CENTRO PRO UNIONE N. 52 - Fall 1997 ISSN: 1122-0384 semi-annual Bulletin In this issue: Letter from the Director...................................................p. 2 Protestant and Catholic Fundamentalists. A Case Study: Political Zionism and the State of Israel by Thomas Stransky.................................................p. 3 The Church: A Reconciled Community Through the Eucharist? by Mar Bawaï Soro.................................................p. 11 Le radici sono nell'eterno. Il rinnovamento, dono del giubileo di James F. Puglisi.................................................p. 18 Centro Pro Unione - Via S. Maria dell'Anima, 30 - 00186 Rome, Italy A Center conducted by the Franciscan Friars of the AtonementDirector's Desk This Spring and Summer were busy months for the Centro as we welcomed many groups and new students who came to use our library facilities and to participate in various activities sponsored by the Centro Pro Unione. Together with S.I.D.I.C. Centre and the Vincent Pallotti Centre we sponsored a very well attended conference given by an old friend of the Centro, Fr. Thomas Stransky, csp, rector of the Tantur Ecumenical Institute in Jerusalem. The title of Tom's talk was “Protestant and Catholic Fundamentalists. A Case Study of Political Zionism and the State of Israel”. We are pleased to offer the full text of his talk in this issue. The Centro wishes to offer its congratulations to the Tantur Centre which celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary of foundation this past May. The Director was present at this celebration and participated in an informal consultation on ecumenical education that followed the conference. We are also pleased to offer in this issue of the Bulletin the text of the conference of Bishop Mar Bawaï Soro of the Assyrian Church of the East given during the 1997 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity Celebration which was sponsored by the Anglican Centre in Rome, the Lay Centre at Foyer Unitas and Centro Pro Unione. During this celebration, presided over by Canon Bruce Ruddock (Director of the Anglican Centre), Rev. Paul Robichaud, csp, the new pastor of Santa Susanna (the American Catholic Parish in Rome) preached a wonderful homily. The third text which is contained in this issue is a talk given by the Director at the Istituto “Mater Ecclesiae” on the occasion of the first year in preparation for the celebration of the Great Jubilee 2000. The Centro hosted several groups during the Spring. These included the ecumenical commission of the diocese of Stockholm, Carroll College from the USA, a group of Russian Orthodox monks and nuns, a group of liturgists who met with Canon Donald Gray, Rector of Westminster Abbey during his visit to Rome. Canon Gray has been very involved in the formulation of the ecumenical venture of a common lectionary for English language countries. Most recently we received a group of 52 students in visit from the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, Switzerland. In addition many individual students and scholars have used our facilities for research. The Centro was invited to be a participant at the Second European Ecumenical Assembly at Graz: “Reconciliation: Gift of God and Source of Life”. Sr. Alessandra, sa and the Director were present for the Assembly at the end of June. The Centro was responsible for the Forum on Intercommunion which was moderated by the Director. We were also very pleased to collaborate with S.I.D.I.C in the successful International Symposium on “Good and Evil after Auschwitz. Ethical Implications for Today” held in Rome, September 22-25 at the Pontifical Gregorian University. From December 1997 to December 1998, the Friars and Sisters of the Atonement will celebrate their centenary of foundation. Rev. Paul Wattson and Mother Lurana White co-founded the Society of the Atonement in the Episcopal Church in the USA in 1898. To mark the beginning of this celebration, the Centro has organized an international symposium: “Petrine Ministry and the Unity of the Church: «towards a patient and fraternal dialogue»”. You will find the full program at the end of this Bulletin. With this issue I will say good-by to our readers as a new director has been named in the person of William Martyn, sa. My thanks go to all who have supported this ministry. From all of us at the Centro we wish you a Blessed Christmas and a New Year of “Peace and Goodness!” James F. Puglisi, sa DirectorN. 52 / Fall 1997Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 3 CCCC Centro Conferences Protestant and Catholic Fundamentalists A Case Study: Political Zionism and the State of Israel by Thomas Stransky, Paulist Rector, Tantur Ecumenical Institute, Jerusalem (Conference given at the Centro Pro Unione, Thursday, 6 February 1997) Who are Christian fundamentalists? Many observers and critics find it hard to describe accurately and to evaluate dispassionately those Protestants who proudly call themselves fundamentalists, and those Catholics who insist to be the only “faithful” members of what they judge to be a quasi- heretical Church since the Second Vatican Council. In fact, other Christians had been rather indifferent to what fundamentalists believe, argue about, and practice until two phenomena appeared quite visibly during the last three decades: 1) Many, too many members, especially young adults, of the mainline Protestant churches and of the Catholic Church are leaving these churches and joining fundamentalist Protestant churches and para-church organizations or are forming Catholic separatist groups. 