Saying sorry for the past just isn’t enough. Addressing Christian anti-Semitism involves facing its anti-Israel element head-on.
By Melanie Phillips, INN
(JNS) The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has announced that the Church of England plans to offer its “repentance” over anti-Semitic church laws that were passed in the 13th century.
Next year will mark the 800th anniversary of the 1222 Synod of Oxford. Among a number of grossly discriminatory measures, this implemented decrees that disqualified Jews from holding public office and forced them to wear clothing that distinguished them from Christians. These laws, says the church, heightened anti-Semitic feeling and led to the first nationwide expulsion of all Jews from England in 1290.
This Synod actually took place before the Church of England came into being centuries later, after the Reformation. So Welby is proposing to repent for the Jew-hatred of the medieval Catholic Church.
He is right, however, to identify general Christian belief as the source. Britain has never faced up to its history of murderous bigotry against its Jewish communities. In the 12th century, Jews were burned alive in pogroms incited by hysterically anti-Jewish priests.
Such barbarous excesses were clearly of their time. However, it’s difficult for the church to draw a line under its anti-Jewish past because the theology still gets in the way.
The New Testament’s call for retribution in perpetuity against the Jewish people for their presumed crime of deicide through the crucifixion of Jesus, amplified by the vicious bigotry of the early church fathers, turned the Jews into devils and justified their slaughter on theological grounds.
There have been only two periods when Britain became positively Judeophile rather than Judeophobic. The first was in the 17th century under the Puritan Lord Protector of England, Oliver Cromwell, and the second was in the 19th century under the influence of Christian evangelicalism.
Both periods involved what might be called biblically faithful Christians who believed that the Jews were God’s chosen people and that they were destined to be restored to their “promised land” of Israel.
In America, the majority of Christians adhere to similar beliefs. That’s why there’s such a strong body of support for Israel among American evangelicals. But that isn’t true of progressive Christian denominations in America and Britain, the Church of England among them.
This is because the religious faith in these churches is so weak they have been particularly vulnerable to the onslaught from secularism.
Replacing faith in God by faith in humanity to better its lot, they fell under the influence of the liberation theology promoted by the World Council of Churches, whose neo-Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-West attitudes paved the way for liberal Christians to embrace the “social justice” agenda.
Since this agenda demonizes Israel as a colonialist oppressor, the progressive churches fell into line with this “new anti-Semitism”—the demonization of the collective Jew in the state of Israel.
But liberation theology also kick-started a revival of “supersessionism,” otherwise known as “replacement theology.”
This ancient doctrine, which was responsible for the murderous Christian pogroms against the Jews of medieval Europe, held that the Christians had replaced the Jews in the eyes of God and had inherited all divine promises made to them while the Jews themselves had become the party of the devil.
Today, this doctrine has been appropriated by Palestinian Arab Christians to claim that it is the Palestinian Arabs who have inherited the divine promise of the land of Israel. This Palestinian “liberation theology” has been adopted wholesale by the World Council of Churches, as well as by progressive churches in Britain and America.
Two years ago, the Church of England published a teaching document on Christian Jewish relations called “God’s Unfailing Word.” This was described in the British press as a long-overdue “call to repentance” for anti-Semitism and acknowledgment of Christianity’s role in the Holocaust.
In his forward to this document, Archbishop Welby wrote: “Too often in history the Church has been responsible for and colluded in anti-Semitism—and the fact that anti-Semitic language and attacks are on the rise across the U.K. and Europe means we cannot be complacent.”
Yet that rise in anti-Semitism has been fueled in large measure by the false belief that the Jews are latter-day usurpers of the land of Israel.
This document actually reinforced that belief by speaking warmly of Palestinian liberation theology and failing to acknowledge that the Jews were the only people for whom the land of Israel had ever been their national home. Instead, it merely said: “There has continued to be a Jewish presence in the land since biblical times.”
Prior to this, the Church of England’s General Synod published in 2002 “Israel/Palestine, An Unholy War” in which it claimed that Palestinian bomb attacks on Israelis were driven by “despair” and “deep-rooted social, economic and political disenfranchisement,” and suggested a moral symmetry between Palestinian Arab murderers and their Israeli victims.
And in 2014, another church report called “Land of Promise?” cherry-picked historical facts once again to mask the unique claim of the Jewish people to the land of Israel.
It criticized Israeli “settlements” and the “separation barrier” as evidence of Israel’s failure to discharge the responsibilities that accompanied the Jews’ biblical “gift” of the land. And it wondered whether it was possible to find an interpretation of history and scripture that would satisfy Zionism while also recognizing “the sufferings of Palestinian and other communities adversely affected by the Zionist project.”
