“The contemporary conflict in Palestine-Israel resounds with biblical metaphors,” the 85 participants said in a statement agreed at the end of the meeting here. However,” the statement continued, “there was significant consensus in the conference that the Bible must not be utilized to justify oppression or supply simplistic commentary on contemporary events.”
The World Council of Churches and Swiss Protestant churches hosted the September 10-14 meeting, which was part of the WCC’s Palestine Israel Ecumenical
Forum initiative, launched in 2007.
“Concrete contributions to the discussions from Palestinian Christians helped to significantly change approaches to the issues,” the host churches from Switzerland said in a statement.
Participants in Bern also warned about “ideologies like anti-Semitism and Christian Zionism”, the latter being a belief among some Christians that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land, and the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 are in accordance with Biblical prophecy.
“A central issue for the conference was how the Bible is read,” participants said. They noted that it is particularly important to differentiate between biblical history and biblical stories, and to distinguish between the Israel of the Bible and the modern State of Israel.
The meeting examined connections that are made between Scripture and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially in references to the “promised land”, which links God’s commitment to the people of Israel and the land they inhabit.
“The idea has been to look again from a theological point of view at ideas such as ‘promised land,” Harvey Cox, a long-time professor at Harvard Divinity School in the United States, told Ecumenical News International. “What do we really mean by ‘promised land’? What does the Bible mean by ‘promised land’? How has the term been hijacked and used for various political reasons, when maybe that is not the significance of the texts at all?”
Cox said that the “strongest part” of the conference had been the presence of church leaders and theologians from the Middle East itself, something the organizers echoed.
“It is the first time that this sensitive issue, this important issue, has been dealt with ecumenically and internationally, where the voice coming from those who are concerned has been really present,” said Michel Nseir, the WCC’s program executive for the Middle East.
Jamal Khadar, a Palestinian Roman Catholic theologian who teaches at the University of Bethlehem, said discussions about the “promised land” needed to be seen in relation to the present-day experience of Palestinians.
“Talking about Israel is not an issue of purely systematic theology; it is more a contextual theology linked with a concrete situation,” Khadar told Ecumenical News International. “The issue of the ‘promised land’, for example, cannot be isolated from the issue of justice and peace in the Middle East.”
He added, “For us the State of Israel is a political reality, and we deal with it as a political reality and not as a theological reality.”
Scholars from Europe and North America at the conference outlined progress made in years of dialogues between Christians and Jews. Recognizing this “Jewish-Christian healing”, the conference said it hoped “Christians from within the context of Palestine-Israel” would be welcomed into such dialogues in future and it invited similar dialogue with Muslims as well.
Cox, the Harvard theologian, agreed that Christian theology had sometimes been framed in such a way that it led to a solidarity with Israel but ignored the situation of the Palestinians.
“That has been true, and it’s been a serious obstacle,” he told ENI. “It’s true certainly in the United States and in Europe, and in the churches of both these areas, and for understandable reasons,” he said. “Christians share the Hebrew Scriptures as part of their own Bible, and there is this very nasty history of Christianity with the Jewish people in the last century, and a sense that some kind of recompense is called for.”
Still, “Ancient Israel is often confused with modern Israel. They are not the same,” Cox added. “We can talk about an integral relationship which must be there theologically between Christians and the Jewish people. Jesus was Jewish; the whole background of Christianity comes from the Jewish people, but the Jewish people and the modern State of Israel, though they overlap in certain ways, are not the same, and therefore we have to be thoughtful and self-critical about how that theme is dealt with.”
The WCC groups 349 Anglican, Orthodox, Protestant and other churches, representing more than 560 million Christians.
