Posted on 07/26/2007 6:41:46 PM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
The National Council of Churches (NCC) is distressed that not all Christians share its animosity towards Israel.
Preferring not to address its own demographic implosion, the NCC periodically lashes out at more demographically robust Christian movements, especially conservative evangelicals. In its latest fusillade, the NCC denounced the “Christian Zionism” of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which recently convened its second convention in Washington for pro-Israel evangelicals. Newt Gringrich was among the speakers.
“CUFI's position of uncritical support for Israel separates it from the Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, and traditional Protestant Churches, all of whom support Israel while at the same time advocate for a Palestinian state,” insisted the NCC’s news release, which mostly quoted Associated General Secretary for International Affairs and Peace Antonios Kireopoulos.
The NCC official asserted that “most Christians” do not share CFI’s stated goals. CFI’s objective, as its website describes, is to increase support for Israel among evangelicals by emphasizing the “the Jewish contribution to Christianity and Israel’s biblical mandate to the land through Bible teachings.”
CFI warns that “with every passing day, the threats to Israel and the Jewish people are growing,” specifically referencing Iran’s nuclear plans and Hamas’ popularity among Palestinians. “Millions of Christians across America have a deep love for Israel and the Jewish people and want to stand with them during these difficult days,” notes the CUFI website, which cites the “threats to Judeo-Christian civilization from radical Islam.”
Speaking unpleasantly about radical jihadists, of course, is unacceptable to the NCC and the Religious Left. "CUFI's ongoing vilification of Islam is also unacceptable," fretted Shanta Premawardhana, an NCC interfaith relations official. "The NCC continues to urge Christians to build relationships with Muslim people, the vast majority of whom are peace-loving, law-abiding people." What the NCC never considers is that refusal to address radical Islamists is no favor to moderate Muslims who are “peace-loving.”
According to the NCC, the CFI has “advocated going to war with Iran,” which is “totally unacceptable,” Premawardhana claimed. "The NCC believes that high-level dialogues with Iran and other Middle Eastern partners is the proper method of dealing with Iran." The NCC believes in high toned denunciations for Christians who disagree with its political agenda. But radical Islamists and other often very savage adversaries of Western Civilization always merit endless respectful dialogue, according to the NCC mindset.
The NCC, like the rest of the Religious Left, prefers to dismiss all pro-Israel evangelicals as “Left-Behind” fanatics whose support for the Jews is merely a crass and self-serving preparation for the end-times. CFI’s “efforts are the latest in a century old apocalyptic movement that began in earnest in the 19th century,” the NCC asserted. “Sometimes called Christian Zionism because of its uncritical support for the State of Israel, it is based on a literal reading of Biblical apocalyptic texts.”
Actually, Zionism and philo-semitism have a long history in Christianity, arguably dating back to the New Testament, whose writers were themselves Jews who followed a Jewish messiah, obviously. But more specifically among Western Protestants, a mystical attachment to the Jewish people and a belief in their connectedness to the land of Israel originated at least with the English Puritans. Zionism of some sort has nearly always resonated among some religionists in America over the last 400 years.
The NCC's founders and early leaders were themselves ardent supporters of Israel. It was not until after the radicalization of the 1960's, and the advent of Liberation Theology, that leftist Protestant prelates suddenly realized that Palestinian insurrectionists were actually God's revolutionary vanguard against Zionist imperialism. Today, the NCC and its allies insist that they support Israel, within its pre-1967 borders. Naturally, these clerics prefer not to acknowledge that those borders are largely indefensible, and that an unrestricted "right of return" for Palestinian descendants would likely erase the Jewish state demographically.
According to Kireopoulos, the CUFI "message differs greatly with what theologians have taught for centuries" about Israel. Apparently, the NCC believes itself a mouthpiece for orthodox theology, instead of the shrinking pulpit for heterodox liberal Protestantism that it actually is. That the restoration of the Jews to Israel may serve some Providential purpose is hardly a belief confined to freakish evangelicals, as the Religous Left, sitting inside its insulated and largely empty churches, prefers to imagine.
"The NCC advocates for a two-state solution, with a secure Israel alongside a viable Palestinian state," declared the NCC news release, sounding so very reasonable. "The NCC has stated the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories is unsupportable. This position is shared by Churches worldwide, and is counter to the position espoused by CUFI."
According to Kireopoulos, "CUFI stands apart from the historic Churches still present in the Holy Land." These churches for Palestinian Christians are "adversely affected by the policies supported by...CUFI." The NCC prelate blamed pro-Israel evangelicals in the U.S. for the plight of Palestinian churches, which are "diminishing and are threatened with extinction."
