Was Jesus a Palestinian?

No. He might have been called a Nazarene, Galilean or a Jew, but there was no geographical place called “Palestine” in the time of Jesus. 

So why did Ilhan Omar retweet Omar Sulaiman’s tweet that “Jesus was a Palestinian.” And why did Sulaiman tweet it in the first place? 

Probably because this idea has been part of contemporary Palestinian political discourse for some time. Check out Amazon for books and T-Shirts. Mitri Raheb advances the same argument in his books. The point, of course, is to strengthen the Palestinian claim to a long historic association with what is now Israel and the West Bank. Such claims in the Palestinian press go back even further, associating contemporary Palestinians with the ancient Philistines who were contemporaries of the earliest tribes of Israel. 

The problem with such arguments is their futility. They will not persuade Israelis to give up the concept of Israel as an (ethnic) Jewish state. Modern Jews, without exception, are part of a thousands of year old history of associating themselves with the land of Israel. It is constantly reiterated in worship and prayer to become an indelible aspect of their identity. Moreover in a post-holocaust world where anti-semitism is present and on the rise Israel is that tangible guarantee of a sustained Jewish people. These far outweigh, when it comes to it, any historical, genealogical, or genetic facts concerning actual associations with the various places that Jews have lived.

But Jewish arguments against a Palestinian identity with the land are equally wrongheaded. You can’t really say, “We lived in Europe for 1850 years but our identity is with this land while you lived here in the land for 1850 years but can’t claim you identify with it - go back to your king in Jordan.” Which is exactly what Jewish militias did in 1948 when they expelled Arabs from different parts of Israel. Of course Palestinians identify with the land, they lived on it, and still do. 

Nor does it help when someone like Fred Menecham of the Simon Wiesenthal Center responds, “Jesus was Jewish, actually.” Because he is comparing an ethnic identity with a geographical designator. And frankly doing so in a way that is intellectually offensive. Bringing in Jesus on the Israeli/Jewish side of a land dispute, when those few Talmudic references to Jesus accuse him of sorcery and idolatry seems ingenuous. It is true that Jesus was Jewish, but since the Jews never claimed him how does that actually address the problem of who has a right to live on the land?

Probably the best thing for Jews and Muslims, and I would say Christians as well, is to leave Jesus out of this. Christians, who claim to reverence Jesus as the Son of God, are near committing blaspheme when they use his name to advance a political point. God will not be used that way. Muslims, who claim to honor Jesus as the “sinless prophet,” should know better than to dishonor him by dragging him into a tweet-storm based on a politically opportune mistruth. And Jews, who at best ignored him and his teaching in their own religious life should leave him to those who believe he was more than a misguided religious teacher from the past. 

So to my friends, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian so deeply entwined in the complex politics of contemporary Israel and Palestine I have a suggestion: leave Jesus out of it. Some of us care more for Him than to have Him dragged through your muddy mutual loathing and swamp of political posturing. If you want to honor one Christians call the Prince of Peace you might cease involving his name in your wars. 

Jews, Israel, and Christian Obligation - When Ideals Collide

Yesterday, as I write, a federal court overthrew a Texas state law strongly supported by the Jewish community, notably AIPAC and the AJC. The law would have forbidden anyone who wants to do business with the state of Texas from supporting the Boycott, Divestiture, and Sanctions movement targeting Israeli businesses. The bill had strong bipartisan support, meaning in Texas strong support from the Christian community. 

Well not me, and I shared my concerns with Jewish leaders. From my perspective the BDS movement is unhelpful, even destructive in its broadest form. But I knew from the start that this bill was, as the court ruled, a clear violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. It was, and was intended to be, a law limiting freedom of expression by punishing any business that expressed support for boycotting, sanctioning, or divesting from businesses in Israel. Since this same legislation has been passed in many other states more court cases will follow, as indeed the plaintiffs in this case have promised. More laws will be struck down. More on Texas can be found here.

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/courts/2019/04/25/federal-judge-rules-texas-ban-boycotting-israel

So why would Christians and Jews who have been strong supporters of the First Amendment seek to pass a law that is clearly a violation of the US Constitution?

The reason is simple. The Jewish community and its Christian allies regard the BDS movement as a direct attempt to destroy the state of Israel. And since most Jews regard the existence of the State of Israel as necessary to Jewish identity and the continuity of the Jewish community the BDS movement is an existential threat to their community.

