your piece on Israel

Dear Michael,

I read through your piece on Israel. What you are addressing is quite a complicated issue. The relation between Christians and Jews have always been problematic right from the start. It begins with John's portrayal of Jews as the children of the devil and Paul's problem with his own past. We need to seriously rethink all our earlier ideas. The idea that God "unchose" the Jews after the arrival of Jesus on the scene has led to disastrous consequences to the Jewish people culminating in the Holocaust. Is God in the business of choosing favorites? Are we now the chosen people? Really? The idea that God punishes the Jewish people to correct them is also a view of God that has to be questioned. Does God punish people to correct them or loves and dies for them to correct them? The idea that the coming together of all the Jews in the nation of Israel will hasten the second coming of Christ is also problematic and this has led several Christian groups, especially in the USA (a land filled with crazy religiosities) to offer totally uncritical support to Israel. Most often people operate with a view that Jews were wrong and we Christians are right. Is that really so? The Judaism of today is not the Pharisaic religion of Jesus' times. There are thousands of Jewish people even today (a few of them are my close friends) who do what God asked us to do through Micah - "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." (Micah 6:8). Are they not God's beloved children? In the midst of all this we have forgotten Jesus, our Lord and Savior, was himself a good and observant Jew!

You see, Michael, we Christians need to do a lot of thinking (including repenting) on this.

God bless.

Thomas.

Dr. M. Thomas Thangaraj
Emeritus Professor of World Christianity
Candler School of Theology, Emory University
1531 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322. USA.