A different view of the West Bank

Tom Gross, in an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, says that the economy of the West Bank is flourishing in a way that will lay the foundation for Palestinian independence.  In fact, he says, Israelis have provided a great deal of support for Palestinian economic growth.  After describing the some of the conspicuous wealth and the film festival that he saw in Nablus, he writes:

Wandering around downtown Nablus the shops and restaurants I saw were full. There were plenty of expensive cars on the streets. Indeed I counted considerably more BMWs and Mercedes than I’ve seen, for example, in downtown Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

And perhaps most importantly of all, we had driven from Jerusalem to Nablus without going through any Israeli checkpoints. The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has removed them all since the Israeli security services (with the encouragement and support of President George W. Bush) were allowed, over recent years, to crush the intifada, restore security to the West Bank and set up the conditions for the economic boom that is now occurring. (There was one border post on the return leg of the journey, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, but the young female guard just waved me and the two Palestinians I was traveling with, through.)

Words and deeds: another critique of Obama’s post-Cairo policies

Yasser El-Shimy, a former Egyptian diplomat and current Ph.D. student at Boston University, echoes Marc Lynch’s observation that the June Cairo speech has not been followed with policy changes:

Today, Dec. 4, marks six months since Barack Obama gave his milestone Cairo speech. America’s standing across the Muslim world, however, is starting to dwindle back to its status quo ante, for a simple reason: The president committed the strategic blunder of not following up his words with actions.

For instance, even after Israel rebuffed Obama’s demand for an immediate halt to settlement expansion on Palestinian lands in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu for “unprecedented” concessions. To Muslims, it appeared that the new sheriff in town was not that different from the old one, at least not when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

To be sure, Muslims resented President George W. Bush, but it was above all his policies they could not fathom. Indeed, more broadly, Muslims’ discontent with Washington has mostly been political in nature. Polls almost uniformly demonstrate that Muslims are disappointed with America’s policies towards the Middle East, and that those policies drive anti-American sentiment. The long list of grievances includes U.S. bias towards Israel, its abiding military presence (in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with massive military bases in the Persian Gulf), as well as its support for autocratic regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region.

El-Shimy offers these policy suggestions to regain momentum:

• Stand firm on the settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and on allowing “the flow of vital goods into the Gaza Strip. This should send the unambiguous message that America is ready and able to lay the groundwork for a peaceful resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and that, in addition to Israel’s security concerns, Palestinian suffering does, in fact, matter.”
• “Second, the formation of a Lebanese national unity government headed by Saad Hariri presents a tremendous opportunity for peace. The arrangement terms should include Israeli withdrawal from the Shib’a Farms and other occupied Lebanese territories, in exchange for the disarmament of Hizbollah.”  Presumably this means that the US should support this process.  I’m not sure that Hizbollah would agree to disarm, though.
• Engage diplomatically with Syria, which has shown openness to talks.
• Don’t bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, and persuade Israel not to do so either.
• Withdraw from Iraq under the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement.

Not sure how possible or how good those suggestions are, but they are a point of view from someone with a different background than your average American commentator.

Tim Keller’s “The Prodigal God”

Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith is a great book.  In this short volume, Keller presents the gospel to his readers with a gentle integrity using the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).  Building on the teaching of his mentor, Edmund P. Clowney, he notes that while the prodigal son is saved in the parable, the story ends with the father appealing to his older son to come in for the celebration of the younger brother’s return.  Keller writes that this party was being paid for out of the older brother’s inheritance, since the younger brother had already taken and spent his part of the father’s property.  Jesus’ target in this parable was the Pharisees and scribes (Luke 15:2), the “elder brothers” who criticized Jesus for associating with sinners, the “younger brothers.”

Keller argues that the two brothers represent the two ways that people sin against God: we can be younger brothers who pursue pleasure with disdain for tradition, or we can be moralists who try to earn favor with God and try to create their own righteousness.  Both are in opposition to loving God for who He is and acting morally because of God’s love and grace to us.  These two types of people often criticize each other, but each is missing God’s grace.  Following the interpretation that the parable is mostly directed at Jesus’ self-righteous critics and counteracting the usual focus on the younger brother, Keller spends more time unpacking the elder brother’s attitude.

