A Jewish Understanding Emerging Issues of Christian A Publication of the Jewish United Fund/ Jewish Federation Responses of Metropolitan Chicago to Israel

Published in cooperation with the United Jewish Communities/ Jewish Council for Public Affairs Israel Advocacy Initiative © 2007, Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago INTRODUCTION

American Jewish organizations have long been active in the interfaith arena. At the national level, the lead has been taken by the synagogue movements and defense organizations (the American Jewish Committee; the Anti-Defamation League; and the American Jewish Congress) with the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (formerly the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council) often coordinating that activity. At the local level, where many essential contacts are made, such work has been carried out by regional offices of those bodies and also, significantly, by the Jewish Federations, Jewish Community Relations Councils, Boards of Rabbis, and individual synagogues and rabbis in various communities.

Much of the interaction with American Catholics was initially propelled by the Second Vatican Council’s passage of Nostra Aetate in 1965, with Protestant bodies and local churches initiating similar outreach as well, especially in the post-Holocaust environment. While Jewish and Christian groups have frequently related to one another by working together on domestic social issues of the day, the Jewish community’s concerns about anti-Semitism and focus on its ties with Israel have often been a significant part of the agenda. With the Palestinian terror assault that began in September 2000 eclipsing what had seemed to be a promising peace process, and with a propaganda war against Israel escalating globally as well, Christian churches became a locus of the battle for American public opinion, and Christian-Jewish relations in America became even more centered on Israel-related matters.

To a varying extent each of America’s major Christian denominations has been affected by attempts to advance support for the Palestinian cause. This has been especially so for groups which are on the ideological wavelength of those in Europe and elsewhere who have been harshly critical of Israel and strongly supportive of the Palestinians. Support of the Palestinian cause often has also been advanced where a church or a church group has close connections with certain individuals and organizations in Jerusalem and the West Bank. This trend has been especially visible within mainline Protestant churches. To a more limited extent, it has also prevailed within certain Catholic circles and even some Evangelical churches, which by and large have been especially sympathetic to Israel and, especially since the election of George W. Bush in November of 2000, have gained increasing national visibility.

A sense of crisis arose when the Presbyterian Church USA took its initial steps regarding divestment from Israel in the summer of 2004. Even before that, though, the climate out of which such steps emerged began to become apparent. In that framework, shortly after September 2000, the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and its Jewish Community Relations Council, for which interfaith relations have long been valued and by which contacts within the Christian community have long been cultivated, intensified its work in this arena. As the Federation and JCRC 1 became more and more involved, we realized that there was a serious need to advance understanding of the major American Christian denominations that are involved in activities in the foreign affairs realm that impact on Israel and its relations with its neighbors — namely the Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, and Evangelicals. Such an undertaking, noting differences between the denominations, would focus on their defining characteristics and belief systems and on the ways those factors connect with their postures and activities regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

This document is thus an attempt to offer what we hope will be helpful background knowledge for the cadres of lay activists and professionals involved in advancing a sympathetic understanding of Israel in the interfaith arena in America, and for Israeli officials charged with advancing the interests of their country. It was written by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko, Judaic Scholar for the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and a key member of the Federation/JCRC professional group that is engaged in this work. Drawing upon his learning, research, contacts, and experience, and with rich comprehension of the issues, Rabbi Poupko has framed what we hope will be a useful compendium for those whose work in this field is new and those for whom it is longstanding; for those seeking information to enhance their own relationships and outreach and those simply wishing to better understand unfolding developments.

We are grateful to the Israel Advocacy Initiative of the United Jewish Communities/ Jewish Council for Public Affairs for its support in the publication of this document.

Michael C. Kotzin Executive Vice President Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago November 2007

2 LOOKING AT THEM LOOKING AT US A Jewish Understanding of Christian Responses to Israel

By Rabbi Yehiel Poupko

Section I: Exploring Attitudes Toward Israel and the Jewish People: The Dominant Christian Groupings in the United States

This monograph presents ideas and analyses intended to help American Jewish communal professionals, lay leaders, and Israeli officials understand how Israel figures in the mind and theology of Christian clergy, the churches they serve, and the denominational and institutional bodies they represent. Examined here are the three largest Christian groupings in the United States: the Roman Catholic Church, the largest mainline and 1 historic Protestant denominations, and the Evangelical Christian community .

The need to understand Christian attitudes toward Israel

This project began in 2002 during the second year of the Palestinian terror war against Israel. When this writer and his colleagues began to talk about Israel with Christian clergy, scholars, and institutional professionals, it became clear that Christian attitudes toward Israel were complex. Some of the responses emerging from Christian clergy and Christian churches have caused much anger and confusion for Israel and the American Jewish community. Meanwhile, conversations both with American Jewish communal professionals and with Israeli officials revealed the need for deeper understandings for them and their institutions about the various Christian groups and their unique features.

American Jewish and Israeli officials have long assumed that American Christians share a common understanding of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, its place in the larger Arab- Israeli confrontation, and Israel’s motivations and intentions. It is enough, they have believed, to teach the facts, usually through chronological, historical accounts. That approach ignores the reality that for Christian believers, particular theologies and worldviews shape and determine how denominations, institutions, and clergy understand Israel and the Middle East conflict. It also glosses over the disparate manner in which Christian groups receive information. How one makes the case for Israel and explains the Jewish people’s connection to their homeland is critical to effective advocacy, and works best if tailor-made for the specific Christian group and its theological and political affirmations. 3 What are the belief systems and worldviews of the three major American Christian groups? How have their histories and theologies shaped their thinking about Zionism, Israel, and the return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancient homeland? How can those who advocate for Israel address Christian believers in the very place where they take their stand of faith?

Any attempt to answer those questions is a difficult exercise at best. In the main, American Jews are barely literate in Jewish theology, let alone Christian theology. Judaism’s focus is on mitzvot and the study of classic texts rather than on the systematic examination and explication of the ideas of the Jewish religious system. Theology is what Jews write to explain Judaism to the intellectual challenges of other thought systems.

Theology plays an entirely different role in Christianity, which is grounded in a set of faith affirmations as opposed to a set of faith actions. Christianity, in most of its expressions, is immersed in the explanation and analysis of those faith tenets. Even in interfaith gatherings, in the main, it can be said that “Christians talk theology and Jews talk mitzvot.” Furthermore, religious ideas are not generally familiar to American society.

This monograph assumes that for Jews to understand how a given Christian denomination views the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, they must first understand that denomination’s theology, history, belief system, religious ideas, and worldview. As with all religious or faith systems, there is a particular language and symbol system that has to be learned. Furthermore, American and Israeli Jews — who have specific histories and experiences that shape their understandings of Christianity — can only encounter Christians effectively if they also have a higher degree of Jewish self-understanding.

How the Ashkenazi Jewish experience shapes the encounter with Christianity

American Jewish communal professionals and lay leaders, as well as Israeli officials (including diplomats), are at the forefront of representing the interests of the American Jewish community and Israel to various churches, church bodies, and clergy. Each Jewish community — American and Israeli — brings to the encounter with American Christianity unique and shared historical experiences. Additionally, and of great significance when it comes to interfaith activities, is the fact that most Jews professionally involved — be they Israeli or American — are laity, whereas their Christian counterparts are largely clergy.

The Israeli and the American Jewish experiences share much in common. Both communities are heir to the same 2,000-year-old legacy of the Christian teaching of contempt for Judaism, which culminated in the Holocaust. Both grasp the fragility of

4 Israel’s existence. Both have witnessed the Arab, Soviet, and Islamist use of anti- Zionism as anti-Semitism. Both currently witness a significant rise in anti-Semitism. Jews are acutely aware that the world Jewish population is but 12 million-13 million, and that one of the world’s two major Jewish centers, Israel, with its 6 million Jews, lives in a rough neighborhood. Jewish history will, for the foreseeable future, be written by the 6-million-member Jewish community of Israel and the 5.5-million-member American Jewish community.

The American Jewish community has its origins in Central and Eastern Europe. More than 85 percent of North America’s Jews (but only 40 percent of Israeli Jews) are heirs to Ashkenazi culture. Most are the descendants of the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth and Tsarist Russia. The Europe from which they came was, for nearly two millennia, Christendom itself. This is not so anymore. Church attendance in most European nations is below 20 percent, some as low as 5 percent. Yet for Ashkenazi Jews in America and Israel, Europe remains synonymous with Christendom and Christianity. These two Ashkenazi communities were raised on the narratives of Jewish suffering at the hands of Christianity and Christians who, with some notable exceptions, perpetrated the destruction of European Jewry, while the Vatican and the Protestant churches stood by in silence. The received Christian experience of most Jews today is negative.

To this must then be added another stratum of difficulty, modernity and secularism. Traditional Jewish, Christian, and Muslim societies base their worldviews on authoritative texts believed revealed in the distant past by God, handed down from generation to generation, and presented and interpreted by reliable authorities. For Jews, this is the Torah at Sinai; for Christians, the New Testament through Jesus, the Apostles, and Paul; for Muslims, the Quran and Mohammed. Thus, a traditionalist is someone who turns to the revealed text and its interpreters in order to answer basic religious, ethical, moral, political, economic, and social questions.

For the traditional believer, something is right or wrong, good or bad, depending on whether God, as represented in the tradition, says so. A believer need not have a victim in order for an act to be wrong and sinful. By contrast, a modernist is one whose worldview is shaped by reason, experience, empirical observation, and science. The modernist may consult tradition, but for the modernist, religious tradition has, at most, a voice, not a veto. For the modernist, ethical and moral determinations are based on essentially two criteria: One, will my action hurt other people? Two, am I comfortable with that action? For the modernist, if no one is hurt, and if he or she is comfortable, then the action is not deemed to be unethical or immoral.

The majority of Jews in the Israeli and American Jewish communities have a decidedly modern outlook on life and the role of religion in society. Yet, in their encounters with Christianity, American and Israeli Jews often meet Christian traditionalists. This is

5 especially so when dealing with the Catholic Church and Evangelicals. Also, modernist Christians often have a different “lens” through which they apply faith to life.

The Jewish people embraced modernity and lent it much strength. This was so because the Jewish people suffered more than anyone from the alliance between church and state and from state-sponsored and established churches. The Middle Ages were the Dark Ages because of that alliance. Thus the Jewish people in Europe were the most immediate beneficiaries of the Enlightenment, and of the separation of church and state.

Jews saw separation of church and state as going hand in hand with Enlightenment, equal rights, and civic opportunity. Thus in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when 2.5 million European Jews came to, and found success in, the United States — a country with no state-established church or experience of social and institutional Christian anti- Semitism — they vowed to safeguard the principle of separation.

Now, early in the 21st century, much has changed in the Israeli and Jewish relationship with the main Christian groupings. Let us begin with the Israeli experience.

The Israeli experience

What Israelis experience of Christianity is limited to a Christian-Arab community that is in decline, and to a series of common and popular stories related by European grandparents and great-grandparents. Furthermore, fully 75 percent of Israeli society can be defined more or less as secular and modernist. Many of those Israelis bring to their understanding of Christianity decidedly negative attitudes toward religion in general. Those attitudes stem in no small measure from the dominant and domineering role of state-established Orthodox Judaism in Israel.

