The Jerusalem 2001 Convention: Excerpts from the Book of Talks and Testimonies
Changing the Future by Confronting the Past Talks and Testimonies –
Jerusalem 2001 Convention – April 17-20
Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary; 216 pages
ISBN 3 87209 647 8
Book review
by Professor Dr. Christian Zippert, bishop emeritus, Marburg, Germany
‘Repent' is the call ringing from the first pages of the Gospels. ‘Repent' is the call that launched the Reformation. As Christians we have taken frighteningly long to apply this call to our guilt-laden relationship to the Jewish people.
In my experience the talks and testimonies, above all the repentance service, at the Jerusalem 2001 Convention are an effective remedy for the widespread disinclination and inability to repent.
It is my hope that this collection of texts, along with the video tapes, will give many people in many countries and in many churches the opportunity to experience for themselves that repentance, when it comes from the heart, reaches the hearts of others, bringing healing. And this healing is what is desperately needed in our relationship to our Jewish brothers and sisters.
Contents of Changing the Future by Confronting the Past:
Talks and Testimonies
My earliest memory goes back to the early days of World War II; we were living in our grandparents' home on the outskirts of London. My brother and I often slept under the stairs ‘in case the Germans dropped a bomb on the house'. However, my father told us, there were ‘good' Germans as well as ‘bad' ones – but never any mention of Jews in Germany.
After the war, I saw pictures of the emaciated inmates of Bergen-Belsen being liberated, and of others for whom liberation came too late – but no one spoke of Jewish inmates.
I had a sound Biblical upbringing; I still vividly remember, at around age seven, watching a Bible class teacher use a flannelgraph visual aid to teach the details of the original Passover night. But it was not till I met Beverley, who later became my wife, that I heard anything about the Jews having a God-given destiny, that was yet to be fulfilled.
Later, I read about persecution of the Jews over the centuries – but took little notice: hadn't they brought about the death of Jesus, at Calvary? Didn't the Gospel record their words, ‘His blood be on us and on our children'? I treated the phrase in The Apostles' Creed ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate' as merely a statement identifying when Jesus died, and ignored the implications behind the fact that the death sentence was pronounced by a Gentile who believed Jesus was innocent. Anyway, if secular authorities brought about this judgment, what was that to do with me?
As a theological student preparing for ordination in the Anglican Church, I took courses in Church history; but many ‘pages' of that history had been ‘torn out' – the ongoing anti-Jewish stance of the Church was never even hinted at.
Chinks of reality first appeared in a large second-hand book shop, where Beverley stumbled across None Is Too Many, a scholarly book about anti-Jewish decisions of the Canadian government (her native country, my adopted homeland) – decisions that were inspired by the deeply held views of a Deputy Minister who was also a lay elder in an evangelical church.
The reality became more stark as I read The Guilt of Christianity, the forerunner to the Jerusalem Convention in April 2001. This brief record of antisemitism in the Church's 2000-year history was inspired by the long-term ministry and teaching of Mother Basilea Schlink, one of the founders of the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary. She had spoken publicly in Germany during the Nazi years, and in 1958 published Israel, My Chosen People – a clear statement both about Israel's calling to be God's blessing to all nations, and about the Christian Church's record of antisemitism.
I began to listen to news bulletins with more discriminating ears. E-mailed information from the News Service of the icej (International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem), two or three times a week, added flesh to the bones. By the time of the Convention, I was ready to join those Protestants and evangelicals who wanted to take responsibility, publicly, for the Church's long record of very un-Christian pre-conceptions and words, attitudes and deeds towards Jews.
Even so, I was not prepared for much that we experienced at the Convention. Perhaps the most devastating statement, repeated by more than one speaker, was the revelation that, although the Holocaust was not perpetrated by the Church, it would not have been possible without the Church's long record of anti-Jewish preaching and persecutions. It was very disturbing to hear Canon Peter Schneider quoted as having demonstrated that, apart from the gas chambers, every method used by the Nazis against the Jewish people had been adopted by the Church some time previously.