Apologizing for the attitudes that fueled Jew-hatred in the past is worthless if similar attitudes are to be found in the church today. And unfortunately, they are—manifesting themselves in this unholy symbiosis of anti-Zionism and theological doctrine.
Even secular folk regard the church as a moral benchmark of truth and integrity. The pernicious falsehoods that such Christians pump out about Israel are therefore regarded as unchallengeably true by people well beyond Christian circles.
Even in godless Britain, progressive Christians have played a hugely disproportionate role in feeding the new anti-Semitism through the influence of the Church England itself, Christian NGOs and other Christian institutions.
Shouldn’t the Church of England be atoning for all this rather than an event that took place seven centuries ago?
The poisonous combination of Christian theology and the social-justice agenda is now making inroads even among America’s bedrock Christian supporters. Earlier this year, a survey by the University of North Carolina at Pembroke revealed a sharp drop in support for Israel among young American evangelicals.
Asked whom they supported in the “Israeli-Palestinian dispute,” just 33.6 percent said Israel, 24.3 percent said the Palestinians and 42.2 percent said neither side. In a similar survey in 2018, 69 percent said they sided with Israel, 5.6 percent said with the Palestinian Arabs and 25.7 percent said they didn’t take either side.
Supporting Palestinianism enables these young evangelicals to appear cool to their secular peers. The twist is that Palestinian “replacement theology” enables them also to tell themselves that they are still loyal Christian believers.
It’s just that they now believe the ludicrous fiction that Jesus was a Palestinian, and its grotesque spin-off that the Israelis are crucifying the Palestinian Arabs of today.
Saying sorry for the past just isn’t enough. Addressing Christian anti-Semitism involves facing its anti-Israel element head-on.
This doesn’t just mean acknowledging the pernicious lies and distortions about Israel perpetrated by the church; it also means acknowledging the roots of this bigotry in Christian theology.
Only such honesty would start to reconcile Christians and Jews, and open the way to a partnership between these two parent-and-daughter faiths that is essential if the West to be defended against the forces threatening to bring its historic culture and values down.
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, broadcaster and author, writes a weekly column for JNS. Currently a columnist for “The Times of London,” her personal and political memoir, “Guardian Angel,” has been published by Bombardier, which also published her first novel, “The Legacy.” Go to melaniephillips.substack.com to access her work.
@Jan, one point you wrote, “all Christians leave retribution to God”, let me say this politely you maybe speaking philosophically or per your personal religious beliefs but that is a 100% falsehood.
Naturally none of this ever occurred during the Spanish inquisition because the Catholics were so benevolent towards Jews. An estimated 200,000 Jews hid their religion so as not to fall to generosity of how the Catholics chose to torture and kill them. There are myriad of examples in history and Christian Jew hatred still prevails.
We see this still today in attacks on temples and in disgraceful shameful chants at soccer games in Europe. We see it in attacks on Jews in Africa and elsewhere.
@ Jan
What experts??? They are NOT Hebrew scholars as you seem to think, but Church Historians, Christian scholars of eminence, whose names can be found even on a simple Wikipaedia search. Do your own work. It’s not easy to decypher your jumbled up post, but well……I “think” I got your meaning, or some of it.
A question….What do you think of your sacred dogma of “The Second Coming”…. Why do you think it was invented…?? Could it be because the “prophesie”s of the supposed Jesus never materiialized, so, to save face, the syory was concocted that …welllll…… the NEXT time he comes alive it’ll happen , I’m certain….. !!!!
Oy Veh..
Even an old fashioned, out-of-date Bible Scholar like Albert Schweitzer cast many dobts on the whole New Yestament, not unusual .In fact it would be strange if thos efairy tales were NT seriously questioned. I even have a book by Renan , written sometime in the 1870s casting doubts. And it didn’t begin then, but hundreds of years before.
The “learned” books guaranteeing the aunticity of both the Gospels and Pauls Letters ae based purely on faith..blind faith… You know it and I know it….
End of story…!!
P.S. Do you know that although Jews bgan returning to England when Oliver Cromwell was inpower, they NEVER, to this day got legal permission to return The committee turned it down.
@ Jan…
The blind can;t see what’s stuck right in front of them.. What about all the vicious obscene Laws passed against Jews from cou/ntry to cou/ntry, all spu/rred by the atholic Chrch, and after, by Lutherans. It is HISTOTICAL… and can NOT be denied…except apparently by you.
