Full-page New York Times ad sneers at Jews

On March 28, 2008, a statement, entitled "The Gospel and the Jews" and drafted by the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA), appeared as a full-page ad in the New York Times.

While asserting that they have a "genuine friendship and love for the Jewish people," the statement's authors suggest that the best way of expressing this passion is "to forthrightly share the love of God in the person of Jesus Christ." According to the statement, "it is only through Jesus that all people can receive eternal life. If Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jewish people, He cannot be the Savior of the World (Acts 4:12)."

Therefore, the statement reasons, "it is good and right for those with specialized knowledge, history and skills to use these gifts to introduce individuals to the Messiah, and that includes those ministries specifically directed to the Jewish people."

Friendship and love? No thank you, I'd rather have friends who respect me for who I am.  Curious to see who would wish to support such an offensive statement (written some sixty years after the murder of six million Jews), I took a look at the statement's "partial list" of signatories.  I was somewhat surprised to see, among all kinds of other evangelical Christians, the names of several biblical scholars: Donald Carson of the Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (whose award-winning books include The Gagging of God: Christianity Confronts Pluralism); Harold Hoehner of the Dallas Theological Seminary; Walter Kaiser, Jr. of the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary; and others as well.  (Dr. Carson did not answer an email inviting him to explain why he signed the statement.)

Given the participation of such figures in this missionary effort, I could not help wondering whether the "specialized knowledge, history and skills" referred to in the WEA statement include the type of one-sided, arrogant "expertise" in the Dead Sea Scrolls that we have recently seen imposed on the public in a variety of museum exhibits -- from which, I recall, an important group of Jewish researchers have been excluded, the explanation offered being that visitors to the museums would be "confused" if they were presented with a full account of the current state of research in this field.

The WEA statement's definition of "love" also raises certain questions. For example, bible scholar William Schniedewind (of UCLA, but until recently also listed on the personnel page of the evangelical "University of the Holy Land") and his student Robert Cargill (who has a ministerial degree from Pepperdine University, an institution affiliated with the Churches of Christ) have been described as "practicing Christians with a deep appreciation of Judaism and Israel." WEA's member page lists a "regional body" not in Israel, but in the "Palestinian Territories," with a P.O. box in Jerusalem; the branch is called the Evangelical Local Council of Churches in the Holy Land.  Well, does Schniedewind's "appreciation" of Israel rise to the level of the "love" described in the WEA statement?

In fact, given what we know about the evangelical affiliations of bible scholars like Schniedewind, Stephen Pfann of the University of the Holy Land and many other faculty members of that institution, or Martin Abegg of Trinity Western University (the platform of whose Dead Sea Scrolls Institute declares that "Evangelical Christian scholars should play a significant role in the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls"), it would be useful to know exactly what all of these scholars think of the statement. Would even one of them be willing to step forward and publicly oppose it? If not, is it fair to conclude that, just like Carson, Hoehner and Kaiser, they acquiesce (however silently) in its terms?

Interestingly, Yonggi Cho, the senior pastor of the Yoido Full Gospel church in Seoul, Korea, also signed the statement.  (With 830,000 members, the Yoido church is the world's largest congregation.)  The World Evangelical Alliance's members include the Christian Council of Korea, a "cooperative organization of Christian denominations that follow the teaching of the Old and New Testament," whose complex mission includes "improving the image of Christianity and strengthening [its] ties with the people through public relations." Given the massive rise of Christianity in Korean society today, this leads me to wonder (1) what Korean Christians think of Jewish people, and (2) whether the biased and misleading museum exhibit focused on the "Dead Sea Scrolls and the Birth of Christianity," which is currently taking place at the National War Memorial museum in Seoul, is an aspect of such public relations. 

The Christian Council of Korea, incidentally, is located in the "Korean Ecumenical Building" in Seoul. Lately, whenever I see this word "ecumenical," it seems to refer to a distinctly Christian phenomenon, with maybe a token Jew or two added in somewhere along the line. For example, in an exchange with me on this site, biblical scholar David Noel Freedman's collaborator Pam Fox Kuhlken lauded Freedman for putting together an "ecumenical team of experts" to prepare an edition of the Leningrad Codex. I asked Dr. Kuhlken how many Jews or agnostics were on the team. She declined to respond.

The WEA statement's signatories also include Stan Guthrie, a managing editor at Christianity Today, as well as Dr. Jerry B. Jenkins, owner of the Christian Writers Guild. Jenkins was this year's keynote speaker at the annual Mount Hermon Christian Writers conference. Others who have attended this conference include the above-mentioned Dr. Kuhlken and her husband Ken Kuhlken (who, at the 2004 conference, gave a workshop entitled "Sheep in Wolves Clothing: Writing for the Secular Market").  So here again the question naturally arises whether Kuhlken and Freedman -- as well as Schniedewind, Abegg, Pfann, and others of their ilk -- approve of this callous, repugnant World Evangelical Alliances statement signed by Jenkins.  

As a matter of simple justice and humanity, surely there must be at least one member of the scholarly evangelical community who would be willing to publicly express his or her opposition to the statement, either in this forum or elsewhere?