Links to my postings on Middle East issues coming to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly

In this posting I have linked to all of the postings I have written on the Middle East that are connected to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly. I hope that will be helpful to some.

On the documents and recommendations made by the Presbyterian Middle East Study Committee:

1. Presbyterian Middle East Study Team & "The Kairos Palestine Document" no longer a Jewish Nation?
2. Report of the Middle East Study Committee to the 219th General Assembly: Is it priestly?
3. "Witness of the Scriptures: A Biblical Theological Reflection: A Reformed Christian's response
4. The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Middle East Study Team-a one sided story
5. Recommendations & all the documents-breaking faith with the Jewish people
6. “A Plea for Justice: A Historical Analysis:” false beginnings, twisted thoughts- part 1
7. “A Plea for Justice: A Historical Analysis:” false beginnings, twisted thoughts- part 2
8. “A Plea for Justice: A Historical Analysis:” false beginnings, twisted thoughts- part 3

On two overtures coming from San Francisco Presbytery

1. Two anti-Semitic Overtures coming to the Presbyterian (U.S.A.) General Assembly from San Francisco Presbytery (Update)

On the paper "Christians and Jews: People of God" and the Middle East Caucus

1. The worm that feeds on the soul of the Church: an exchange of letters

On the Advisory Committee for Social Witness Policy and their references to the Middle East

1. The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy: Ignoring Christian persecution, maligning Israel

For my Jewish friends and others ...

For My Jewish friends a story in silent films- (For my Christian friends too.) I can't say enjoy the first part but it needs to be shown. You will like the second part. But they go together.


The first is KADDISH FOR ALL THE HOLOCAUST VICTIMS
That means prayers for the dead. If you are not Jewish you may not know much about the history of the Holocaust but the caricatures are Nazi propaganda pictures of the Jews and the pictures of the seemingly handsome men, women and children are the Aryan ideals of the Nazis. (My apologies I cannot remove the ads on the video.)




The second is a film with just music and very old film from the beginning days of the State of Israel.

Sweeping Church History: A review of The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why

Sweeping Church History: a review of:

The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why.
By Phyllis Tickle

Emergent Village Resources for communities of faith, BakerBooks 2008


Phyllis Tickle’s book The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why is both disquieting and fascinating. The author proposes grandiose schemes of history and offers predictive speculations which trouble me, and yet I met my past in many corners even down to her last footnote on Joachim of Fiore.[1] However, I don’t believe that I or other orthodox Christians will see our future in The Great Emergence.

This is a book which has been picked for some use as a catalyst or under girding for the recommended Presbyterian (U.S.A.) General Assembly Commission on Middle Governing Bodies coming from the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly. Tickle is writing about the Emerging Movement in Western Christianity. She attempts to find the movement's cause, define its progress and answer some pertinent questions about its future. And in doing so Tickle looks at past Christian movements as well as the kinds of cultural and historical events that she believes shaped Christianity in different ages.

Tickle’s thesis is that every five hundred years the Church finds itself disconnected from its meaning and must mend or remake the faith story in which it is involved. She refers to Right Reverend Mark Dyer, writing of his idea, “that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as twenty-first century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every five-hundred years the Church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale.” He also suggested that we are now in the midst of that kind of a sale.

The theory Tickle explores is an idea that groups, institutions even nations are tethered by cable to the thing that gives them meaning, or that thing that is bigger then the individual or group. She uses analogies: the cable is covered by a water proof casing. The cable is called “the story.” That is the “shared history—mythic, actual, and assumed—of the social unit.” Going further there is an interior mesh sleeve which the author writes is “sometimes called the consensual illusion and sometimes the common imagination and sometimes by combinations of those two.” It is the agreement of the members about how things work. (34-5) Tickle uses the idea of a flat earth to describe how that might work. (emphasis author's)

Next she describes three ropes that are intertwined inside. They are called spirituality, corporeality and morality and make up, in order, the internal experiences, the physical evidences and the external outcome of the spirituality. Tickle writes about how each of these can become frayed, torn and need repair. It is here that she looks at Church history and notes the important points when all must be redone or reworked. And it is here that I am troubled with her historical schema as well as what I see as a parochial outcome. I will address both.

Reformation: Tickle points to several Church moments which she sees as times when the Church’s link to its meaning has become so badly damaged that the Church needed to change or as she puts it “reconfigure.” She deals with the Great Reformation and pulls in a multitude of reasons for that event including: Too many men attempting to be Pope at the same time –causing a sense of a disconnect from authority, Greek scholars leaving Constantinople for Europe with copies of the ancient classical writers, conflicts between Islam and Christianity and with that “the acquisition of a library of over four hundred thousand volumes,” the rise of city-states and nations and Gutenberg, whose invention helped spread the writings of the Reformation.

