The Church of Scotland Takes the Low Road

May 14, 2013 By Bruce Bawer

Even if you’re in the habit of thinking a lot about Europe, it can be easy to forget about Scotland. This is curious, perhaps, given that Scotland arguably played at least as significant a role as England in shaping the culture of the thirteen colonies and of the early American republic. The Western world owes a major debt to such seminal Scottish thinkers as Adam Smith and David Hume (not to mention that great theorist of liberty, John Stuart Mill, who, while born in London, was the son of a Scotsman). Scotland was a hub of the Industrial Revolution, and the homeland of some of the most beloved writers in English, from Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott to Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Yet the recent history of Scotland, like that of Quebec, has been dominated not by great authors or thinkers or businessmen but, rather, by mischief-makers who have kept themselves busy agitating for Scottish independence. Although it could be argued that modern capitalism was born in Scotland, today it’s a firmly socialist country, where the Parliament currently includes 41 Labourites and only one Tory, and where the welfare state is even more comprehensive than in England.

Then there’s the Church of Scotland. Unlike the Church of England, which was shown off, in all its glory, at the Margaret Thatcher funeral – and which is, of course, the Mother Church of the Anglican Communism, to which to the American Episcopal Church belongs – the Church of Scotland is Presbyterian. It is, moreover, one of those churches that have taken it upon themselves to be very active in international leftist activism. For years, its longstanding habit of expressing poisonous hostility toward Israel and mindless sympathy for the “Palestinian cause” didn’t distinguish it significantly from any number of other left-leaning ecclesiastical bodies around the world. That changed a few days ago, with the publication of a report – intended to be discussed and voted upon at the Church’s general assembly, which begins on May 18 – that was so blatantly anti-Semitic that it truly separated the Church of Scotland from the rest of the Israel-bashing pack.

Indeed, “The Inheritance of Abraham: A Report on the Promised Land” proved to be an instant classic of the most reprehensible kind – a brand-new core text in the annals of Christian Jew-hatred.

The report takes on supporters of Israel – both Jewish and Christian – who justify their Zionism by citing passages from Genesis in which God promises the Holy Land to Abraham’s descendants.  It challenges these biblical arguments from many directions – arguing, for example, that they’re irreconcilable with the warnings by prophets against the “pursuit of power and wealth” and that Israel has betrayed the justice that “is a major theme in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.” Quoting a famous line from Micah – “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?” – the report essentially maintains that Israel isn’t living up to the mandate of Jewish scripture, and that the Jewish state doesn’t deserve the support of Christians who seek to live up to the mandate of Christian scripture. For good measure, the report mocks the very idea that the creation of modern Israel is a “miracle,” sneering: “What is meant by ‘miracle’? Was Al Nakba a ‘miracle’ – driving people from their ancestral land and property with no right of reclaim; the creation of the Gaza Strip; all the refugee camps; the occupied Palestinian territory with the destruction of community life; and the impoverishment of the Palestinian people?”

The thrust of the report is crystal clear: “To be critical of Zionism is not anti-Semitic.” It quotes Christian theologians who oppose Israel – and one Jew, Mark Braverman, who rejects Zionism.  Obviously because the report’s authors think that by citing a Jew they’re insulating themselves from the charge of anti-Semitism, they place Braverman front and center in outlining their core argument, noting, in short, that:

Braverman is adamant that Christians must not sacrifice the universalist, inclusive dimension of Christianity and revert to the particular exclusivism of the Jewish faith because we feel guilty about the Holocaust. He is equally clear that the Jewish people have to repent of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians between 1947 and 1949. They must be challenged, too, to stop thinking of themselves as victims and special, and recognise that the present immoral, unjust treatment of Palestinian people is unsustainable.

Braverman challenges, too, what he calls “revisionist Christian theology,” more widely known as Western post-Holocaust theology, i.e. theology which takes away Jesus’ radical critique of Jewish theology and practice in order to provide no excuse for Christian anti-Semitism. In this approach, he claims, the Jewish people are and remain God’s chosen. This gives them the right to land, to triumph over enemies and a sense of specialness.

