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Some 15,000 Messianic Jews currently live in Israel, but if you saw one on the street you would almost certainly fail to recognize any difference. They honor Jewish circumcision, bar-mitzvah, and wedding ceremonies, but believe Jesus is the messiah.

The small community of Yad Hashmona, near Jerusalem, is home to a number of Messianic-Jewish families. They believe in Jesus – or Yeshua, as they call him – and in the teachings of the New Testament as well as the old. They are Jews in every sense, but for the most part keep this side of their faith to themselves. When these families gather for the Shabbat meal, however, Jesus is the guest star at their table.

Around 350,000 Messianic Jews live in the US, and one would be just as hard-pressed to recognize them there as in Israel. Some are Orthodox, and dress as the haredim do, while others are traditional and wear a yarmulke or no religious symbol at all. They are for the most part Zionists, and see IDF service as a top priority. In the army they serve as pilots, commanders, and elite unit members, but usually make sure to keep their messianic beliefs under wraps.

The fact that Jesus was Jewish is generally agreed upon, but what happened after his death is subject to rancorous theological debate. History books tend to recall the first century as a time of rebellion and prophets in Jewish antiquity, and this was also Christianity’s first chapter, bringing about pre-historic inter-religious quarreling and anti-Semitism.But in separating between Jews and Christians, history largely ignores the story of those Jewish people who believed Christ was the messiah and continued this tradition well after his death – the ancestors of the Messianic-Jewish faith in modern times.

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Cordoba House or the Corboda Initiative are the rather less well known names of the proposed Islamic community center and mosque in New York City, more popularly known as the “Ground Zero Mosque”.

Interestingly, if you search for the term “Corboda” you’ll discover that this is…

Wiki

…a city in Andalusia, southern Spain, and the capital of the province of Córdoba. An Iberian and Roman city in ancient times, in the Middle Ages it was capital of an Islamic caliphate. During this time Cordoba was one of the largest cities in the world.

Within this city is the “Great Mosque of Corboda” or as it it is better known today, “Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption”.

Here’s Wiki on the Great Mosque of Corboda:

The Great Mosque of Córdoba, now known as the Catedral de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción (English: Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption) was a mosque built by the Umayyads on the site of a Christian Visigothic Church^[1] in the Andalusian city of Córdoba, Spain. It is regarded as perhaps the most accomplished monument of the Umayyad dynasty of Córdoba. After the Spanish Reconquista, it was rebuilt as Roman Catholic church with a Gothic cathedral inserted into the centre of the large Moorish building. Today the entire building is used to house the Cathedral of the diocese of Córdoba in Spain.

Interestingly, just as the Corboda of New York is riven with controversy and strife, so is the Spanish namesake:

CathNews:

Muslim groups are trying to convince Church leaders of the Cathedral of Cordoba in southern Spain – once the Great Mosque of Cordoba – to allow for both Muslim and Christian worship within the premises.

But the Bishop of Cordoba, Demetrio Fernandez, says sharing the space with Muslims would be like a man sharing his wife with another man, according to a report on the Christian Today website.

“There are things that are shared and others that are not, and the Cathedral of Cordoba is not shared with Muslims,” said Fernandez, according to the Spanish-language Europa Press.

Built in the 8th century after the Moorish invasion of Spain, the Cordoba house of worship was transformed from a mosque into a cathedral in 1236 when King Ferdinand III captured the city of Cordoba from the Moors.

Since then, except on rare occasions, Muslim prayer rites have been forbidden inside.

Earlier this year, in April, there was a scuffle between police officers and Muslim tourists from Austria who were trying to pray there.

Despite the bishop’s rejections, efforts to open Cordoba Cathedral for Muslim prayer and worship are ongoing.

Mansur Escudero, who is leading the push for Muslims to pray at the Cathedral, said the issue is not only important for Muslims but for humankind.

“We want it to be a place where anyone – whether Muslim, Christian or Jew – can do his meditation or his internal way of worshipping, or praying or whatever he wants to call it,” he added.

One of the deep bones of contention surrounding the Corboda of new York is over its identity as a Mosque. As David of Anglican Samizdat blogged earlier today:

It’s not a mosque, it’s a cultural centre with a prayer room.

This is true up to a point; it is a cultural centre, a large Islamic cultural centre with a large – a very large – prayer room. The prayer room will be large enough to house up to 2000 people; I am uncertain whether a reluctance to call this a mosque is the blinkered response of people refusing to allow a cherished preconception to be demolished or whether calling a room designed to house 2000 praying Muslims a mosque inflicts semantic violence on the word.

Isn’t it remarkable that Both Corboda’s are entrenched in bitter dispute over the validity of the buildings as mosques and appropriate places of worship for Muslims.

