Why I Defend and Support Israel As An Anglican Bishop

This article was originally given as part of People of the Land: A Twenty-First Century Case for Christian Zionism, a conference hosted by the Institute on Religion and Democracy 

Christian Zionists are often charged with being politically dangerous, supporting an occupying oppressor in the Middle East and threatening world peace. They are also said to be theologically heretical for two reasons. On the one hand, they teach the very opposite of replacement theology. On the other hand, the Zionist conviction that God has brought Israel back to her own land in our day has become entangled with dispensational theology and political activism.

So how is it that an Anglican Bishop [and numbers of my colleagues in episcopal orders] defend and support Israel in 2015?

One of the great strengths of the Anglican Church expressed through membership of seventy seven million member global Anglican Communion is the diversity of its Christian membership.

With foundations in the 16th century English reformation, Anglicans have been among the champions of numerous global movements that continue to impact our world to this very day.

For example:

William Wilberforce: Christian Abolitionist, Reformer, Statesman; Florence Nightingale, Nurse, Social Reformer; John Wesley, Charles Simeon, John Newton. And in our own nation, George Washington, John Jay, James Madison, Richard Dobbs Spaight all Anglicans who have impacted their own immediate situations and influenced global movements from theological reform, to child care, to the abolition of slavery and availability of education.

However, when the Anglican Church comes to discuss Israel, her past, present and future, there appears to be a consistent theological, social and political hostility towards Israel, the Jewish people, their religion and State.

Dr. George Carey, 103rd Archbishop of Canterbury in office from 1991-2002, became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 150 years to decline to be the Patron of The Anglican Church’s Ministry Among the Jewish People. Reports at the time confirmed that the Archbishop, the most senior figure in the Anglican Church, did not wish to endorse the organization’s missionary work, which he felt was damaging to interfaith relations. His successor, Dr. Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, faced a torrent of criticism for the “ill-judged” decision of the Church of England’s General Synod in 2006, to back disinvestment from a US company that makes giant bulldozers used by the Israeli army.

Outspoken Anglican priest, The Rev. Stephen Sizer appears to have made attacking Christian support for Israel a central focus of his ministry. Ironically, he comes not from the church’s left-wing but its evangelical membership. Sizer has said, “In its worst forms, Christian Zionism uses the Bible to justify racial superiority, land expropriation, home demolitions, colonial settlements, the denial of international law and the dehumanization of Arabs.”

In 2007 Sizer spoke in Iran about Christian Zionism at 8 Iranian schools and was interviewed on Iranian television, radio and in newspapers about Christian Zionism’s “destructive” influence.

Here in the United States, The Episcopal Church has approximately 2 million members and some 7,000 churches. Because of its presence in the United States, the relative wealth of its members, and its connections to Anglicans throughout the world, The Episcopal Church is in a strategic position to influence attitudes toward Israel on both a national and global scale. Sadly, The Episcopal Church’s leaders and constitutive bodies routinely issue one-sided statements about Arab-Israeli conflicts and its publications portray Israel as exclusively responsible for violence in the region.

Both the General Convention and the Executive Council have exhibited a marked tendency to hold Israel to a utopian standard of conduct and its adversaries to no standard at all.

In November 1994, the Executive Council approved a resolution asking Motorola Company to “establish a policy to prohibit the sale of products or provision of services to any settlement, including persons residing in those settlements, located in the Occupied Territories.” This resolution, passed one month after two Hamas suicide bombings had killed 13 Israelis and wounded 80.

In June 1995, the Executive Council passed a resolution asserting that Jerusalem should be a shared city (ignoring decades of Palestinian aggression against Israel that make such an arrangement untenable).

In July 2000, the General Convention approved a resolution affirming the “right of return for every Palestinian, as well as restitution/compensation for their loss as called for by the United Nations.”

While passing these politically charged resolutions, The Episcopal Church is silent. There has been no resolution calling upon Hamas to dismantle terrorist infrastructure and there is only silence about anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hate- mongering in mosques, media and children’s textbooks.

All of these circumstances and generations of anti-Israeli positioning, both theologically, politically and socially, have led many, perhaps most members of Anglican Churches to believe that in order to be a legitimate Anglican in the twenty first century, one must oppose the Jewish people, their State and religion on almost every level.

How then can I be a bishop of the Anglican Church and support and defend Israel in 2015?

When a more comprehensive and thorough examination is made of the Anglican Church, her theology, history and involvement, both socially and religiously, past and present, with the Jewish people and more latterly the State of Israel, another position emerges, one that is less regularly articulated and not so widely known, yet a position which is embraced by thousands of faithful Anglicans across the globe.