After a while the report sets Braverman aside, but continues along the same lines:

Jesus offered a radical critique of Jewish specialness and exclusivism….If Jesus is indeed the Yes to all God’s promises the promise to Abraham about land is fulfilled through the impact of Jesus, not by restoration of land to the Jewish people. Jesus gave a new direction and message for the people of God, one which did not feature a special area of land for them….Jesus’ vision of the kingdom is not for one limited area of territory, it is a way of anticipating how things can be if people are obedient to God….  Our Church points to the Kingdom, which cannot be tied to any earthly kingdom. Jesus said before Pilate that he was indeed a king but “my kingdom is not from this world.”

There’s much more in the report, but suffice it to say that every single word of it is intended to bolster a theological case for the dissolution of Israel.

In short, it’s a breathtakingly offensive piece of work. Yes, all the stuff about Jesus’ message and vision and so forth is a fair enough representation of the Christian understanding of the New Testament. But as a statement about Israel and Jews in the twenty-first century, it’s beyond offensive. In its blithe, supercilious application of Christian theology to a contemporary Jewish situation, it’s breathtakingly arrogant, and – yes – cold-bloodedly anti-Semitic. Early in the document, its authors make a point of spelling out their opposition to Western colonialism and imperialism; but their smug articulation, in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of the doctrine of supercessionism (also known as replacement theology) – which posits that the New Covenant under Jesus replaces Jehovah’s covenant with the Hebrew people – is offensive in precisely the same way as colonialism and imperialism, only on a far larger scale. Although the report, like most such products of left-leaning churches today, is full of pretty language about mercy, kindness, reconciliation, and “God’s universal, inclusive love,” it resurrects official Christian attitudes toward Jewish people and Jewish belief that one would have hoped were buried with the Holocaust.

Gratifyingly, the Church of Scotland got hammered for issuing this disgusting document. Israel’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Daniel Taub, thundered that it “belittles the deeply held Jewish attachment to the land of Israel in a way which is truly hurtful.” Ephraim Borowski, head of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities (there are about 6000 Jews in Scotland), complained that the report “reads like an Inquisition-era polemic against Jews and Judaism….The picture it paints of both Judaism and Israel is barely even a caricature. The arrogance of telling the Jewish people how to interpret Jewish texts and Jewish theology is breathtaking.” Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League called the document “stunningly offensive…an affront to Jews around the world and to the State of Israel.” And the Jerusalem Post said that the Church of Scotland “owes the Jewish people an apology for this incendiary text that is more fitting to the 13th Century than to this one.”

In response to this chorus of outrage, the Church quickly buckled, yanking the report from its website and agreeing to meet with Jewish community leaders. After the meeting, the Church described the dialogue as “very positive,” insisted that its report had not been intended to deny Israel’s right to exist, and promised that “a new introduction” would be added “to set the context for the report and give clarity about some of the language used.” Scotland’s Jews seemed satisfied. They shouldn’t be. No sensible person who has read “The Inheritance of Abraham” in its entirety report would find the mere addition of a new introduction (whatever its contents) sufficient to render this monstrosity inoffensive; the only decent move for the Church would be to withdraw the entire document, apologize for it profusely, and commit itself to an intense examination of its own collective conscience vis-à-vis Israel and the Jewish people. But that, apparently, isn’t about to happen. The stink of Jew-hatred, then, remains – no more fetid in Scotland, alas, than in many other corners of today’s Europe

The breakdown of marriage and its connection to childbearing in American culture is now a given:  In 1980, about 18% of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, it was 41%.  Among whites, the increase was from 11% to 36%; among African Americans, from 56% to 72%; among Hispanics, from 37% (in 1990) to 53%.  Consider, as well, the share of children living with two parents.  Since 1970, it has dropped from 82% to 63%.  Among whites, the decline is from 87% to 73%; among African Americans, from 57% to 31%; among Hispanics, from 78% to 57%.  The causes of all this dysfunction are complex, but Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute in his book,Coming Apart, argues that having children out of wedlock is now more common and acceptable partially because the sexual revolution permitted men to get sex without marriage.  In addition, the waning influence of religious-based ethical standards has undermined the importance of the family.  Further, feminism and expanded welfare dependency have both made it easier for women to survive on their own.  Finally, liberalized divorce laws naturally increased the divorce rate, usually leaving women to raise the children.  Few would argue that these various trends are positive; in fact, a very strong case could be made that American culture is in crisis because of these trends.

