Listening to Middle Eastern Christians

Abstract

Through television Western Christians have recently been exposed to vivid images of the violent repression of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. With live ammunition, three-foot clubs and cyanide tear gas, courtesy of the United States, the Palestinian protest of the occupation is being hammered into silence. Once it is silenced, it is hard to know whether Western people will continue to wonder about what is happening to those who are suffering under this occupation.The World Council of Churches, the Vatican and fundamentalist Christians have long since assumed their stances on the question of Israel and the Palestinians. For the World Council and the Vatican, relationships to Judaism and relationship to the state of Israel are separate questions, the one theological, the other political. Generally, both have supported the two-state solution, or the granting of a mini-Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Fundamentalists, by contrast, are militant supporters of an expanded Israel, based on their reading of Biblical prophecy.The voices which are largely unheard in western Christian circles are those of Middle Eastern Christians themselves. Unlike Western liberal Christians, they generally understand that, because the state of Israel implicitly makes claims based on Hebrew Scripture, these claims must be confronted theologically.One such statement was put together as long ago as 1967 by a group of Middle Eastern Christian theologians, headed by George Khodr, present bishop of Mount Lebanon in the Orthodox Church of Antioch. Entitled What is Required of the Christian Faith Concerning the Palestinian Problem, it lay major emphasis on the spiritual and universal meaning of Christian faith.