Anyway, next time you read of the “Ground Zero Mosque” spare a thought for the troubles rumbling around the original Corboda place of worship.

An article in the Guardian today written by atheist Padraig Reidy is doing the blog rounds at the moment, as he says that the anti-Catholic rhetoric emanating from some in the run up to the Pope’s visit is “making him uneasy”.

Here’s a snippet:

With Benedict on his way, the chorus rises. A Facebook invitation asks me to “Give Pope Benedict a lesson in British Values of Equality”. On leading left blog Liberal Conspiracy, one writer, discussing the Vatican’s stance on euthanasia, tells us: “This is, after all, a church that expects its followers to mumble incantations in front of a large statue of a mostly naked European bloke nailed to Roman torture implement and includes an act of ritual cannibalism in its rites… so who’s really obsessed with death here.”

Examine the language here. “Incantations”, “cannibalism”. This is the tone of Ian Paisley’s rabidly anti-papist Free Presbyterian church, not of rational secular debate. The faux-sympathy over child sexual abuse feels similarly galling, used as an opportunity to attack the church rather than express genuine concern for victims. Almost the entire focus on clerical abuse scandals is on sexual attacks on young boys by old priests, despite the fact that most of the abuse detailed in the various inquiries’ reports consists of beating and physical and mental torture.

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Last week we had the case of Catholics with Attitude liasing with the police after receiving anti-Catholic abuse online.

And just yesterday the Protect the Pope website cited Supporters of Protest the Pope discussing violence against Pope Benedict:

Supporters of Protest the Pope posted a thread yesterday on the Reddit atheism group in which they discussed wanting to commit violent attacks against Pope Benedict during his state visit to the UK. The title of the thread is ‘Protest the Pope’ and it is headed by a link to the Protest the Pope website. The Reddit atheism groups has 81,803 readers.

Contributors to the thread express their sick desire to assassinate Pope Benedict, obscenely comparing him to ‘war criminals who have been executed for less’. They go on to discuss wanting to breaking ‘a few ribs at least’.

Here are excerpts from their ‘Protest the Pope’ thread:

“I apologize for going all serious all of a sudden. I think I need to make it clear that while my appeal for killing the Pope is frivolous, my reason behind that appeal is not.

With his steadfast battle against condoms, the Pope is condemning millions of human beings every year to a painful and inhumane death to AIDS. Women and children, both completely innocent, are dying. War criminals have been executed for less.

Sadly, assassinating the Pope wouldn’t even help. He’d be succeeded by another asshole who would do the same.”

“That idea is very pleasant, but, sadly, it would make the pope (and all other collateral victims) martyrs, only giving more strength to ignorant people. I think some loud booing + some big signs demanding is arrest would be nice to see, for a start =)”

“ [When bargaining, always ask for more so you can settle for what you actually want.] How about just severely beating him? As a follower of Christ, he should appreciate having a few ribs broken, at least.”

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As Fr. Stephen Smutts commented earlier:

The anti-Catholic movement in the UK is indeed, rabid.

It would seem that there is a rather militant and aggressive subculture attached to the anti-Pope / Catholic  movement, which is causing many of us to feel somewhat uneasy.

I came across this short letter in the Church of England Newspaper and wondered what you good folks thought of it:

Sir, Am I missing the point? Didn’t Jesus say as his second greatest commandment ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself…’? Not love your neighbour as yourself, so long as they are not homosexual. Nor love your neighbour as yourself so long as their orthodox or liberal views of the church don’t clash with your orthodox or liberal views.

Can any logical thinking churchgoer wonder at the diminishing congregations when some of our leaders – the ones we look up to as our moral compass – have completely overlooked the words of Jesus to publicly play out petty disputes over whom they would prefer to be or not to be active members of our church?

If it were not for the damage being caused to the Church I may feel sorry for some of the moral crusaders; because if they do love their neighbours as themselves, they obviously hold themselves in very low regard.

Keep it up much longer and you won’t have a church to argue about.

Chris Reed,
HMP Parkhurt, Isle of Wight

ArtDaily

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says the refusal of Romania’s central bank to withdraw a coin with an image of a prime minister who stripped Jews of their citizenship before World War II is “insensitive” to the memory of Holocaust victims.

The Anti-Defamation League also condemned the decision and urged President Traian Basescu Friday to ensure that information about the anti-Semitic actions of Miron Cristea is included with each coin.

The museum in Washington, D.C., said Cristea’s tenure as Romania’s premier from 1938 to 1939 “marked the opening of a systematic campaign of anti-Semitic persecution by successive Romania governments that resulted in the devastation of the Romanian Jewish community during the Holocaust.”

“We are shocked and disappointed that the National Bank of Romania has decided to honor Miron Cristea, even after consideration of his anti-Semitic actions and statements,” Anti-Defamation League director Abraham H. Foxman said.