What do we know about this significant growth of unmarried moms?  From a recently published article by Kay Hymowitz, W. Bradford Wilcox and Kelleen Kaye, we know these facts:

• By the time they turn 30, about two-thirds of American women have had their first child, usually outside of marriage.  They write: “Indeed, 20-somethings are driving America’s all-time high level of nonmarital childbearing, which is now at 41% of all births, according to vital-statistics data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention.  Sixty percent of those births are to women in their 20s, while teens account for one-fifth of nonmarital births.  Between 1990 and 2008, the teen pregnancy rate has dropped by 42%, while the rate of nonmarital childbearing among 20-something women has risen by 27%.”

• The shift of unmarried parenthood from teens to 20-somethings is in part an unexpected consequence of delaying marriage.  Over four decades, the marriage age has risen steadily to a new high of nearly 27 for women and 29 for men.
• Delayed marriage does, to some extent, seem to be related to the struggles of today’s working and lower middle class young adults.  They delay marriage, but not childbearing.  Indeed, 58% of first births among this group are now to unmarried women.  However, among college graduates, only 12% of first births are outside marriage.

• Many unmarried mothers in their 20s are living with their baby’s father when they give birth.  But about two-fifths of those couples break up before their child’s first birthday; that is three times the rate for married couples of their age.  The writers also have discovered that “these parents often go on to have another child (or children), with another partner (or partners), creating a family maze of step parents, siblings, grandparents and homes.  As a great deal of research has shown, such instability is one of the greatest risks to children’s well-being.  It greatly increases the likelihood that they will experience academic, social and emotional problems like poor grades, drug abuse and (perpetuating the cycle) unmarried childbearing.”

Within American culture, marriage was once the foundation stone of “adult identity, finances and family.”  No longer.  Research by Hymowitz and her colleagues shows that “children born to stable, married parents are more likely to graduate from high school and from college, well-equipped to thrive in a knowledge economy, and, in turn, more likely to marry and start their own families on a stable footing.  The converse is true for children from homes marked by instability.  Without a stable family, their chances of moving up the education and income ladder are stunted, which—in turn—reduces their odds of getting married as adults.”

The importance of marriage is also changing in American culture.  According to the Pew Research Center, marriage is important today for different reasons.  For Christians, marriage is the most important institution God created.  It is a complementary union between a man and a woman for life.  It is also the means for procreation and the raising and nurturing of children.  It is the foundation stone for human civilization.  For post-World War II Americans, marriage was nothing particularly unusual.  It was respectable and was the only acceptable and decent way to share a home with a partner.  Hence, shame accompanied children born out of wedlock.  But this is no longer the norm.  In a recent summary of some of the Pew research, Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University writes, “Today, marriage is more discretionary than ever, and also more distinctive.  It is something young adults do after they and their live-in partners have good jobs and a nice apartment.  It has become the capstone experience—the last brick put in place after everything else is set.  People marry to show their family and friends how well their lives are going, even if deep down they are unsure whether their partnership will last a lifetime.”

Further, according to the National Center for Family and Marriage, young adults without college degrees are increasingly likely to put off marriage and have their children in cohabiting relationships, sometimes years before they marry.  There is thus a weakening linkage between marriage and childbearing in America.  Cherlin writes: “In a cultural climate in which having children outside of marriage is increasingly acceptable, non-college educated young adults seem to treat reproduction as mandatory or at least axiomatic, and marriage as more of an optional add-on.  Most do eventually marry, although not necessarily to the person they had their first child with.”  In contrast, college-educated women wait until they are married to have children.  They will more than likely cohabit with a partner, or even several during their 20s, but late in their 20s, after graduate school is finished, they get married and begin to have children.  Marriage, if it occurs, is the last thing young adults do, not as the beginning of adulthood, as it was for generations, but rather as the capstone act of becoming an adult.

Marriage as an institution is no longer logically connected to childbearing in America, especially for those without a college education.  Yet, even for those who earn a college degree, cohabitation before marriage, if marriage occurs at all, is the new normal.  If women with children marry, they usually do not marry the father of their first child.  Hymowitz and her research group have demonstrated the terrible consequences of this dysfunction on children.  There is nothing really positive about this new normal for the children these complex social relationships produce.  God declared at creation that marriage is His foundational institution.  As Jesus said in Matthew 19:4, “from the beginning He created them male and female,” and intended for them to marry, love each other in a “one-flesh” relationship, and have children.  Indeed, He performed the first marriage and declared it His “norm.”  It is the Creation Ordinance standard for all time and all cultures.  Those who willfully reject this Ordinance will suffer the consequences of that rejection:  Witness 21^st century America.