So my first concern: while all of the above historical events certainly changed society and advanced the Reformation, they cannot be the main reasons for the Reformation. Instead the main reason was because of the divine intervention of God. The Lord of the Church heard the cries for renewal, undoubtedly planned for the cries for renewal.

Various groups, in what is now Germany, had been praying for a hundred years for Church renewal. And earlier, though all that first thousand years, and beyond, there had been different renewal events such as the one in the 13th century at Cluny Monastery. Later there was Wycliffe in England, whom Tickle does mention, but not in this context. Next there was John Hus in Bohemia who died for the proclamation of justification by faith among other issues. The need for reformation and God’s intervention for his Church are the reasons. The Church did not adjust its story for the sake of or because of cultural change, but because the Lord called her back to an apostolic witness and Scripture.

The parochial outcome I am concerned about is that Tickle has taken huge worldwide events, such as the Great Schism or even “The Axial Age” and compared them to a relative small movement in the United States and Britain (As compared to the rise of a vibrant and different Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere and Asia ). Tickle’s views of what is happening in Christianity should be read along-side the writings of Philip Jenkins.[2]

Tickle goes on to write about the cultural events which brought forth what she and others call The Great Emergence. They include scientific events such as the evolutional theories of Darwin, Albert Einstein’s “special theory of relativity” and “Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.” Her religious events include the newest search for the Historical Jesus, Pentecostalism, Karl Marx, immigration connected to Buddhism entering the United States, drugs in the 1960s and Joseph Campbell.

The authority of the Word: And this is all to say that Tickle believes that these events, alongside others, began to tear apart the story of Protestantism in particular and Christianity as a whole. But she constantly, as in her Reformation account, insists that in these events the church lost its center of authority which is Sola Scriptura (only Scripture). She in fact insists that the ordination of self-affirming homosexuals will bring an end to the view that the Bible is the Church’s authority. She writes:

“When all is resolved [the homosexual issues]—and it most surely will be—the Reformation’s understanding of Scripture as it had been taught by Protestantism for almost five centuries will be dead.” (101)

And this is the real story Tickle is telling. That many in today’s Church in the United States and Britain either do not or will not find authority in the Holy Scripture. Tickle even writes, “The question of ‘Where now is our authority?’ is, as we have noted, always the central and overarching one in every time of upheaval. The great Emergence will be no different from its predecessors in this regard.”

And this is where my review will now focus. Tickle sets up some suggestions for where the emerging movement might find its authority. One is in the Pentecostalism she highlights that exploded onto the twentieth century moving whole continents toward a vibrant Christianity. Tickle writes:

“Pentecostalism by definition assumes the direct agency of the Holy Spirit as instructor and counselor and commander as well as comforter. As such and stated practically, Pentecostalism assumes that ultimate authority is experiential rather than canonical. This is not either to say or to imply that there is a denial of the Holy Scriptures. It is to say, rather that forced into a choice between what a believer thinks with his or her own mind to be from the Holy Scripture and an apparently contradictory message from the Holy Spirit, many a Pentecostal must prayerfully, fearfully, humbly accept the more immediate authority of the received message.” (Emphasis author's.)(85)

Tickle goes on to state that”Pentecostalism, offered the Great Emergence its first, solid, applied answer to the question of where now is our authority.” But she is wrong about the Pentecostals.

At just the turn of the Century in California a group of Pentecostals at a camp meeting were led by one member who believed they were to understand “through the leading of the Holy Spirit” that Jesus was the true name of God and there was only one person in the Godhead. They are now called Jesus only or oneness Pentecostals and exist on the thin edges of the Pentecostal movement rejecting the Trinity. But when they first began they were members of the Assemblies of God. The Assemblies of God leaders, through the study of Scripture, said no, that was not a biblical teaching. While this kind of experienced doctrine can be an ongoing problem in Pentecostal churches it is nonetheless battled by using Scripture.[3]

Tickle follows this up when she calls for a speedy search for an authority base for those who are emerging Christians. She writes:

“The new Christianity of the Great Emergence must discover some authority base or delivery system and/or governing agency of its own. It must formulate—and soon—something other than Luther’s Sola Scriptura which, although used so well by the Great Reformation originally, is now as hopelessly outmoded or insufficient, even after it is, as here, spruced up and re-couched in more current sensibilities.” (151)

She then speculates on the authority that the Emerging Movement will use suggesting that they might find it in what she calls “Networked Authority.” Probably her best picture of this is her picture of the emerging church with its sense of authority. That is, “The Church is a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks, etc., etc. in interlacing levels of complexity.”