As prime minister, Cristea was responsible for revising Romania’s citizenship law, stripping about 225,000 Jews — or 37 percent of the nation’s Jewish population — of citizenship.

Some 280,000 Jews and 11,000 Roma, or Gypsies, were killed during the pro-fascist regime of dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu, who was prime minister from 1940 to 1944 and executed by the Communists in 1946.

Only about 6,000 Jews live in Romania today.

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Christian Today:

The new principal of the International Christian College says the end of Christendom is the biggest challenge facing the church in the West.

Richard Tiplady started in his new role as principal of ICC this month after departing from European Christian Mission, where he had been British Director for the last six years.

He spoke of the need to re-think church in a post-Christendom and increasingly plural context.

“The biggest challenge we have to face in the West in our mission is to accept that Christendom is over.”

“That we are no longer in a privileged position of power in society and that we do ourselves no service – we do the gospel no service – to clamour to bring it back.”

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How true!

If only everyone would grasp these points, then we could all move forward.

An interesting exchange between Bishop Spong and Albert Mohler tussling over the veracity of Scripture:

I think it is self-evident that these guys inhabit extreme antipodal positions, which makes fruitful dialogue between them virtually impossible.

Personally I’m not a fan of either of their polar positions and quite coincidentally I’ve just read an address by N T Wright which picks up on exactly this theme:

Debates about the authority of scripture have tended to get off on the wrong foot and to turn into an unproductive shouting-match. This is partly because here, as in matters of political theology, in the words of Jim Wallis ‘the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it’. And sometimes the other way round as well. We have allowed our debates to be polarized within the false either/or of post-enlightenment categories, so that we either see the Bible as a holy book, almost a magic book, in which we can simply look up detached answers to troubling questions, or see it within its historical context and therefore claim the right to relativize anything and everything we don’t immediately like about it. These categories are themselves mistaken; the Bible itself helps us to challenge them; and when we probe deeper into the question, ‘what does it mean to say that the Bible is authoritative’, we discover a new and richer framework which simultaneously enables us to be deeply faithful to scripture and energizes and shapes us, corporately and individually, for our urgent mission into tomorrow’s world.

Consider: How does what we call ‘the authority of the Bible’ relate to the authority of God himself – and the authority of Jesus himself? When the risen Jesus commissions his followers for their worldwide mission, he does not say ‘all authority in heaven and earth is given to – the books you people are going to go and write.’ He says that all authority is given to him. When we say the closing words of the Lord’s prayer, we don’t say that the kingdom, the power and the glory belong to the Bible, but to God himself. And when Jesus commissions the disciples for mission in John 20, he doesn’t say ‘receive this book’ but ‘receive the Holy Spirit’. Authority, then, has a trinitarian shape and content. If we want to say, as I certainly want to say in line with our entire Anglican tradition, that the Bible is in some sense our authority, the Bible itself insists that that sentence must be read as a shorthand way of saying something a bit more complicated, something that will enable us to get some critical distance on the traditional shouting-match. From very early on in the church, it became clear that those entrusted with God’s mission included some who were called to write – to write letters on the one hand, and to collect, edit and write up the stories about Jesus, and the story of Jesus, on the other hand. The composition-criticism of the last few decades has moved us on a long way from the old half-truth that the biblical authors ‘didn’t think they were writing scripture’. Paul certainly believed that God had entrusted him with an authoritative mission, and that his letter-writing formed part of that Spirit-given, Christ-shaped, kingdom-bringing activity. And the gospel writers, in their different ways, write in such a manner as to say, with quite a rich artistry: here is the continuation and culmination of the great story you know from Israel’s scriptures, and this is how, through its central character, it is now transformed into the narrative of God’s dealings not just with Israel but with the whole world. Any first-century Jew who has the nerve to begin a book with ‘In the beginning’, weaving the themes of Genesis and Exodus, of Isaiah and the Psalms, into the story of Israel’s Messiah, and doing so in such a way as to provide a framework around and energy for the mission and life of the followers of this Messiah – anyone who does something like this is either astonishingly un-self-aware or is making the definite claim to be writing something that corresponds, in a new mode, to the scriptural narrative of ancient Israel.

