Algemeiner: Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died on Sunday, was a Nobel Prize winner and a hero of the anti-apartheid movement. Yet despite all his many qualities, he had a real problem with Jews and the Jewish State. He had many Jewish friends and admirers. But his blatantly antisemitic rhetoric, on public record, consistently and simply proved that you can be a likable, even sweet hero, and still be a dangerous fool.
I have tried to understand why so many perfectly nice, good Christians seem to have such trouble with Israel. Is it just the sympathy for the underdog? Or the arrogance of many Israelis? Is it something about Jews or Judaism that offends them?
Mahatma Gandhi, one of the founders of modern India was regarded as a holy man. He, too, could not sympathize with Jewish aspirations. Gandhi’s great ideal was that of satyagraha: non-violent resistance to evil. A lovely idea in theory, and a very Christian idea of turning the other cheek observed more in the breach. Of Hitler’s evil, Gandhi said in 1938, “the calculated violence of Hitler may result in a general massacre of Jews, but if their minds could be prepared for voluntary suffering, the massacre could be turned to a day of thanksgiving and joy.”
Thank you, but no thank you. He admired the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who visited Hitler to ensure that if he invaded the Middle East, he would exterminate the Jews there too. He even suggested that “the Jews should follow the doctrine of satyagraha and offer themselves to the Arabs to be shot or thrown into the dead sea.” One wonders why he didn’t suggest satyagraha to Stalin.” Read More …
Opinion: Holy men. How we mortals revere those ‘spiritual’ men elevated by their seemingly righteous causes. Popes of the Roman Catholic Church are addressed as ‘your holiness’. Yet when we peel back the onion just a bit, we find the most ancient hatred on earth is deep in many of their beliefs.
What is seldom asked of these spiritual men is, of which spirit are you? Like genders, there are only two: God and Satan, and men can’t serve both (Matthew 6:24).
From the article:
“Why, still today — and mainly in the progressive Protestant churches — is Israel so hated? Some people blame Replacement or Supersess
Without God’s prophetic word it is easy to see how Replacement Theology/anti-Semitism can happen. Two hundred years after Christ there was no sign of the Jewish nation as Jerusalem lay in rubble. The Jews had been scattered to the four corners of the earth in fulfillment of Deuteronomy 4:25-30, and the early church determined that God was finished with the Jews and all the promises of the covenant made to Abraham had been transferred to the church.
By the 5th century AD, Chrysostom (Archbishop of Constantinople) and Augustine were all in on that theory. Fast forward to the Reformation started by a Catholic priest named Martin Luther who turned the Church’s teaching of salvation on its head, yet anti-Semitism remained.
By the 16th century, a new form of anti-Semitism crept into the church by ‘holy men’ of the day. Replacement Theology determined that all the redeemed of Christ are Israel, which lasted until the 19th century when a literal reading of God’s word made a comeback.
See more on Replacement Theology HERE