The following are some of the factors that characterize Israeli attitudes toward Christians:

1. The Zionist movement and the State of Israel are in significant measure a response to Christian anti-Semitism. Had Jewish life continued to be safe and viable in Christendom, in Europe, the Zionist movement might not have been successful.

2. Christian anti-Semitism is, to a very significant degree, responsible for the destruction of European Jewry. The Holocaust is too enormous an event to be attributed exclusively to Christian anti-Semitism, but the Holocaust is impossible without two millennia of the Christian teaching of contempt for Judaism and the Jewish people.

6 3. Due in part to the alliance between church and state and its negative consequences for Jews living in Christian lands, Jews have been at the forefront of secular social and political movements during the past two centuries in Europe. Socialism, Communism, Zionism, Yiddishism, Folkism, and the Enlightenment all share in common opposition to Christianity and to religion in general.

The State of Israel is the result of the single most successful secular Jewish movement of the past 200 years, Zionism. During nearly six decades of its existence, Israel has developed in the absence of regular cultural, social, and political interaction with Christianity. To the extent that Christianity found a place in the consciousness of the average Israeli, it did so through reports of experiences with Christianity, largely in Eastern and Central Europe, and, to a lesser degree, in Western Europe. These are the stories of Jews and their families who fled Eastern Europe, due largely to pogroms, which were Christian anti-Jewish acts, culminating, of course, in the Holocaust, which took place in Christendom. At the same time, Israelis occasionally experience the honoring and the celebration of those Christians in Europe who are known as Righteous Gentiles for having saved Jews during the Holocaust. And then something happened.

In March 2000, the State of Israel, the government of Israel, and Israeli society experienced an unprecedented and historic event. Pope John Paul II, regarded by Catholicism as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, celebrated the completion of two millennia of Christianity and the inauguration of the third Christian millennium by traveling to Israel. John Paul II came to visit the first and only Western Jewish community to live, develop, and flourish absent a significant Christian communal presence.

The pope’s person, and his very presence as an effective and powerful spiritual figure, forced Israel’s Jewish population to meet and consider contemporary Christianity. This recent experience with Christianity, stimulated by the pope’s visit, was a critical and formative experience for Israeli society. Israeli officials, charged with responsibility for representing Israel in the United States and helping various Christians and Christian organizations understand Israel, certainly gained from this experience.

American Jews experience Christianity in a new age of paradox

A series of paradoxes characterizes the Jewish-Christian encounter in the contemporary world, and especially in the United States. Europe, Christendom, the place of the longest and most intense Jewish-Christian encounter, is ever less Christian and possessed of small and declining Jewish communities. The second-largest Jewish community in the world, the American Jewish community, experiences and is responsible for the most significant contemporary Jewish-Christian encounter, undertaken in an American environment characterized by pluralism and democracy. This American Jewish community revels in its secularism. Christians, especially Roman Catholics and more recently Evangelicals, often criticize American Jews and American Jewish communal 7 institutions as advocates of secularism, even as that Jewish community by and large encourages and practices interfaith dialogue and understanding.

Christian Americans are among the most observant practitioners of their faith in the world, with about 60 percent saying they attend church at least twice a month. By comparison less than half that percentage of American Jews report attending synagogue. At the same time, the United States is the first predominantly Christian country where the church does not wield official power at the national level.

Thus, at the dawn of the third Christian millennium, Judaism and Christianity, Christians and Jews face a new circumstance in their relations. In one setting, Christians are, for the first time, a minority in a majority Jewish culture, the State of Israel. In this country, despite the disparity in numbers, American Jews and American Christians meet each other in a politically-neutral, democratic environment.

Affecting those relations are fundamental attitudes. In the modern American Jewish imagination, there is something fundamentally irrational about Christian belief. Christianity, with its doctrines of the Virgin Birth, Trinity, and Resurrection, defies common sense to many American Jews, who often doubt that even liberal Christians view Christian Bible stories as more than metaphor.

Implications

Given these realities, the American Jewish community must become more sophisticated in how it relates to the gamut of Christian denominations and creedal professions.

It is important for Israeli officials and American Jewish communal professionals and lay leaders to keep in mind that the universe of Christianity is vast and diverse. In order to be effective in developing relationships with Christians and with their institutions, it is necessary to know and to be aware of the unique features of each of the denominations and groupings that distinguish them from other Christians. We now move to specific treatments of Roman Catholicism, mainline Protestantism, and Evangelicalism.

1 This monograph does not treat the varieties of African American Christianity in the United States and their understanding of and relationship to all that is Israel. The subject is vast and complex and much of what is known about their relationship to Israel is experiential and anecdotal, limited to specific encounters between specific Jewish communities and African American churches, rather than research.

8 Section II: Roman Catholicism

Jews, Catholics, and the American experience

The Roman Catholic Church, with approximately 66.5 million faithful, is the largest Christian group in the United States today. The Catholic Church is, perhaps, the quintessential hierarchical and international “institution.” Its ways of interacting, internally and externally, are deeply informed by tradition. The Vatican is not immune to the world around it, nor is the American Roman Catholic Church divorced from the day-to-day realities of historic affairs, the trials and tribulations of nation-states, and the ethnic groupings of its adherents. The 19th- and 20th-century dramas that have overtaken the distinctly Catholic nations of Poland, Lithuania, Ireland, and Italy, to name but a few, are part of the Church’s sense of how humanity structures itself in history. Roman Catholicism has a this-worldly orientation and involvement, and for that reason, the dramas of the Jewish people in the 20th century—the destruction of European Jewry, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the rescue of Soviet Jewry—are familiar to Catholics. They know dramas like these in the histories of their faithful.

Today, the fastest-growing group of Catholic Americans are Hispanics. As relative newcomers, they may not share some of the same experiences. Historically the Catholic known to many Jews has been a member of one of several great ethnic groupings, such as the Polish, Irish, or Italian. The traditional Catholic ethnic groupings have had an affinity for the Jewish people, sharing similar stories about the flight from oppression and hunger, the wrenching pain of leaving Europe, the difficulty of traveling to the United States, the painful encounters at Ellis Island, and the task of creating a new life in a new land.

In coming to the United States, Catholic and Jewish immigrants both encountered a common obstacle. Very often, the public schoolteacher, the government official, the politician, the storekeeper, and the landlord viewed these newcomers as outsiders. That is why many Jews and Catholics in the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century became advocates for the great “melting pot” that would minimize the impact of their differences. They also sought to reduce the influence and power of organized religion, namely Protestant Christianity, in the official public life of the United States.

Catholics and Jews also share an attachment to ethnicity and family. Catholicism, like Judaism, is a pre-modern and ancient faith system, which views nation-states as a natural way to organize humanity. Its own experience is intimately bound up with nation-states and national identities. Unlike mainline Protestants, who have sought to transcend national identity and unite all of humanity in a common spiritual patrimony, the Catholic Church in the United States cherishes national identities, such as Irish, Italian and Polish, among others. Catholics and Jews both have a high regard for ritual and the role of family meals in religious observances. These factors contribute to the 9 fundamentally positive attitude of Catholics toward the Jewish people and toward Israel, the Jewish nation-state.

Despite these similarities, there is something ironic about the Jewish-Catholic encounter in the United States. Jews and Catholics have worked closely for many years on a range of issues such as combating poverty and promoting immigration. As Catholics gained political power, though, their position on the separation of religion and state evolved — and the issue of aid for parochial schools became a central item on the Church’s agenda. In later years, the Church would take strong stances against birth control, abortion, and gay rights that stood in stark contrast to some of the Jewish communal positions. These differences, however, would not harm the close relationship, including the Catholic Church’s support for Israel. Ethan Felson, of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, explains that these differences can exist between coalition partners because religious communities do not place the same quid pro quo expectations on one another — as might be the case with other constituencies — because there is a respect for the fact that political positions are often grounded in immutable theology. This, as will be explored, will hold true for relations with mainline Protestants and increasingly with Evangelical Protestants as well.

Historic reconciliation

Today the Catholic Church views Judaism and the Jewish people with great respect, and works for the development of even better relations. This was not always the case. The radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin played to and advanced anti-Semitism among American Catholics in the early 20th century. In the post-Holocaust era, however, the Catholic Church did the hard work and imbued its teachings with the results of that learning. Forty years after Nostre Aetate, the groundbreaking Vatican declaration that teaches its faithful to understand others as they understand themselves, and its subsequent teachings — the most important and far-reaching documents that the Church has promulgated about Judaism and the Jewish people — the experience of Catholics and Jews epitomizes reconciliation, and indeed, trust. The visits to Israel by two popes, the first in 1964 and the second in 2000, illustrate how much matters have changed.

Since St. Augustine of Hippo in the fourth century, the Church and all of Christianity have held that the wandering, homelessness, and exile of the Jewish people is proof that the Jews are punished for their continuing and stubborn rejection of Jesus Christ. Thus, the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel threatens the basic coherence of Christianity. For if the wandering, homelessness, and exile of the Jewish people are testimony to the truth of Christianity, then the return of the Jewish people is proof that that is not so. For the Catholic Church to recognize the Jewish state is to undo almost 2,000 years of Christian teaching.

In 1964 Pope Paul VI visited Israel, but refused to meet with a government representative 10 or to be received in official state or government premises. This was an explicit statement that the Vatican could not recognize the establishment of a sovereign Jewish state in the Holy Land, from which the Jews were once exiled for rejecting Jesus Christ.

Thirty-six years after the visit of Pope Paul VI, another pope visited Israel. Pope John Paul II, nee Karol Wotyla, was born in Krakow, Poland. His papacy began in 1979 and he traveled to Israel in the year 2000 to commemorate the culmination of two millennia of Christianity. After landing at Ben-Gurion Airport, he met Israel’s President Moshe Katzav and Prime Minister Ehud Barak, as well as Israel’s Chief Rabbis. He rode through the streets of Jerusalem and was welcomed by throngs of Jews. He went to the Old City, the heart of Jerusalem, where he visited the Western Wall — the place to which Jewish prayer and yearning have been directed since the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 CE, the place that represents the ongoing attachment of the Jewish people to the Land, marks the site of Israel’s redemption, and celebrates the ineffable experience of moving from Auschwitz to Jerusalem in but a few years. He prayed:

God of our fathers, You chose Abraham and his descendants To bring Your name to the nations; We are deeply saddened By the behavior of those Who in the course of history Have caused these children of Yours to suffer And asking Your forgiveness We wish to commit ourselves To genuine brotherhood With the people of the Covenant Jerusalem, 26 March 2000. Joannes Paulus II

Theological reasoning and change

Pope John Paul II’s prayer at the Western Wall was remarkable, for it proclaims to Christendom that:

1. The children of Abraham and his descendants, the Jewish people, continue to have a sacred religious purpose to bring the name of the One God to the nations;

2. Anti-Semitism was an offense against God, because it has caused “these children of Yours to suffer”;

3. Christians still need forgiveness for the suffering that has been brought to the Jewish people; 11 4. The phrase “We wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant” means that while the Church seeks good relations with all faith communities, it has a unique and special relationship with the Jewish people, with whom it shares a common father in faith, Abraham, and without whom the Church cannot understand its very self. This is evoked in the word “brotherhood”;

5. Most significantly, the pope referred to the Jewish people as “the people of the Covenant.” In other words, the covenant that God made with the Jewish people in the Torah, at Sinai, is not superceded and nullified by the covenant God made with the Gentiles.