However, the statement that most affected me, personally, came from David Faber, a survivor of eight concentration camps. He was describing the sadism of Eichmann, which he experienced firsthand in Auschwitz. After being beaten at Eichmann's orders, he heard him say, ‘You wish you were dead, and your problem would be over, but you're going to die anyway. But first I want to see you suffer, and then I am going to kill you.' Pleasure in prolonging the intense suffering of someone else? ‘How unusual,' people may say. But young boys will sometimes cut off a spider's legs and then watch – with obvious glee – as the poor creature wriggles and squirms. A scientific experiment? Of course not: it's just further evidence that sin affects us all, deeply; sin perverts us, even the most respectable among us. As I listened to David, I realized that whenever I enjoy myself at someone else's unwanted, painful expense, I am as guilty as Eichmann was.
Just as serious as inquisitions, torture, and killing has been the teaching and preaching of the Church. Have we forgotten:
– That ‘a new covenant', an ‘everlasting covenant', was promised by a Jewish prophet, Jeremiah, to Jews in Jerusalem?
– That our Gospels tell us that this new covenant was instituted by a Jew, Jesus, in a group of twelve Jews – at The Last Supper?
– That the Holy Spirit was poured out at Pentecost on 120 Jewish disciples of Jesus?
– That the ensuing sermon (which won 3,000 new disciples) was preached by a Jew, Peter, to a large crowd of Jews and Jewish proselytes?
In our thinking, we have replaced these Jews with Gentiles of our own imagining, and gone on to replace the Saviour Jew from Nazareth, who grew up in Judaism (as it was then), with a would-be saviour of our own design, not unlike us ourselves. We have tried to re-fashion Jesus of Nazareth as the-Son-of-God-in-our-own-image: sin can't get much more serious than that – to try to re-design God.
Having known the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary since 1968, Beverley and I have been very conscious that these sisters never do anything superficially. The speakers at the Convention reflected their thorough approach. They made it clear that this long-term sin of the Church is not a minor matter, something that can be overlooked. As I listened carefully to those addressing the Convention, I realized that any repentance I expressed would have to match the sin's seriousness. As a young boy, I had often been encouraged to ‘say sorry' to my brother; but then ‘I became a man and put away childish things'. I realized now that saying sorry wasn't anywhere near enough.
Early in the Convention, speakers began to warn us that:
– real repentance would require a substantial knowledge of the suffering inflicted by the Church of which we are members: to use ‘umbrella language' would not be really confessing;
– real repentance would require considerable sense of the pain our victims had endured;
– real repentance would require accurate details of why we, the Gentile Church, had developed such an anti-Jewish stance
Why do we need these details? Because we shall not be able to rid ourselves of our antisemitism without facing up to how we developed such an attitude in the first place.
Some of the Jewish guests, present for the Repentance Service itself, were heard to comment quietly, ‘Well said; now do it' – merely saying we're sorry would not be enough.
At the Jerusalem Convention, we expressed our repentance for the past in words – not a bad way to start. But now, in retrospect, how are we to put feet to those words, so that they don't prove to be mere words, and nothing more? As the speakers made clear, it will take more than merely not repeating the deeds of our past; we have to change our attitudes, which are the source of our deeds. Replacement Theology (or supersessionism, as some call it) is not acceptable. For too long, we have read the New Testament as though it were a collection of Gentile writings; we have forgotten that the New Testament was written largely by Jews – Messianic Jews (or Hebrew Christians) we might call them today. With the help of today's Messianic Jews, the Church must re-read the New Testament, and re-evaluate all our teaching through the Jewish eyes of the original Christians. We must re-read our commentaries, our devotional guides, our scholarly textbooks, with an eagle eye ready to spot and deal with every statement, every reference that presumes Israel was rejected by God, that the Gentile Church is ‘the new Israel'.
Some of the questions put to us by some of the speakers were extremely provocative – deliberately? to shake us out of complacency? At the Convention, we had come from all over the world, from different cultures, different Christian traditions. We did not necessarily share the same theological views; but we were united in wanting to repent of those attitudes within the Church that had made persecution of Jews an accepted norm, even made the Holocaust possible.