Accordingly none have all the truth but it comes out of the center of the community (158) and yet has run through the “hubs” of the network and is “tried and amended and tempered into wisdom and right action for effecting the Father’s will.” (153) And predicatively all of this may lead to a change in Christian belief. The cable is taken out, remade and stuffed back in. Seeing part of this process as a de-Hellenization of Christianity, Tickle writes:

“Some of the de-Hellenization on religious formation is already discernable. The actual nature of the atonement, for example or the tenet of an angry God who must be appeased or the question of evil’s origins are suddenly all up for reconsideration. If in pursuing this line of exegesis, the Great Emergence really does what most of its observers think it will, it will rewrite Christian theology—and thereby North American—culture—into something far more Jewish, more paradoxical, more narrative, and more mystical than anything the Church has had for the last seventeen or eighteen hundred years.” (162)

In the diagram Tickle uses to explain the Emerging church, she places those who refuse to follow the patterns and process of the emergence off to the corners including some of those who she names social justice Christians (Tickle’s name for all mainline Christians). But mostly the few numbers include those who hold to biblical authority. I do not see this as a correct reading although she might be right.

What I do see is liturgical churches, mainline churches, pentecostal churches and conservative churches who will still acknowledge the authority of Scripture which is after all the word of God. I still see those whom she places in the corners obeying the Lord of the Church in obedience to his word. After all, those who belong to Jesus are not simply connected to a cable which connects to their meaning; they are in a real way united to the resurrected Lord. And Jesus is after all the same, yesterday, today and forever.



[1] This would include a love for History including Church History, coming to Christ in a Southern Baptist Church, spending the first fifteen years of my marriage in an Assembly of God Church and the next fifteen years in an independent Church loosely connected to the Calvary Chapels, and doing research on several cultic groups that embraced the kind of theological scheme that Joachim of Fiore advocated.
[2] See for instance Philip Jenkins books, The Next Christendom & The Lost History of Christianity.
[3] J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of American Religions Volume 1, (McGrath Publishing Company 1978) 1, 287-8.

Anti-Zionism = anti-Semitsm?

Someone on one of my earlier blog postings about Middle East issues asked if I could explain how anti-Zionism is the new anti-Semitism?” I directed her to a document I had posted in August 2009, Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism a report to Congress. It is a pdf document prepared by The United States Department of State which explores contemporary anti-Semitism and includes anti-Zionism. Picture taken by Zombie, see note at bottom 1.

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The question was also asked how anti-Zionism follows from anti-Semitism. But the question could be turned around. In the above document this is explained:

“This report does not purport to ascribe motive to the various critics of Israel. However, disproportionate criticism of the Jewish State and/or Israelis and demon­izing them as barbaric, unprincipled, selfish, inhu­mane, etc. is anti-Semitic and has the effect of caus­ing global audiences to associate those bad attributes with Jews in general. Similar to the way that constant news coverage associating Muslims with terrorism, or blacks with crime, can have the effect of promoting anti-Muslim or anti-black prejudice, respectively, con­stant and disproportionate criticism of Israel can have the effect of promoting anti-Jewish prejudice.”

Going beyond this is the human tendency to become so engulfed in a cause that one loses the ability to sort through material and choose what at least has a semblance of integrity while discarding the appalling. In this matter an example of using integrity is Martin Niemöller. As a Christian pastor in Germany, concerned about the moral decadence of his country, he at first thought Adolf Hitler was a good person to lead Germany. He would later oppose Hitler, even to his face, with such tenacity that he became Hitler’s personal prisoner.

Dislike for some policies of the State of Israel is leading some organizations and some activist into some very shadowy corners. The Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian (U.S.A.) has published a booklet, Steadfast Hope which suggests among other things that the Jewish European immigrants are not descendents of the ancient Israelites; the recent Presbyterian Middle East Study Committee recommends the Kairos Document that would do away with a Jewish State. And some activists join or, perhaps unintentionally, promote organizations that probably years earlier they would have rejected with great repulsion. The slide happens sometimes out of good intentions.

On one well known activist’s Facebook information page she has pages that truly cross the line from her concerns about Israel’s policies to the promotion of vulgar anti-Zionism which can certainly be equated with the worse kind of anti-Semitism. (Pages on Facebook consist of various groups that the person has joined because they care about the issues that organization or person promotes. For instance on my information page or profile I have such pages as Tim Keller, C.S. Lewis and the Simon Wiesenthal Center .

But, besides such recognized organizations as Amnesty International activist Anna Baltzer, who is Jewish and pro Palestinian, somehow, unaware of her pages, moves on to Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago and further to the World Antizionist Congress . This last site is vile. Another is Anti-Zionism and also vile. In this last one The Protocol’s of the Elders of Zion are discussed as though they are real.

Our society is slipping into anti-Semitism because it is slipping into a vile anti-Zionism. This is very serious. It is changing who we are as a people. It will change who we are as Presbyterians.

1. Zombie does photographic journalism: The picture above is from a rally in S.F. on March 20th 2010. He has entitled it:

San Francisco "Anti-War" Rally:
The New Communist/Truth/Jihad Alliance
Several pictures my bother some readers but the information about those forging alliances is interesting.