2) Fundamentalists are beginning to exercise clout in political elections and in domestic and foreign legislative policies — the move from personal piety to social critique and political activism. Either one does not want or must oppose their votes and platforms, or one eagerly seeks to recruit these Christians into coalitions with specific agendae and tradeoffs. Here the old adage holds: “politics makes strange bedfellows”. The best example of this is the Protestant fundamentalist stance towards the State of Israel since its founding as a sovereign modern state in 1948, and now during the fragile Israeli/Palestinian “peace process”. In fact, as I strive to learn by what traits christian fundamentalists describe themselves by their own written and spoken words, I offer the thesis: Christian fundamentalists would have to rewrite almost their entire theological and popular literature, if they have not seen in the history of political Zionism and the State of Israel so many “divine signs” to point to as proofs that they alone are correctly interpreting the Scriptures. During one night last September in Jerusalem, without notice the new Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu opened the Hasmonean tunnel next to the ancient Temple Mount's foundation, now the Muslim's Al-haram-al-Sharif with its sacred Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosque. Riots started, and the smell of soldiers' and civilians' blood and the sight of family tears at Palestinian and Israeli graves were searing our hearts. On the very weekend of the blood, in the Holy City the well-organized International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem [ICEJ] had gathered 6,000 Christians from over 100 countries to celebrate the Jewish Feast of the Tabernacles, in fulfillment of Zechariah's prophecy1. Most of these pilgrims were Protestant fundamentalists. They offered unconditional support for the State of Israel and its present government's policies, which they then judged were rightly over and against the peace-and-justice concerns of Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians. They cheerfully heard the address of the prime minister whom the ICEJ leader, Jan Willem van der Hoeven, introduced with the theological accolade: “If there is proof of a God in heaven, it is the result of the last elections” (in May). Prime minister Netanyahu returned the compliment. He called the congregants “ambassadors of truth”. Israeli TV cameras followed these christian visitors who formed the largest group to pass through the Hasmonean tunnel and its newly opened exit to the Via Dolorosa in the Muslim Quarter — in christian piety, the holiest of the Old City streets. Indeed, a clearly visible move from inner piety to outward politics, and a coalition with the Israeli government freshly in power. And so when in Israel and elsewhere, christian fundamentalists are coming out of the closet into the public arenas, one asks the questions: “Who are they? What makes them tick”? Most popular descriptions are accusatory: “sectarian”, “authoritarian”, “simplistic”, “closed minded”, “not really Protestant”, and “gullible as Catholics”. Or as one church leader admitted when asked to describe fundamentalists: “Whatever kind of Christians you don't like”. [One person's fundamentalist is another's liberal]. Recently offsetting these caricatures are more dispassionate attempts to describe and interpret the general fundamentalist 1 Zech. 14:16.4 Bulletin / Centro Pro UnioneN. 52 / Fall 1997 phenomenon, including studies by fundamentalists themselves2. These interdisciplinary studies are trying to avoid the danger of oversimplifying by reductionalisms a very complex christian movement in varied social-cultural settings. For examples of reductionalisms: 1) Blurring fundamentalism with all of the conservative movements within Christianity today, whether Pentecostal, or Evangelical Protestant and Anglican, or Roman Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox. 2) Or placing all fundamentalists on the same couch, and reducing them to the same psychological type and cognitive mindset: a closed personality who lusts for certitude and ideological purity and for moral or ethical rigorism. 3) Or reducing fundamentalists to a system of theological statements, which are then juxtaposed to other christian theologies for comparisons. 4) Or treating fundamentalism as a religious-social-political movement which is organizationally self-contained, and is not diffused beyond institutional borders on the christian map. All such simplifications or reductionalisms distort. They prevent our grasp of what is going on within christian communities, and in similar ways, within other world religions. I call it: the search for and fighting for fundamental confidences in the face of modernity. The search for fundamentals Communities and peoples need their own history, those memories, traditions and myths, rites and cults which express their fundamental confidence in one's world-view. That is, that ultimate commitment or overriding, indeed final authority over all other commitments; that basic pattern through which I grasp experience and judge ideas, and can make sense of reality, even the reality of confusions, ambiguities and doubts in the face of modernity. But what is modernity? To be modern, as Marshall Berman describes it, is “to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air”. Indeed, modernity disassembles those structures and symbols which have been expressing, sustaining and fostering ultimate and penultimate meanings over the long haul. In the quest for fundamental confidences one must more and more intentionally choose from a bewildering variety of available meaning