As the Convention progressed, it was increasingly clear that historic, mainline Christianity had failed to obey our Lord's unequivocal instructions: ‘Love your neighbour; love your enemies; do good to those who hate you …' More than un-Christian words, the Church has been guilty of un-Christian deeds.
By definition, followers of Jesus are not to hate anyone. But during the Hitler era the Church (both inside and outside of Germany) did not love the Jews; had the Church taken a clear, sufficiently determined stand against Nazi antisemitism, and in the Allied countries against indifference towards the fate of the Jews, we could have prevented the Holocaust, or at least lessened its devastation. Because we refused to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit, He had to bring us into deep humiliation, by using a fine, non-Messianic Jew, one of the Holocaust survivors, to remind us of this teaching of the one we call ‘Lord'. As David Faber put it: ‘How can people say I love Christ and I hate Jews? … If [Christ] could be with us for one second, he would tell you: It was not my teaching. My teaching was love, not hate.'
By the record of our animosity and hostility to our Jewish neighbours – not just in the twentieth century, but over most of the previous 1,900 years – we have lost all credibility as those commissioned to bring them Good News. As another survivor of the Holocaust said recently, after I returned home from the Convention:
Christians say that the Jews at the time of Jesus forgot their Torah;
but since then, Christians have forgotten the teaching of their Jesus.
We may wish they would recognize Jesus of Nazareth as their Messiah; but in the face of all the suffering they've endured (much at the whim of the Church), perhaps we need instead to recognize in them the Suffering Servant of the Lord (thinking carefully about the whole of Isaiah 41-53, including 41:8,9, and not just about 52:13-53:12). We may have heard Christian preachers say that all suffering is redemptive; let us apply that thought to the long, hard trail of Jewish suffering.
But all is not lost: if our repentance is genuine, we shall ask the Holy Spirit to ransack our hearts, minds and lives, to do whatever is necessary so that our personal lives, the lives of our families, our churches and our fellowships will reflect not only appreciation for our Jewish roots, but also humble re-appraisal of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.
For His sake, let us learn to love our Jewish brothers and sisters. ‘Love' does not mean to idolize the Jews, or superficially adopt some of their customs or music; nor does it mean telling them how to run the State of Israel. Instead, with no hidden agenda on our part, no ulterior motive, it means seeking them out to befriend them, especially at this time when they have so few friends. (Have you ever asked yourself why the whole world is against the Jews?) If they respond, and ask us questions, we can give them Christian answers. If they choose to reject what we say, we will respect their decision – our responsibility, if we are to do as Jesus taught us, is to go on loving our neighbours.
As you read this book, you may be interested in all this, but question how much you can have been involved, let alone be responsible: ‘It all happened before I was born.' John Sandager's testimony as a lawyer may help you to re-think such a view. We can be an accessory to a crime – once we become aware of enough facts – if we do not report them. And as members of the Body of Christ, we have to remember that when a finger pulls a trigger, it is the whole person who is charged in court, not just the finger. Scandals in the North American Church over the last few decades have affected the whole Church – there, at least – on the basis of ‘tainted by association'. Similarly, the centuries-long record of anti-Judaism discredits today's generation of Christians as well – unless we take a stand, repent of the Church's sins of the past, and renounce any further antisemitism.
There may be other issues still lingering, even agitated, in the reader's mind: one concerns the Palestinian Arabs, about whom little was said at the Convention. Have the Sisters of Mary anything to say about them? To some, perhaps, the April Convention in Jerusalem seemed to focus on the Jews, but in fact it was centred on Christians, not on Jews – centred on the un-Christian way Christians (who should have known better) had treated Jews; centred on the seriousness of their guilt before the Holy God revealed in both the Jewish and Christian scriptures. This guilt the Christians there wanted to repent of; and in order to show the seriousness of their repentance, and to be held accountable for changing their ways in the future, they invited Jews to be present to witness their expression of repentance.