They don't see the requiring those who contract with the state of Texas from joining the BDS movement as opposing freedom of speech or conscience. They see it as the Texas State Government refusing to do business with anyone seeking to destroy a whole people, a sovereign state, and ally of the United States.

But look further into the article. It isn't just Jewish leaders and their Christian allies who have an interest in a foreign state. The plaintiff at the center of the court case, Bahai Amawi,  boycotts Israeli products because her people (in the Palestinian Territory) are being mistreated by Israel. One can see her point of view. Why wouldn't you, as a matter of principle, refuse to do business with companies you believe are hurting your people? And why shouldn't you be able to state those principles freely? This is America, right?

What we find at work here is a deep disjunction between American ideals and the reality of transnational ethnic loyalties. Someone like myself, whose family has been in the United States for many generations and is ethnically mixed, can hardly imagine what such loyalties are about. I have no idea what I am other than an American. And that fits with the ideals I was taught in school. The United States is a new world where the old world can be left behind. We are a melting pot where all those old loyalties and memories are supposed to be boiled off.

(An aside, Elvis Costello's beautiful "Green Song" looks at exactly this from an Irish perspective. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwjzJeAR8-I)

But it has never really been like that. New immigrants have always kept in touch with the "old country." As late as the 1970's the IRA was active among Irish immigrants in Boston. Here in Texas Mexican flags fly over car dealerships and sports bars. So why should it be any different for Jews and Palestinians?

Nor can we fail to remember those who because of their skin color or family name or both were denied an equal place, or maybe any place in the supposed melting pot. Jews and Muslims have both been, alongside African Americans and Latinos victims of that kind of bigotry. Segregation was a far more vicious attack on American ideals than any threat from Fascism or Communism and those who perpetuated it are alive and at work today.

It is both deeply human, and a natural reaction to the universalizing and reifying tendencies of the Enlightenment, to maintain family ties and an interest in a homeland; whether real or imagined. The ideal of the United States was to make us all rootless so we could become planted in new soil. But we can now see that for many people this American soil isn't yet deep enough to sustain a healthy identity. Organizations like Ancestor.com and 23andMe exist because a lot of us are feeling rootless.

So its not surprising that much of the 20th century, and now the 21st, has been the story of wars fought to establish ethnic homelands. The melting pot ideal embodied by the United States has only a shaky following even here, and has little currency outside our unique history and borders. What was imagined as the inevitable future of a global civilization now appears to quite possibly have been a step too far too fast for many.

Of all ethnic identities. Which is why the state, whether the State of Texas, a city government, or the Federal government, needs to stay out of supporting or undermining any ethnic identity. All Americans have a right to identify with some "old world" if they can find one. And none has the right to deny that right to others.

The judge in this case asked the Texas attorney general, "What is the interest of the State of Texas in this." And Ken Paxton, not surprisingly, had no answer. Neither did Governor Abbot. And neither do those legislators both Republican and Democratic who passed the now suspended law. Because the only interest of the state should be providing equal rights to all, in particular those rights guaranteed in the constitution. It may be hoped that Texas politicians will begin to focus on that ideal.

Let's Take the Id out of Christian Identity.

The work habitually done in obedience to Christ’s commands is the character of the Church, and hence its identity as the Body of Christ, for in this work the Church reiterates the work of Christ. Scripture, creeds, liturgies, and structures are just chalk dust on a board by comparison.

I still remember back in systematic theology when John Deschner lectured on the Trinity. First there was a triangle on the chalk board. Then at each point the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit, then a whole series of correspondences of these with other aspects of the Godhead. When the whole thing was finished Schubert Ogden, co-teacher in those days at Perkins, asked, “Why is Father on top? Why not rotate the whole thing, or any of the correspondences?

Indeed. It is always a problem when you try to inscribe God onto a chalkboard. Or for that matter a three dimensional space like a cathedral. The latter is both a tribute and a profound theological statement. And deeply misleading. 

There may have been a time in a culture dominated by Aristotelian metaphysics that names like “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” designated persons in static relationship to one another: something that could be inscribed in the space of a cathedral or on a blackboard. But we don’t live in that time. Both our personal experience and our science tell us that nothing is static. There is no “being,” only becoming. However deeply we look into the atom or out into the universe we never find a substance. We only find movement. We find no dancer, only a dance. To say in English (it may have made sense 1700 years ago in Greek) that the Son is “of one substance with the Father” isn’t just meaningless, it’s absurd. 