Keller discusses our sin and the resulting alienation from God, although he does not say much (if anything) about hell.  This may be the one weakness of the book, although from this article you can tell that Keller considers the doctrine of hell important.  On the other hand, the final three chapters of the book focus on how sinners are redeemed, and give a compelling description for the costly love of Christ and the hope and glories of salvation in its different facets: relationship with God and other believers, the restoration of the creation, and sanctification.  One of the great parts about these chapters is that they point people to the wonders of salvation in a very deep and biblical way, which perform the important task of not simply scaring people away from hell but asking them to consider the joys of knowing God through Christ.  I think that this is a great book for Christians to examine their own hearts for elder and younger brother tendencies and to remind themselves to look upon God’s great love for us.  I also think that it is a fresh way to present the timeless gospel to someone who doesn’t believe in Christ.

A good documentary on health care: “Money-Driven Medicine”

I just watched Money-Driven Medicine this evening.  It’s a documentary about our profit-driven health care system that shows how money-making infuses and corrupts our system.  My fiancee, who works as a nurse at both a hospital and a doctor’s office, says that the film portrayed the system very fairly.  Here are a couple of things that stood out to me:

• For the market enthusiasts: Repeating “we have the best health care system in the world” is not enough.  Idealizing free-market competition in the health care system doesn’t make sense to me.  One central point of the documentary is that the health care industry is based on paying for services.  This incentivizes all sorts of unnecessary tests and often turns doctors into dispensers of procedures rather than counselors who can help you improve your health and live a healthy lifestyle.  The most extreme example in the film was that Dr. Donald Berwick, who researches the health care system, called a hospital in Texas that advertised a great procedure.  He asked for information about it to share with other hospitals, but the hospital refused to share it because sole possession of the procedure gave them a competitive edge in their market.
• For those who want to increase the role of government: It appears that the documentary was based on Maggie Mahar’s book of the same name.  Mahar said in the movie that you can trace the rise of medicine as an industry to the creation of Medicare in 1965.  This meant that medicine was big business, and businesses that built lots and lots of hospitals with lots and lots of technology and placed businessmen in charge of health care companies became the norm.  So that’s a serious challenge to the Democrats’ plans for more government involvement and money in the system.  Wouldn’t that suggest that companies will line up to get lots of money from the government as the government spends more?  It seems like the Obama plan will entrench the medical industry that much more, as some critics are saying.

I’d encourage you to watch the movie if you’re interested in this topic.  For now, it looks like it’s only free until the end of November, but maybe they’ll extend the free period.

Finally, an interesting way to look at the economy from Doug Wilson.  It’s an old post that I was reminded of when thinking about this:

We still have more capitalist traces and remnants than (say) Europe, but ours is a managed and manipulated economy, not a free economy. This means, in the long run, we have a system where subsidized and regulated business and officious government put their heads together and decide the best way to screw the little guy. In response, the little guy howls and, not having read basic economics, calls for the government to “do something.” The government is happy to pretend to do so because this bestows more power on them, and the government will then have more resources to work with the next group of lobbyists for this interest or that one. Free market?

Secular and religious Zionism

In Zionism, David Engel writes that “after 1948 many diaspora Zionists expressed their Zionism primarily by employing the Hebrew of contemporary Israel as a second language and by constructing their cultural environment around the literature, music, art, thought and scholarship of Jews in the Jewish state, in order to participate as completely as possible in the ongoing development of Jewish civilization” (146).  Engel writes that this commitment came from the Zionist tradition of thinking of the Jews as a “nation” in the modern sense, influenced by the European nationalist thought of the late 19^th century.  This was quite different from the traditional Jewish sense of a people in covenant with God, bound by His law.  In traditional Jewish life, rabbis had acted as the interpreters of God’s law.

Engel continues, referring to Peter Smolenskin, possibly the first advocate of large-scale Jewish migration to Palestine in the late 1800s:

In contrast, thinking about Jews as a modern nation suggested an altogether different locus of sovereignty – the Jewish people itself.  Smolenskin placed sovereignty with the Jewish nation as a whole in an 1875 essay exploring how Jewish law might adapt itself to circumstances in which one or another legal prohibition “becomes a burden upon the people, keeping them from pursuing their livelihood and their interests”….  Rabbis, he argued, could not be counted upon to help lighten the burden, because they “have nothing in common with those who work for a living, so they can neither know nor understand the distress that the multiplicity of law causes”.  Therefore, he reasoned, in such circumstances “the people” themselves could rightfully ignore or modify aspects of the divine law on their own authority.  Defining Jews as a “nation” quickly became a way to justify this position; if “nations” possessed the inalienable right to establish their own states – an increasingly common assertion in Smolenskin’s day – then the authority to make laws must reside in the general will of a nation’s own members. (147)

This definition of Jewishness as constantly evolving was accepted by many Zionist thinkers in the 20th century “especially because it provided them with a basis for claiming leadership of the Jewish people in the absence of rabbinic sanction” (148).  This meant that once Israel was established, there were questions about the relationship of Zionism and the new Jewish state.  Engel writes that Israel’s leaders wanted all Jews to come to Israel, while Jews outside of Israel wanted to have a say in Jewish policies.

My previous post on Zionism focused on the influences that the secular ideologies of socialism and nationalism had on Zionism, as has this one so far.  If Engel is right, as I think he is, then secular ideas played a major role in the foundation of the Zionist movement.  Many of the movement’s leaders, including the first prime minister of Israel, hoped that Israel’s establishment would lead to “normalization,” diminishing anti-Semitism as Jews rose to a normal status of nationhood along with other nations.

But, Engel writes, Israel’s victory over its Arab neighbors in the 1967 (Six-Day) War added a new dimension to Jewish attachment to Israel.  Now that Israel controlled the Western Wall of the Temple and other holy sites, a profoundly religious attachment to the land of Israel emerged among a greater number of Jews, and religious Jews who wanted to settle the new territories for religious reasons and in some cases prepare the way for the Messiah began to have more influence.  The religious Zionists often supported the secular, more hawkish Likud party, as both supported the idea of a larger Israel that did not need to worry about “normalizing” relationships with the outside world.

Lastly, one interesting trend that Engel highlighted was that while some in Likud have backed away from their agreement with religious Zionism (think of Ariel Sharon’s program of unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, and I believe that he was considering a similar action in the West Bank before his stroke), American Zionist organizations have remained committed to the Israeli possession of religious sites.  Engel refers to American Zionists who argued during peace talks in 2000 that Israel ought to take into account the religious needs of Jews worldwide before making deals that would affect the possession of these sites.  This has sparked some reaction in Israeli secular elite circles that perhaps Israel ought to simply worry about its own Jewish and non-Jewish citizens and not feel any responsibility toward Jews in the worldwide diaspora.  This position is called “post-Zionism” (185), and reflects the tension that I discussed above: what is the relationship between the state of Israel and the Zionist movement?

Ministering to returning soldiers

Yesterday I listened to a podcast of a great episode of Speaking of Faith, originally from 2006.  Krista Tippett interviewed Chaplain Major John Morris about his role in ministering to soldiers during and after war (listen to the program or read the transcript here).  He started out with a very evocative description of Easter 2004 in Fallujah:

Maj. Morris: I was at a camp with the Marines, the 1st Marine Division. I was supporting Army special operations soldiers, psychological operations soldiers, who were supporting the 1st Marine Division as they began to lay siege to and take down that city. At Camp Blue Diamond, it’s the headquarters of the 1st Marine Division, and we had an early sunrise service, which actually was dangerous because the camp was being mortared occasionally. But, nonetheless, the Marines showed up in great strength, with a few Army personnel there.

And I celebrated with Father Devine, the 1st Marine Division Roman Catholic priest. And it was particularly memorable because, you know, it was the only service I’ve ever conducted where we were — we all knew that, by the end of the day, people who were worshipping in that service would no longer be on this planet. And so we talked about the hope of the Resurrection with a sense of fervency and urgency that I had never experienced before.

The walls of the chapel were adorned with posters with the name of every Marine that had been wounded in the Anbar province, and every Marine that had been killed. And I couldn’t help but think of that verse in Hebrew[s], as it talked about being surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. You know, we were, and we knew that very quickly many of us could be on that wall.

So there was a sense of joy, and expectancy, and dread all meld [sic] together. All the Marines had their weapons. They were ready to go out on their mission. The place was packed. It was loud, as Marines can be. It was a participatory service. It was a beautiful, sacred privilege. And the service ended. And I went on my way to do my rounds of conducting Easter services for Marines and Army personnel all over that area. So it was an amazing time. A lot of Marines were killed, a lot of Army soldiers killed.

Morris gave a perspective on soldiers’ lives from a close perspective, which is welcome amid the rampant politicization of our wars by politicians and political media.  To me, it’s become clear that our political discourse has very little space for soldiers’ actual experiences.  The soldiers must be righteous executors of a righteous foreign policy (for supporters of the wars), victims (for mainstream opponents of the wars), or criminals (for far left opponents of the wars).  It’s sad that very few seem to be really interested in understanding what soldiers go through, but instead seem more interested in using the soldiers as political props.  There doesn’t seem to be a lot of room in any of those characterizations for a real human experience in war.

Robert Louis Wilken lecture on the Church Fathers and Scripture

Wheaton College, just a bit over an hour from my home, has inaugurated the new Center for Early Christian Studies.  On October 29, Robert Louis Wilken of the University of Virginia gave the inaugural lecture, “Going Deeper into the Bible:  The Church Fathers as Interpreters.”  Although I wasn’t able to go, I listened to the lecture last week.  You can do the same by clicking on the above link for the CECS.

Wilken tried to show how the Church Fathers interpreted Scripture.  David Neff, Editor-in-Chief of the Christianity Today Media Group, attended the lecture and gave a summary of Wilken’s argument and the example that he used about the interpretation of Isaiah 6:

Evangelicals have long taught that the meaning of Scripture is open to every Spirit-led reader, and that biblical interpretation must not be held hostage by church tradition. Isn’t the Bible intelligible without the Fathers?Yes, of course, in a sense it is. But the Fathers help us go more deeply into the Bible, Wilken said. They teach us to read it more slowly and enter it more deeply. He illustrated this by looking at several passages through their eyes, showing the way in which they treated the Bible as a single, coherent book in which difficult passages are illuminated by other passages. Indeed, those other texts raise the questions that lead us deeper.

Thus Isaiah‘s report in chapter 6 that the prophet “saw God” is clearly in tension with passages (such as John 1:18) that suggest no human has seen, or even can see, God. The key, however, is found in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” By mining the notions in that passage, the Fathers were able, not only to explain in what sense some might “see God,” but also to point the way toward the ideal Christian life. Thus to see God is to be united to him through purity of life. Understand, said Wilken, that the Bible is not primarily about the head; it is about the heart.

Christ and discontinuity

Peter Leithart reflects on the Sanhedrin’s horror at Jesus’ statement that he would destroy and then rebuild the temple.  While he was referring to his body, they took it as an offense against the center of their religious life.  Rather than wanting a God who claims this power,

They want a god of guarantees, whose entire reason for being is to ensure that their temple will stand and keep standing, no matter what.   Like all pagans, they want a god who ensures the persistence of the past, not a God who breaks down to make a new future.  For them, a God who destroys and raises up is a blasphemous God.

That’s what Sanhedrins of every age long for: A god who sanctions their tradition.   They will always send a God who kicks over their little monuments to the cross.

A caution for Christians in every era.

John Piper: Rejoice over the reach of world Christianity, but don’t be complacent

From his recent sermon, The Legacy of Antioch:

Meet the Global South

Let’s review the situation of the world today in regard to the spread of Christianity, and what this new term Global South means. The Global South refers to the astonishing growth of the Christian church in Africa, Latin America, and Asia while the formerly dominant centers of Christian influence in Europe and America are weakening. For example:

• At the beginning of the twentieth century, about 71 percent of professing Christians in the world lived in Europe. By the end of the twentieth century, that number had shrunk to 28 percent. 43 percent of the Christians now lived in Latin America and Africa.¹
• In 1900, Africa had 10 million Christians, which was about 10 percent of the population. By 2000, the number of Christians was 360 million, about half the population of the continent. This is probably the largest shift in religious affiliation that has ever occurred, anywhere.²
• There are 17 million baptized members of the Anglican church in Nigeria, compared with 2.8 million in the United States.³
• “This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined.”
• “The number of practicing Christians in China is approaching the number in the United States.”⁴
• “Last Sunday . . . more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called ‘Christian Europe.’”
• Kenya has more people in Christian churches on Sunday than Canada.
• “More believers worship together in Nagaland than in Norway.”
• “More Christian workers from Brazil are active in cross cultural ministry outside their homelands than from Britain or from Canada.” In other words, the churches of the Global South are increasingly sending churches.
• Last Sunday “more Presbyterians were in church in Ghana than in Scotland.”⁵
• “This past week in Great Britain, at least fifteen thousand Christian foreign missionaries were hard at work evangelizing the locals. Most of these missionaries are from Africa and Asia.”⁶

“In a word,” Mark Noll says, “the Christian church has experienced a larger geographical redistribution in the last fifty years than in any comparable period in its history, with the exception of the very earliest years of church history.”⁷

The West Is Not Done in Sending Missionaries

This is a great cause for Christians to rejoice in the sovereign grace of God. But what it does not mean is that the day of sending missionaries from our churches in the West is over. That would be a tragic misunderstanding of the situation. Partnership in mission with the Global South does not mean that all the unreached peoples of the world can be reached by people who are in the Global South. Don’t buy into the idea that we should send our money, not our people. That would sound very much like: “Let them shed their blood, not ours; we’ll just send money.”

The point of the sermon was this: “The Legacy of Antioch is that it was a mission church that became a sending church through the partnership of Barnabas and Saul, who in the end were sent out by the church to which they were sent.”  Piper also highlights the need for Christian instruction after conversion:

In all your evangelism and church planting, don’t neglect to teach the converts and to take them deep into the gospel and build them up so they are stable and strong….