A very good new web site: Richard Bauckham-Biblical Scholar and Theologian

A particularly good and new web site is “Richard Bauckham - Biblical Scholar and Theologian.’ Among the books he has authored are Jesus and the God of Israel: God Crucified and Other Studies on the New Testament’s Christology of Divine Identity and Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony.

There are quite a few good sermons and lectures on this site. And a clue to what the two books, above, are about are the lectures, Orthodoxy in Christology and Surrounded by Truth.

In the lecture “Orthodoxy in Christology” Bauckham offers various ways to approach the biblical and historical understanding of who Jesus Christ is. One thing he does insist on is that the approach must have three components to be adequate, that is, it must have a contemporary understanding, a biblical component and an orthodox credal one. And he writes about how in the past that list has always been read from the right to the left but now in most cases it is read from the left to the right.

Bauckham does explain how the modern and postmodern way of understanding who Jesus is affects our thoughts on Christology. He states that the post-modern understanding of Christology that attempts to finds its position in a supposedly early diversity of christologies presupposes that the modern historical view has already deconstructed orthodoxy.

Bauckham goes on to explain how the modern historical method has not destroyed credal orthodoxy. And going beyond this he speaks to the way and the need to understand Christology in our contemporary situation. He writes:

“Thinking through afresh the relationship between the Bible and credal orthodoxy enables us the better to understand both. Moreover, it is out of such thinking that the lines linking the Bible and credal orthodoxy to the third corner of the triangle of orthodoxy develop. Who is Jesus Christ for us today? The simplest answer might be that he is God for us - both that he truly is God for us and also that he is God for us today. Here and now as much as there and then, it is in Jesus that we find the God who is not indifferent to us or against us, nor even the God who regards us benevolently from afar, but the God who is with us and for us in a radical identification with the human situation that transforms it.”

The other lecture, “Surrounded by Truth” is, of course, about Jesus who is truth. But here also Bauckham explores what that means to us today and how we live it out as Christians. Here is a quote to whet your appetite:

“That truth is encountered we see most fully in the case of Jesus as truth. As the human person he is, as God embodied in a human life, his personal reality confronts us. He eludes our grasp, as all persons do in genuinely personal encounter. We cannot apply to him the modern rationalist desire to master truth, but nor is the postmodern notion of constructing our own truth for ourselves appropriate – not, once again, if we encounter him in his personal otherness. Of course, it is in fact all too easy to construct a Jesus figure of our own making – Jesus as we would like to him to be, a Jesus who is nothing but a reflection of ourselves or our ideals, even a Jesus as we fear he may be. Quests of the historical Jesus – modern or postmodern - always run that risk. But when they fall for it they evade the experience of encounter, preferring a useful idol to the personal otherness of Jesus. They turn, like Pilate, from the possibility of encounter back to mastery and control.”

So check out the site. There are even some children stories entitled, MacBears,

He is Risen

I have been hesitating about writing an Easter blog. Strange for a Christian I know. But a lingering sadness has engulfed me because of all the written words about how the cross was not about redemption; the sacrifice of the Incarnate one for our sins. And so many of the writers are Presbyterians. First there is Carol Howard Merritt, who suggested such a sacrifice “puts into question the nature and character of God.” And there is Rita Nakashima Brock and her continuing diatribe about the cross and the need for redemption.

The Presbyterian News decided to get in on it suggesting that Reformed Christians hold that the resurrection is more important than the cross. Bethany Furkin wrote that “Our focus is not the cross or the suffering of Jesus but his resurrection.” And of course the one who loves to mock Christ, Christians and all things that belong to the Lord mocked everything with great glee.

I found myself only wanting to stay by the cross, but that is probably not a problem. The bodily resurrection of Jesus means nothing without the cross. And the cross means nothing without the resurrection. Without the resurrection “our faith is worthless” and we are “still in our sins,” Paul writes. But he also writes that “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses according to the riches of his grace which he lavished on us. (Eph 1:7-8)” It isn’t either/or—it is a lavish gift.

When the apostle John saw a mysterious book full of the history of God’s work in the midst of an evil world and his holy people he cried because no one could open it. But an elder comforted him with the news that one had prevailed. “Stop weeping; behold, the Lion that is from the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has overcome so as to open the book and its seven seals. (Rev. 5: 5)” And how and what had Jesus overcome?

The song that the elders and the four amazing creatures sang:

“Worthy are you to take the book and to break its seals; for you were slain, and purchased for God with your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.”

“You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.”

This is redemption and resurrection wrapped around each other.

The wonder of his gift-Good Friday

Redemption

by George Herbert

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A small-rented lease, and cancel th' old
In heaven at his manor I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
about some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight returned, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
of thieves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, and died.