Jews, Israel, Zionism...Cause or Cure?

Daphne Anson has posted here about a terrible article available here. Said article accuses the Jews of gassing the Syrians to provoke war. Daphne recalls what happened when the Black Death ravaged Europe.

Her linked article on the Black Death suggests that Jews were singled out because they were not suffering to the same extent. The reason being the benign effect of the Levitical hygiene laws. According to the book 'None of these Diseases' by S.I. McMillen M.D. (and since updated), it was the application of the Levitical principle of quarantine that brought the disease under control. The mob blamed the Jews, but there were cooler heads in the Church (only they had the power and the knowledge) who reasoned it out and enforced the Levitical rules. Grimly ironic that the Jews were blamed for being the cause when, in fact, they had the cure.

It behooves Christians to remember what St. Paul had to say about the Jews. 

Romans 9:
1I am speaking the truth in Christ—I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit— 2that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers,^a my kinsmen according to the flesh. 4They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. 5To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

For Christ read Anointed or Messiah. It all means the same.

In other words, Paul is saying that without the Jews we Gentile Christians would have nothing.

Whenever rogue clerics and others tell us that Israel, the Jews or Zionism is the cause of all evils, we need to remember the Word of God, which we would not have were it not for the Jews.

Paul again: http://biblehub.com/1_timothy/6-10.htm
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.

The Jews are no more or less responsible for the evils of this sinful world than anyone else. They are not the Cause...

But they still have the Cure .

 

Archbishop Cranmer savages Church of Scotland report

The ever excellent Archbishop Cranmer has posted a scathing rebuttal of the 'theology' underlying a Church of Scotland report. The report recommends a theological position that states,

"Promises about the land of Israel were never intended to be taken literally, or as applying to a defined geographical territory. They are a way of speaking about how to live under God so that justice and peace reign, the weak and poor are protected, the stranger is included, and all have a share in the  community and a contribution to make to it. The ‘promised land’in the Bible is not a place, so much as a metaphor of how things ought to be among the people of God. This ‘promised land’ can be found – or built – anywhere."

  Cranmer clearly understands what I am trying to do here at The Almond Rod. To wit: demonstrate that a living faith in Jesus the Christ must accept that God's promises to Israel are essential to our understanding of Jesus as Messiah.

He cites an article in the Jewish Chronicle and also lists an extensive range of facts about the history of the Land. Cranmer's final paragraph reads as follows:

God promised Abraham that his descendants would have a land, and would be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. Israel is a fulfilment of that promise. We thank the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for the restoration of the Jewish people to their land, because it was a promise that He would so. And if that was not a promise, then Jesus is not the long-promised Messiah, and our promised salvation is nullified in a myriad of meaningless metaphors.

Amen to that Your Grace, amen to that.

I nearly forgot. He precedes his report with a superbly ironic image from the days when the Church of Scotland was doctrinally sound and fervently Zionist.

It is the the motto of the Church of Scotland. The image is instantly recognisable as a representation of the Burning Bush and the Latin 'Nec tamen consumebatur' translates as 'Yet it was not consumed'.  If Moses hadn't believed God literally, the Israelites would still be in Egypt!

Israel is just a dream - or is it?

Daphne Anson cross-posted my previous post and, without apology, I am cross posting a video she got from one of her regular readers. 

It is clever, it is brilliant, it is inspirational, it is how the Lie works, and I love it. You'd never have guessed;-)

The Big Lie, madness and the famous Eccles.

Over at Daphne Anson's Blog is a piece on a lady who used to be my MP. She's a very likeable person, as far as I could tell from the few times I've met her. However, in my opinion, like a great many socialists, but not all, she's a sucker for a sob story. Enough of Clare Short, it was something else that is so mad you've got to laugh, if only sardonically.

After reading Daphne's piece, I got curious and looked up 'ElectronicIntifada'. It's on an illustration with the post with a quote from Steven Sizer. EI seem to believe that the BBC is now ruled by a cabal of hardline Zionists. If that is true, it's a revolution. Will we now see the Balen report? Somehow I doubt it.