What happened between these two papal pilgrimages?

On October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council adopted Nostra Aetate: Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions, acknowledging the origins of the Roman Catholic Church in Judaism:

“Since Christians and Jews have such a common spiritual heritage, this sacred council wishes to encourage and further mutual understanding and appreciation. This can be achieved especially by way of biblical and theological inquiry and through friendly discussions.”

The document then goes on to state that:

“…neither all Jews indiscriminately at that time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during His Passion. It is true that the Church is the new people of God, yet the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed, as if this followed from Holy Scripture. Consequently, all must take care, lest in catechizing or in preaching the word of God they teach anything which is not in accord with the truth of the Gospel message…”

Thus, some 40 years ago, the Roman Catholic Church called for dialogue with the Jewish community and renounced the accusation of deicide.

A subsequent document entitled “Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration ‘Nostra Aetate’” states that:

“Christians must therefore strive to acquire a better knowledge of the basic components of the religious tradition of Judaism; they must strive to learn by what essential traits the Jews define themselves in the light of their own religious experience.”

With respect to liturgical readings, 12 “care will be taken to see that homilies…will not distort their meaning, especially when it is a question of passages which seem to show the Jewish people as such in an unfavorable light.”

Furthermore,

“The Old Testament and the Jewish Tradition founded upon it must not be set against the New Testament in such a way that the former seems to constitute a religion of only justice, fear and legalism, with no appeal to the love of God and neighbor.”

And,

“The history of Judaism did not end with the destruction of Jerusalem, but rather went on to develop a religious tradition.”

In this document the Church went further than Nostra Aetate and made the all- important statement that the Church must understand Jews and Judaism as Jews and Judaism understand themselves. It called for great care in the use of New Testament texts that appear to be anti-Jewish. And finally, it rejected two old Church stereotypes about the Jews: that the Hebrew scriptures portray a stern God and that Judaism ceased to develop with the coming of Christ.

Finally, during the Papacy of Pope John Paul II, the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews issued a paper entitled “NOTES on the correct way to present the Jews and Judaism in preaching and catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church.” This document cites the pope himself:

“The Holy Father has stated this permanent reality of the Jewish people in a remarkable theological formula in his allocution to the Jewish community of West Germany at Mainz on November 17, 1980: ‘The people of God of the Old Covenant, which has never been revoked.’”

Thanks to Nostra Aetate and the documents that followed it, the Catholic Church changed the teaching of Judaism in the Roman Catholic primary and secondary educational systems, the theological representation of Judaism in seminaries, and the removal from liturgy of negative and hostile statements about the Jewish people and Judaism.

A critical development in the relationship between the Catholic Church and Jews was the 1979 selection of Karol Wotyla to be pope. As a young boy and teenager Karol Wotyla knew and played with many young Jews in his hometown of Wadowice. He had wonderful experiences with Jewish friends, their parents, and his neighbors. He also witnessed the virulent Polish anti-Semitism of the interwar period and had a front-row seat for the 13 horrors of the Holocaust. He saw how Christian anti-Semitism had contributed to the murder of Europe’s Jews, among them more than 3 million Jews of Poland.

After the Holocaust he refused to baptize a hidden Jewish child, because the parents, who had perished at Auschwitz, wanted their child raised in the Jewish faith. Pope John Paul II’s lifelong friendship with Jews was famously portrayed to the world when he had a reunion in Israel at Yad Vashem with one of those playmates, Jerzy Kluger. The evils of Nazism and Communism are writ large in the man who would be the longest serving pope of the modern era.

Yet for all of his personal responses, John Paul II faced a theological conundrum: To be a Christian means that one believes there is salvation only through Christ. To be a Catholic means that one cannot repudiate the theology of Augustine. Through his personal odyssey to Jerusalem and to the Wall, John Paul II substituted personal example for written text. He redefined the Church’s perennial question: “Do not the Jews need Christ?” to ask, “Do not Christians need the Jews?”

While the position of the Church today remains, “Everyone needs Christ” — for that is what it means to be a Christian — the Catholic Church, in great part thanks to John Paul II, has become quite pragmatic. His actions have taught the following lessons to the Church and its faithful:

1. Anti-Semitism rooted in Church teaching is one of the Church’s greatest sins;

2. Anti-Semitism rooted in Church teaching in some measure contributed to the Holocaust;

3. The Jewish people are still in Covenant with and beloved of God;

4. The return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancient homeland is a moral and historic necessity that needs no justification beyond the fact that all peoples and nations are entitled to self-determination and to their own secure circumstance in their ancient homeland;

5. The Church views the State of Israel as a secular phenomenon;

6. While everyone, including the Jews, needs Christ, given all that has happened over the past 2,000 years, and given the consequences of that idea when practiced, and given that the Church has other priorities and tasks, the conversion of the Jews will have to wait. This task may in fact be God’s to fulfill in God’s own time.

This latter position places Catholicism in an important position. Regarding Judaism, Christian denominations fall into one of three general categories: supercessionists, 14 “supercessionists-but,” and non-supercessionists. Supercessionists hold that the covenant made in and through Jesus of Nazareth supercedes God’s covenant made with Israel at Sinai. For one covenant to supercede another means that the second covenant replaces the first covenant, which no longer has efficacy; thus the only way to achieve salvation is through the covenant with Christ. This is not the Catholic view.

Whereas non-supercessionists hold that both covenants have equal validity, Catholics fall into the category of “supercessionists-but,” who hold that the covenant with Christ supercedes God’s covenant with Israel but does not nullify its effectiveness for the Jews. Although Catholics believe it would be best for Jews to have a covenant with God through Christ, the covenant made with Israel at Sinai still has efficacy.

Diplomatic relations with Israel

Nevertheless, there does remain one significant source of difficulty in the relationship between the Jewish people and the State of Israel on the one hand and the Roman Catholic Church and the Vatican on the other hand. Nostra Aetate began a process of genuine repentance on the part of the Church for what its teachings and actions have done to the Jewish people. Subsequent Church documents have presented new and important attitudinal and theological changes. However, these declarations and statements have yet to mention, let alone acknowledge, the central reality of Jewish life today: namely, the return to sovereignty of the Jewish people in the ancient homeland, and the establishment of the State of Israel, the government of Israel, and a majority Jewish culture. This was a decidedly secular development grounded in a theological change with profound religious, secular, and political consequences. Israel and the Vatican established diplomatic relations during John Paul II’s papacy.

The Vatican is best known to the Catholic faithful, to the Jewish people, and to the world as a religious institution that, among other things, embodies, expresses and applies the Roman Catholic faith in relation to a myriad of contemporary issues. There are times when the Vatican and its administrative arm or government, the Curia, behaves and communicates like any government; namely in pursuit of its own interests.

This tension between the Vatican as government and the Vatican as a religious body is often confusing for Jews, especially when it comes to the Church’s relations with Israel, where the Vatican grapples with a conflict between 2,000 years of Christian teaching and contemporary reality.

For two millennia the Church taught that the Jewish people would not and could not return to the Holy Land. That was something that only believers in Jesus of Nazareth could make happen. It appears in the opinions of several bishops and cardinals that the Vatican’s diplomatic recognition of Israel could not have happened without the theological change in the Church’s attitude to Judaism and the Jewish people described 15 above. At the same time, it is easier for the Church to deal with this real and profound challenge to its theology by viewing Israel merely as a secular, democratic nation-state, a Hebrew-speaking Honduras of sorts, and as such, a state that deserves the Vatican’s recognition as much as any other secular, democratic nation-state. Yet this secular recognition of the secular, democratic State of Israel is not possible without theological change; moreover, this recognition has theological consequences.

The Roman Catholic Church has always held that the State of Israel has no religious significance, meaning that the State of Israel was not established as an expression of the Will of God or because of God’s intervention. Indeed, a majority of the Jewish people believe this as well. At the same time, the Church, in the words of a number of Catholic thinkers, theologians, bishops, and cardinals, is, in the best sense of the term, “curious” about how the Jewish people, newly restored to power, will conduct themselves after centuries of exile and powerlessness.

This complicated circumstance becomes further entangled with the reality that the Jewish people now wields sovereignty in the Holy Land, where Jesus lived and conducted his ministry, and where Christians are now a minority.

The Jewish people and the Jewish community at times did become quite concerned with John Paul II and the Vatican. After all, this very same pope met with the former Secretary General of the United Nations Kurt Waldheim, who had collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. This very same pope embraced Yasser Arafat, PLO chairman and father of its terrorist program. However, the Jewish community warmly welcomed a statement by a joint Vatican-Jewish commission that recognized anti- Zionism as a form of anti-Semitism.

While it is too soon to assess the papacy of Benedict XVI, some of his actions bode well for the future of Catholic-Jewish relations. Among them are his quick affirmation of the Church’s special relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people, and his speech on his first visit to his native homeland, Germany, at the synagogue of Cologne. The specter of a German pope at a synagogue in the very country and amongst the very people that perpetrated the destruction of European Jewry was an epoch-making moment. But there are likely to be unwelcome moments with him, too.

For example, the Vatican criticizes certain actions of the government of Israel in relation to Arab nations and the Palestinians. Still, one should never doubt the commitment of Benedict XVI and the Catholic Church to a secure and safe Israel, or to their abiding love and respect for Judaism and the Jewish people.

Understanding Catholic concerns

The Roman Catholic Church is a critical player in the Middle East, the State of Israel, 16 and the West Bank. It has institutional interests, both political and theological. In the main, American cardinals and bishops are sensitive to the American Jewish community’s concerns about their Church’s activities in the Middle East and about the Vatican’s statements. Yet when the Vatican responds to events in the Middle East and to the whole set of relationships between Israel and its neighbors, it is important for American Jewish and Israeli officials to reckon with a number of factors.

Ironically, just as the Roman Catholic Church, long a European force, ceased to wield temporal military power, the Jewish people, powerless for nearly 2,000 years, acquired power. The Church understands the devastating damage done to its spiritual life by its alliance with the power of monarchs, empire builders, and their armies. To be sure, the Roman Catholic Church is not pacifist; it views wars of self-defense as just. However it has a narrow definition of the threat that would justify self-defense. The war in Lebanon is a good example of this dilemma. The Church views with skepticism and great caution the use of military force. For the Church to justify force in a pre-emptive war, it requires a very real demonstration that there is an immediate and looming threat. This Catholic perspective comes at a time when the Jewish people have just begun to use military power as a sovereign nation-state.

The dwindling Christian population in the Holy Land is another matter of much concern to Catholics, which bears directly upon Catholic attitudes to Israel. One should never underestimate the significance of a very small Christian community to the Vatican in the very land where Jesus was born and realized his ministry. The possibility of that small Christian community withering away to the point where Christianity is a museum culture in the Holy Land is a matter of deep pain for many Christians, including the Catholic Church.

Representatives of the American Jewish community and Israeli officials face the challenge of learning to be sympathetic and active in responding to their Catholic counterparts concerning the circumstance of Israeli Christians. Israel’s Jews face the challenge of treating Arab Christians, a minority within a minority, with special sensitivity. A viable and vibrant Arab Christian community in Israel, with ties to the Vatican and to the West, is in Israel’s moral and political interest.

