Tuesday, December 26, 2006
Here's a very interesting article in The Christian Century concerning Jesus as Jew. The Christian Century has not always maintained an editorial policy that we would call "friendly," so the article is a welcome surprise, especially considering the fact that it spends some time focusing on the troubling imagery of Sabeel's Naim Ateek: Misusing Jesus, How the church divorces Jesus from Judaism
A few comments from Naim Ateek, an Anglican priest and founder of the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem, are indicative of this rhetoric. At Notre Dame in 2001, Ateek preached on "The Zionist Ideology of Domination Versus the Reign of God." He identified "Jesus Christ, living in our country as a Palestinian under occupation," and declared that "Israel has placed a large boulder, a big stone that has metaphorically shut off the Palestinians in a tomb. It is similar to the stone placed on the entrance of Jesus' tomb." That same year, for his Easter message, Ateek proclaimed: "In this season of Lent, it seems to many of us that Jesus is on the cross again with thousands of crucified Palestinians around Him. ... The Israeli government crucifixion system is operating daily."
At a worship service in Jerusalem in April 2002, he stated: "Palestinians have been condemned as a nation by Israel, and sentenced to destruction. The accusations of people in power are strikingly similar throughout history to the charges leveled against Jesus in this city—terrorist, evildoer, or rebel and a subversive person. Palestinians are being crucified today for refusing to succumb to Israel's demand for greater concession on land."
The rhetoric is overblown. Jesus did not advise his followers to blow up Romans (and Ateek is not advising his followers to blow up Jews, but by lumping all Palestinians into one category, he risks that impression); Palestinians have not been sentenced to destruction. Ateek is hardly silenced. On the contrary, he continues to hold international conferences at his center and give talks and sermons at Notre Dame, the Center for Jewish-Christian Relations at Cambridge University, the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, and elsewhere.
Ateek's rhetoric is also slippery, since its anti-Jewish impact is often more a matter of perception. For a convocation at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he preached concerning Jesus' messages: "They reflect an inclusive commitment to one's fellow humanity and a ministry that has depth and breadth of scope—a commitment to the poor, a commitment to the ministry of healing, a commitment to justice and liberation of the oppressed, a commitment to jubilee which involves economic justice for all. I believe that these words constituted a paradigm shift at the time of Jesus, and they provide us with the basis of a paradigm shift for ministry in the twenty-first century." In making this claim, he erases Jesus' Judaism. If concern for the poor originated with Jesus, then the church might follow that ancient heretic Marcion and jettison the entire "Old Testament."...
The whole thing holds interest. [h/t: DVZ]
"Any writing that separates Jesus and his first followers from Jewish identity, associates these proto-Christians with the Palestinian population ... is not only historically untenable but theologically abhorrent."
One obvious indication of the ahistoricity of Sabeel's liberation theology is that when Jesus and his disciples lived, the place was known as Judea. The Romans renamed it Palestine after the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 66 C.E. in an attempt to erase the memory of the Jewish commonwealth. The name "Palestine" was chosen because it was reminischent of the Jews' former nemesis, the Philistines, whose territory had been in what is now called the Gaza strip.
And to think that Anglican bishops have called fundamentalist Christianity bad theology!