As I looked through the Google links on EI, I found this at Uprooted Palestinian . It appears that this  believes that George Soros funds EI, which may or may not be true and, get this, that George Soros is part of the Zionist conspiracy. Yes, he states that EI are Israel's spokesman.

"The truth is that these Electronic people are Israel’s spokesmen."

We can judge the quality of his reportage from another, more recent post, on the Syrian genocide.

The piece is headed by a picture which has nothing to do with Syria but is of Mohammed al Durrah (Dura).

My link goes to an exhaustive Wikipedia piece which leaves the matter unresolved, wisely from their point of view, because it has been demonstrated that, if the boy died, he was never killed by Israeli bullets.

What matters is not the truth but the tug on the heart.

Behind both these websites is the allegation that a Zionist Cabal is at work. Now back to Stephen Sizer . His quote is a criticism of CUFI and includes a picture with the link 'Banging the Drums of War'.

The article he is linking to, by one Emily Warda (and also here ) contains some valid criticism of what is really US American culture and not Zionism, followed by assorted distortions, unsupported assertions about Christian Zionism, an exaggeration of CUFI's influence and finishing with the (unsupported) assertion that they are banging the drums of war. CUFI has some 1.3 million members but that is out of a population of nearly 316 million. That's 0.4% of the population. OK, let's make some allowances for age and call it nearly 1%. According to the leftist Salon.com the muslim population could range from less that 1 million to up to 10 million. This is typical of attempts to quantify Islam. Generally, most come out at 2 - 3 million. Allowing for age, it's about even. I doubt that all the CUFI supporters are rich, white and powerful.

Which brings me back to the madness. If Zionism, in all its forms, is so powerful why am I not the Archbishop of Canterbury; why is Stephen Sizer still a vicar; why did the Holocaust happen; why is Israel so small; why does Israel surrender land for peace...etc. etc.?

Ah, yes. That singularly unsuccessful Zionist plot to rule the world which is simultaneously rich, powerful, secret, diabolical... yawn. Where does this strange idea come from? Its a Big Lie. Goebbels practiced it. Paul predicted it http://bible.cc/2_thessalonians/2-11.htm .

Actually, the lie is a distortion of promises in the Tenach and in the New Testament. It's the argument over the nature of that distortion and how to interpret scripture that separates me, and others, from Sizer and his ilk.

The day when Israel will be pre-eminent among the nations only comes with the (return of) the Messiah. This will not be brought about by precipitating Armageddon (more about that some other time). It's the rage against God that leads to a rage against real Christianity and against the Jew (again more later).

It's God's fault. He chose someone. It could have been a Briton. If it had we would be fighting the French and others for a piece of  the British Isles. It would have been the same story with British names. Josh Davidson would have been born in the North of England and executed in London. And so on.

The Messiah had to be somewhere. Which brings me at last to that saner form of madness which is the Goon Show and the famous Eccles. 

Eccles, when trapped in a coal cellar and questioned on what he was doing there, replies "Everybody's got to be somewhere".

And therein is the problem. The Jews, and others, are allowed to be somewhere, just as long as it is somewhere else.

The devolution of 'Divinity' - or how to undermine a Christian education and Zionism

So what has a Christian Education got to do with Zionism? Once this would have sounded like a stupid question. Even anti-Semites would have recognised the connection between a Christian Education and a belief that Israel should be back in the Land. 

For US readers and others where religious education is not part of the curriculum, I will need to give a little background. For those looking for detail, I suggest Googling 'History of Education Acts UK'. For the rest of us, the UK was slow to take the education of all the nation's children seriously. The Churches had a played a large part, but  could not provide a universal system.

In 1902, an Education Act was passed as a result of the instigation of one Arthur Balfour. Yes, Israel, that Balfour! The argument over religion was between the denominations and not over the inclusion of Christianity. After all, the King James Bible had helped shape the English language.