17 Section III: Mainline Protestantism

The definition of Protestantism can be found in its name — the embodiment of the “protest” against a single Christian church, the Roman Catholic Church. The Catholic Church until a few hundred years ago forbade its faithful from studying Christian sacred texts. The development of the printing press and the broader availability of the Christian Bible that it provided, combined with the excesses of Catholic hegemony in Europe, led to the Reformation — and the birth of Protestantism — and the affiliations of those who have been the “power elite” of America such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.

The theological, liturgical, and political positions of the multitude of Protestant churches lack the uniformity of the Catholic Church. They also have no central hierarchy, no individual religious figurehead on the local or national level, and no single address other than the coordinating body called the National Council of Churches USA. They are, however, all adherents of the “priesthood of all believers.”

There are many ways of describing the differences between Protestant denominations. Each has a unique history, place of origin, and theological framework including the role of baptism and the symbolism and use of communion. The most obvious distinctions, however, are in their structure. While there is no spiritual hierarchy for those who believe in the priesthood of all believers, there are other important distinctions in hierarchy, including whether the church has an ecclesiastical/clerical hierarchy and what body within the church has the final authority for calling a pastor to the congregational pulpit and making religious decisions.

Episcopal

Three of the largest mainline churches have episcopal structures, meaning they are organized into regions supervised by bishops. Unlike the Catholic Church, however, bishops are elected from beneath rather than appointed from above. Another distinguishing feature of the episcopal structure is a leadership group such as a house of delegates that includes other church leaders including laity. Together the house of bishops and a house of delegates or general assembly form a bicameral governance for the Church.

• The Episcopal Church USA is the American member of the Anglican Communion, which has its roots in King Henry VIII’s excommunication by the Catholic Church and subsequent creation of the Church of England. The Episcopal Church’s structure is similar to the Catholic Church, absent the pope, with bishops overseeing dioceses and a bicameral polity that includes a House of Bishops and a House of Delegates composed of priests, deacons, and lay persons. Headquarters are in New York City.

• The United Methodist Church is the largest mainline Protestant church and the third 18 largest denomination in America (after the Catholic Church and the Southern Baptist Convention). Regions called Annual Conferences are led by bishops who are empowered to call clergy to their pulpits. Headquarters are in Washington, D.C.

• The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is organized in synods, each led by a bishop and a council. The Lutheran church holds to the teachings of Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther. ELCA is affiliated with the World Lutheran Federation. Its headquarters are in Chicago, IL.

• The three largest historically black churches also fall into this category, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.

Presbyterian

Presbyterian policy and practise has its roots in the rejection of a clerical hierarchy with a bishop serving above the parish minister. John Calvin and John Knox advanced this system of church governance.

Presbyterian Church USA is organized into synods that cover larger geographic areas, and in each synod are presbyteries. The presbytery has purview over the ordination and installation of ministers, including approval of ministers who are selected by congregations. Each church sends its clergy and two, three, or four elders to serve on the presbytery based on the size of the congregation. Each presbytery, often administered by an executive presbyter, selects a stated clerk who is clergy and a moderator who is a layperson. There is no ecclesiastical hierarchy within the PCUSA and lay and clergy are considered to be co-equal. Church policy is set by a General Assembly. The PCUSA is headquartered in Louisville, Ky.

Congregationalist

Congregational churches have a structure that is most similar to ours in the Jewish community. Each congregation is independent, selecting and calling to the pulpit its own pastor.

• United Church of Christ is the result of the merger in 1957 of the Congregational Christian Church, which was central to the history of New England, and the Evangelical and Reformed Churches, which were German in origin and concentrated in the Midwest and the Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Ohio areas respectively. The UCC is deeply steeped in early American history, as the Congregational churches had their roots in the Puritan and pilgrim churches. The UCC headquarters are in Cleveland.

19 • Disciples of Christ, sometimes called the Christian Church, is a congregational denomination that grew out of the Restoration movement. Located in Indianapolis, this church shares several ministries with the United Church of Christ, including the one that deals with international concerns.

• United Church of Canada is the result of the merger of the largest blocks of the Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches in Canada.

• Baptist churches, including those that are mainline, are also Congregationalist in structure.

Another way of organizing and presenting the Protestant denominations in America has been 1 developed by Mark A. Noll . The examples in each category are illustrative, but not exhaustive:

Denominations of British background with roots in the Colonial Period. This category includes the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church, the United Church of Christ, and the United Methodist Church.

Denominations originating in Europe. This category includes the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) and other Lutheran churches.

Primarily African-American denominations with origins in the 19th century. This category includes the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the National Baptist Convention of America.

Restorationist Churches with origins primarily in the first half of the 19th century. This category includes the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and Churches of Christ.

Holiness Churches with origins in the second half of the 19th century. This category includes the Church of the Nazarene and the Salvation Army.

Pentecostal Denominations originating in the 20th century. This category includes the Assemblies of God and Churches of God in Christ.

New denominations in the 20th century arising from older British or Colonial bodies. This category includes the Baptist Bible Fellowship International and the Presbyterian Church in America.

The origins of Protestantism

What accounts for this multiplicity of mainline Protestant churches and denominations? Let’s go back to the beginning. 20 The mainline Protestant understanding and reformation of Christianity begins with Martin Luther (1484-1546). After him nothing was ever again quite the same in the Western world. Martin Luther “protested” what he saw as the corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church. He was convinced that once he pinned his 95 Theses to the door of the Roman Catholic Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on All Hallows Eve, October 31, 1517, Pope Leo X would learn the truth of the abuses committed in the name of the faith. Among other things, Luther was profoundly vexed by the sale of indulgences, which, when purchased, freed the customer from the wages of sin.

Luther’s protests, however, were unacceptable to the Church. He was excommunicated in 1521. He taught a theological principle known as the “priesthood of believers,” meaning that every Christian had direct access to God through Jesus and did not need the instrumentality of the Church or its priests. This idea was seen by the Church as an assault on the apostolic faith, meaning the Catholic faith, which derives its spiritual and religious authority from having been established by a direct grant of authority from Jesus to Peter and the Apostles.

As a result of Luther’s beliefs, his contribution went beyond theology or religious ideas, helping to prepare the way for modernity. By presenting the notion of a direct link to God through Jesus, independent of the Roman Catholic or any Church, Luther helped lay the foundation for what we know as individual autonomy.

Luther believed that human beings are so steeped in sin there is nothing they can do to earn salvation. Good works (or mitzvot in Judaism) cannot redeem a person from sin. After all, if one is sinful, what merit can the deeds of such a depraved being have in the eyes of God?

Luther held instead that salvation from sin is an unearned and unmerited gift of God, an act of Grace that could only come from the very nature of God, filled as it is with overflowing love. Believing that every Christian could have an unmediated, direct relationship with God through Jesus, Luther developed the concept of sola scriptura. This meant that scripture, the Bible alone, is the source of authority for the believing Christian. Luther translated the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament into the German vernacular, so that all could read and study them.

Thus, Luther enabled Protestants to approach the text of scripture without the mediating agencies of tradition, church teaching, prior commentaries, history, or the lives and experiences of existing Christian communities. Not surprisingly, this license stimulated much freedom in biblical interpretation and faith expression, giving birth to the splintering that characterizes Protestantism to this day.

Nowhere has this manifested itself more than in America, where mainline Protestants married the blank slate of life they had brought with them from Europe with the reality 21 that, in the New World, there were no precedents. The Protestants who came to the United States saw themselves as leaving a Europe that not only lacked religious freedom but was also corrupted with sin. In their view, the New World was the Promised Land, and would offer them the opportunity to succeed where Europe had failed.

It was aboard the flagship Arbella, in 1630, that John Winthrop — speaking to fellow Puritans fleeing England — delivered his famous sermon, which inspires mainline Protestants to this day. It reads in part:

“Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the council of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God…We shall find that the God of Israel is among us when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: The Lord make it like that of New England: for we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”

In this New World, religious groupings could organize in ways not allowed under the British monarchy. This entrepreneurial ethos, and Luther’s notion of individual autonomy in religious affairs, when combined with the reality of the New World, served as the basis for the creative entrepreneurial development of Protestant Christian denominations in America.

Two general schools

During what historians call the Great Awakening of the 1730s and the 1740s, Protestantism in the United States divided into two general schools, liberal and evangelical, which differ essentially as follows:

The evangelical Protestant believes strictly and centrally in the doctrine of original sin, which all humanity receives from the primal sin of Adam and Eve. Furthermore, if one does not have the saving and atoning power of Jesus Christ, the Christian life must focus on combating the possibility of eternal damnation in hell.

Liberal Protestantism took a different view of these issues. Liberal American Protestantism, in the 18th and 19th century, was inspired by Western notions of progress, the improvability of the human condition, the belief that, as time moves on, all people, but Christians in particular, will come to a better understanding of the mind and will of God, and that with the progress of time, humans are coming ever closer to realizing the Kingdom of God on Earth. This theological position and the essential optimism of liberal Protestants about human goodness motivates them to take liberal or progressive stances toward a variety of social, political and economic issues.

22 The following are some characteristics of the mainline Protestants denominations2:

• Middle- and upper-middle-class, based upon income, education, and communal influence; • Northwest European origins; • Dispersed rather than concentrated in any one geographic area in the United States; • Prayer settings characterized by formality, regimen, prescription and avoidance of emotional expression; • Open to a variety of biblical translations and interpretations; • Theologically, heavily influenced by the liberal Social Gospel; • High degree of institutional development within each denomination, including communication systems, educational materials, missionary work and political lobbying; • Clergy coming from interdenominational divinity schools; • Participation in ecumenical activities and the National Council of Churches; • Low levels of denominational commitment among adherents, who often move among different churches and denominations; • Significant involvement in social issues; • Commitment to education, with religious education taking place through church- based programs, such as Sunday school; • A pervasive tension between acceptance of American society and culture as given and good, and a prophetic mandate for active engagement for social change and reform; • Patronage of and identification with the Christian Century, a Chicago-based weekly magazine examining “issues of culture and politics, as well as theology, while paying attention to issues of faith arising in everyday life.”

Implications in the numbers

To understand the role of mainline Protestants in America, one must understand that these groups became used to being the “power elite” — with almost all American presidents and most congressional leaders and governors coming from their ranks. Several of these groups were wealthy, and many continue to maintain significant endowments and land holdings. However, many factors have contributed to a significant decline in membership in mainline Protestant churches over the past 40 years, and a concomitant decline in influence3:

Church Membership (in millions) 1960 1982 2005 Episcopal Church USA 3.3 2.8 1.9 Evangelical Lutheran Church in America NA 5.3 3.7 Presbyterian Church (USA) 4.2 3.2 2.4 United Church of Christ 2.3 1.7 1.3 United Methodist Church 10.6 9.4 8.2 23 It appears that the Jewish community devotes less time to cultivating its relationship with the largest of the five, the United Methodist Church, and much more time to working on its relationship with the PCUSA, the ELCA, and the Episcopalians. There are reasons for this: The PCUSA regularly presents the Jewish community with the most significant challenges. The ELCA has deep, profound German roots, and its founder, Martin Luther, made horrible statements about the Jewish people. The ELCA has done good penitential work in this area, which has brought them closer to the Jewish community. The Episcopalians, given their educational, cultural, and socio- economic status, are comparable to many Jews. There are also close relationships with many Congregational churches (UCC) due to the similarity of structure and geographical proximity in many areas.