Of course the theological answer to this is the God isn’t bound by our human perceptions of reality. That, after all, is the meaning of transcendence. All we need need is new analogical language - surely exactly the work theologians are paid to do.

Yet when it comes to ecclesiology the problem is more acute. Take the most common designation for the Church, “the Body of Christ.” Here the body is clearly located in the reality we experience, as was God incarnate in Jesus. And we now know that human bodies, or bodies made of humans, are all becoming and no being. They are all relationships and no essence. Or to put it in modern psychological terms, they are all ego, and no id. The word “body” isn’t a thing, it is the designation for a set of infinitely complex movements during the shortest period of time that humans can perceive. Cut that period in half and you still find movement. Half it again a thousand times and you still find movement. You will never find some solid unchanging thing that “is” a body. 

Nor do we solve this problem by locating the essence in the Spirit of Christ, for the Spirit above all else is both dynamic and sets the body into motion. It “blows where it will” and is scarcely to be pinned down by mere theologians. 

So instead of identifying The Body of Christ with utterly insubstantial substances, we can better identify the Body of Christ by its narrative of engagement with the world; a narrative co-authored by Spirit of Christ and the followers of Christ who embody his Spirit. The Body of Christ has is no essence waiting to be uncovered, only an ever emerging self-in-action being revealed. Such character as the Body of Christ possesses, it possesses in its habitually repeated narratives of encounter with the world. 

So, for example, the Eucharist being celebrated is the character of the Body of Christ. The confessing of the faith of the church through obedience to his command is the character of the Body of Christ. The habitual feeding of the poor, healing the sick, giving water to the thirsty, and visiting those in prison gives the Body of Christ its character. 

(I note in passing that the United States “Confessing Movement,” whose name echos that of the Bekennende Kirche of Germany during the Third Reich, provides one of the richest ironies of the 21st century. The Bekennende Kirche were identified exactly by their actions in defiance of the Nazi state and thier work on behalf of those worst oppressed. They confessed with their lives and at the cost of their lives. The US “Confessing Movement” is merely the politically charged assertion of static doctrine by privileged people, a defense of soon-to-be chalk dust; notably at neither risk nor cost to themselves.)

More generally the work habitually done in obedience to Christ’s commands is the character of the Church, and hence its identity as the Body of Christ, for in this work the Church reiterates the work of Christ. Scripture, creeds, liturgies, and structures are just chalk dust on a board. They capture, one hopes, the best examples of past engagement as a guide for the future. They are useful in identifying the Church only as accounts of the processes by which it takes on the character of Christ. But when they in themselves become for Christians the character of the Body of Christ they are no better than a tomb in which the body lies awaiting resurrection.

Scripture in particular is holy only as it inspires and motivates Christian mission. If all it inspires is arguments about its meaning it is has become dead letters on crumbling pages. The creeds are holy only when they unify the church for mission. When they become the basis of false unity based on verbal conformity, or worse a bludgeon for heresy hunters they become the whitewash on an ecclesial tomb. And ministers apart from the doing of ministry, engaged only in positioning themselves in static hierarchical relationships may as well lie in those very tombs.

In our world churches are becoming the Body of Christ as they tell in their lives the story of Christ’s encounter with the world. And we see this happening around the world. We only need to see ourselves in this way, identified and unified by stories we are telling together as the Body of Christ rather than by fruitless efforts to find a common essence or ancient urquelle. 

Do you see someone feeding the poor, visiting the imprisoned, healing the sick, comforting those who morn? Do you see the faithful administering of the sacraments and the praising of God?  There, in that work, the church is becoming the Body of Christ; because Risen Christ is at work through and among the citizens of his Reign. 

Our Globalist Fantasy

Bob Dylan‘s song “you got to serve somebody“ marked his enigmatic conversion to Christianity. It became popular, and was covered by numerous other artists, because it said something we can all relate to. Schleiermacher himself couldn’t have said it better. No human can escape the web of human interdependencies. And no human can escape that sense, If only fleeting that there is something greater upon which we depend as well.

The genius of the Enlightenment was to seek to make the human response to those human interdependencies, and the absolute dependency on God, entirely voluntary. Humans would no longer be in the thrall to self appointed authorities, whether civil or religious.