Of course, the NCC will never mention that Christian populations from throughout the Middle-East are declining, thanks largely to pressures from radical Islam. For the Religious Left, the Islamists themselves are never at fault but are merely the understandable consequence of endless Western oppressions dating to the Crusades. Almost hilariously, Kireopoulos frets about the de-emphasis on Jesus Christ by CUFI's pro-Israel evangelicals.
"The Christian Gospel is clear that salvation came through the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ," Kireopoulos intoned. "To supplement this message is to prevert the Gospel" that CUFI claims to preach. Naturally, the NCC and the Religious Left prefer not to mention inconvenient topics such as the resurrection of Christ in their various outreaches to Muslims. In fact, the Resurrection, which for leftist Protestants is typically just a poetic metaphor for social justice, is not a topic on which the NCC typically focuses.
Just as the NCC is almost never interested in persecuted Christians anywhere, except when the supposed perpetrators are Israel and its American evangelical supporters, so too the NCC will not usually cite the Resurrection, except as a polemic against both Israel's Jews and their Christians friends.
I as well, for reasons I'll try to elaborate.
Unfortunately JP is avowedly (see his home page) under the influence of Marcionism, and ancient heresy that insists that the Jewish G-d is not that of chr*stianity. Wideawake will know better than I whether he also taught that the gnostic doctrine that the created universe is itself evil.
Philoponus is an even more radical heretic than Marcion.
To recap:
(1) The Gnostics in large part taught that God revealed himself through many, many emanations (often called "aeons" not in the sense of periods of time but in terms of created layers of reality) ending in the grossness of actual physical earthly life. They taught that Jesus, like Osiris or Hermes or Mithras, was a great teacher who revealed how to penetrate through all these layers to reach divinity. So, from the Gnostic point of view, the physical world we live in is a regrettable debasement.
(2) One hundred years later, Marcion taught that the true God created a number of spirits one of which, called the Demiurge, created the physical world and mankind. The Demiurge was pure justice without mercy and was arbitrary in his decisions - Marcion believed that the choice of the Jews, in his view an unrefined and coarse people, as the Demiurge's chosen people demonstrated the flaws of the Demiurge's world and of the Demiurge's Scripture.
Marcion believed that the physical world was inferior and transitory and that Jesus represented the mercy and spiritual transcendence that the inferior Demiurge of the Jews lacked.
I will point out that Marcion's "church growth" strategy was to focus on the wealthy and well-educated Gentiles of the Roman world and that he carefully tailored his message (his New Testament was less than half the size of the canonical New Testament, containing only an edited version of the Gospel of Luke, the Acts and an edited version of only 10 of the Pauline epistles) to appeal to the philosophical, Hellenized demographic.
(3) One hundred years after that, Manichaeus out-Marcioned Marcion by declaring the Demiurge to not only be the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, but also a devil, unjust as well as merciless, and the physical world he created to be an evil prison which everyone must strive to escape.
In contrast to all this dualistic paranoia, orthodox Judaism has always held that the earth is an eternal creation, that God is its creator, and that it will one day be ruled by the Moshiach from Jerusalem in perfect conformity to God's justice and mercy and the orthodox Christian view is that the earth is an eternal creation, that God is its creator, and that it will one day be refashioned and ruled by the returned Jesus from the New Jerusalem in perfect conformity to God's justice and mercy.
Returning to Philoponus' heresy - he is an avowed Marcionite but is closer to the Manichaeans in his views.
However Philoponus' personality is close to Marcion's: he believes that he is an infallible judge of what is or is not true Scripture, he has contempt for the Jewish people and he uses the arguments of the godless secular world (in his case Dawkinesque arguments, in Marcion's case Stoic/Sceptic arguments) against the Hebrew Scriptures.
He goes farther than Marcion: in the case of the children who taunted Elisha being slain, Marcion would have argued that this punishment was indeed just - but that it ought to have been tempered with mercy.
Philoponus' argument is entirely secular: what God did was just wrong and really, really mean and mean people suck and yada, yada, yada.
JP also seems to be laboring under the misapprehension that I am Jewish myself. He seems to think I wrote parts of the TaNa"KH!!!
Not to get into a big theological thingie here (which I'm not as qualified to discuss as you are, wideawake), but the reason the Torah says so little about the afterlife is because this world, the world G-d created in the beginning, is in fact going to be the main part of the afterlife! Obeying the commandments (Mosaic for Jews, Noachide for non-Jews) helps to refine and perfect the universe so that it will one day be the paradise G-d intended it to be, and the ultimate reward is to be resurrected and live here during that time.
And he’s gone.
Good riddance!