systems, including those that are not explicitly religious or are explicitly antireligious. Joined to this search-in-bewilderment is at least an uneasy sense that christian mainline religion in its institutional forms, whether Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox, is not capable of responding to this cultural crisis. The once powerful mainline and more liberal than mainline churches are being sidelined. The fastest growing churches in most areas of the six continents are the conservative Evangelicals and the Pentecostals, each with subgroups easily identifiable as “fundamentalist”. Why? In the sociologist Dean Kelly's description, the mainline Protestant and Catholic local churches are perceived as no longer “serious”; that is, they no longer provide ultimate meaning; no longer demand serious commitment; over-apologize for their beliefs, loyalties, or practices; and allow themselves to be treated as though it makes no difference or should make no difference in their adherents' creeds or personal and communal behavior. If modernity does threaten, even destroys fundamental christian confidences, then only “serious” churches can be creative; that is, only they can strongly support identity in transition, and only they can erect a firm bridge between who they are and what they want to become as faithful Christians. Otherwise, there is a break down of historical continuity of the self-identity of a church and of its members. Thus, fundamentalism is but one expression among Christians to be “serious”, to meet the needs for fundamental confidences in the face of modernity: the struggle to find a firm foundation in life; the longing to break through the bewildering variety of religious/anti-religious/a-religious/moral/amoral claims; the search for a buttress against social instabilities and marginalizations, democratic dislocations, and perceived moral, even physical “ends-of-the world”. In this disarray, the Christian hungers for God's revealed clear, not-to-be-disputed answer, and for an earthly authority to voice it. Fundamentalists, whether Protestant or Catholic, firmly believe that God has given them that answer to modernity. Here we have one interpretation of christian faith in which “charismatic” leaders locate with easy certitude in chosen words, doctrines and practices the actions of a strict God who is saving a religious elite from corrupt forms of christian faith and from an evil world. The fundamentalists seem to reduce the complexity of the world's experience to a bipolar, even a manichean-apocalyptic model: good-bad, true-false; kingdom of Light, kingdom of Darkness; God-and-we, Satan-and-others; Christ/Antichrist; Christian/“secular humanist”. The human being is largely sinful. The world is far more evil than good. In a world of such contrasts the fundamentalists believe God has given them both the tactics and message. They are convinced that God calls them to be disciplined no-nonsense crusaders on a battlefield. They proudly bear Christ's flag to carry out his clear purposes and undisputed will, even if that obedience be a scandal to liberal intellectuals and a stumbling block to peoples of other faiths. 2 The following descriptions summarize, expand or update my “Fundamentalists, Protestant & Catholic. An Ecumenical Challenge?” in: H.S. WILSON (ed.), Christian Fundamentalism Today. The papers and findings of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches/Lutheran World Federation/Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity Consultation 22 to 26 February 1993, Die Evangelische Akademie Mülheim/Ruhr, Germany, “Studies from the World Alliance of Reformed”, 26 (Geneva: World Alliance of Reformed Churches, 1994) 22-39.N. 52 / Fall 1997Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 5 Their message includes highly selective scenarios. First, they select what in modernity is evil to characterize the entire “modern times”, and then they compare these times with a reconstructed earlier Golden Age, by selecting and emphasizing one or other of its traits which they regard as enfleshments of doctrinal and practical fundamentals for the present. They seek the glorious ages of their church or their founders, an imaginary past stripped of its terrors, and for which historians are hard put to find the evidence: the first generation of disciples of Jesus; or the first five centuries of the Church; or the Middle Ages in Europe; or the sixteenth century Reformation; or the nineteenth century. [To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: what we consider to be old, venerable and never-changing is usually the product of the period just before our own.] “Bring back that ol'-time religion”. “The Bible days are coming again”. “Return to Pope Pius IX's fortress church”, or return at least to the Catholic Church before the corrupting Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Second, fundamentalists claim authority over a sacred biblical and/or church tradition which they perceive all other Christians are corroding. As ambassadors of Christ's truth they fight with an armory of absolute proof texts, and so arrange the texts as to be most effective to sustain courage in themselves and to weaken the opponents. Third, fundamentalists fight against general or specific enemies, whether within or without the group — against all agents who assault what is dearly held as fundamental. The general titles are “modernists”, “secular humanists”, “bible critics”, and, as in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, “non-biblical” local christian hierarchs, clergy and laity who are overinfluenced by Islam and by a false political agenda. All these