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Exchange 49 (2020) 257-277 brill.com/exch The Revival of Palestinian Christianity Developments in Palestinian Theology Elizabeth S. Marteijn PhD Candidate, School of Divinity, Centre for the Study of World Christianity, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK [email protected] Abstract Palestinian Christians are a minority of approximately 1 or 2% in a context marked by conflict, expulsions, and ongoing emigration. Despite all this, Palestinian Christians have made a significant contribution to society in the spheres of politics, the arts, sci- ence, and social welfare. Moreover, from the 1980s onwards, this Palestinian context of struggle has also been the source for the emergence of a socially and politically committed contextual theology. This article analyses the development of Palestinian contextual theology by examining theological publications by Palestinian theologians. It identifies liberation, reconciliation, witness, ecumenism, and interfaith-dialogue as some of the dominant theological themes. What unites these publications is a theological engagement with the Palestinian Christian identity in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Keywords contextual theology – Israeli-Palestinian conflict – Kairos theology – Palestinian Christianity – Palestinian theology – public theology 1 An Arab Christian Awakening Palestinian Christians feel deeply rooted in Palestinian society. They under- stand themselves as part of the Palestinian community and actively contribute to its flourishing. This article aims to outline how Palestinian Christians have embraced their vocation, in the words of Emeritus Patriarch Michel Sabbah, to © Elizabeth S. Marteijn, 2020 | doi:10.1163/1572543X-12341569 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY 4.0Downloaded license. from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:35:54PM via free access 258 Marteijn be “in the service of society.”1 Michel Sabbah, born in Nazareth in 1933, was con- secrated on 6th January, 1988, by Pope John Paul II as the first Palestinian-born Roman Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem. This was a significant event in the re- cent history of the Palestinian church, highlighting the indigenization of re- ligious leadership in the 1970s and 1980s. These indigenous Palestinian (and other Arab) church leaders gradually made their voices heard on topics like in- justice, peace, and occupation, encouraging their religious communities not to lose hope. This development of indigenization has paved the way for a specific Palestinian strand of theological thought, as well as a feeling of public respon- sibility visible among both the clergy and laypeople in Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant denominations. Not long after Michel Sabbah assumed his post as Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, he published his first pastoral letter on 15th August, 1988, in which he encouraged the faithful to “proclaim the message of the faith ac- cording to God’s Will: to carry out our mission means to serve Him and our fellow-men.”2 With these words, Sabbah voiced a specific Palestinian theologi- cal theme that I call ‘the revival of Palestinian Christianity’: a spiritual, societal, and political awakening of the Palestinian church that started in the 1970s and which transformed the local churches into an important force for social and political change. This revival is part of a longer, more gradual ‘Christian awakening’ in the Middle East, starting in the 19th century and continuing over the course of the 20th century, itself the result of the challenges of war, displacement, migration, European intervention, and an overall religious radicalisation in the Middle East. In this context, Arab Christians have found opportunities to contribute to social and political change. Examples are the Christian pioneers in Arab nationalist thinking during the Nahḍa (‘Arab Renaissance’) in Ottoman Syria,3 such as Butrus al-Bustani (1819-1883), a Maronite convert to Protestantism, as well as the Melkite (Greek Catholic) father and son Nasif Al-Yaziji (1800- 1871) and Ibrahim Al-Yaziji (1847-1906). The Coptic Orthodox politician and 1 Michel Sabbah, First Pastoral Letter “Our Faith in the Holy Land,” Jerusalem 15th August 1988, § 45. https://www.lpj.org/first-pastoral-letter-of-patriarch-michel-sabbah/ (accessed May 2020). 2 Sabbah, First Pastoral Letter, § 5. 3 Throughout this article, the transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) has been used. Diacritical marks for transliterated terms have been used and all Arabic terms are italicised in the text, except for names of persons, places and or- ganisations. The English spelling of places that have a clearly established English name, like Jerusalem (instead of the Arabic name Al-Quds), has been used. For names of persons, their own preferred spelling has been honoured. ExchangeDownloaded 49 from ( Brill.com09/30/20212020) 257-277 04:35:54PM via free access The Revival of Palestinian Christianity 259 diplomat in Egypt, Boutros Boutros-Ghali (1922-2016), is a more recent exam- ple of an Arab Christian with social and political influence, having served as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. In terms of public visibility and engagement, Arab Christians have also been influential in the arts and sciences. For example, the voice of Lebanese Greek Orthodox singer Fairuz (b. 1935) is regularly heard on radio broadcasts all over the Levant. Born in an Anglican Palestinian family, literary critic Edward Said (1935-2003) has been one of the most influential thinkers in recent scholarship, well-known for his theory of Orientalism.4 Arab Christians have also been influential in social welfare, for instance in the flourishing of the press in 19th and 20th century Lebanon and Egypt, not to mention their influence in the areas of education and health care, mainly due to their contact with Western missionary work.5 This article contests the common and rather pessimist discourse on Christians in the Middle East. Themes of suffering and the impending dis- appearance of Middle Eastern Christianity seemed to dominate in the writ- ings of historians such as Frenchman Jean-Pierre Valognes and American Philip Jenkins, but also appeared in the works of more popular writers such as Scottish William Dalrymple.6 Christians in the Middle East, Palestinian Christians included, do indeed live in vulnerable circumstances with declin- ing numbers. Statistics of the World Christian Database reveal that Christians 4 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003 [1978]). Born to a Protestant family, Said identified as a secular humanist. However, Said was the keynote speaker during Sabeel’s first international conference in Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem in 1990, a clearly Christian-oriented event (which will be referred to later in this article). 5 See, for example: Deanna Ferree Womack, Protestants, Gender and the Arab Renaissance in Late Ottoman Syria (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019); David D. Grafton, The Contested Origins of the 1865 Arabic Bible: Contributions to the Nineteenth Century Nahḍa (Leiden: Brill, 2016); Heather J. Sharkey, “American Missionaries, the Arabic Bible, and Coptic Reform in Late Nineteenth-century Egypt,” in American Missionaries and the Middle East: Foundational Encounters, (eds.). Mehmet Ali Doğan and Heather J. Sharkey (Salt Lake City, UT: The University of Utah Press, 2011), 237-59; Heather J. Sharkey, American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Qustandi Shomali, “Palestinian Christians: Politics, Press and Religious Identity 1900- 1948,” in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, (eds.). Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner & Kevork Hintlian (London: Scorpion Cavendish Ltd, 1995), 225-36. 6 Jean-Pierre Valognes, Vie et mort des chrétiens d’Orient: Des origines à nos jours (Life and Death of Middle Eastern Christians: From the Origins to the Present Day) (Paris: Fayard, 1994); Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How it Died (Oxford: Lion Hudson PLC, 2008); William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A journey in the shadow of Byzantium (London: Harper Press, 1998). Exchange 49 (2020) 257-277 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 04:35:54PM via free access 260 Marteijn make up 0.82% of the population in the Palestinian Territories and 2% of the population in Israel.7 These Palestinian Christians live as a tiny minority in a context marked by armed and ideological conflict, expulsions, and ongoing emigration. Palestinian Christians are suffering from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and—as Middle Eastern Christians in general—from the rise of mili- tant Islamic groups. On top of that, about half of the Palestinian population lives outside the borders of the historical Palestine of 1948,8 which makes them a people in diaspora. Consequently, Palestinian Christians are often cat- egorised as “a threatened form of Christianity”, “a Christian neighbour to the Muslims”, or “a minority in need of help (from the West)”.9 While acknowledging the harsh situation in which Palestinian Christians are living, this article aims to demonstrate how Palestinian Christians have brought about a revival and played a significant role in creating a society based on the principles of justice, peace, and reconciliation. This article specifically focuses on the public role of Palestinian contextual theology as reflected in
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