There are many reasons for the overall decline of the mainline Protestant denominations and specific reasons for each denomination’s circumstances. Perhaps the shortest and most comprehensive assessment of the mainline and each of its denominations is found in “America’s Religions: From Their Origins to the 20th Century” by Peter W. Williams.

Williams cites the following reasons for the decline4: • The mainline has a very low birthrate due to high levels of education, income, and social class. • The mainline is seen as lacking spiritual vitality. • As Williams has written, “The effervescence of individual spiritual experience and of community achieved in worship seemed to have yielded to the proliferation of bureaucratic structures and the special purpose organizations which sociologist Robert Wuthnow has identified as one of the most important characteristics of what he has called the ‘restructuring’ of American religion since World War II.” Thus the needs once met exclusively by the Church now are met by a variety of other nonprofit, advocacy, political, self-help, relief, journalistic, and social welfare organizations.

Among the foremost scholars of contemporary mainline Protestantism are Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney. In their book, “American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future,” they set forth the following new trends in American religious life, each having negative consequences for the mainline5:

1. The privileged mainline Protestants have fallen upon hard times and no longer enjoy the influence and power they once had. 2. Conservative Protestants are flourishing and are now much more culture- affirming than they used to be. 3. Roman Catholic leadership has assumed a new position in the center and is articulating a social vision to its constituency and the public at large.

24 4. Secular humanism is identified as a growing and hostile force in relation to traditional religion and morality.

Two mainline Protestant observers, Balmer and Winner, measure the decline by three additional indices: membership, church attendance, and giving. They explain why mainline Protestantism, which claimed to represent the middle-class aspiration to the American way of life, has declined so much since the mid-20th century. They point out that the problem began with the very establishment of the National Council of Churches in 19506.

The National Council of Churches was founded to promote interdenominational cooperation for the sake of Christian unity. While the founders were following John 17, in which Jesus expressed the hope that his followers “may all be one,” this ecumenical movement sought to erase the “creative divisiveness” so characteristic of mainline Protestant vitality — namely, the ability of any individual or group of individuals to develop new denominations, churches, liturgies, and expressions of faith.

This ecumenical effort led to inter-communion, which signaled a theological disaster. In the name of unity, they reduced their theologically distinctive faith affirmations to the lowest common denominators: peace, justice, and inclusiveness. Thus mainline Protestants came to place ever more emphasis on inclusivity rather than on salvation.

Furthermore, mainline Protestants embraced the Social Gospel, which held that religious people ought to work at redeeming not only individuals but also social and political institutions. This was at a time when white America was fleeing the cities for the suburbs, where many mainline Protestant churches failed to follow their members. The Evangelicals quickly understood the trend, and sought to serve the new arrivals.

Finally, because of the ecumenical movement, the mainline Protestant “customer” no longer could recognize the distinctive features and benefits of the denominational religious “product.” By the 1980s, the ecumenical movement had blurred many of the differences between Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Episcopalian doctrine and praxis. At the same time, Evangelicals were offering an intense religious experience, a presence in the suburbs, and a well-defined religious product.

The impact of the culture of dissent on foreign policy views

In general, mainline Protestants have an excellent relationship with Judaism, the religion of the Jewish people; but they have a complex and problematic relationship with the Jewish people and their national character as expressed and realized in Zionism and the State of Israel. Each denomination has good and admirable statements that condemn anti-Semitism, pray for forgiveness for the sin of having brought much suffering to the Jewish people over the centuries, affirm that Israel and the Jewish people are in effective covenant with God, and renounce the mission to the Jews. So 25 why are mainline Protestants so critical of the State of Israel and supportive of the Palestinian position, causing so much discussion and anger in the Jewish community?

It is helpful first to understand mainline Protestants as they understand themselves, especially in regard to their role in dissent against American foreign policy and in the human rights movement. As Lester Kurtz has written, “Mainline Protestantism provides an institutional infrastructure for dissent that has no rival on the contemporary American political scene.7”

He notes that while a variety of advocacy efforts are centered in labor unions, universities, and interest groups, it is primarily in the mainline Protestant churches that persistent voices against American foreign policy are heard. It is from the churches that the resources flow which facilitate dissent. He notes that mainline Protestant churches have been effective in expressing dissent because historically they have “been the U.S. political mainstream, and are thus viewed as insiders.8”

Furthermore, as Allan Hertzke wrote, “If domestic social policy constitutes the major priority and the principal success of the fundamentalist groups, foreign policy is a major focus of the liberal groups and represents their greatest effectiveness in galvanizing constituents into action.9”

Seeing themselves as insiders, mainline Protestants view American foreign policy as their foreign policy, and hence theirs to critique. Also, because the domestic religious agenda has come to be dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and the Evangelical Christian community, the mainline Protestant community, which was dominant in the 1950s and 60s in the civil rights movement, now finds itself with foreign affairs as the only arena in which to express its religo-moral stance.

Yet mainline Protestants also see themselves as the very bedrock of American culture. The colonies, the Founding Fathers and the very system of government they constructed, and nascent American society, were founded on and by mainline Protestantism. It was mainline Protestants who established America’s libraries, museums, hospitals, universities, corporations, and industries, and they continue to supply a disproportionate number of the leaders of those institutions. American civilization is the creation of Protestant Christianity, which has always been ambivalent about the use of force and its own political power.

Thus, as Kurtz and Fulton note, mainline Protestant Christianity confronts a paradox: it is a central pillar of American culture and a fundamental advocate of the system, yet it likes to play a prophetic role, deviating markedly from the dominant realpolitik political culture. Or to put it more colloquially, on the one hand mainline Protestants want to run the country, while on the other hand they want to criticize those who do in fact run the country. 26 The stance toward Israel

While it is not clear that the five largest mainline Protestant denominations celebrate the return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in the ancient homeland of Israel, nevertheless they all affirm the right of Israel to exist within secure, recognized, and just boundaries, which they see as the June 5, 1967, borders established by the Armistice of 1949. At the same time, mainline denominations, especially Presbyterians and Lutherans, present histories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict clearly stating that the establishment of the State of Israel was an act of injustice to the indigenous Palestinian population.

Each mainline Protestant denomination has staff and missions working in and traveling to the West Bank and Gaza, lay and clerical workers who witness the real suffering of the Palestinian people. From their perspective, the continuation of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict has one root cause, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, which began with Israel’s victory in the 1967 war. It is primarily in witness against that occupation and in witness to that suffering that mainline Protestants condemn Israel.

Liberation theology with a twist

Lately, the desire to give voice to the suffering of the Palestinian people has taken an ominous turn. Since the early 1990s pro-Palestinian activists in mainline Protestant churches and in some of their national structures have developed a partnership with the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, established by the Reverend Naim Ateek and based in Jerusalem.

With the help and sponsorship of Sabeel, some Palestinian Protestant clergy have gained an audience in North American churches. As its name notes, Sabeel is committed to the application of liberation theology to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Liberation theology has its roots in Latin America in the 1960s. Led by Roman Catholic clergy and inspired by the Second Vatican Council, it is often cited as a form of Christian socialism. In essence, liberation theology explores the relationship between Christian theology and political activism, particularly in areas of social justice and human rights. This theology focuses on Jesus as liberator. Emphasis is placed on those parts of the Bible where Jesus’s mission is described in terms of liberation, as an advocate of justice. A number of liberation theologians add Marxist concepts such as the doctrine of perpetual class struggle.

The main methodological innovation of liberation theology is to do theology, i.e., speak of God, from the viewpoint of the economically poor and oppressed of the human community. According to liberation theologian Jon Sobrino S.J., the poor are a privileged channel of God’s grace. Phillip Berryman, another scholar on the subject, 27 said that liberation theology is “an interpretation of Christian faith through the poor’s suffering, their struggle and hope, and a critique of society and Christianity through the eyes of the poor.”

Classical liberation theology espouses the belief that God is with the oppressed. Palestinian liberation theology casts Palestinians as the oppressed and Israel as the oppressor:

Christ is not in the tanks and jet fighters, fighting on the side of the oppressors [Israel]… God is in the city of Gaza, in the Jenin camp and in the old city of Nablus, Ramallah, and Bethlehem suffering with the oppressed10.

The Palestinian Liberation Theology movement defines itself as:

An ecumenical grassroots movement, rooted in solid Christian biblical interpretation and nourished by the hopes, dreams, and struggles of the Palestinian people… this theology seeks to provide a holistic vision of God’s redeeming activity in the midst of the current reality faced by the Christian community of Palestine and Israel. In a situation where justice has been long neglected, Palestinian Liberation Theology opens new horizons of understanding for the pursuit of a just peace and for the reconciliation proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ11.

Liberation theology was developed in Central America as a religious response to a situation in which powerless, unarmed peasants were being tyrannized by powerful, armed governmental elites, in struggles that were black and white, with good and evil clearly defined. That is the way its advocates present the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But in the words of the president of one mainline Protestant theological seminary, “To apply liberation theology to the Israel-Palestinian conflict is to engage in Manichean politics.”

In making its case, the Sabeel Institute has created a new expression of Christian theological anti-Semitism. With references to “the Israeli crucifixion machine” and other highly charged deicide analogies used to criticize Israel, Sabeel transfers wholesale the classic Christian teaching of contempt for Judaism and the Jewish People, to Zionism, to the State of Israel, and to the Jewish community and people who support the State of Israel.

The essential elements of the adversus Judaeos tradition, when transferred to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, transform a real, “this-worldly” conflict, which must be resolved at the negotiating table, into the continuation of the 2,000-year-old Christian assault on Judaism. Sabeel regularly portrays the government of Israel and Israel society as embodying the same evils as Herod, Caiaphus, and Pilate. In this view, the Palestinians are the new Christ, and the Jewish state continues to play the same crucifying role the Jews played 2,000 years ago.