agents — the movements and forces, the organizations and individuals — are conspiring both to destroy the community of faithful disciples of Christ and to bless that very social order which by divine imperatives true Christians are called radically to change. So one must keep at a distance Christians who even waver on certain fundamentals. Watch out in particular for those coreligionists who call themselves friendly messengers and plead for at least an “agreement to disagree”, or who in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process, consider political compromises as a legitimate ethical response to the resolution of conflict. Furthermore, beware of those who falsely believe that the Holy Spirit is active in the ecumenical movement. Affiliation with the World Council of Churches or with the Middle East Council of Churches, or with Jerusalem's coalition of local churches, is a biblically prohibited alliance with apostates and unbelievers. Basic tenets or fundamentals Of course, major christian traditions hold that certain articles of biblical faith are fundamentals, while others are non-essential and open to free debate. In the late 19th and early 20th century the Catholic Church and the Reformation churches were facing reinterpretations of the christian faith in terms of contemporary historical, scientific, psychological and philosophical positions, generated by the Big Four — Kant, Darwin, Marx, and Freud. The general label was pejorative: Modernism. Pope Pius X judged it to be “the synthesis of all heresies”3, and he required all ecclesiastics and teachers of Catholic philosophy and theology to affirm non-debatable stands in the Oath Against Modernism 4 . In facing the same challenge of rectifying theological deviations in order to preserve true christians from the acids of modernism, Evangelical Protestants published a series of booklets: The Fundamentals: A Testimony of Truth5. The series later became the symbolic reference point and label for “fundamentalist” subgroups among the Conservative Evangelicals. Listed are five pivotal “fundamentals of faith and of evangelical Christianity”, five here-we-stands which pressed the question, “Do you believe these or not”? The yes's and no's caused the schism within Protestantism which continues to this day, between most Conservative or Neo-Evangelical Protestants and others. Gradually these Fundamentalists created narrower definitions of what the five fundamentals mean, and these explanations become the test of who is and who is not a “bible-believing” Christian. To deny all or any of these strictly interpreted fundamentals is to “betray the biblical God”. 1) The inerrancy of Scripture: the originally recorded words are “verbally inspired” or “God-breathed”. Whatever the Bible says on any subject, even if by passing comment, is the clear will and mind of God on that subject, including historical and scientific affirmations and prophetic discourse. The Bible in an absolute reality in itself, flawless texts that yield an internally consistent theology. The Bible is no way can be relative to the understanding of those who wrote the texts or who hear them in varying cultural and historical contexts. The fundamentalists propose “a loving God does not, indeed cannot disclose the divine mind and will in order to confuse. All human beings in good faith and with common-sense can immediately grasp the biblical Word”. This proposition should negate the need and legitimacy of “outside” interpretation. But in fact the fundamentalist interpreter — this preacher or leader or that small church alone, this organization or that conference resolution alone — equals the right view of God and of us, and absolutizes that biblical interpretation as the only one. So the fundamentalist asks: “How can you read the same text as I do, and not come to the same understanding as I? You must be operating in bad faith, or with no faith, and that characterizes an accommodation to modernity or to the political religion of, say, Palestinian theologians and the leaders of the historic Jerusalem churches — a compromising alteration of the divine word”. 2) The deity of Jesus: God-man, of the Triune God, born of a virgin in Bethlehem, “like unto us in all things but sin”. 3Pascendi dominici gregis, 1907 (Denz. 37th ed. 3475-3500). 4 Motuproprio «Sacrorum antistitum», 1910 (Denz. 3537-3550). 5 A.C. DIXON (general editor), (Chicago: Testimony Publishing, 1910-15).6 Bulletin / Centro Pro UnioneN. 52 / Fall 1997 3) The God-man is The Savior: by his death Jesus took on all the sins of all men and women of all times. Christ's blood shed on Calvary is always sufficient to cleanse every sin from every person. This third fundamental raises the question of the salvation of unbelievers. If pressed to answer, almost all fundamentalists would claim that one remains in a state of sin and damnation until he or she personally commits oneself to Jesus Christ as the Lord and the Savior, and to a way of christian discipleship as biblically understood by the fundamentalists. Thus, some groups organize missionary activities among the Jews, in the specific hope of leading them out of different degrees of lossness and ignorance, to become “true Jewish believers”; that is, committed disciples of Jesus the Messiah. 4) The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ: the same body born in Bethlehem and in Jerusalem, suffered, died and was raised from the dead. And because Christ rose in his body, one day we too will rise from the dead in our bodies. 