From very early on the first Christians discovered that the church was to be shaped, and its mission and life taken forward, by the work of people who were called to write about Jesus, and about what it meant to follow him in his kingdom-mission. The new dispensation, the Messianic age, did not mean the abandonment of the notion of being shaped by a God-given book, but rather its transformation into something new, new genres and themes developing out of the old. But this already indicates that the Bible was not something detached, an entity apart from the church, simply standing over against it. The Bible as we know it, Old and New Testaments, was, from the first, part of the life of God’s people, and remained so as it was read in worship, studied in controversy, and made the basis for mission. But this did not mean then, and does not mean now, that the Bible can be twisted into whichever shape the church wants at a particular time. You can’t say, as some have tried to say, ‘the church wrote the Bible, so the church can rewrite the Bible’. Paul would have had sharp words to say about that, as would the author of Revelation. From very early on, all the more powerful for being implicit and not yet much thought through, we find the first Christians living under scripture, that is, believing that this book is its peculiar gift from its Lord, through the work of his Spirit, designed to enable the church to be the church, which is of course as we have been thinking throughout this Conference not a static thing but to be the church in mission, to be sent into the world with the good news of God’s kingdom through the death and resurrection of his Son and in the power of that same Spirit.

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Just thought I’d share two interesting articles with you, both covering fairly controversial issues.

The first by Roger Olsen looks at Biblical “innerancy”, or more specifically, the term “innerancy” itself:

A common response to my rejection of the term “inerrancy” is “If the Bible contains a single error, how can we know it is God’s Word?”

First, let me say again: It is the TERM “inerrancy” that I reject, not the authority or trustworthiness of Scripture.  AND every inerrantist I know or have read admits there are errors in Scripture as we have it today.  Only the original autographs were inerrant in the strictest sense.  What I want is an authoritative Bible that actually exists and not one that used to exist!

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The second by John Farrell over at the Guardian covers evolution and he notes some rather intriguing facts relating to Pope Pius X11 and John Paul II in this regard:

More and more these days it seems like evolution is turning into a litmus test with only two possible results. If you accept evolution, creationists consider you a heretic. If you question evolution, Darwinists denounce you as a moron. But history shows that a qualified acceptance of evolution was, from the moment Darwin published his Origin of Species, a default position for many who were open to the theory, even when they were deeply disturbed by it.

Sixty years ago the controversial pope Pius XII, for example, made an accommodation with evolution the official position of the Catholic Church, when he wrote in his encyclical Humani Generis, that the scientific investigation of the material origins of the human body was perfectly legitimate, provided Catholic theologians kept in mind that the soul was to be considered always the direct creation of God.

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No big surprise and good for the Methodist Church.

Previous scathing post here.

Church Times

THE first communion service on the social-networking website Twitter did not take place last Saturday, after the Methodist minister organising it was asked to postpone it, while the Methodist Church examined the idea.

The Revd Tim Ross announced plans to hold the online service last month (News, 23 July), but decided to cancel it after senior Methodist offi­cials asked for more time to consider whether a communion in cyberspace was appropriate.

Mr Ross wrote in a statement on his website: “Whilst I have not been absolutely forbidden to perform com­munion on Twitter, British Meth­odist Church authorities have strongly urged me to cancel it.”

The online service was replaced by a series of short prayers for Christian unity, which, Mr Ross said, “was the motivation for the project”.

The assistant secretary of the Methodist Conference, the Revd Ken Howcroft, said that the Church under­stood Mr Ross’s passion for the importance of communion and of using new media in mission; but the Church needed to “reflect and pray deeply in order to discern what developments are appropriate”.

In an article for the Methodist Recorder, Mr Ross said objections to the Twitter communion had been raised by the Methodist Church Faith and Order Committee, which said it was “not a valid communion”. The idea of “remote communion”, where participants receive the bread and wine at the same time, but in different places, “conflicts with the ethos of the Conference report ‘His Presence Makes the Feast’ (2003) which talks about ‘embodied wor­ship’”.

Mr Ross said the report’s reference to “disembodied spirits” did not say that participants must be in the same physical place, but rather referred to the attitude of those present. “The issue boils down to two questions: Is remote communion a valid com­munion? Is the Christian community on the internet a valid, gathered Christian community? If the answer to both these questions is ‘Yes’, then a communion service performed by such a community of believers must be valid and may be performed.”

Informative essay over at chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it examining the inherent difficulties of introducing Christianity into Japan.

Ancient cultural precepts that minimize the importance of the individual and encourage skepticism of absolute claims work against the introduction of Christian thought, says Ambassador Kagefumi Ueno. He adds that Japanese traditionally direct their reverence toward nature, and tend to regard Christianity with suspicion as a “foreign” influence.

Well worth a read:

CULTURE AND RELIGIOSITY IN MODERN JAPAN

by Kagefumi Ueno

I believe that there are, at least, three elements which characterize Japanese religiosity philosophically distinct from Christianity.

The three key words are “self”, ”Nature” and ”absolutization”.

First, in terms of the notion of “self”, there is a clear-cut distinction between Buddhistic-Shintoistic notion and western monotheistic notion.

Second, in terms of view of Nature, the east and the west are also substantially different. While Japanese deem Nature as divine, Christians do not share the same reverence.

Third, in terms of value, because of their religious mentality, Japanese by and large have much less “propensity” towards its absolutization than Westerners.

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