28 Other factors shaping mainline Protestant attitudes

While it is important to avoid seeing mainline Protestant animosity toward Israel as universal or inevitable, a number of factors contribute to a negative posture toward Israel within mainline Protestant churches:

1. With the exception of the Lutherans, they have not undergone the same process as Catholics have undergone in examining their own history of anti-Semitism. Except for the Lutherans, mainline Protestant denominations do not have a European antecedent that contributed significantly to the oppression of the Jewish people. Thus, they have not acquired the same sense of responsibility for the fate and welfare of the Jewish people that Catholics have acquired. They have not integrated and comprehended the need of the Jewish people for sovereignty in a nation state. 2. Unlike the Catholic Church, they lack a significant attachment to ethnic national identity, so there is far less understanding of the Jewish people’s needs for a nation-state. This is of course paradoxical, since they advocate, in the most strenuous language, the need of a Palestinian state for a Palestinian people. 3. They see themselves as “called upon” to oppose American foreign policy, which they often view as colonial and imperial. They view support of Israel as an extension of that imperial foreign policy. According to one report, the mainline Protestant community has devoted more than a third of its criticism for human rights violations in the past several years to the State of Israel. 4. They have, for a long time, leaned politically to the left. Thus, Palestinian violence is often dismissed as the justifiable and understandable behavior of an oppressed people, and the Israeli use of physical force is viewed as imperialistic. 5. They believe that by definition, those who are suffering have moral superiority. The Palestinians are suffering. 6. They have a complex relationship with power, beginning with the fact that they created American power; projected it to Africa and Asia; and did so not just through the medium of diplomacy, military power, and commerce, but through missionary work as well. For mainline Protestants power is either essentially evil or leans to sinfulness. Therefore, the powerless are by definition innocent and not subject to moral scrutiny. Those who have power are by definition suspect. 7. Mainline Protestants continue to hold on to a 19th-century, West European Enlightenment notion that proposed a quid pro quo to the Jewish people: We will fully accept you, even in marriage to our family members, as long as you give up your claim to distinctiveness. The universalism of mainline Protestants has little if any room for continued Jewish distinctiveness, especially of a national nature. 8. They have a theological problem with the return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancient homeland. Many mainline Protestants believe that Israel is a name and a religious category that is spiritual in nature. Everything that is good and new comes through Christ: There is the incomplete Old Testament, 29 and then there is the complete and fulfilled New Testament and New Covenant for the New Israel. Although the Jewish people remain in covenant with God, the promise of land is generally not understood to be part of the covenant. Israel is no longer a specific nation that lives upon a specific land. Israel is the believers in Christ, and now that all can come to the One God through Christ, there is no chosen people. All who come to Christ are the new Israel; because there is no longer a specific chosen people there need not be, nor is there, a specific chosen land. Whatever people in whatever land come to Christ are in fact holy. The Promised Land is life on this earth, with no boundaries, or eternal life for those who are “in Christ.” Mainline Protestants see the establishment of the State of Israel as a theological challenge because they approach the New Testament Sola Scriptura. They often experience the Jewish people today as described in the first century, and experience the presence of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel through the texts of the New Testament. As such, with the coming of Jesus, that portion of the Old Covenant made with Avraham to give his children the Land is now at an end. 9. They must also contend with another group of Protestants, the Evangelicals, whose understanding of Israel is diametrically opposed to theirs. Israel figures prominently in the Evangelical imagination, as will be described in the section on Evangelical Christianity. The mainline Protestants are hemorrhaging membership to the Evangelicals; thus, mainline Protestantism’s major competition for the hearts and minds of Christians and unchurched Americans is with Evangelicals, who are so very supportive of Israel. 10. There is a profound disdain for Evangelical Christians, to whom political power, numbers and wealth have transferred in this country. Arguably, mainline Protestants’ criticism of Israel is a displacement of the disdain they feel for Evangelical Christians and the Christian Zionism that they embrace. 11. Unlike Armenians, Roman Catholics, and the Eastern Orthodox, mainline Protestants, with the exception of the questionable Garden Tomb, claim no specific New Testament site in the Land of Israel. For mainline Protestants, access to the reality of the Holy Land comes in the suffering Christ-like body of Palestinians. There is a deep and abiding concern for the situation of Christians in the place they consider the Holy Land. Palestinian Christians are viewed as co- religionists, and not as part of a broader Arab or Muslim world. Their suffering is believed to be the fault of Israel. By and large, mainline Protestants reject or minimize assertions that Palestinians or Muslims bear significant culpability in their plight.

Divestment

Divestment is a recent symptom of ideas and circumstances described above. The General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) resolved in July 2004 to begin a process of studying selective, phased divestment from companies that do business in 30 Israel to advance Presbyterian goals. From the Jewish community’s point of view, the divestment movement is an attempt to isolate and demonize the State of Israel, and reflects a view of the conflict as one between an utterly powerful Israel and an utterly powerless Palestinian people, a conflict in which there is all good on one side and all evil on the other.

The conflict between the American Jewish community and the PCUSA over divestment has demonstrated that in each of the five mainline Protestant denominations, the American Jewish community and Israeli officials face four different audiences: the staff of the denomination’s national structure, the key activists on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the local clergy, and the church membership. The former two are rather small in number, and are the key people who have taken significantly anti-Israel positions. The latter two are a vital audience who in the main are more positively inclined towards Israel. The consequences of this for American Jewish and Israeli officials are obvious. Each and every local American Jewish community needs to begin to develop ever more effective relationships with its neighbors, the local Protestant clergy, and the Christians in the pews. Furthermore, work in any given Jewish community, with any given Protestant church or metropolitan Church structure, requires a high degree of information gathering and understanding before arriving at any conclusions.

1 Mark A. Noll, American Evangleical Christianity An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), 31 – 32. 2 Peter W. Williams, America’s Religions from their Origins to the Twenty-First Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 356 – 357. 3 Eileen W. Lindner, ed., Yearbook of American &Canadian Churches 2006 Postmodern Christianity: Emergent Church and Blogs (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2006), 9 –14. 4 Williams, 355 – 375. 5 Wade Clark Roof and William McKinney, American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 4. 6 Randall Balmer and Lauren F. Winner, Protestantism in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 32 – 33. 7 Lester Kurtz and Kelly Goran Fulton, “Love Your Enemies? Protestants United States Foreign Policy,” in The Quiet Hand of God, ed. Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans (Berkely: University of CaliforniaPress, 2002), 364. 8 Kurtz, “Love Your Enemies?,” 364. 9 Kurtz, “Love Your Enemies?,” 364. 10 Ateek, Cornerstone, Sabeel’s newsletter, summer 2002. 11 Briefing Materials on Christianity 31 Section IV: Evangelical Christianity

Viewed by some Jews as friends, by others as foes, the one thing certain is that Evangelical Christians pose a great conundrum for American Jews.

“Evangelical Christian” is a term that is at once descriptive and deceptive. It is descriptive both because these are Christians who believe in the calling to spread the “good news” of the New Testament and because it is the preferred term of this segment of Americans, which is rapidly growing, both in numbers and influence. It is deceptive because many Christians across the spectrum, including those in mainline Protestant denominations, can be described as Evangelical—and because Evangelicals include several often overlapping groupings, including Fundamentalist, Charismatic, and Pentecostal Christians. The sheer growth and enormous diversity of all that is Evangelical Christianity presents particular challenges to anyone who would attempt to understand them, let alone explain them to others. Adding to this already significant degree of difficulty is the fact that the Jewish community has so very little experience with Evangelicals. My colleague Jay Tcath, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, has rightly observed that by and large, where there are large Jewish communities, such as the West Coast and the Northeast, there are relatively small Evangelical communities. And where there are small or no Jewish communities, there are often very large Evangelical communities, such as the rural areas of America, the South, and the Southwest.

It is best to understand another faith system in the words of its practitioners and believers. The pre-eminent historian of American Christianity, himself a pious Evangelical Christian, Professor Mark Noll, writes:

“Evangelicalism at its best is an offensive religion. It claims that human beings cannot be reconciled to God, understand the ultimate purposes of the world, or live in a virtuous life unless they confess their sin before the living God and receive new life in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. Such particularity has always been offensive, and in our multicultural, post-modern world it is more offensive than ever1.”

This statement is at the heart of the challenge for American Jews and Israelis who want to understand Evangelical Christianity.

Many Americans see Evangelicals as coming from a lower socio-economic class, having less education, being less cultured, and subscribing to a form of Christianity that is anti-modern, unprogressive, and conservative. This impression, however, is not accurate. The popular media play a critical role in shaping American attitudes and impressions about Evangelicals, and for many Americans, the face of Evangelical Christianity is that of people such as the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, 32 and Gary Bauer. And so, at the outset it should be made clear that this essay is not about the Christian Right; it is about Evangelical Christianity.

In the main, most of those who identify with the Christian Right are Evangelicals, but not all Evangelicals identify with the Christian Right. “Christian Right” is a political activism term, whereas “Evangelical” describes a faith affirmation. Too often, the media and the public use those terms interchangeably, but vast numbers of Evangelicals do not identify with the political activism of the Christian right.

In fact, it is useful to remember that Evangelical Christianity dominated religious life in American from the Colonial period until the Civil War, followed by the ascendancy of mainline Protestantism from the Civil War to World War II. Then, in the wake of the 1960s, mainline Protestants pursued the so-called Social Gospel, and, as outlined in the section on mainline Protestantism, in the last 30 years their membership has declined from 40 million to 20 million. Meanwhile, Evangelical Christianity is growing, with approximately 52.5 million adult American adherents, or 25 percent of the adult population in America.

Evangelical Christians do not necessarily belong to a denomination. Some denominations are decidedly Evangelical, such as the Southern Baptist Convention (the second-largest in America) and Assemblies of God (one of the largest Pentecostal denominations), but Evangelical Christians can be found in many of the mainline Protestant denominations, where they often occupy a somewhat challenging status. Very often, though, Evangelicals belong to congregations that are independent or only loosely connected with a national movement. In all cases, though, Evangelical Christianity as experienced in America is much more decentralized than the mainline churches. The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) is an increasingly important coordinating body, serving as a contrast to the mainline Protestants’ National Council of Churches (USA), in reaction to which the NAE was formed.

On important social positions, Evangelicals generally hold a set of positions that are different from those held by the majority, but not all of American Jews. Some of the core social positions of Evangelicals are these: homosexuality is a sin; there should be no absolute right to abortion; government aid to religious schools and “moments of silence” in the public schools are desirable, though not for the purpose of worship or religious instruction.

Given this Christian denominational history, the terror war launched against Israel in 2000 has created a paradox for the American Jewish community. The mainline Protestants, with whom Jews are most comfortable by virtue of social, political, economic, and educational status, as well as many shared positions on domestic issues, have often turned out to be Israel’s most ardent critics. The Evangelicals, with whom most American Jews do not share a common set of social, political, and cultural views, 33 have turned out to be Israel’s best friends. Some American Jews find this paradox embarrassing. Most find it confusing.

Evangelicals: A Description

There is something in Jewish experience that can aid in understanding the Evangelical experience. Hasidism, which emerged in the mid-18th century as a popular mysticism that promised to every Jew what heretofore had been the exclusive domain of the elite, is analogous to Evangelical Christianity. Hasidism, which held that every Jew could have direct experience of the presence of the One God, came as a rebellion against the formalism of rabbinic scholarly high culture, thus fulfilling a deep longing for the essence of Judaism. Hasidism is taught through stories of the Hasidic masters, stories that are sacred scripture in and of themselves because of the emphasis that Hasidism places on the individual’s experience. Religious movements that place an emphasis on the personal rather than the familial or the collective experience require the testimony of personal experience to transmit their teachings. The story is the medium for that individual experience.

Evangelical Christianity, which broke from the religious formalism of the Lutheran state churches of Germany, has its roots in Europe, in England, and in late 17th-century Colonial America. Like Hasidism, Evangelical Christianity seeks to broaden and deepen the individual’s experience.

The personal story is central in Evangelical Christianity, and Evangelical Christianity is intensely personal. As Mark A. Noll notes, “Most of Evangelicalism’s early hymn writers wrote of what they had personally experienced, as did John Newton, the slave trader become Anglican priest, who wrote the lyrics: ‘Amazing grace! How sweet the sound/that saved a wretch like me/I once was lost, but now am found/was blind, but now I see.’” In addition to emphasizing direct and immediate personal experience of the saving grace of Christ, the hymn expresses the importance of unmerited grace and its ready accessibility to one who is prepared to accept the truth of Christianity.