5) The second coming of Jesus Christ: the only hope for God's human family and for God's wounded creation is that Jesus is coming again. Let me put this last fundamental in a wider context. The christian faith, in its judaic rootings, includes a metahistorical outlook which identifies with some precision beginnings, meantimes, and ends; creation, redemption and consummation. What God has set in motion in creation, God brings to fulfillment in the eschaton — “the last days” or “the Day of the Lord”. The future is already occurring in the meantime to color the interpretation of present events, especially the existential experiences of inflicted cruelty and pain, obvious injustices and oppressions, wars and genocidal ethnic-cleansings. In strands of Jewish and Christian eschatology “the last days” culminate decisive stages of history during which an extraordinary complex of events will happen in order to terminate an era and inaugurate a new one. In the apocalyptic and apocryphal sources (Jewish and Christian), cosmic elements play a decisive role in calculating history into periods, with the faith-conviction that the end is imminent and the Messiah is the key actor. The primary working metaphors and images are those of battles and wars, with heavy eternal stakes in the outcome. A pronounced sub-theme is the “thousand years”, called millennialism or chiliasm (chilioi): the belief, based chiefly on the literal interpretation of Revelations 20:1-10, that the Christ will come again personally to rule visibly upon the earth for 1,000 years6. Throughout christian history one finds a compulsion to locate the beginnings of the end-times in current evil events, catastrophes and hostile powers: the pre-Constantinian Roman Empire and the persecuted Church; the post-Constantinian Arians and defenders of christian orthodoxy; the Muslim unholy triumphs against holy christian Crusaders which climaxed in Salah al-Din's takeover of Holy Jerusalem (1187). For the 14th century John Wyclif, the pope was the Anti-Christ. Although Martin Luther identified St. John's Two Beasts as the pope and the emperor, some Catholic purveyors of the Reformation reversed the role: Luther was the Anti-Christ. As later became Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and Ayatollah Khomayni. In all of this name-calling and calendar-fixing, the constant problem was not to loose face in revising the predictions when events turned out otherwise, and when believers who had been stranded on mountaintops of firm hope and clear expectation were forced to return to the lights, shadows and darkness of the valleys of ordinary day-to-day life. Today Hal Linsay, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Richard De Haan, Rex Humbard, George Archer, Jan van der Hoeven, and a host of other fundamentalist evangelists hold a world-history vision of what is called apocalyptic premillennialism. Since not all the prophecies in the Old and New Testaments have been fulfilled either in the first coming of Christ or in the history of the church, there must be a future millennium, a last epoch or dispensation on earth, during which the fidelity of God requires that the remaining prophecies find their fulfillment. It is a complicated scenario and fundamentalist interpreters offer many different and controverted subplots. But for all modern fundamentalist interpreters, the “canon within the canon”of Scriptures isprophecy, understood as revealed predictions of future historical events. The Bible is a divine jigsaw puzzle for the entire sweep of history. The fundamentalist interpreter fits the biblical pieces of prophecy together in a way that makes clear the entire movement of history, and in what is called “time-setting”, discerns in some detail where to place present events in the divine calendar of the whole. They include apocalyptic events, described literally in all those biblical images which will bring history to an end. Political Zionism/Israel As Protestant fundamentalists interpret the five fundamentals, today, they still have a basic coherence and unity. So one asks: how does this all converge into firm stances towards political Zionism and the State of Israel, including its present peace negotiations with the Palestinian National Authority? In every fundamentalist's list of being-fulfilled prophecies, the State of Israel plays a central role in the cast of divine actors in God's directed penultimate and last act. In short, God's prophesied purpose for Israel has not been fulfilled in the Church but Israel awaits a political-social-religious fulfillment in the form of a restored and perfected Jewish nation under the rule of the returned Jesus the Christ, on the Davidic throne in Jerusalem. The Church will cease its mediation of divine grace, and the divinely saved ones will disappear (“be raptured”) from history, so that Israel may resume its primary role as God's instrument during “the last days”. It will not be an easy road. All Jews “in unbelief” have already 6 Already articulated in the mid-100s by the Gentile Christian from Nablus in Samaria, JUSTIN MARTYR, Dialogue with Trypho, 80,5.N. 52 / Fall 1997Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 7 been in-gathered in Israel; the galut, their diaspora, has faded away. First, Satan will control the age, filling it with natural earthquakes, floods and famines, and with devastating wars and murderous dictatorial regimes. Then a war of tribulation will destroy millions in Israel, but a remnant of the Jews will accept Jesus Christ, and so be saved. These new believers will be united with Christ who returns to earth. Christ is not alone. He comes with his army of saints, composed of the resurrected faithful saints of the Old Testament, of the Church, and of the tribulation martyrs. Together they destroy