In other words, he would do what Barnabas and Saul did. They saw a great ingathering, and they taught and taught and taught. They strengthened the believers. They sank the roots of the people down deep. They brought stability. They built a foundation for missions.

All over the world (you read this in all the literature), the cry is for trained, strong, Bible-saturated leaders. What will your part be in raising them up?

Justin Martyr before the prefect of Rome

Through reading Litfin’s Getting to Know the Church Fathers, I found out that the short narrative of Justin’s martyrdom is online at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, maintained by Calvin College.  Justin and others were arrested in Rome about AD 165.  The prefect (chief magistrate) of Rome first ordered Justin to sacrifice to the gods and then examined him about his beliefs and the meetings of Christians that followed him (see Chapter I and Chapter II).  The prefect, Rusticus, then asked the others if they were Christians and asked Liberianus if he would worship the gods.  Their responses, recorded in Chapter III give a brief glimpse into what seems to have been a diverse group of Christians in Rome.  Two had been taught the faith by their parents, while another claimed that “Christ is our true father, and faith in Him is our mother; and my earthly parents died.”  This latter man, Hierax, had originally come from “Iconium in Phrygia” and came to Rome after he was driven out, while Euelpistus’ parents were in Cappadocia.  Euelpistus, “a servant of Caesar,” gave my favorite response to the prefect: “I too am a Christian, having been freed by Christ; and by the grace of Christ I partake of the same hope.”  In the face of their commitment, the prefect informed the Christians of the fate that they faced.  I have quoted in full the last two chapters (IV and V) of the story:

The prefect says to Justin, “Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend into heaven?” Justin said, “I hope that, if I endure these things, I shall have His gifts.²⁶⁴⁶ [alternate reading: “I shall have what He teaches [us to expect].”] // For I know that, to all who have thus lived, there abides the divine favour until the completion of the whole world.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Do you suppose, then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense?” Justin said, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Let us, then, now come to the matter in hand, and which presses. Having come together, offer sacrifice with one accord to the gods.” Justin said, “No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Unless ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly punished.” Justin said, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when we have been punished,²⁶⁴⁷ [alternate reading: “It was our chief wish to endure tortures for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so to be saved.”] // because this shall become to us salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Saviour.” Thus also said the other martyrs: “Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols.”

Rusticus the prefect pronounced sentence, saying, “Let those who have refused to sacrifice to the gods and to yield to the command of the emperor be scourged,²⁶⁴⁸ and led away to suffer the punishment of decapitation, according to the laws.” The holy martyrs having glorified God, and having gone forth to the accustomed place, were beheaded, and perfected their testimony in the confession of the Saviour. And some of the faithful having secretly removed their bodies, laid them in a suitable place, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ having wrought along with them, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

According to G.W. Bowersock’s Martyrdom and Rome, narratives of martyrdom were a major form of early Christian literature “that was exciting to read as it was edifying” (24).  This narrative clearly points to the respect accorded to martyrs, portraying Justin and his companions as having “perfected their testimony in the confession of the Saviour.”

Note: When quoting from the source, I left the footnote links in.  Go to the CCEL source to read them in full, if you’d like to.  For two of them, I tried to summarize the note in brackets.

The prefect says to Justin, “Hearken, you who are called learned, and think that you know true doctrines; if you are scourged and beheaded, do you believe you will ascend into heaven?” Justin said, “I hope that, if I endure these things, I shall have His gifts.^26462646 Another reading is δόγματα, which may be translated, “I shall have what He teaches [us to expect].” // For I know that, to all who have thus lived, there abides the divine favour until the completion of the whole world.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Do you suppose, then, that you will ascend into heaven to receive some recompense?” Justin said, “I do not suppose it, but I know and am fully persuaded of it.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Let us, then, now come to the matter in hand, and which presses. Having come together, offer sacrifice with one accord to the gods.” Justin said, “No right-thinking person falls away from piety to impiety.” Rusticus the prefect said, “Unless ye obey, ye shall be mercilessly punished.” Justin said, “Through prayer we can be saved on account of our Lord Jesus Christ, even when we have been punished,^26472647 This passage admits of another rendering. Lord Hailes, following the common Latin version, thus translates: “It was our chief wish to endure tortures for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so to be saved.” // because this shall become to us salvation and confidence at the more fearful and universal judgment-seat of our Lord and Saviour.” Thus also said the other martyrs: “Do what you will, for we are Christians, and do not sacrifice to idols.”