Evangelical Christianity, with its roots in in the Colonial period, is a uniquely American form of Christianity. American Protestantism in the early 18th century held two opposing positions about the nature of humanity and the Christian faith. One position, the source of liberal Protestantism in America, held that there is a benevolent God who would ultimately grant everyone salvation. The other position, the source of Evangelical Christianity, held that humanity is characterized by depravity and original sin, and that without a radical, personal conversionary experience, one could not be saved. Thus, the two faiths are separated by their opposite positions on the doctrines of original sin, eternal damnation, and the role of biblical inspiration.

Evangelical Christianity holds that the human condition is sinful, and therefore, in need 34 of God’s unmerited grace, salvation, and cleansing from sin. The liberal Protestant, on the other hand, subscribes to Enlightenment notions about the positive nature of reason and the human condition, believing that as human beings advance, they will inexorably come to a better knowledge of God. As a consequence, liberal Protestantism holds that humanity is moving closer to making the Kingdom of Heaven a reality on earth, in which peace, justice, and truth will prevail.

The word Evangelical comes from the Greek, Evangelion, which simply means “Good News.” This refers to the good news, or the gospel, of the New Testament. The term Evangelical itself has many usages and applications. All Christianity is, to some degree, concerned with evangelism. The following is Mark Noll’s classification in his basic work American Evangelical Christianity: An Introduction:

Evangelical Protestants: People who are affiliated with the following churches: Adventist, Alliance, Baptist, Brethren, Church of Christ, Church of God, Mennonite; who identified their denomination as charismatic, evangelical, fundamentalist, holiness, Pentecostal; or who offered an indeterminate answer to the question of religious affiliation but who could be placed with these churches through other means.

In addition, Evangelicals are found in each of the mainline Protestant churches. One of the best summaries of the basic features of Evangelical Christianity comes to us from the British historian David Bebbington. He has identified the key features of Evangelicalism as:

Conversionism—an emphasis on the new birth, the self-conversionary experience as a life-changing experience of God, as it says in John 3:3: Jesus answered, “And very truly I tell you, no one can see the Kingdom of God without being born from above.”

Biblicism—a strict reliance on the Bible (the Hebrew and Christian Testaments) as the sole, ultimate religious authority. This is a legacy of Martin Luther’s Sola Scriptura—“by and through Scripture alone”—which declared that the Bible alone, not Church teaching, doctrine, or experience, is the source of religious authority. The consequence of this approach to the Bible is twofold. Absent an interpretive tradition or authoritative Church teaching, the Evangelical approaches the text without the mediation of Christian tradition or history. This results in literalism. It also establishes the individual as an authoritative reader of the Bible. This is one of the factors that has led to a high degree of denominationalism within American Protestantism.

Activism—a commitment to bringing the “Good News” to others so that they will accept Christ and be saved.

35 Crucicentrism—the focus on Christ’s redeeming sacrifice on the Cross, his suffering and death for the sins of humanity as the only way of salvation.

Among the factors that characterize Evangelical Christianity are the lack of a central Church hierarchy and governance body; an emphasis on individual experience; decentralization; no fixed, common document that sets forth dogma; and a high degree of application of faith to emerging circumstances. Here are other elements that are found among some Evangelical Christianity, but are not defining characteristics. Each is sufficient, but not necessary:

• Fundamentalism. Fundamentalists essentially reject modernity. While all Christian fundamentalists can be considered Evangelical, not all Evangelicals are fundamentalist. The essential difference between Evangelicals and fundamentalists can be described by analogy to the relationship in the Jewish community between the Modern Orthodox and the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox. Both Orthodox groups have the same set of theological beliefs and religious commitments; they differ only on the degree to which one should or should not be involved with modernity, Western civilization, and the host culture. Many Evangelicals believe in engagement with the host culture and modernity; those who are fundamentalist do not. Often the terms are used imprecisely.

• Physical experience. Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians emphasize personal religious experience, including baptism in water. For Pentecostals, this transformative experience is often accompanied by speaking in tongues. Charismatics and Pentecostals also pursue divine healing, exuberant worship, and being “slain in the spirit” (falling down in a semi-conscious state). What differentiates them is that for classical Pentecostals, speaking in tongues is viewed as the initial sign of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, whereas Charismatics believe that Christians receive the Holy Spirit at their conversion or water baptism, but that the spirit can become specially active in their lives if they seek His further blessing.

• Political conservativism. Perhaps one of the most significant religious phenomena of the second half of the 20th century is the marriage of Evangelical Christianity with politics. Many Evangelical Christians, from their reading of scripture, arrive at politically conservative positions on many social issues, and political conservatives constitute the majority among Evangelicals. Often they view society as afflicted with moral decay. They see themselves in a “culture war” over issues that include feminism, homosexuality, and the place of religion in society and public life. Yet many Evangelicals bring from their text a socially liberal agenda, embracing a social justice agenda that includes government programs to help the poor, the infirm, and the elderly as well as individual liberties and civil rights protections for minorities.

36 Evangelicals and Israel

When it comes to Israel, most Evangelicals believe that the covenants and biblical promises made in the Torah, to the Patriarchs and Matriarchs and to the Jewish people, continue and are intimately bound up with, and realized in, contemporary Jewry and the State of Israel. For some, the connection between faith and Israel begins and ends with the promise of land, and the “call to action” that comes after it, that God will bless those who bless Israel. For others, there are notions of the End of Days and the return of Jews to the Promised Land. This distinction is critical and requires some explanation.

The rise of modernity causes reactions among all religious people and groups, with some becoming less faithful and others becoming ever more intense and protective of their faith commitments.

In England in the 1830s, because of dissatisfaction with the Anglican Church’s accommodations to modernity, John Nelson Darby left the Anglican priesthood and began meeting with three other colleagues. This scripture study group developed into what became known as the Plymouth Brethren. Led by Darby, the Plymouth Brethren developed a concept called “dispensational pre-millennialism,” a term whose explanation is found at the beginning of Christian history.

The early Christians believed that Jesus’s return was imminent. After the first several centuries, when he didn’t return, it was decided that the Second Coming would take place in the distant future, at the end of time. Consequently, this belief in the Second Coming receded into the background of Christian faith. Darby changed all that. He asserted that, due to the unfaithfulness of the Church, Jesus had to come sooner rather than later. Sinful humanity could not wait; Jesus was needed now. Darby asserted that the Millennium, which means the Kingdom of Heaven on earth, would soon come to be and that it would be preceded, not followed, by the Second Coming of Jesus — hence the term “pre-millennialism.”

Darby divided all of history into periods or eras, which he called “dispensations.” In an earlier dispensation God’s Covenant was with Israel, but Israel was sinful. In Darby’s view, the earthly people—Israel, the Jewish people—delayed the Second Coming of Jesus by rejecting him. Therefore, in another dispensation, known as the “Church Age,” God’s Covenant was with the Christians. But Darby held that since it was now the Christians who were sinful, a new era or dispensation would begin, in which God’s Covenant would be with the Jewish people, whose return to the Land of Israel is a necessary precondition for the Second Coming and the Millennium. The Second Coming would precede the Millennium. It was all about to happen now.

According to Darby, in the current dispensation (the 19th century, prior to the Second Coming), those who have been faithful will ascend to Heaven in an event known as 37 “the Rapture.” And that will be followed by “the Tribulation,” in which those who have been “left behind” will suffer terribly during the reign of the anti-Christ. During the period of Tribulation many Jews will convert to Christianity. Then, when Jesus returns he will reign as Messiah over the Jewish people and the Temple, the Priesthood, and the sacrifices will be restored. This will then be followed by a battle at Har (Mount) Meggido (Armageddon) in the north of Israel, at which point Jesus will defeat the anti- Christ and establish the Millennial Kingdom — one thousand years of peace, prosperity, and holiness on earth. At the end of the thousandth year Satan will be defeated, the dead will be resurrected and judged, and “a new Heaven and a new Earth” will ensue (see Revelation 21:1).

Darby’s religious ideology came to the United States after the Civil War, and he died in 1882. The First Zionist Congress took place in 1897. The Balfour Declaration was proclaimed in 1917. The State of Israel was established in 1948. Jerusalem was re- united in 1967. It is not difficult to see why many Evangelicals believe that Darby’s theology, or “prophecy,” is correct, and has been proven so by events. Today the term Christian Zionist is sometimes used to refer to those who hold this view.

Using the broadest definition, white Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of the American adult population. This means that about 52.5 million white adult Americans are Evangelicals. Using data provided by the Pew Center and others, it is estimated that 33 million Evangelicals are influenced by biblical prophecy about Israel, though most of them are not “pre-millennial dispensationalists”;” 16.5 million Evangelicals are strongly influenced by biblical prophecy on Israel; and other survey data suggest that hardcore dispensationalists are roughly 10 percent of all white Evangelicals, or approximately 5 million adult Americans. (This data and analysis was given to me in a personal communication from Professor John Green, director, Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.)

Thus, we can see that Darby’s theology of dispensational pre-millennialism has a political and cultural impact on the attitudes of politically active Evangelical Christians, not just on those who are hardcore dispensationalists. It inspires them to view the return of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, and the aliyah (immigration to Israel) of more than a million Jews from the former Soviet Union to the Land of Israel as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Those events inspire them to believe that something of ultimate religious importance is about to happen. They are a sign that the Jews remain God’s chosen people.

Another way of understanding this comes from a prominent Evangelical commentator and journalist, David Neff, editor of Christianity Today. A significant majority of Evangelicals, even though they do not engage in the literal application of biblical prophecy to contemporary situations and are not orthodox pre-millennial dispensationalists, believe that the biblical promise of land is realized in the modern State of Israel. Furthermore, 38 geopolitical realities deepen their support for Israel, a nation that they believe shares their democratic values and stands against regimes they find abhorrent. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Evangelicals come to their support of Israel based on a literal, plain reading of the covenant made with Abraham in B’reisheet-Genesis 15. All these Evangelical Christians may also be considered “Christian Zionists.”

In the 1970s there emerged a growing consensus among Evangelicals that Israel in the Hebrew Bible refers to the Jewish people and that the modern State of Israel is a fulfillment of the promise made by God to Abraham. These Evangelicals do not have a systematic or detailed theological understanding of the return of the Jewish people to sovereignty in Israel. They are possessed of a biblically inspired sense of empathy with Israel. Indeed the drama of the Jewish people in the 20th century — the destruction of European Jewry, the in-gathering of the exiles, the establishment of sovereignty in the ancient Jewish homeland, the day-to-day reality of the State of Israel, the liberation of Soviet Jewry — figures prominently in the Evangelical imagination.

Relations between Evangelicals and the Jewish community

While many Evangelical Christians are strong supporters of Israel they present a dilemma for some in the Jewish community. It is only within the world of Evangelical Christianity that one today finds institutions and individuals who actively work to convert Jews, vigorously and clearly asserting that without Christ there cannot be salvation, redemption, or cleansing from sin.

In this regard, it is important to take note of the Luasanne Covenant, developed in 1974 at a conference attended by Evangelical Christian leaders from 150 countries. At this meeting the Luasanne Committee for World Evangelization was established. The Luasanne Covenant charges churches and Christian organizations to work together to make Jesus Christ known throughout the world. The Luasanne Covenant website also carries with it a link entitled “LC: For Jewish Evangelism.” It has no such readily identifiable link for Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus.