the forces of the Anti-Christ in his final rebellion, at the Battle of Armageddon which some locate on the Jezreel plain below Megiddo7, in today's northern Israel. Then will come a thousand-year era of peace. “The spiritual aristocracy” of believing Christians, both Jew and Gentile, are under Jesus Christ, Davidic king and priest. Under his sovereign authority, redeemed Israel presides over all the nations; Jerusalem arbitrates all international disputes; and peoples of all nations use the rebuilt Temple. Finally, when all of them will have accepted Christ's ministry of righteous rule, the Son of God will voluntarily hand over to the Father this kingdom, and it merges with the universal kingdom — one throne through the ages of ages. In this megadrama, the State of Israel is a sine qua non conditio of Christ's second coming. And that is the primary though not exclusive reason and motivation why today all true- believing fundamentalists, must defend Israel by every means possible. God, in Christ, calls them to “comfort and support” Israel unconditionally. God has greatly comforted these Christians themselves by the unexpected, “miraculous” victory of the 1967 six-day war, when Israeli had reunited Jerusalem and begun to occupy the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, then under direct Jordanian rule. The victory fired the engines of prophecy in what fundamentalist Nelson Bell called “the unfolding destiny”. God was preparing Israel for the arrival of the Messiah. In 1968 Raymond Fox pressed the Jews to rebuild the Temple and reinstate the priestly sacrifices. Later Hal Linsay wrote Late Great Planet Earth — still in its revisions the biggest best-seller after the Bible, over 22 million copies. What astonishes Linsay “is that we are watching the fulfillment before our eyes of over 500 prophecies of the end in our time. Some of the future events that were predicted hundreds of years ago read like today's newspapers”. Linsay designates 500 fulfilled prophecies, collected from Isaiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, parts of the synoptic gospels, Paul's letters, and John's Apocalypse. What he calls the beginning of “the countdown”: the establishment of Israel;8 the return of Jerusalem to Jewish control in 1967; 9 the alignment of Arab States against Israel; 10 the rise of a new Roman Empire in the form of the European common market;11 the movement of a one-world government;12 the apostasy of the mainline churches 13 . Thus, the political crisis in the Middle East is seen through apocalyptic scenarios. The State of Israel represents holy fighting against the Devil. Palestinians, and other Arabs, are reduced to mere pawns in the drama. Before its collapse the communist Soviet Union had represented Ezekiel's “land of Magog” to the north. After the demise of the USSR, the Evil Empire, the invading enemy of God or “the Gog of Magog” (Ezek 38:1) has moved south, shifting from the Soviet Union of Communism to the Middle East of Islam. Just prior to the Persian Gulf War in January 1991, some believed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were agents for the final holy battle. Many Christian fundamentalists believe that the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and the Golan are within the God-given borders of Israel, and the Jews should be faithful to God's gift. A few christian trusts raise money to “redeem the Land” for Jewish settlements. I use the International Christian Embassy of Jerusalem [ICEI] as a very visible group. There are other like-minded organizations: Bridges for Peace, Root and Branch, Christians United for Israel, Wake UP Coalition, A Praise in the Earth, Zion Gate International Christian Leadership Conference for Israel, and others. The ICEJ's platform is from Isaiah: 14 “Comfort God's people, Israel”. And its judgement over friends and enemies is from Genesis: 15 “I will bless those who bless thee, and curse those who curse thee”. At Jerusalem's 1996 Embassy Congress the participants pledged to be “christian doers of the word”, and to act against the real enemy of Israel and the Jewish People, an “enemy both within and without, through a watering down of Zionist principles and through the ever-increasing threat of Islamic fundamentalism”. Thus, as bearers of Christ's commission to help the Jewish State, they strongly and publicly support those Jews, in Israel or in diaspora, who are against the September 1993 Israeli/Palestinian Peace Agreement; who are for the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and on the Golan; who are against the autonomy, under the Palestinian National Authority, given to Gaza and to Jericho and other towns such as Bethlehem, and even more strongly last month, against 7 Rev 16:16. 8 Ezek 30—40. 9 Zech 12—14. 10 Ezek 30:4f. 11 Dan 7:17. 12 Rev 17:3ff. 13 2 Peter 2:10. 14 Is 40:1. 15 Gen 12:3.8 Bulletin / Centro Pro UnioneN. 