American Methodism was a full expression of that Enlightenment ideal. It was born in a twin movement of independence by Americans from the British civil authorities and the church of England. But ultimately American Methodism could not escape from the third grand movement of its opening era; imperialism. With inconsistent exceptions it sent missionaries into the world to create an empire of the spirit. They offered freedom from sin in Jesus Christ but almost simultaneously placed people in thrall to their own Methodist discipline and more broadly Western civilization. At least initially missionaries lacked the perspective to understand either the limitations of their own culture or its implicit diminution of human freedom that it brought. 

Put in an other way, the missionaries mistook a voluntary response to the call of the gospel with actual human freedom. 

You gotta serve somebody. The American Methodists offered Christ as Lord, but without much subtlety insisted that new converts to the Lord’s service also follow their orders. Initially they made no distinction between Christ and their particular culture of obedience articulated in their discipline. 

Still, eventually the missionaries recognized, under the influence of growing bodies of indigenous Christians, the problematic nature of the mission. By the 20th century things were changing.

As indigenous Methodists began to claim their freedom, the more cognizant of the missionaries became partners. Methodists across the world, supported by missionaries, rightly insisted that their hard won national autonomy from western empires be matched by autonomy from American Methodism’s empire of the Spirit. The exceptions, and none went uncontested, were those Methodists who needed the shelter and support of American Methodism in situations of continued religious and political oppression and instability.

The result, by 1968, would be a United Methodist church both managed and supported entirely from the United States but with small and growing appendages in Europe, a few African countries, and the Philippines. All the other former dominions of the old Methodist empire were autonomous. It was this situation that would give birth to a new form of the old imperial fantasy. It would be called Global United Methodism. Many missionaries cringed. 

This globalist fantasy came at just the right time to give comfort to American United Methodists observing their own national decline, and to American conservative/traditionalist United Methodists marginalized by the structures of the new UMC and the rapidly changing American culture. Because even in 1968 it was clear that the growing appendages of American Methodism were mostly theologically conservative in the American sense of the word.

Unfortunately exactly what was meant by “Global” wasn’t clear in 1968, nor is it clear now. 

The structure of this new “Global United Methodism" was extremely American-centric. Central conferences were given some measure of cultural autonomy. The American church, despite its own cultural variations, continued to be considered the cultural norm from which the Central conferences varied. All of the major boards and agencies remained in the United States. The result is that today United Methodists are politically interdependent to the extent that political power is distributed according to membership, but remain highly dependent financially on the US churches. Participation in the Global UMC was theoretically voluntary but with all property and funding controlled at the center participants were hardly free.

So, we must ask, what does “Global” mean as a description of the United Methodist Church? Pragmatically it has meant primarily: 1. Political structures are uniform across its not-really-global reach, 2. Property and funding are controlled from the center, which is presumed to unify. 3. doctrinal and social principles are shared, if not uniformly adhered to, and 4. US boards and agencies extend their mission globally. 

And what does “Global” mean theologically? 

Nothing really. 

Self-identified traditionalists have focused almost entirely on participation in three supposedly unifying aspects of being church: credal uniformity (including distinctly Wesleyan notes), uniform adherence to traditional western family structures, and a uniformly enforced discipline regulated by a democratically elected General Conference. Only the third of these is distinctly United Methodist in either content or tradition. In the end only thing that binds us together into a distinct Church is law. 

Progressives, in so far as they offer a vision of a global church, offer vaguer ideas of being “one in the Spirit”  that are no more distinctively United Methodist than the theology of the traditionalists. But instead of a uniformly enforced discipline they focus on “partnerships” as the media joining politically autonomous churches together, leaving us only egalitarian structures of shared power to hold us together. 

Both traditionalist and progressive ideas of a global church are actually fruitless fantasizing because they have no theological foundation.  National Methodist churches that gained their autonomy from US domination are not going to submit to a common discipline just because it is controlled from a different continent. And a global church isn’t created by pragmatic arrangements for power-sharing. You gotta serve somebody, but I'm guessing that no one wants to serve law and power. 

What neither fantasy takes seriously is the inculturated nature of Christianity. The church is inculturated precisely because as the body of Christ it is and expression of the incarnation, which is non-different from the inculturation of God. Given that we now have, as God promises and demands, a diversity of cultures, the theological basis for a global church will need to be intercultural. Culture is the root of difference, and intercultural dialogue is the key to an always emerging unity. And this implies a theology of a sort we haven’t yet imagined, a theology that is inter-incarnational. More on that in another post.

You gotta serve somebody. Maybe we can find a way for it to always be Christ.