1. Historical Support – Anglicans and Israel

Two hundred years ago, the Holy Bible profoundly affected a man named Joseph Frey, a Jewish believer in Jesus the Messiah, who became the founder of the Anglican Church’s Ministry Among the Jewish People.

In 2009, The Church’s Ministry among Jewish People (CMJ) an Anglican mission, celebrated its 200th anniversary. Although not the first evangelical Christian organization founded to serve the Jewish people, CMJ is the longest standing. During these 200 years, CMJ witnessed every major historical event in Europe and the Middle East – and experienced every crisis that the Jewish people encountered. And yet, the Church’s Ministry Among the Jewish People, an Anglican Ministry continues to believe that God has not finished with His people Israel.

The founders of CMJ were influenced by the Protestant Reformers and especially the 16th and 17th century Puritans, who believed that God had not revoked his covenant love for the Jewish people. From the beginning, CMJ was aware that God had promised to bring Israel back to her God, Messiah and land. Seeing the oppression and persecution of the Jewish people, CMJ began a ministry of relieving the suffering of the Jewish people through charity at local levels, political activism in the highest echelons of the British government and proclaiming the Gospel of God’s Kingdom including the promised restoration of His covenant people to their calling.

CMJ set up mission stations throughout the world. Schools, churches, clinics, hospitals, printing presses and bookshops were established primarily in Europe and the Middle East to help alleviate the suffering of the Jewish people.

CMJ staff were instrumental in combating anti-Semitism, and Christians in the British government (many involved with CMJ such as William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury) played a key role in the Jewish return to the Land of Israel. CMJ not only built the first Protestant church in the Middle East, Christ Church Jerusalem, but also the first schools, the first houses of industry for job training, and the first hospital with state- of-the-art equipment and medicine, all of which helped bring modern standards of health, welfare, and education to Eretz Yisrael.

In August 1840, The Times of London reported that the British government was considering Jewish restoration. An important, though often neglected, figure in British support of the restoration of the Jews was William Hechler, an Anglican clergyman of German descent who was Chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna and became a close friend of Theodor Herzl.

Hechler, the Anglican, was instrumental in aiding Herzl through his diplomatic activities, and may, in that sense, be called the founder of modern Christian Zionism.

Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of Theodor Herzl, it was noted by the editors of the English-language memorial volume that William Hechler would prove, “not only the first, but the most constant and the most indefatigable of Herzl’s followers”.

Anglicans have both historically and boldly supported the Jewish people and Israel’s right to exist.

2. Biblical and Ecclesial Support

Biblical advocacy of the restoration of the Jews to the covenant land was advocated by many theologians following the protestant reformation. John Owen, John Gill, Samuel Rutherford, Charles Wesley who wrote in 1762,

We know, it must be done,
For God hath spoke the word,
All Israel shall their Saviour own,
To their first state restor’d:
Re-built by his command,
Jerusalem shall rise,
Her temple on Moriah stand
Again, and touch the skies.

Anglican Bishop J.C Ryle, the first Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, who died in 1900 clearly taught and believed in the restoration of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel.
In his work, “Coming Events and Present Duties,” Ryle wrote, “Christ will gather the scattered tribes of Israel, and place them once more in their own land… As He literally rode upon an ass, was literally sold for thirty pieces of silver, had His hands and feet literally pierced, was numbered literally with the transgressors and had lots literally cast upon His raiment, and all that Scripture might be fulfilled so also will He come, literally set up a kingdom and literally reign over the earth.”

Ryle and those before him, understood the clarity of the biblical narrative.

In what is sometimes described as the New Testaments most comprehensive presentation regarding the Jews and Israel, the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 9-11, “Did God reject His people?” And his response, “By no means! I am an Israelite [writes Paul], a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin.” God did not reject His people, whom he foreknew.

Paul uses the strongest negative in the Greek language he could have used – – never let it be, never, never, impossible, unthinkable, out of the question. God still has his chosen people. He made a covenant with them. He will never break it. Even if they break covenant, God still fully committed to them.

Paul says, the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Visiting Germany in 1980, Pope John Paul II summarized the proper Catholic approach to Judaism with the words: “Who meets Jesus Christ meets Judaism.” He described Jews as “the people of God of the Old Covenant never retracted by God.”

Again, the biblical narrative is clear. How could Almighty God have finished with Israel?
“To them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises… the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ.”

Three times in Romans chapter 11 the Apostle Paul rebukes the Gentiles believers for their arrogance and their boasting that they have replaced the Jews. If Paul had not confronted this erroneous replacement theology and if such theology had been allowed to continue in Rome there would today be two Christian churches, a Jewish Church and a Gentile Church and this would have spread through the whole Empire because all roads lead from Rome and as well as to Rome.