See Robert J. Samuelson in the Washington Post (14 April 2103); Kay Hymowitz, W. Bradford Wilcox and Kelleen Kaye in the Wall Street Journal (15 March 2103); and Andrew J. Cherlin in the New York Times Sunday “Review” (28 April 2013).

Since the 1960s, American culture has experienced a tectonic shift in how it views human sexuality.  It began with the sexual liberation movement that promoted free-love and sexual emancipation.  Contraceptives revolutionized sexual activity, shifting the emphasis from procreation, pregnancy and parental responsibility to sex without the possibility of children.  The focus was now on pleasure and self-fulfillment.  Having sex was now viewed as an aspect of human happiness and fulfillment—a right to be exercised.  As the culture continued its shift, gay and lesbian sexuality became the focal point in the 1990s, and the framing of sexuality as a right was embraced completely.  Sexuality was not a matter of ethics or morals; it was a right—a right that required governmental protection and guarantee.  So, the 21^st century has witnessed the accommodation to gay and lesbian sex as a human right that needs governmental protection:  It has become the new “civil right.”  Two other types of sexuality were added to embracing sexuality as a right—bisexuality and transgender.  As a culture, we now often speak of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered people in the same breath:  LGBT is now as familiar an acrostic as NOW, the NAACP or the ACLU.  Finally, in 2013 the new “right” of human sexuality is same-sex marriage, a panacea that has been nothing short of stunning.  Most analysts assume that the Supreme Court this June will embrace some form of legitimacy for same-sex marriage as a human right protected by the Constitution.

There are three additional pieces of evidence that manifest the breadth and depth of culture change in terms of human sexuality:

• Families and parenting arrangements are changing:  About one in five gay and lesbian couples is raising children under age 18.  One in 10 men with a male partner or spouse is a military veteran.  As many as 6 million Americans, roughly 2% of the population, have a parent who is gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBT).  A February Gallup Poll found that 3.5% of American adults identify themselves as LGBT.  The 2010 census counted 646,000 same-sex couples, including 130,000 who were married.

• The definition of marriage is changing.  In fact, as theologian Albert Mohler demonstrates, there are two rival views of marriage:  The conjugal view, which defines marriage as a “bodily as well as an emotional and spiritual bond,” which sustains the world through the creation and nurture of children, and the revisionist view, which defines marriage as “a loving emotional bond, one distinguished by its intensity, with no reference to a duty beyond its partners.”  He writes:  “The conjugal view, based in the function of the family and the nurture of children, points to lifelong fidelity.  The revisionist view points to a relationship based on emotional intensity in which the partners remain ‘as long as they find it.’”  The revisionist view is what is modeled on television, Hollywood and now undergirds the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s.

• Many sociologists are now talking about a post-gay movement in American culture.  Six years ago, no student health plan covered “gender reassignment surgery,” and now three dozen do, with 25 others offering related hormone therapy.  Andree Seu Peterson recently reported that the University of Pennsylvania proudly trumpets two dozen gay groups on campus, including Queer People of Color and Lambda Alliance, with a new group Penn Non-Cis (“cis” meaning gender-biology incompatibility).  Modern psychiatry is adding new categories to accommodate the proliferation of sexual identity types:  e.g., “genderqueer, androgyne, and non-cisgender.”  This proliferation of confusion drives the Christian back to the simple words of Jesus:  “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female . . .” (Matthew 19:4).  The God who created us “male and female” knows the path to health and life.  But American culture has long ago rejected that path!  Thus, Peterson reminds us of the definition of “perversity”:  “the alteration of something from its original course, meaning, or state, to a corruption of what was first intended.”  There is no better single term that captures the confusion of American culture when it comes to human sexuality.