52 / Fall 1997 the autonomy of 80% of Hebron; and who are against the subsequent negotiations towards a final settlement of “peace for land, land for peace”. Furthermore, true bible-believing Christians have the duty to urge that all dispersed Jews should consider permanent immigration to their homeland, Eretz Yisrael, because the aliya is God's call to the nations. The Embassy helped finance, for example, the Jews of the former Soviet Union and of Ethiopia to “come home”. And in Israel, it is exemplary by generous works of social assistance to the neglected poor, both Jew and Arab. It is very understandable that most Jews worldwide welcome such practical comfort. And it is understandable why many Israeli Jews, including some, certainly not all, government officials and political parties such as the Likud, align with western christian fundamentalist Zionist organizations. These Christians are not only warm friends of the Jewish people and the State of Israel; they have political influence back home. But in this Israeli alliance with fundamentalist Zionists, placed in parenthesis is the latter's conviction that the Jews must be gathered in Eretz Israel in order for Jesus the Christ to come again, to proclaim yes-to-Him and salvation, or no-to-Him and damnation. Who is Christian? A local clergy spokesman in Jerusalem called the Embassy folk “unchristian”. And Embassy's Jan Willem van der Hoeven returned the epitaph. According to an interview in the Jerusalem Post16, he classified “two types of Christians — the organized historical ecclesiastical churches and individuals both inside and outside the historical churches ... whose allegiance is to the Lord and His word, not to the Church”. These Christians “know what the Bible says. They read the prophecies of Isaiah and Zechariah, and they know what the Lord plans for the people of Israel”. But the historical local churches of Jerusalem Mr. van der Hoeven calls “hotbeds of Palestinian sentiment .... who often use the robes of Christ to help the Palestinian cause”, so that “right under Israel's nose, the churches are often vehicles of anti-Israel sentiment working to the detriment of what God has promised for His people”. This judgement, despite my own nine-year experience in the Holy Land that most of its Christians and certainly the leaders of the local churches consistently, publicly, and with no public- relations hypocrisy, have prayerfully been pressing for a just peace with security for God's peoples of the Land — Israelis and Palestinians, and for a reconciling response to a common religious call to Jews, Christians and Muslims, first revealed to Abraham, our one father in faith: “to keep the Way of the Lord by doing what is right and just” 17 . Who are Catholic fundamentalists? With different degrees of emphasis, Protestant fundamentalist streams contain a severe judgement on Roman Catholicism. The Fundamentals, the series of booklets in the 1910s, set out to prove that “the Papal Church” is not at all christian but “a Satanic delusion”, clearly preaching and practicing what Paul severely warns about: “another gospel”. “No peace with Rome must be on our lips and in our lives”. Catholics are objects of christian mission. The plea in Revelations18 is addressed to those bible- believing Christians “who may be in the Roman body but not of it: ‘Come out of it, my people'”. Anti-Catholicism still flows through the Protestant fundamentalist movement. We are still impolitely called “Romanists” or “Papists”. One still finds in their literature long lists of Catholic doctrines and practices whose falsities are proven by abundant biblical references. Most on the list misrepresent and contradict by non-nuance what the Catholic Church in fact teaches and practices: for example, biblical relativism; and mere human teaching authority over the Bible. For several reasons, many Catholics have moved out and joined Protestant fundamentalist groups. Some of these groups will acknowledge in Catholics some biblical truth and authentic christian commitments. They even support Catholic leaders, including the present pope, as courageous defenders of biblical faith on such issues as right to life against abortion, the indissolubility of christian marriage, the condemnation of premarital sex and active homosexuality. On these issues many fundamentalists are willing to be in public coalition with like- minded Roman Catholics, or at least they will not refuse to such Catholics affiliation with their organizations. I have met several practicing Catholics who ally with Protestant Zionist groups but who are unaware of that most fundamentalist basis of apocalyptic premillennialism which details God's plans for the horrific battles and the ultimate future of Israeli Jews. These Catholics join in various events in order to express their love and respect for the Jewish People, to atone for Catholic sins against the Jews, and to support the Jewish homeland of Israel. In general they are not anti-local Christians, especially not against their fellow Catholics in the Holy Land. Not all christian friends and supporters of Israel are Zionists, just as not all christian Zionists are fundamentalist premillennialists. Anti-Israel Catholics But the dominating Catholic fundamentalists, strictly described, take the opposite position. They are blatantly anti- Jewish and anti-Israel. They form a unique group among the rebellious children of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). It's a very specific Roman Catholic fundamentalism. Let me explain19. Today's Catholics have been born and educated before, during 16 Sept. 27, 1996. 17 Gen 18:19. 18 Rev 18:4. 