By DENNIS PRAGER—
Earlier this month, the Church of Scotland issued a report titled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land.'” The essence of the report is that according to the Bible, Jews have no more attachment to the land of Israel than anyone else. Hence “promised land” is in quotation marks in the report’s title — because there is no promised land. In the report’s words: “The New Testament contains a radical re-interpretation of the concepts of ‘Israel,’ ‘temple,’ ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘land.’ When the Bible mentions ‘Israel,’ it does not mean Israel; when it says ‘temple,’ the Bible does not mean the Jewish temple; ‘Jerusalem’ does not mean the city of Jerusalem; and ‘land’ does not mean land. “Promises about the land of Israel,” the report continues, “were never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory.” Even during the worst excesses of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, it is doubtful that any normative Christian body declared that “Israel,” “the temple,” “Jerusalem” and “the land” no longer meant or were ever intended to mean what those words represent. This claim is not only profoundly anti-Semitic. It is an act of theological forgery; it makes a mockery of the Bible as a coherent document and it renders Christianity inherently anti-Semitic.
It would be as if a major post-Christian religious body had announced that “Jesus,” “Christ,” “crucifixion” and “resurrection” had never meant what Christians and the Christian Bible had always understood them to mean. Imagine if a major Muslim body declared that Jesus means Muhammad; Christ means Quran; crucifixion means Islamophobia; and resurrection means the Hajj. I have never equated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism. But the Church of Scotland report is not about criticism of Israel; it is about invalidating the Jewish people and invalidating the Jews’ historically incontestable claims to the land upon which the only independent states that ever existed were Jewish.
The Church of Scotland report asserts that the Bible does not support the existence of a Jewish state: “There has been a widespread assumption by many Christians as well as many Jewish people that the Bible supports an essentially Jewish state of Israel. This raises an increasing number of difficulties. … ”
It asserts that justice and the existence of a Jewish state are mutually exclusive: “There is a direct conflict of interest between wanting human rights and justice for all and retaining the right to the land.”
It asserts that the Jews’ return to Israel has no biblical basis.
It asserts that the notion that the Jews have or ever had a special relationship with G0D — one of the most oft repeated ideas in the Hebrew Bible — is negated in that very same Bible: “That exclusivist tradition implied Jews had a special, privileged position in relation to G0D. But the prophetic tradition stood against this.” The Chosen People is not chosen, in other words.
It asserts that G0D’s promise of the land to Abraham has nothing to do with the Jews; it is only about Jesus: “The promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people.”
It asserts that even Jesus — that proud, religious Jew — did not believe in any special relationship between G0D and the Jews: “Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness … ”
At the same time, this truly immoral document does not devote a word to why there were Palestinian refugees: While the Jews accepted the 1947-48 partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, all the neighboring Arab states rejected the partition and invaded the Jews in order to annihilate Israel at birth.
Nor does the report devote a single sentence to how Israel’s occupation of the West Bank came about: In 1967, Israel’s neighbors sought to exterminate Israel just as Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and most Palestinians and other Muslims in the Middle East today wish to now. And that only because of that war, won by Israel, did Israel come to occupy the West Bank of Jordan.
Nor is a word devoted to Palestinian national honoring of their numerous terrorists, or to the exterminationist and anti-Semitic propaganda that saturates Middle East media or to the widespread Palestinian support for terrorism (according to the just-released Pew Forum poll of Muslims, 40 percent of Palestinians support suicide terror).
And the Church of Scotland did not think it important to even hint at what happened in Gaza after the Israelis gave the whole of Gaza to the Palestinians: The Palestinians converted it into a terror-state that regularly launches rockets into Israel to kill as many Israelis as possible.
And, most vile of all, the Church of Scotland never once notes, let alone condemns, the Muslim countries and organizations that seek to annihilate Israel, an existential threat that no other country or people in the world face.
The Church of Scotland has given voice to the ugliest depiction of Jews since medieval times. The official reaction of the Scottish Jewish community is that Christian-Jewish post-Holocaust dialogue seems to have been a moral and intellectual waste of time. I do not agree. But if other Christian churches do not condemn the Church of Scotland — despite its promise to revise its report to include a statement that Israel has a right to exist (!) — even pro-Christian Jews will wonder whether the Scottish Jewish community’s reaction is valid.
And how did this happen? The report is a combination of medieval Christian anti-Judaism and contemporary leftist anti-Zionism. For Jews and Israel, that’s a lethal combination.
The church of scotland is talking nonsense. This seems to stem from the so called replacement theology which is totally wrong. This states that the Christian church has replaced Israel as God’s people. Perhaps someone in the church of scotland would like to read their bible.God’s promise to Israel is as valid today as it has always been.
Also I always thought that Palestine was a Roman invention. According to my Bible all the land West of the Jordan river was the promised land.
I find the statement by C of S offensive and way off the mark.
Ps I am a gentile living in England. God bless Israel.
Richard.
Shalom and grace to the writers and readers of this article.
Many of us have been aware of this totally incorrect and tragic Doctrine , twisting the clear words of the inerrant, well authorised Tanakh and B’rit Chadash. [Whole Bible.]
That a Church ~ that in fact through their support of the ‘Scottish Hospital’ in Tiberius in Israel, [for almost 200 years] did very good work for the whole Community, in the area, did not contribute to this wrong Theory, by their actions ~ (at least in the early days), should now present this anti-Jewish, anti-Scriptural theory is more than tragic!
God’s infallible Word is: “I WILL that bless those who bless you”… [Abraham, through his descendants, Isaac and Jacob] “and whoever curses you, I WILL curse, AND ALL THE PEOPLES ON EARTH will be blessed by you.” In reality, even the Church of Scotland have received that Blessing, (we would like to believe) through Yeshua/ Jesus the Divinely acceptable Son of God by His words, twice in the New Testament: ~ at Jesus’ Baptism and Transfiguration. [Luke 3:22 & Luke 9: 35.] If you take the scissors to one part of the Word of God, be careful that you do not remove the key parts, you presumably count on for your Eternal Salvation. We would pray that God would bless all concerned about this issue, out of His amazing, undeserved GRACE, but we also wish you to look carefully at the wrong decisions ‘you’ have made about God’s CLEAR choice and blessing of (yes, His still resistant nation -AS A NATION) but destined for full restoration as Ezekiel 36 & also Chapter 39: 29, and Isaiah 19:23 -25 says so specifically to MODERN Israel!
FOR & ON BEHALF OF ‘THE GETHSEMANE OLIVET’ [evangelical, inter-church PRAYER & INFO Group in N.Z.] g.o.fellowship@maxnet.co.nz.
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We are greatly offended by the church of Scotland’s paper. If all these things mentioned in their paper as untrue are untrue then the whole of scripture is untrue. It is either all true or none of it is true. We believe it is ALL TRUE! God said the land is Israel and belongs to His people, Jews and all the tribes of Israel, whoever they are, He knows! May His word be true and all men liars. We stand with Him and Israel and the Jews!
This seems to be pretty specific to me. There was no Church of Scotland, Anglican, Catholic or any other when this was written. It specifically states,
“when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt”
Has The Church of Scotland or the other replacement theology churches ever read this?
Jeremiah 31:31-34
New American Standard Bible (NASB)
31 “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, My covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them,” declares the Lord. 33 “But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” declares the Lord, “I will put My law within them and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. 34 They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them,” declares the Lord, “for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.”