No more needs to be said. The English Church is only NOW apologising and asking forgiveness for the 1290 expulsion. Even centuries before that Jews had to wear demeaning clothes to make stand out for mockery and cursing.
I’ve read Social Histories too, maybe you haven’t. !!
Technically there is an issue with the statement “The New Testament’s call for retribution in perpetuity against the Jewish people for their presumed crime of deicide through the crucifixion of Jesus.” as there is no such call in the entire book- I think Melanie Phillips meant “Some Christian’s call…”
Some Christians deny the diety of Christ and they suffered also, denigrated, refused public office and in some places killed, so it is a *disputed* among Christians.
The New Testament does call for some things, but never retribution, and certainly not for the great mercy of the obedient death in the face of nastiness by those in authority. God’s ‘retribution’ was resurrection. It does call that all Christians (every last one of them) leave vengeance to God! Imagine it, no nasty bitter court cases, no bitter railing, no endless vendettas, no paybacks just calls for repentance, truth, mercy and forgiveness. I doubt that those killing Jews in ‘retribution’ even knew their New Testament! Lots of ignorance in 1200s and that including the lazy clergy!
@Edgar G
Proven by Experts? Which experts? One day you might go look yourself and then you may have much less trust in ‘experts’. I myself am descended from an expert, yes, indeed a Hebrew scholar of some note from time past – experts from one era may not remain experts into another Osiander’s expertise made it into Brown Driver Briggs but others since may dispute what he wrote. When is the last word?
As to proof as to who existed or not, one day if things go on there may be no proof you or I existed. I have ancestors lost a mere 120 years ago- no trace whatsover they ever existed… not a single record, and though I exist I have no ancestors before 1500 not one.. as if they rose out of the dirt, not a name not a grave, no writing. Even a place in recent history of ancestral habitation was wiped off the map and no longer exists – as if it never existed, perhaps they may find an old bottle, but even the stone footings were taken to build new things. So how do we know for sure who lived when, or whether they wrote or did not write? But in saying they could not have existed and written when there are documents must be put in the context of secular family history one such documents form the 1600 alleging events 300 years before is revered as true, and the subject considered settled!
As to Paul, as you may note his letters are disagreeable and the man clearly argumentative, admitted everyone hates him in Asia – no matter who penned it whenever, it must have been penned by someone before the first dated manuscripts.. to which we may well ask why he was so fixated on people keeping Jewish law… when in later times nearly all Christians had pretty much given it up. Thus does the writing, which exists, and must have come from someone’s head have a context say 300CE or later? Or was he a Jew in the era where Jews were turning the world upside down and causing the Romans so much trouble they wiped out Jerusalem and put there a temple to Jupiter?
I was a scholar in another field, not the Bible – so I know experts.. and their failings. I also know one thing there is a lot I don’t know but in general what does the world look like if we think all documents are fakes? or is it just the ones we don’t like? I think on it.
@ Sean Osborne.
You have some sort of chutzpah to be quoting Christian lies on a throroughly Jewish supporting site, although all (nearly) are welcome. Controversy is “good” dognma is “not so good”,. Of the 13 purported “Letters” of Paul all but 5 have been proven by experts to be fakes. Romans, written by unknowns, is to a supposed congregation n Rome which Paul s totally unfamilar with,, Even for “Paul”… there is no proof he ever existed.
And we know for certain that several comments by “Paul” leap out to the eye as outright lies,
Herod, for nstance, rescued Julius Caesar when facing doom in Alexandria. He brought food, weaons, soldiers and much more to his aid. He was a faithful and active Roman ally for 25 years before he was honoured by Roman citizenship.
Hundreds of thousands of people lived in Rome for centuries, without having citizenship, at best, some had a very limited form.
ANd all foreign Citizenship lapsed at the death of an Emperor,to be renewed-or not- after accession of a new. No unknown “tentmaker” (bottom of the craft,scale) 1500 miles away, – a good afternoon’s stroll-..rwas ever a Roman Citizen, and, except for the exclusive families, coud it ecer be “inherited” from a father equally onknown as was “Paul”..
The guy, if he existed, whatever his name, had a great imagination, that is so. But then many had…thus the rise of Christianity by lying to the thousands of “G-D Lovers”, who crowded the synagogues of those days..
Maybe, after a heavy night, they were breathing spirits ….on truth…..!!
True believing ‘bride of Christ’ (Yeshua HaMashiach) Christian’s know very well and completely comprehend Paul’s teaching in Roman’s 11.
It is the Spirit-breathed Truth of the matter. Period.