Yesterday evening I posted the unsurprising news that the official Iranian government newsagency had welcomed the recent British Methodist Church position on Israel and Palestine.
This prompted a Jewish observer at that same conference, someone who was actually in the room to say how he felt about the proceddings. Let Richard Cooper take up the story:
I attended the Methodist Conference as a local Jewish observer. Though acknowledged as such from the podium, I was not allowed to speak. Your neighbour Rev.Nichola Jones from Erdington Methodist Church made a chilling speech. Here is an extract, transcribed word for word from the conference video http://tinyurl.com/32m45hn
"In the Bible we learn of the Chosen People. Who are they and what were they chosen for? Genesis tells us again & again that God chooses Abraham and makes a covenant with Abraham & his heirs: a covenant being a two-sided agreement with obligations on both parties, like marriage......Of course, Israel today is not the same as Israel in the Bible: in the Bible, Israel refers to the people of Abraham's descendants, who are in covenant with God. Israel today is a modern, secular state, created in 1948.......For years I cherished the Galatian text...now I read it properly: 'In Christ there is no longer male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek (we could say Jew or Arab): we are all one in Christ.' We are heirs of Abraham, and so inheritors of the promise of Abraham. Jesus, who makes with us a new covenant which transforms us utterly, never speaks of the land or owning it: he speaks of the Kingdom & joining it and invites us to do so. He teaches us God is not a racist God with favourites, but God loves all his children & blesses them. What is it God requires of you, asks Micah today: to do justice, to show mercy, to walk humbly with God....."
Listening to this and others (there were also approving references to Messianic Judaism and disparaging references to Christian Zionism), I felt like the accused in a Nazi show trial. This is pure supersessionist ideology, identical with that espoused by the revanchist Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson.
If this is now to be the official policy of the Methodist church in Britain - that the State of Israel by its 'oppressive actions' has broken the Jews' covenant with God - then I see no purpose in further dialogue between Anglo-Jewry and Methodism.![]()
This prompted a Jewish observer at that same conference, someone who was actually in the room to say how he felt about the proceddings. Let Richard Cooper take up the story:
I attended the Methodist Conference as a local Jewish observer. Though acknowledged as such from the podium, I was not allowed to speak. Your neighbour Rev.Nichola Jones from Erdington Methodist Church made a chilling speech. Here is an extract, transcribed word for word from the conference video http://tinyurl.com/32m45hn
"In the Bible we learn of the Chosen People. Who are they and what were they chosen for? Genesis tells us again & again that God chooses Abraham and makes a covenant with Abraham & his heirs: a covenant being a two-sided agreement with obligations on both parties, like marriage......Of course, Israel today is not the same as Israel in the Bible: in the Bible, Israel refers to the people of Abraham's descendants, who are in covenant with God. Israel today is a modern, secular state, created in 1948.......For years I cherished the Galatian text...now I read it properly: 'In Christ there is no longer male or female, slave or free, Jew or Greek (we could say Jew or Arab): we are all one in Christ.' We are heirs of Abraham, and so inheritors of the promise of Abraham. Jesus, who makes with us a new covenant which transforms us utterly, never speaks of the land or owning it: he speaks of the Kingdom & joining it and invites us to do so. He teaches us God is not a racist God with favourites, but God loves all his children & blesses them. What is it God requires of you, asks Micah today: to do justice, to show mercy, to walk humbly with God....."
Listening to this and others (there were also approving references to Messianic Judaism and disparaging references to Christian Zionism), I felt like the accused in a Nazi show trial. This is pure supersessionist ideology, identical with that espoused by the revanchist Catholic Bishop Richard Williamson.
If this is now to be the official policy of the Methodist church in Britain - that the State of Israel by its 'oppressive actions' has broken the Jews' covenant with God - then I see no purpose in further dialogue between Anglo-Jewry and Methodism.
