Former Free Church
of Scotland Moderator Rev Dr John Ross (above) reflects on a controversial report from the
Church of Scotland which denies any special privileges for the Jewish people in
the land of Israel.
‘The inheritance of Abraham?’, cobbled together by the
Church of Scotland’s Church and Society Council has been removed from the Kirk’s website because
it is being rewritten by Church of Scotland officials.
Dr Ross was awarded
his PhD for research on the Scottish Mission to the Jews, and previously served
as General Secretary of Christian Witness to Israel and was the European
Co-ordinator of the Lausanne Consultation on Jewish Evangelism.
The Church and Society Council’s report for the General Assembly
of the Church of Scotland, said John Ross, was ‘patronising and deeply
offensive.’
The Times said it was ‘a slap in the face.’ The Jerusalem Post saw it as
an ‘Anti-Jewish text [that] will shame the Church of Scotland’.
The Jewish Chronicle spoke of it as breathtaking arrogance and with
impeccable logic, the evangelical Cranmer blog argued that the ‘Church of Scotland
report denies Jesus was the promised Messiah’. I agree, but I am not in the
least surprised.
Sally Foster-Fulton’s (Church and Society Council convener) report is both highly controversial and
utterly superficial. It provides further proof of how a growing antisemitic
tendency within the Kirk is leading to a deliberate rejection of the Church of
Scotland’s historic missionary priorities.
In his critique of ‘The inheritance of Abraham?’, John Ross provides a very useful
historical background to the report.
Here, then, is another stage on the Kirk’s inexorable journey away
from is historical commitment to the Bible as the Word of God, its confessional
theological heritage, and its erstwhile evangelical missionary commitments.
To all intents and purposes the Church of Scotland’s missionary
interest in the Jews ended in 1981. That year the General Assembly redefined
its relationship to the Jewish people in terms of dialogue with the community
rather than the evangelisation of individuals. But this much vaunted high level
project, considered so strategic, was stillborn.
In 1985 this reorientation gave rise to the Board of World
Mission and Unity’s report, ‘Christians and Jews Today’. This report was sent
down to the Kirk’s presbyteries for consideration, but two years later less
than half had bothered to respond.
For most, the Church of Scotland’s historic relationship to the
Jewish people was unimportant and uninteresting. Enthusiasm for Jewish
missions, which had been sustained for a hundred and fifty years, had finally
been overcome by inertia.
In the years that followed, the Kirk’s Board of World Mission
and Unity ceased to make an annual report to the General Assembly on Jewish
related issues. The historic view of Israel, as the Jewish people, both in the
Land and the Diaspora, was jettisoned.
Israel was now seen as synonymous with the State of Israel and
support for Israel was mischievously misrepresented as a tendency to
uncritically rubber stamp any old Knesset policy.
By 2000, the Kirk’s interest was refocused on the political
situation in the Middle East. Its reports extended a biased support for
Palestinian cause, dropping the term ‘Israel’ in favour of a mythical entity
called ‘Israel/Palestine.’
It is significant, therefore, that the 2013 report comes not
from the World Mission Council, but the Church and Society Council, the Jewish
people being no longer of any missionary interest to the Kirk.
The most grievous omission of the current report is its total
neglect of the Church’s historical recognition of the great debt it owes, under
God, to the Jewish people. Recognition of this fact need not lead to uncritical
approval of everything done by the State of Israel.
Indeed it is the prerogative of friends to offer strong
constructive criticism. But today’s Church of Scotland is no friend to the
Jewish people, on whom it has turned its back.
If this report is accepted, it will prove that the Kirk has
turned St Paul’s ‘great sorrow and unceasing anguish’ (Romans 9:2) for the
Jewish people, into scorn and rejection. How different the stance adopted by
Thomas Chalmers, who, in his Lectures on
the Epistle to the Romans, described a sensitive sharing of the gospel with
the Jewish people as ‘the first and foremost object of Christian policy’.
The downgrade we are currently seeing in the Church of Scotland
in this, as in many other areas, is inevitable and it will get worse.
Remove the lynchpin of Scripture as the Word of God, as the
liberals did, and in time the wheels fall off the ecclesiastical vehicle.
Dr Ross's comments are covered this morning in The Scotsman and in the Church of Scotland's Life and Work.
Rev Stephen Sizer predictably and enthusiastically praised the Kirk
report and appeared on the Iranian-run Press TV to endorse the report. He also used the report to promote his own anti-Israel material.