At the risk of oversimplification, one can describe a paradox. On the one hand, Evangelicals are great supporters of Jewish national identity as expressed in Zionism and as realized in the State of Israel; but because they feel they must actively evangelize their Christian faith, they are our “enemies” in the matter of the religion of the Jewish people, Judaism. Conversely, most mainline Protestants are hardly friends of Israel as the expression of Jewish national identity; but they are friendly to the religion of the Jewish people, Judaism, by virtue of the fact that they have renounced and generally do not practice the “Mission” to the Jews.

At the same time, one should not assume that Evangelical support for Israel is unconditional and unwavering. A growing number of Evangelical Christians are 39 increasingly concerned about the plight of Palestinians, especially Palestinian Christians. For example, a group called Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, which from time to time has enjoyed the support of the spiritual leader of the Lausanne Covenant, John Stott, expresses a significant bias against Israel.

While many Evangelicals use biblical literalism and the belief in the immediacy of prophecy to assert that we are now witnessing the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, some Evangelicals, like the author Mark Harlan, use this same methodology to draw different conclusions. Harlan refers to the text of the Torah and the Prophets, to assert that if ancient Israel does not keep the Covenant and pursue the ways of justice, Israel will be exiled from the Land. He readily applies those First Temple-era words (8th-7th centuries BCE) to the modern State of Israel and the plight of the Palestinians. He argues that the Evangelical must be faithful not just to the literal reading of Genesis and the Book of Revelation, but also to the literal immediacy of God’s warnings to the Jewish people in the First Temple period, namely, that if they do not pursue justice, they will be exiled.

There is another small but growing Evangelical voice that dissents from the Evangelical Christian community’s generally unquestioning support for Israel’s practices and policies. It comes from some of the most important thinkers and preachers in the Evangelical world. Essentially, they break down into two schools of thought.

One group emerges in response to that form of Christian Zionism which is based upon pre-millennial dispensationalism. This group includes Evangelicals who are friends of Israel, but do not believe that the State of Israel is the harbinger of a fairly immediate Second Coming. Among the prominent Evangelical preachers and thinkers who profoundly disagree with Christian Zionism are the Reverend Tony Campolo and the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, the Reverend Richard Mouw.

The second group includes Evangelical intellectuals and scholars who are friends of Israel and have positive relationships with the Jewish people, but who believe it is neither in Israel’s interest nor in the interest of Evangelical Christianity to unquestioningly support the government of Israel and to fail to assign some responsibility to Israel for the suffering of Palestinians. In the words of Gerald McDermott, while “most fundamentalists still endorse the Zionist project and see it as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, they are more divided than ever. The conflict with the Palestinians has caused many Evangelicals to question the justice of Israel’s position.”

Christian theology and Jewish reality

It is important to point out to Christian groups that, unlike most Christians, the Jewish people today see their situation and that of the State of Israel outside the realm of theology. For a significant majority of Jews the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel have no theological significance. Rather, Zionism and the State of 40 Israel are a grand, urgent and necessary humanitarian, national, historic project, by which to secure the material welfare and the cultural uniqueness of the Jewish people. In other words, what most Christians “theologize” we the Jewish people do not.

Most Christians view the Jewish return to the Land of Israel in a religious framework. Mainline Protestants and Catholics, in the main, rejected the Zionist movement and the establishment of the State of Israel for theological reasons. They both held that the exile, and hence its continuity and endurance, was testimony to the sinfulness of Israel for having rejected the Christ. Furthermore, they both held that the Covenant made by God, making a grant of the Land of Israel to the children of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, was superceded by the Covenant made through Christ. They both spiritualized Israel; that is to say, until the Christ, Israel was a specific nation of people born of family in the flesh of Abraham and Sarah, who at Sinai entered into a Covenant with God that Israel, because of its unfaithfulness, broke. God then made a new Covenant with a new Israel. “Israel,” then, meant anyone who had accepted Christ. “Israel” was no longer a term referring to a family or nation in the flesh, but rather to a spiritual family. Israel was no longer the nation descended from Abraham and Sarah, but anyone who is a believer in Christ. Therefore, the earthly Israel can never return to the earthly Land of Israel.

The Catholics and many in the mainline Protestant community have, since 1967, altered their thinking on this. To most of them, the rationale for the existence of a modern State of Israel is based on modern realities, including the security of Jews in the post-Holocaust era.

Many Evangelicals, especially those who follow Darby, never had this Christian theological problem. Evangelicals always knew that Israel would return to Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. However, this is a double-edged sword, only recently drawn from its scabbard, that presents a high degree of complexity, as is already indicated by the position of certain segments of the politically active Christian right.

Central to Jewish self-understanding and Jewish reality is the fact that Israel is a modern, Western democratic state. Its decisions in matters of war and peace, its deliberations about the security of the country and its citizens will, as a matter of democratic and Jewish conviction, be determined by the processes of a democratic society and its elected officials. Some segments of the Evangelical community are not prepared to understand this. Their position was voiced when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, on a visit to Washington, D.C., after announcing the disengagement from Gaza, was told by then Speaker of the House Tom DeLay and by Pat Robertson that they could not support that plan because all of biblical Israel is God’s gift to the Jews, and no government of Israel can contravene the will of God.

Mainline Protestants are now in a battle with Evangelicals for the very pews of their 41 churches, for the very heart and soul of American Christendom. They are attacking the Evangelicals on all fronts, but perhaps nowhere more intensively than on Evangelical support for Israel and the theological meaning of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

Mainline Protestants reject Christian support for Israel that is based on a theology grounded in biblical literalism, inerrancy of prophecy, and the assertion that one can look at contemporary events and know God’s will. Beyond that, they hold the Jewish people and Israel accountable for Evangelical support. Many mainline Protestants in effect are saying, “How justified can Zionism and Israel be if their strongest support in the Christian community is coming from Evangelical quarters, and is meant to culminate in the conversion of the Jews?”

At the same time, the Evangelical turns to the Jewish community and in effect says, “For decades, many of you have made common cause with mainline Protestants, with liberals, on a whole series of social, political, and economic issues. Yet when it comes to Israel, which we Evangelicals know matters most to you, they are not your friends, and we are.”

The Jewish community finds itself caught in the middle of this feud, while mainline Protestant attacks on Israel often appear to be based not on an evaluation of the merits of the situation, but on a reflexive opposition to whatever the Evangelicals embrace.

1 (From “Understanding American Evangelicals: A Conversation with Mark Noll and Jay Tolson.” Center Conversations: An Occasional Publication of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. June 2004, Number 29.) 42 Bibliography of Resources

For a survey of Christianity in America, as well as concise and helpful sections on the current state of various Christian religious groups, a highly useful book is America’s Religions: From their Origins to the 21st Century by Peter Williams, published by University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago. This is an eminently readable book. The author assumes that he is writing for the intelligent layperson rather than for scholars of religion.

SECTION II: ROMAN CATHOLICISM

The Roman Catholic Church is a vast, complex worldwide body. With 1.2 billion faithful, it expresses itself in a variety of venues, persons, media, and institutions. Any effort to maintain effective relations concerning Israel requires knowing what Roman Catholic clergy, institutions, and scholars think and do, especially in each local community.

National Publications

The Roman Catholic Church and community in the United States have an array of publications. The following four provide a reliable representation of the Catholic right, center and left:

• The National Catholic Reporter is a bi-weekly publication based in Kansas City, Mo. Left-of-center on social, political, economic, and religious issues, it occasionally publishes articles critical of Israel. • America: The National Catholic Weekly is a Jesuit publication. It occasionally carries articles about Israel and the Middle East. It is quite critical of Israel, especially on issues directly affecting Arab Catholics and relations with the Vatican. • Commonweal, a review of religion, politics, and culture, is an independent journal of opinion edited and published 22 times a year by lay Catholics. With offices in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, it asserts that it has “a good view of the Hudson River and beyond.” It publishes occasional, reasonably balanced articles on Israel and the Palestinians. • Zenit is an international news agency based in Rome that covers news of the Vatican and the pope. It distributes a daily e-mail, which provides timely news on the Vatican, including its actions on Israel and the Middle East.

SECTION III: MAINLINE PROTESTANTISM

Each of the five largest mainline Protestant denominations maintains a website. They are the Presbyterian Church with www.PCUSA.org; the Episcoplians with www.ecusa.anglican.org; the Methodists with www.umc.org, the UCC with www.ucc.org; and the Lutherans with www.elca.org. These websites are always up to 43 date, and provide access to the denominations’ basic positions, actions, pronouncements, and teachings. All five websites are easily located by going to the website of the National Council of Churches, which, itself, serves as an important source for information on collaboration amongst the mainline Protestant denominations. Each of the denominations treated in this essay has magazines and journals that appear on a regular basis. The PCUSA publishes Presbyterians Today, the Episcopal Church publishes Episcopalian Life, the ELCA publishes The Lutheran, the UCC publishes UCNews, and the UMC publish Interpreter Magazine. Furthermore, the single easiest and best source for keeping current on developments in the mainline Protestant churches is of course the bi-weekly magazine Christian Century.

This essay draws heavily upon the following three books, all recommended for further reading:

Protestantism in America. Randal Balmer and Laura F. Winner. Columbia University Press, New York, 2002.

American Mainline Religion: Its Changing Shape and Future. Wade Clark and Rube William McKinney. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick: New Jersey. Fourth Printing, 1992.

The Quiet Hand of God: Faith Based Activism and the Public Role of Mainline Protestantism. Ed. Robert Wuthnow and John H. Evans. University of California Press. Berkeley and Los Angeles: CA. 2002.

SECTION IV: EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANITY

To compensate for their lack of centralization, Evangelicals are prolific in writing about themselves and communicating with the rest of American society, in producing house organs and journals, and in their use of the Web. No understanding of Evangelical Christianity is possible without the writings of Mark Noll. The foundation book is America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2002). This is a scholarly work. Also by Mark Noll is Work We Have to Do: A History of Protestants in America (Oxford University Press, 2002). In addition, two books by Christian Smith are quite useful: American Evangelicalism, Embattled and Thriving (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1998) and Christian America? What Evangelicals Really Want (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 2002). These two books present easily accessible data on the basic social, political, economic, and moral attitude of Evangelical Christians, and the diversity of opinion amongst them. For an important critique of Evangelical Christianity, Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids, MI, 1995) is indispnsable. The single best magazine to read in order to keep up with Evangelical Christianity is Christianity Today.

44 Author’s Acknowledgements

For the sake of intellectual honesty, it is necessary to express gratitude to those who make contribution to any written and published work. At the outset this monograph would not have been possible without the leadership and understanding of Dr. Steven B. Nasatir, President of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, who has made it possible for me to study, think, and write about such com- plex theological and political issues. He knew early on how much Christian respons- es to Israel were rooted in Christian theology. Though my work on this monograph does not bear directly on his important areas of responsibility, the fact is that Jeffrey L. Cohen, Senior Vice-President, Development at the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, has made this and more so very real and possible. This Monograph would also not have been possible without Dr. Michael C. Kotzin, Executive Vice President of the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, and Ethan Felson, Associate Executive Director for the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Their contributions are found on every page.

Rabbi Yehiel Poupko Judaic Scholar Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago