Politics & Christology my apologia

A friend asked me several days ago, “why was I writing on politics so much when the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) needed good Christological theology.” Good question. And sometimes I feel unfaithful, as though I haven’t been writing enough about Jesus, his cross, the wonderful salvation he bestows on us, the righteousness he gives that is his and his alone. But are political issues like the State of Israel, or the ordination of practicing homosexuals disconnected from Christology?

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Hardly. The homosexual issue is so clear I won’t even go there. Faithfulness to Christ includes faithfulness to his word, both the Old and New Testaments. But what about the State of Israel? What about the Jewish People? How do they even begin to connect to Christology?

First of all models for living out correct Christology, that is following Jesus Christ as Lord, while living in the midst of institutions which foster anti-Semitism, are abundant in the past century, not the least of which is Corrie ten Boon and Dietrich Bonheoffer.

Perhaps Presbyterians don’t remember or know anything about Corrie ten Boom. She wrote a book in 1971 entitled the Hiding Place. It is the story of her family and how they hid Jewish people in their home in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation. Corrie lost all of her family in concentration camps. She was also a prisoner but was freed due to a clerical error. The title of her book has a double meaning. There was a hiding place in their home, and there is a hiding place in God because of Jesus Christ.

One of the important things to know about the Booms was their devotion to both Jesus Christ and the Jewish people. The family had participated in prayer meetings for almost a hundred years praying for the Jewish people before the time of the Nazis. God gives us our deepest desires, centers them in himself and then uses us in that place he has prepared for us. That is never outside of, can never be outside of, our relationship to Jesus Christ.

Dietrich Bonheoffer is undoubtedly well known to Presbyterians as well as most mainline church members and also known to many Evangelicals. The Cost of Discipleship, his most well known book is read by both conservatives and liberals. One of the most prominent members of the Confessing Church, Bonheoffer spoke out the most about what was happening to the Jewish people in Germany and elsewhere.

Although he was finally executed for his part in the plot to kill Hitler, he was actually jailed for his part in helping Jews cross the borders of Germany.

One small but excellent book, Christ the Center, is the restructured notes of Bonheoffer’s students taken during his lectures on Christology in the year 1933. Bonheoffer was very concerned with the fate of the Jewish people and with Christology.

But the connection with Christology and the State of Israel, which Bonheoffer did not live to see, has to do with that safe place that God has provided for them. If Christ is God, and he is, and if God is sovereign, which he is, then the State of Israel is a part of his plan for our day. I don’t think we can biblically say what will happen to Israel as a state in this our time, but I do think we can say, biblically, what may happen to the nations who are intent on her destruction if they continue their course.

Still the theological connection between the Jewish people, Israel and Christology is best explained by Arthur C. Cochrane in the chapter “The Message of Barmen for Contemporary Church History,” in The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust.[1] He is looking at some of Karl Barth’s thoughts about what was the most devastating theological heresies affecting theology during the Nazi era.

Barth at first honed in on the idea of a second revelation given by the German Christians set alongside God’s revelation in Christ. (And that is very important) Yet, Cochrane points out that in a sermon given in Dec.10, 1933 on Romans 15:5-13 “it is evident that he [Barth] had come to see the Jewish question as a question of faith in Jesus Christ and that post Christum is identical with Israel ante Christum.”

Cochrane goes on to write about those who organized the Pastor’s Emergency League and how they understood, as they resisted the Aryan paragraph, that there existed a unity between the Jews and the Church, as he puts it, “’Salvation is from the Jews’—not only two thousand years ago but in every generation as well.”

But some of Cochrane’s words as he explains the connections are profound.

“It dawned upon them [Christian scholars concerned with the Holocaust] that the Jewish question is the question about Jesus Christ, that the spirit of Antisemitism is the spirit of antichrist, and where the Jews are hated and persecuted, the faithful followers of the Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, will also be hated and persecuted. They realized that in the last analysis the Church Struggle and World War II were waged because of Israel and that in spite of the Holocaust, Israel could not be annihilated.

Cochrane quotes Jeremiah 31:35-36. “Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the Lord of hosts is his name: If the fixed order departs from before me says the Lord, then shall the descendents of Israel cease from being a nation before me forever.”

I believe that is a complete apologia. The connection between the Jewish people and the State of Israel is a cord of steel. The connection between the Jewish people and Christians is unbreakable. As that spirit of Antisemitism and antichrist arise in both the mainline churches and the surrounding countries of Israel I will be writing about politics as well as Christology.

[1] The book The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust is a collection of essays given at a conference by that name in 1974. The essays are by Christians, Jews and even a few pagans. The one by Elie Wiesel, “Talking and Writing and Keeping Silent,” is worth the price of the book if you can find it.