I'll never understand the irony: if you attack Jewish noses or bankers you're automatically classed as an anti-Semite and outside polite society. If you attack the Jewish G-d (apparently even openly) then you're not anti-Jewish, you're anti-religious, and that's somehow perfectly acceptable.
One bad thing; we're losing the only Assyrian we had on this forum (so far as I know). But since most Assyrians aren't Marcionites or whatever-in-blazes JP was, then maybe we can find a new one (maybe even in Iraq).
True, the animal sacrifices didn't stop until the God-ordained destruction of the temple occurred in 70 AD. Interesting that it hasn't been rebuilt in the almost 2,000 years since. ;)
Whats interesting is that most of your buddies tell me it wasn't needed anymore after Jesus shed blood. You're telling me God ordained it appx 35 years later. ok. whatever.
It wasn't.
You're telling me God ordained it appx 35 years later.
Yes, I'm telling you God allowed the Jews time to get their act together, accept the perfect atonement offered through the Messiah, and realize they didn't need animal sacrifice any more. They blew that chance (as, of course, God knew they would).
That doesn’t explain “Christians” continuing the practice for 35 years. Need some consistency please.
Sure it does. Most of the original Christians were converted Jews.
If you read the book of Acts, you can see that there was controversy in the early church as to whether converted Gentiles should be taught to practice Judaic law after their conversion. The decision was that they did not, but that did not change the fact that at least some converted Jews continued to observe many of the things they had throughout their lives.
Messianic Jews today continue to observe many of those same things, but they do so with the knowledge that they point to Jesus, their Messiah.
Oh ya that's right. Until the trinity was forced down their throats and by the year 100 you couldn't find any of them.
Todays Messianic Jews are just Trinitarians in Hebrew sheeps clothing.
Actually, the concept of the trinity is given in the New Testament, starting in the gospel of John. They wouldn't have used the word 'trinity' of course, since it is an English word, and it is quite possible they didn't have much of an understanding of the deeper concepts about God at that point. But they did recognize Jesus as God manifest in the flesh.Todays Messianic Jews are just Trinitarians in Hebrew sheeps clothing.
They are Christians who continue to observe the feasts/festivals/holidays of Judaism with an understanding and appreciation of how they point to Jesus, their Messiah.
Actually, the concept of the trinity is given in the New Testament, starting in the gospel of John. They wouldn't have used the word 'trinity' of course, since it is an English word, and it is quite possible they didn't have much of an understanding of the deeper concepts about God at that point. But they did recognize Jesus as God manifest in the flesh.
Todays Messianic Jews are just Trinitarians in Hebrew sheeps clothing.
They are Christians who continue to observe the feasts/festivals/holidays of Judaism with an understanding and appreciation of how they point to Jesus, their Messiah.
Assuming for arguments sake that I found NT writings to be inspired the concept of "trinity" still must be interpreted from them.
They are Christians who continue to observe the feasts/festivals/holidays of Judaism with an understanding and appreciation of how they point to Jesus, their Messiah.
Exactly. They are Christians and nothing else.
I have to disagree. I could give you a whole list of scriptural references, but to what avail? It appears that you don't believe the NT writings, so it would be a waste of time for both of us.
Exactly. They are Christians and nothing else.
However, they call themselves Messianic Jews. I don't have any problem with that. Do you? If so, why?
Because a trinitarian belief which includes a human as God couldn't be more diametrically opposed to Judaism. As for Messianism, ("Messiah" being on who leads in saving the Jewish people, examples: Moses, Joshua, David etc.)Jews believe they have had Messiahs in the past and will have one or more in the future. Gods coming down from heaven is a concept that has its origins in earlier paganism and mystery religions which has nothing in common with Judaism.
Thats not to say the two religions do not have similarities. They both seem to realize the ideal successful society here would be based on observance of the 10 commands (words). A beautiful concept which spawned western civilization.
Interesting then, that the books of Moses record that God walked with Adam and Eve in the garden and that He spoke with Moses face to face like a friend (among other accounts of God taking on human form), not to mention the prophecies regarding the Messiah in books such as Isaiah and Zechariah.
Writings tell us no man has ever seen God face to face. Seems as tho we don't know when to take writings literally or figuratively.
God is Spirit, so of course one can't see Him - unless He takes human form, which scripture shows that He has.
Seems as tho we don't know when to take writings literally or figuratively.
Well, maybe you don't. ;)
There ya have it. If you're speaking of Hebrew Scripture you're taking literally where it should be figuratively. If you're talking about NT writings you're reading a sundial in a closet. :-)
On what do you base your assertion that it should be figurative?
If you're talking about NT writings you're reading a sundial in a closet.
It would seem so to one who is lost.
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