Israel or any other nation, rather the church is simply God’s way of continually interrupting the world in Christ through the Spirit.  This certainly poses a challenge to the self-understandings of all nations unique and distinctive ways, including Israel (and Rome and America, I might add).  And this challenge is a stumbling block that we dare not remove if we are to be faithful to the gospel.

Israel in Christian Theology

Posted by on January 25, 2008 5 comments

One of the issues I often come back to in seeking to understand the overarching flavor of various theologians is the way in which Israel as the people of God functions within their various theologies.  I suggest a couple preliminary points about how one’s theology of Israel affects one’s overall theology, particularly ecclesiology.

First, how one views Israel will largely determine how they view the nature of redemption and the church.  If our understanding of Israel is a purely intrumental one, namely that Yahweh elects Israel merely for the purpose of fixing the fallen creation, then our ecclesiology is likely to be fundamentally instrumental as well.  Israel and the church are viewed as means to other ends, rather than as loci of God’s action and presence.  On these readings, God’s work in salvation history is really something other than what is happening in Israel and the church.  They may witness to that other end, or be some sort of tool in God’s toolbox to get the world there, but they do not really participate in, or embody that end. 

Second, how one views the way in which the church’s identity is mediated through Israel will largely determine the political character of the church polity and practice.  If the (largely Gentile) church understands itself as being grafted into the reality of Israel through the Spirit, it will understand its own polity in a fundamentally Israel-like way.  Most specifically this view of ecclesial identity inclines the church towards a diasporic self-understanding.  On the contrary, a supercessionist view in which the church replaces Israel as the people of God tends to find the church’s idenity mediated through other political structures, such as the state.  This is to suggest that how one understands the continuity of Israel and the church will largely determine how one views the political identity and practice of the church in the world.

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