Is there no hope, then?  Are we doomed as a culture to this ongoing proliferation of sexual confusion in the name of rights?  Yes, there is hope—the power of the Gospel to transform a life.  I recently came across an article about and an interview with Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.  Butterfield had been a leftist lesbian professor of English and women’s studies.  On the track to becoming tenured, she began researching the Religious Right and “their politics of hatred against queers like me.  To do this, I would need to read the one book that had, in my estimation, gotten so many people off track:  the Bible.”  She wrote an article in 1997 for a local newspaper in which she criticized Promise Keepers.  In response to her article, she received a letter from Ken Smith, pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church.  She describes the letter as “kind and inquiring.”  Smith encouraged her to explore several key questions:  “How did you arrive at your interpretations?  How do you know you are right?  Do you believe in God?”  She observed that Smith was asking her to “defend the presuppositions that undergirded [my article].”  She writes:  “As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview.  Ken’s letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.”  Butterfield began to go to Smith’s church.  Pastor Smith did not mock her; he engaged her in a relationship with him and his wife:  “They entered my world.”  She then began reading the Bible.  She writes, “I read the way a glutton devours.  I read it many times that first year in multiple translations.”  She wrote that “I fought with everything I had.  I did not want this.  I did not ask for this.  I counted the costs.  And I did not like the math on the other side of the equal sign.”  After several years of reading the Bible, spending time with Pastor Smith and his wife, Floy, she “came to Jesus, openhanded and naked.  In this war of worldviews . . . Jesus triumphed.  And I was a broken mess.  Conversion was a train wreck.  I did not want to lose everything I loved.  But the voice of God sang a sanguine love song in the rubble of my world.  I weakly believed that if Jesus could conquer death, he could make right my world.  I drank, tentatively at first, of the solace of the Holy Spirit.  I rested in perfect peace, then community, and today in the shelter of a covenant family, where one calls me ‘wife’ and many call me ‘mother.’”  Butterfield is now married and her husband pastors the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham.  But, she cautions, “My former life lurks in the edges of my heart, shiny and still like a knife.”

Cultural dysfunction and perversity can only be overcome by the power of the Gospel.  The firm, gracious and magnanimous love that Pastor Ken Smith and his wife showed to Rosaria Champagne Butterfield changed her life, for it pointed her to Jesus.  As she read the Bible, her worldview was challenged and she honestly saw its shortcomings.  Jesus transformed her and continues to do so.  That is the answer!!!

See Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, “My Train Wreck Conversion,” in Christianity Today (January/February 2013), pp. 112-113 and an interview with her in World (23 Marcy 2013), pp. 32-35; Andree Seu Peterson in World (23 March 2013), p. 83; Carol Morello in the Washington Post (4 March 2013); and www.albertmohler.com (2 April 2013). PRINT PDF

 

 John Whitehead writes for the Rutherford Institute:

For those like myself who have studied emerging police states, the sight of a city placed under martial law—its citizens under house arrest (officials used the Orwellian phrase “shelter in place” to describe the mandatory lockdown), military-style helicopters equipped with thermal imaging devices buzzing the skies, tanks and armored vehicles on the streets, and snipers perched on rooftops, while thousands of black-garbed police swarmed the streets and SWAT teams carried out house-to-house searches in search of two young and seemingly unlikely bombing suspects—leaves us in a growing state of unease.

Mind you, these are no longer warning signs of a steadily encroaching police state. The police state has arrived.

Equally unnerving is the ease with which Americans welcomed the city-wide lockdown, the routine invasion of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses. Watching it unfold, I couldn’t help but think of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s remarks during the Nuremberg trials. As Goering noted: It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

As the events in Boston have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every country. The same propaganda and police state tactics that worked for Adolf Hitler 80 years ago continue to be employed with great success in a post-9/11 America. . . .

Clearly, the outlook for civil liberties under Obama grows bleaker by the day, from his embrace of indefinite detention for U.S. citizens and drone kill lists to warrantless surveillance of phone, email and internet communications, and prosecutions of government whistleblowers. Most recently, capitalizing on the nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear, government officials used the Boston Marathon tragedy as a means of extending the reach of the police state, starting with the House of Representatives’ overwhelming passage of the controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which opens the door to greater internet surveillance by the government.

These troubling developments are the outward manifestations of an inner, philosophical shift underway in how the government views not only the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but “we the people,” as well. What this reflects is a move away from a government bound by the rule of law to one that seeks total control through the imposition of its own self-serving laws on the populace.

All the while, the American people remain largely oblivious to the looming threats to their freedoms, eager to be persuaded that the government can solve the problems that plague us—whether it be terrorism, an economic depression, an environmental disaster or even a flu epidemic. Yet having bought into the false notion that the government can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes, we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.