19 The following three paragraphs summarize my “The Roman Catholic Church Today, Towards the Third Millennium”, to be published in The Tantur Papers.N. 52 / Fall 1997Bulletin / Centro Pro Unione 9 or after the Second Vatican Council. No other church has so faced “the modern world” in every dimension of church life. Vatican II had so wide-ranging an agenda that during its aftermath of over three decades, the Church is still suffering from “future shock” — that dizzying collective disorientation caused by the future becoming present too quickly. Too much comes too soon for too many — sudden discontinuities in the actual or presumed confidences of Catholic identity. This steady doze of future shock still infects a church which prides itself in its faithful developmental continuity with the past. But are not some of the Vatican II reforms in teaching and practice an intentional rejection of the past by 180 degree turns? Certainly more radical than “developmental continuity”. The most obvious of these shifts are the Church's teachings on the right to religious freedom for individual persons and communities; on the Church's ecumenical relations with other Christians and other churches; and on the Church's interreligious relations with peoples of other world faiths, such as the Muslims; and in particular, the Church's unique relation to the Jewish People of today. I describe Catholic conservatives as those who place a high value on established traditional ideas, practices, symbols, and historical heritage — especially in times of rapid cultural change. One defends and preserves the biblical and doctrinal confidences of the Catholic Church's time-tested experience against real or presumed purely rational or emotional changes and the pressures of faddism. In the resolution of any doubt about mere trendiness or authentic development, the motto is Chesterton's: “We want a church that not only is right when the world is right, but also is right when the world is wrong”. None of the conservative Catholics want to be called “fundamentalists”. For them that label smacks too much of pejorative Protestantism, or of muddled anti-intellectualism, or of self-pitying marginalization, or of militancy without humility and patience in dialogue with fellow Catholics. Nonetheless, I suggest there are fundamentalist strains within the conservative movement in the post-Vatican II Church. Just as Protestant fundamentalists are subgroups within conservative Evangelical Protestantism, so within conservative Catholicism the Catholic fundamentalists are subgroups. Initially for many Catholics, Vatican II became a kind of “end of the world”. It unwrapped the Catholic package, broke down Catholic identity-confidences. It caused a sudden death of a clear historical continuity and the symbols which expressed and sustained it. So the Catholic fundamentalist reaction: an evolution- in-reverse, not towards the future but towards the past, through policies and strategies of restoration. The reaction is a retrospective utopia, a return to a blissful Golden Age which selective memory constructs. Whereas most Protestant fundamentalists apply the principle of literal interpretation to a selected set of biblical texts, Catholic fundamentalists apply the same principle to Catholic traditions. Traditions become pure and innocent, ever intact. They almost replace Scriptures. So fundamentalists reduce the Catholic tradition to selected texts and interpret them wrenched from their historical contexts and the total life of “the Church of all times”, for example, the Church's relation to the Jews or to Muslims. They carefully select texts from all general councils and popes, except Vatican II and popes John XXIII, Paul VI, and John Paul II. These fundamentalists are indeed fighters. They are convinced that though small in numbers, they alone are saving both the Catholic Church and the world in fidelity to the Spirit-protected tradition. Thus they have every right and duty to denounce the infidelity of other laity or clergy, of the general hierarchy, including the incumbent Pope John Paul II. Although one should draw the fundamentalist circle with blurred and porous lines within the Catholic Church, the most visible, almost caricaturized expression continues to be the Society of St. Pius X, founded by the late Archbishop's Marcel Lefebvre in Switzerland in 1970. In Lefebvre's never-mincing words, Vatican II “is the greatest disaster not only of this century but of any century since the foundation of the Church”. Lefebvre's movement represents those who declare the church of Vatican Council II to be heretical because it has incarnated discontinuities and thereby has corrupted the unchangeable tradition which had been firmly set by the definitions and canons of the Councils of Trent and of Vatican I, and by statements of anti-modernist popes, such as Pius IX (1846-78) and Pius X (1903-14). These Catholic fundamentalists look specifically at the radical theological shift of the official Catholic Church towards the Jews of Christ's time and the Jewish people throughout the common era, and at the present Vatican political partnership with the State of Israel through diplomatic relations. They look at this and cringe with dismay, if not horror. So they stubbornly fight to maintain what they believe God has clearly revealed and the Church had once faithfully taught: 1. The Jews crucified the Christ, the Son of God. By this act of “God-killing” (deicidium), and by the failure of the majority of the Jews to accept Jesus of Nazareth as also their Messiah, Lord and Savior, the Jews then and now have forsaken all rights to God's previous promises. In divine punishment, the Jews should continue, as did Cain, to wander, to be vagabondi, forever. God now wills and providentially sustains the dispersed existence of the Jews among the Catholics, in order to remind Christians of the unlimited blessings of God's gifts to the people of the New Covenant, the New Qahal, the new Israel, identified as the Roman Catholic Church. This New Covenant has completely replaced the Old Covenant. 2. To apply this classical position to present times, God has cancelled the promise of covenantal relation of the Jews, thus to their former homeland, Eretz Yisrael.Klal Yisrael, the congregation of Israel, is a fiction. The blindfolded synagogue kneels before the divinely enlightened Church20, whatever 20Cf. Strasbourg cathedral's sculptural reliefs.Next >