"Most, however, accepted the argument that, with mass education developing fast elsewhere, Britain needed an educated workforce if it was to maintain its position in world trade. So Balfour got his bill.

Religion

But not before religion had once again reared its divisive head. The 1870 Act had taken 28 days to debate. The 1902 Act took 59, and most of that time was spent on the religious clauses.

Dissenters and Doubters objected to state funds being used to support denominational schools, including those of the Church of England but more especially those of the Catholic Church. 'Inside and outside Parliament there was outcry against "Rome on the rates"' (Gates 2005:19)." 

There have been Christians in the British Isles since Roman times. Although the Anglo-Saxons were, mostly, evangelised by Augustine sent from Rome, the Celtic Church already existed and had made substantial inroads in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the North of England. This latter area, being not only my place of origin but a producer of many saints and clergy even to this day.

The subject was often called 'Divinity' and would be taught by clergy or suitably qualified persons. It was, and is, the one subject protected by law. This gave rise to the belief that it was compulsory. Actually, it was not and is not. Parents could and can withdraw their children from the subject if they have sufficient reason.

When I started school in the late 50s, the subject was usually called Religious Instruction. All pupils had a 'Statutory' lesson of, at least, one period a week. This, although intended as a minimum, soon became a maximum. Getting suitably qualified RI teachers was always a problem.

Somewhere along the way, it became known as Religious Education. Certainly, by the time I left my secondary education in 1971 it was RE. It was also still Christian and automatically included teaching about the Old Testament (Tenach).

After Bible College, when I went to train as a teacher, something had begun to change the nature of the subject. It was now called Religious Studies. My education degree included that component. It was not automatically Christian, and many RS teachers were not Christian believers, or even believers in anything at all.

Religious Studies now included Comparative Religion. Moral Instruction began to pass to a new subject, often called PSME (Personal, Social and Moral Education). This was not Christian unless some of its teachers were Christian. 

Unless a school was denominational, RE departments were under increasing pressure to teach Comparative Religions even when there were no children of other faiths in the school. 

Immigration meant that in the cities more and more pupils were from non-Christian religions. We began to see mosques, gurdwaras, mandirs, viharas, etc. being built. For those not familiar with these terms, they are as follows: Mosque - Islamic and roughly the equivalent of a synagogue (Jewish); mandir - Hindu temple; gurdwara (door of the Guru) Sikh and again a meeting place not a temple; vihara - Buddhist depends on the form of Buddhism.

All the above faiths, together with Christianity and Judaism had to be covered in that one period a week. This was not fair to any religion and academically, so unsound as to be a serious challenge to the intellectual integrity of an educated and conscientious teacher. Most teachers were now trained in RS and were pretty ignorant of the basics of even one religion.

The result was a superficial study of the beliefs and practices of all religions without any real understanding of why and how these faiths worked. Pupils and teachers came to conclusion that all religions were the same, which is New Age thinking or Hinduism without the Indian culture. Unsurprisingly, Muslims are now setting up their own schools citing Jewish and Christian denominational schools as a precedent.

RS is rarely taught to any intellectual standard and without any academic rigour. 

We now have a generation of young adults who have no understanding of the Christian heritage of the UK, no knowledge of the Bible, no knowledge of the Jewishness of the Old and the New Testaments and no knowledge of the history of Israel before 1947.

They have no defence against the twisting of history and the Arab claims to rewrite history. When   Hanan Ashrawi first claimed that Jesus was a Palestinian, I laughed in amazement that she even thought any one would believe her. Surely her credibility as a sane person was destroyed? Apparently not. We get a little game playing with the term Palestinian for those of us who know that Jesus was, and is, Jewish. Anyone else, including the propagandised people of the West Bank and Gaza, assume it means that Jesus was an Arab and /or a Muslim.

By the way, I often had to teach children that Jesus was not a Christian but a Jew. That was ignorance, now they are deliberately lied to.

I no longer teach my subject in schools. I am a preacher and a Bible teacher.