But that expression of repentance was directed to the Lord, not to the Jews, not even to those Jews who were present. And so, similarly, Jews have nothing to fear when, on other occasions (as have already taken place), Christians express repentance about what they have done to Arab Moslems. This Convention and these addresses are not spoken to the exclusion of non-Jews; they just focus on one particular area of Christian guilt.
The sessions of the Jerusalem Convention, in April 2001, were held at Ramat Rachel, on the outskirts of the modern city. According to The NIV Study Bible, archaeologists have identified Ramat Rachel with Beth-Hakkerem, referred to in Nehemiah 3:14, a fire-signal point at the time of Jeremiah (6:1). In hosting this Convention and overseeing all the preparations, the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary has lit a fire, and sent a signal to all who will take note:
– The Lord will have His way – with Christians as well as anyone else; we ignore His will and His ways at our peril.
– We cannot treat His Jewish people – or anyone else, for that matter – as people He no longer loves; we cannot treat them as dirt, less than animals, and expect the Lord to turn a blind eye.
– We may take our sin lightly, but He does not.
On the Sunday morning after the Convention, many of us attended the service at the oldest Protestant church in the Middle East, Christ Church, in the Old City. There we saw a clear message in stained glass, straight from Romans 11: an olive tree, with new branches grafted into it. These new branches represent the Gentile Church, grafted into Israel. In this passage, Paul says not only some things that we remember, but also other things that we conveniently forget: the most serious item we forget is that the life of the grafted branch comes from the stem of the tree.
There is another tree, the banyan tree, native to India, but also to be seen elsewhere, including in Florida. Like mistletoe, which grows as a graft in apple trees, the banyan plant begins life by depending on the life of another tree, growing from its own seed that lands where a branch of the host tree meets the stem. Unlike mistletoe, the banyan eventually takes over and kills the host tree as it spreads, and spreads, and spreads, getting its life not from the stem of the host tree, but by putting down suckers to the ground and feeding on whatever it finds there.
The olive tree represents Israel, from whom Gentile Christians were supposed to get their life: ‘Salvation is of the Jews,' said Jesus. The banyan tree represents the Gentile Church as it has chosen to go, getting its life not from its host tree, but rather ignoring its host, and even trying to kill it.
The Jerusalem Convention was not a final statement, with all questions neatly answered. It was a significant, long-overdue statement from Protestants, joining other Christians in taking responsibility for past sins of the Church. But it was also a commitment for the future: we have work to do – Christians particularly should be in the forefront of those who take a stand against antisemitism, within the Church as well as antisemitism perpetrated by others.
But there is something more serious than the guilt of Christianity for making Jews suffer, treating them un-Christianly, and this too we must confront. Many Jews died in the Holocaust with the Shema on their lips. But many others, then and since, have lost their faith in God because of what they suffered, or because they saw their fellow-Jews suffering. Jesus came close to saying that to cause a child to stumble is unforgivable. To make people suffer physically is terrible; to cause them to lose their faith in God is worse, far worse. We must repent, in deed as well as in word.
This Convention, these addresses have troubled me, agitated my conscience, stirred my mind. When I now read familiar scriptures, I see new meanings; new questions confront me. May the Holy Spirit keep us in this search, even while He opens our eyes to see God's mysteries explained, mysteries which were never intended to remain secret, so that our love for Jesus, our Jewish Saviour, and for His people will grow and mature until we – and they – see Him face to face.
Canon Philip Ward comes from an extensive line of evangelical ancestors. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Toronto after emigrating from Britain with his family, and then enjoyed a brief but successful career in general insurance underwriting: he became a Fellow of the Insurance Institute of Canada immediately before training at the London College of Divinity (now St. John's, Nottingham). For 32 years, he served in Anglican Parishes in Pastoral Ministry in Britain and Canada, and was appointed Canon of the Diocese of Fredericton in 1993. He is currently Administrator of the East Canada Branch of the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, following 30 years of benefiting from their ministry and teaching.
