Posted on 07/28/2003 8:44:14 AM PDT by truthandlife
As Israelis and Palestinians take faltering steps toward ending Mideast violence, Christian groups in the United States have different stances on the U.S.-backed peace plan.
The majority of churches - Roman Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant and some evangelical groups - generally welcome the three-step plan called the "road map," which envisions the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.
A vocal segment of evangelical Protestants, however, is lobbying the Bush administration to abandon the peace plan. They say it rewards terrorism and violates God's promise in Genesis to give the Jewish people the historic land of Israel.
"Christian Zionists" also see the modern state of Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy - and a precondition of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Setting up a Palestinian stats is seen as undermining these end times events.
"Because of their apocalyptic interpretation of the Bible, they view the initiative as a betrayal," said Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Columbia University.
Gary Bauer, a former Republican presidential candidate and an evangelical Christian, is spearheading a one-state solution campaign" with a group called Americans for a Safe Israel. The group is erecting billboards and distributing bumper stickers emblazoned with a verse from Genesis: "And the Lord said to Jacob...'Unto thy offspring will I give this land.'"
Another group, Christian Friends of Israel Communities, last year donated $200,000 from U.S. churches to help build Jewish settlements in "Judea and Samaria" - the biblical [ed.: and most accurate] name for the West Bank.
"Judea and Samaria were given to the Jews by God, and I cannot see the United States of America taking this land and giving it to a known terrorist," said religious broadcaster Pat Robertson, referring to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Such views, heard widely on Christian radio and television - and increasingly picked up in the Muslim media - are harshly criticized as counterproductive and theologically misguided by most other American Christian groups, including a significant number of evangelicals.
"Christian Zionists have turned their biblical interpretation into a political ideology that is aligning itself with the most extreme forms of Zionism in (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon's own coalition," said Donald Wagner, a religion professor at North Park University in Chicago and a do-founder of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.
Gerard Powers, director of the international justice and peace office at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said that the Christian Zionist view was too one-sided.
Others said that Christian Zionists were ignoring the suffering of Palestinian Christians, whose roots in the area go back to the early church.
Bauer, president of American Values, a conservative think tank, counters that a Palestinian state "will be used as a launching pad for more terrorist attacks against Israel."
Christian Zionism is based on a theology called dispensationalism. It emphasizes a literal reading of prophetic and apocalyptic passages in the Bible. Dispensationalists believe that the regathering of the Jewish people in Israel is foretold in Scripture, and that Israel will play a key role in end time events.
This theology - popularized in the "Left Behind" novels - is embraced by about a quarter to a third of the evangelical Protestants in this country, or as many as 17 million Americans, estimated Timothy Weber, a church historian and president of the Memphis Theological Seminary.
By pushing the Mideast initiative, Bush risks alienating those evangelical voters.
Activism from churches supporting the peace plan - modest until now - has intensified, partly in reaction to the anti-road map efforts.
Churches for Mideast Peace, a coalition of 18 mainline Protestant and Catholic groups, has been sending out e-mail alerts to 4,000 grassroots organizers, urging them to contact their congressional representatives to back the road map.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/952911/posts
The comments on this thread are better though.
What irks me the most is that Evangelical Christian support for Israel -- one writer characterized it as "ferocious," which works for me -- in the face of a growing global hostility against Israel, is being demonized and mischaracterized, and Evangelicals who are thus, as holding to an apocalyptic worldview and therefore to be mistrusted and kept at a distance.
The inherrant danger in this should be obvious to anybody, including those who have studied military history as well as having served in any armed forces.
If Israel's supporters (Jew or Christian -- it doesn't matter) in the face of this transparent and reckless slander allow the moral and political support of Israel to be degraded to the point that the lunatics in the Middle East who think they can still take down Israel or the United States are emboldened to do so, "Armageddon" becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when Israel is finally attacked.
That is what is so insidious about this.
If you'd like to be on or off this
Christian Supporters of Israel ping list,
please FR mail me. ~
This is completely idiotic. For one thing, most of the Jews who participate in "Nefesh B'Nefesh" have their own scriptural understanding of prophecy. I have the utmost admiration and respect for our Christian supporters, yet one Freeper (now ZOTTED) had the audacity to accuse me of being a "mouthpiece" for "missionaries."
Well, I AM a missionary, but I witness Orthodox Judaism to other Jews. That's a bad thing?
The fact that there are people willing to vocalize this sentiment is troubling.
The fact that there are people willing to sit there and listen to it without calling them on it is more troubling.
And I suspect that since the Bible is written at an adult level and the Left Behind series is written at third-grade level, more people are taking the word of a sub-dime-story quality novel at face value rather than going through the difficult task of searching the Scriptures.
If book sales are an indication, it is sweeping the land. People are prone to mental laziness by nature.
Maybe the jail time, the fraud, the family abandonment made him find the Lord, but he still refused to support his family after he got into the religion business.
1 And the dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name.
2 The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion. The dragon gave the beast his power and his throne and great authority.
Not really. I think I made myself clear earlier when I described what a left Behind cultist was. I never said everyone who read the books was an extremist. Just a poor judge of literature.
They are no more one and the same than those who like baseball (many, many) are the same as diehard Montreal Expo fans (few, few).
Perhaps, but I have never had an Expo fan tell me I was unregenerate if I didn't support their team.
You're right: People are lazy, but that doesn't mean Left Behind isn't high entertainment . . . (And, people were lazy long before Tim LaHaye started cranking out the LB series.)
LB is low entertainment. And I didn't claim that LB made people lazy: to the contrary, Mr. LaHaye saw people's existing intellectual laziness and decided to exploit it for profit.
Certainly more edifying than Harry Potter, etc.
A cartoonish caricature of Bible prophecy isn't edifying. And comparing LB favorably with Harry Potter is pretty easy - the Potter books are also garbage, albeit garbage of a more sinister sort.
On the other hand, the Curious George books are more edifying and more ably written than either LB or HP.
Scofield claimed to have found the Lord in 1879. In 1880 he forged a mortgage document, swindled his former mother-in-law out of $1,300 dollars and despite his larcenous gains, failed to provide for the wife and children he abandoned.
Yet millions of Americans accept his spurious and backward Bible commentary as if it were part of God's Word itself.
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