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Rant Number 577 13 March 2014
‘Anglicanism is no suitable religion for a Christian’ joked King Charles II. A tad unfair. As the state religion of mighty England – a noble Christian nation - Anglicanism cannot have been that bad. As England has decayed, however, so has Anglicanism. An official church report on Christian Zionism sadly illustrates it. Because it miserably sits on the fence on a matter which cries out for Christian plain-speaking and decision.
Christian Zionism, CZ, is a fraud. It is a moronic sect, a monstrosity, a nonsense fit not for Christians but for beasts. For creatures without intellect. A contradiction in terms. A perversion, a mindless idiocy and a harmful one at that. However, it is allied with the wider Zionist cause. Hence to abstain from firmly, unequivocally condemning, blasting this cause is disgraceful.
A key figure in this deformed travesty of Christianity was John Nelson Darby. With obfuscation, the report calls him an ‘Irish Anglican clergyman’. Actually he was a Plymouth Brethren. Another ‘beastly’ type of religion. A fundamentalist and literalist body now semi-extinct, the Brethren have no real clergy, no sacraments, disbelieve in tradition and even reason. Edmund Gosse’s moving autobiography, ‘Father and Son’, well conveys the utterly destructive effects of such asinine creed on a young person.
Darby divided history in epochs called ‘dispensations’. In each period God dealt with his creation differently. In proof, he invoked the Second Letter of St Paul to Timothy, chapter, 2, verse 15. That just does it, because that verse has nothing to do with ‘dispensations’. Darby was an ignoramus who beguiled people even more gullible and uninformed than himself.
The final epoch for this lunatic was crowned by Christ’s Second Coming – a perfect orthodox belief, of course – and by Christ gathering Christians into Heaven before the ‘millennium’ – a thousand years - during which Satan is restrained. A misleading notion, based on a misreading of Revelation 20:2, whose only occasional merit is to have provided Bible support for oppressed and dispossessed people to vent their frustrations. Not even remotely so in Darby. St Augustine long ago dismissed the millennium as a fable. The battle between Christ and Satan is essentially spiritual. It is fought by the Church and by us every day. And the Saint explained the thousand years allegorically. At any rate, Revelation says nothing about Jews having to return to the Holy Land in order for Jesus Christ to appear, as Christian Zionists moronically claim.
I am not a Jew. Zionism is a Jewish ideology. I am a Christian. I am happy to state that Christian Zionism is false. A heresy and a perversion of Christianity. Because the New Testament teaches that the Church is the authentic, final dispensation. St Paul himself teaches in Galatians that the Church ‘the Israel of God’. That’s it.
Outrageously the report nowhere mentions St Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Shocking because Romans, chapters 9 to 11, contains the clear, definitive and absolute statement of the apostolic position vis-à-vis Israel. There a zealous Christian can discern the perfect solution of the knotty question of how the Church relates to the Jews. Unlike pussy-footing Anglicans, Paul pins his colours to the mast. He proudly boasts of his Jewish identity and heritage. He lists the tremendous virtues of his holy nation and asks: ‘Has God rejected his people?’ and answers: ‘By no means!...So all Israel will be saved.’ Amen to that. Shameful that the Anglican midgets did not see fit to quote the words of this giant of the faith.
A main aim of CZ is the material re-building of the Temple of Jerusalem, in ruins since the Romans, my ancestors, destroyed in AD 70. They believe such an act is necessary for Christ’s Second Coming. Apart from the theological absurdity of this – Jesus declared that the he himself was the new Temple – moreover, the Temple is absent from the Heavenly Jerusalem as portrayed in Revelation – it is also highly incendiary. Because after Muslims conquered Jerusalem they built their shrine, al-Haram al-Sharif, over the Temple site. If some Jewish nutters decided to pull that down to rebuild the Temple…la Samaha Allah! It would open wide the gates of hell throughout the whole Middle East.
The Anglican report on CZ, Land of Promise, packs a good deal of useful information and even some intelligence and learning. Where it falls ruinously and unforgivably down is by sticking to a pseudo-Anglican middle way. Because it blabs of ‘holding together the material and the spiritual...the particular and the universal’ and such similar clichés. It rejects, on the whole CZ but it pulls back from denouncing the injustice and the pain inflicted on the people of Palestine by the Netanyahu gang, the real Zionism. This is deplorable. ‘Let your speech be yes or no’, says Christ, ‘anything more comes from evil.’ A radical teaching, implying the virtue of concision, and cogent on this subject. Why not say openly that Israeli state policy is dead wrong? Why the pusillanimous evasion? Like the case of Rowan Williams, formely of Canterbury, who cowardly dodged the issue of justice for the Palestinians for fear of damaging interfaith relations? Of offending the oppressors? Where is the Cross, where is the imitation of Christ in Williams’ evasion and feebleness? Williams, a clever man, allegedly, but a very poor example for Christians.
Of course, Britain is a tiny bit responsible for the evils inflicted on the Arabs of Palestine – Balfour declaration and all that. Maybe some Anglicans feel coy, even ashamed about it. But that should be an incentive to stick up for the cause of Palestine today.
The report is a feeble, tepid, lukewarm affair. Let Anglicans be aware of the warning in Revelation to the Laodiceans: ‘You are neither hot nor cold; therefore I will spew you out of my mouth’.
Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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