In chapter nine Paul writes that the Jewish people were in the past a selected people.In chapter ten in the present, Paul writes they are a stubborn people, but then in chapter eleven, Paul writes, that in the future the Jewish people will be a saved people, which is perhaps the biggest surprise of all, the New Testament is clear, the Jewish people havea future in God.

As a Christian, as an Anglican bishop, from the foundation of critical biblical exegesis, I support Israel’s right to exist. I do not believe you can read the Bible, the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, and be in any doubt about this at all.

As an Anglican, the biblical narrative alone is sufficient to support the Jewish people and Israel’s right to exist.

3. Moral Support – Long Memories

Over the past 100 years the world has seen unspeakable disasters and suffering. The nearly 1.5 million Armenians who were slaughtered in a genocide at the hands of the  Ottoman Empire in 1915. The  unthinkable acts of terror perpetrated by Islamic terrorist on September 11, 2001. The beheading of twenty one Coptic Christians on the Libyan coast in February of this year.

However, the holocaust during World War II, in which approximately 6 million Jews were exterminated in Adolph Hilter’s ‘final solution’ demands in itself the world’s support for the creation, existence, protection and preservation of the Jewish people and the State of Israel.

In 1945 the world was brought face to face with the horrific scenes of the concentration  camps through newsreels and the printed media. Nail marks are still visible in the gas chamber walls of Auschwitz where Jews had tried to claw their way out of the suffocating death chamber into which they were herded. After arriving on the trains and inhaling Zyklong B, their lives abruptly ended. Their hair was cut off and used to stuff cushions, if their teeth had any gold fillings they were wrenched out with pliers, if there were any

tattoos on their skin the skin was carefully peeled off to make lamp shades, if their was any fat on their body at all, it was taken to make soap and their bodies were incinerated into ash and sold for fertilizer. Some historians suggest that from arriving on the train, to the point where human ash was available as fertilizer, took 90 minutes.

Speaking of the atrocities against the Jewish people, The Most Rev. William Temple, 98th Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury who served during the Second World War said, “My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind. The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days. It is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller’s wounds as he lay there by the roadside and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a remendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.”

In contrast to that courageous and prophetic word from Archbishop Temple, much of the Anglican Church in the West has largely been silent over the horrific atrocities directed against the Jewish people and the State of Israel. Very sadly and inexcusably, even Anglican bishops have been the perpetrators of this evil. In 1969, Elias Khoury, an Anglican priest from Ramallah, then Dean of the Anglican Cathedral of St. George the Martyr in Jerusalem, was caught and convicted by Israeli authorities for having transported explosive devices in a medical chest placed inside his car.

The explosives were used by the Islamic terrorist group, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, at the British Consulate in Jerusalem and at a supermarket, resulting in the deaths of two people and causing injuries to eleven others. In a deal with authorities, Khoury was allowed to emigrate to Jordan where he was rewarded for his actions by being made Anglican Bishop of Amman.

Such actions are outrageous and indefensible at every level.

I believe that every Christian has a responsibility to neutralize the most dreadful persecution that there has been over the past 2000 years, the holocaust of God’s people.

At Beit Hatfutsot, the Museum of the Jewish People, in Tel Aviv there is a statue of a woman triumphant, strong and beautiful [this woman represents the Christian Church] and by her side is a cringing, poor, thin terrified statue of a woman who represents the Jewish people. The statues tragically depict the anti-Semitic attitude of much of Christian history towards the Jewish people and Israel.

Jewish people have long memories because their history is long.

Let me say at this juncture, the moral foundation for my support of Israel should not in any way be seen as a basis for excusing injustice and any human right abuses that may be perpetrated by the modern State of Israel towards Palestinians or any other ethnic minority, however I do believe that every nation has a right to defend itself, it’s people, its borders and the right of every individual to freely choose and change their religious affiliation.

Two thousand years of anti-Semitism will only be undone by a generation of Christians who declare their solidarity and support of the right of Israel to exist in the world, by confronting immoral, unbiblical and anti-Semitic policies of governments, administrations, presidents, prime minsters, churches and individuals.

My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind.

4. Personal Support – a bishops final word

I am a disciple of Jesus Christ. I am convinced that what Jesus said, recorded in the gospels of the New Testament, is the Word of Almighty God. Jesus himself said, “Salvation is from the Jews.” In Christ, I am grafted into them, not them into me.

It was a Jewish woman who nurtured and cared for my Jewish Messiah.

It is the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints from the apostles, the Jewish apostles, that the church continues to declare and defend to this day.

It is to the Land of Israel, the city which He called, “The City of the Great King” to which Jesus will make his second advent.

And to quote once again Anglican Bishop J.C. Ryle when writing about these events said, “…denial of [the literal gathering of the Jewish nation, and their restoration to their own land] is as astonishing and incomprehensible to my own mind as the denial of the divinity of Christ.”