Justice and Only Justice: A Palestinian Theology of Liberation

Rating:
Summary: THE OLD TESTAMENT IS A PROBLEM FOR ATEEK
Review: According to Ateek, the establishment of Israel as a nation in the Holy Land made the Old Testament a problem for Palestinians. "It has become almost repugnant to Palestinian Christians. As a result, the Old Testament has generally fallen into disuse among both clergy and laity, and the Chruch has been unable to come to terms with its ambiguities, questions, and paradoxes--especially with its direct application to the twentieth-century events in Palestine."

Ateek's solution to this problem is not for Palestinians to adjust their thinking to the Word of God, but to "contextualize" (i.e. to adjust the Word of God to the wishes of Palestinians).

Haven't we all wanted to do this when our desires went against the Word of God? Yet haven't we learned through painful experiences that God's view of what is best for us is always better than what we think we want?

Somehow Ateek fails to understand that to be followers of Jesus (who calls Himself "truth") we must be lovers of truth.

To make Palestinians feel good, Ateek tries to convince us that Jesus was Palestinian, born in Palestine, and that his disciples were Palestinians and that the Palestinian Christians of today are descendants of those early Palestinian Christians.

The New Testament gives us two genealogies of Jesus, both showing that he was Jewish, and the land where Jesus was born and lived is called Israel, and Judea and Samaria in the New Testament. Jesus told his disciples to go only to the children of Israel initially, so His first followers were Jewish.

It is an historical fact that Israel (Judea and Samaria) was not called Palestine until after AD 135 (some 100 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus).

Palestinian Christians are not Jews, but Arabs. How could the Jewish families that followed Jesus turn into Arab families of today?

Why should we gentiles be jealous that Jews were given a land by God? Jews rule some 9,000 square miles of land. Hasn't God been even more generous to Arabs? Arabs rule some 500,000 square miles of land. Why do Arabs feel that they must also rule the Holy Land?

The Lord told us that He had set the Holy Land apart for a special purpose. He told us that the Children of Israel would live there and that they would be driven out, that a 10th would remain in the land like seed, and that He (God) would bring them back and make them a nation in the Holy Land.

We Christians should be happy to see God's promises coming true in our day, because this proves that the Bible is true. And we Gentile (Arabic and others) Christians can know for sure (because He kept His promise to the Jews) that God will also keep His promise to bring us into the eternal home that He promised to us. How much better is that eternal home than a tiny area of 8,000 or 11,000 square miles for a few decades?

Arabic Christian brothers and sisters, do not try to change the Bible to suit our selfish ambitions here on earth. Know that God is wiser than we are and that we must adjust our desires to His Word, rather than attempting the impossible (i.e. adjusting God's Word to our desires). His way is always best.

Refusing to accept God's Word is futile. It can only bring suffering and pain to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: THE OLD TESTAMENT IS A PROBLEM FOR ATEEK
Review: According to Ateek, the establishment of Israel as a nation in the Holy Land made the Old Testament a problem for Palestinians. "It has become almost repugnant to Palestinian Christians. As a result, the Old Testament has generally fallen into disuse among both clergy and laity, and the Chruch has been unable to come to terms with its ambiguities, questions, and paradoxes--especially with its direct application to the twentieth-century events in Palestine."

Ateek's solution to this problem is not for Palestinians to adjust their thinking to the Word of God, but to "contextualize" (i.e. to adjust the Word of God to the wishes of Palestinians).

Haven't we all wanted to do this when our desires went against the Word of God? Yet haven't we learned through painful experiences that God's view of what is best for us is always better than what we think we want?

Somehow Ateek fails to understand that to be followers of Jesus (who calls Himself "truth") we must be lovers of truth.

To make Palestinians feel good, Ateek tries to convince us that Jesus was Palestinian, born in Palestine, and that his disciples were Palestinians and that the Palestinian Christians of today are descendants of those early Palestinian Christians.

The New Testament gives us two genealogies of Jesus, both showing that he was Jewish, and the land where Jesus was born and lived is called Israel, and Judea and Samaria in the New Testament. Jesus told his disciples to go only to the children of Israel initially, so His first followers were Jewish.

It is an historical fact that Israel (Judea and Samaria) was not called Palestine until after AD 135 (some 100 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus).

Palestinian Christians are not Jews, but Arabs. How could the Jewish families that followed Jesus turn into Arab families of today?

Why should we gentiles be jealous that Jews were given a land by God? Jews rule some 9,000 square miles of land. Hasn't God been even more generous to Arabs? Arabs rule some 500,000 square miles of land. Why do Arabs feel that they must also rule the Holy Land?

The Lord told us that He had set the Holy Land apart for a special purpose. He told us that the Children of Israel would live there and that they would be driven out, that a 10th would remain in the land like seed, and that He (God) would bring them back and make them a nation in the Holy Land.

We Christians should be happy to see God's promises coming true in our day, because this proves that the Bible is true. And we Gentile (Arabic and others) Christians can know for sure (because He kept His promise to the Jews) that God will also keep His promise to bring us into the eternal home that He promised to us. How much better is that eternal home than a tiny area of 8,000 or 11,000 square miles for a few decades?

Arabic Christian brothers and sisters, do not try to change the Bible to suit our selfish ambitions here on earth. Know that God is wiser than we are and that we must adjust our desires to His Word, rather than attempting the impossible (i.e. adjusting God's Word to our desires). His way is always best.

Refusing to accept God's Word is futile. It can only bring suffering and pain to everyone.

Rating:
Summary: theologically astute
Review: atik is both gentle and forceful. his arguments and old testament understanding are *very* biblically and historically grounded. as a christian who has spent a lot of time studying the bible, i find that atik has done an amazing job laying out the groundwork for a very revolutionary liberation theology.
theologically, atik *is not* a premillenialist in his interpretation in hermeneutics (and eschatology, as other essays he's written have shown) so, if one is a premillenialist (which is a very faulty, in my opinion, theological standpoint since it depends on a eurocentric understanding of scripture which was created at the turn of the 20th century and originally dismissed as "heresy")one will not take to kindly to atik's book.
ideologically, the zionist "christian" will confuse atik's understanding of christ as a palestinian. as biblical anthropologists have pointed out, the idea of "jew" as a race did not exist during christ's time. there was only the jewish religion and the national boundaries of Palestine where this religious culture dominated at the time. the racial ideas of "palestinian" and "jew" did not emerge until much later and were only galvanized as a binary in 1948. atik is referring to this historical fact.
the words are wise and compelling. atik has done a lot of research and has grounded everything with a profound understanding of the bible.

Rating:
Summary: Anti-Jewish and anti-Christian
Review: This is an amazing book. Those of us who support human rights realize that without justice and truth, we won't have rights. So we're tempted to agree with an author who asks for "justice."

The problem is that the word "justice" is misused here, just as the word "socialism" was by the National Socialists, or the word "democratic" by the German Democratic Republic, or the word "racism" by the United Nations. For those who want a discussion of justice, I recommend "A Theory of Justice" by John Rawls.

I think of justice as fairness. Before saying what is just, I think Ateek would have done well to pretend that he didn't know whether he happened to be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Pagan. And as a minimum, he had to realize that demanding everything for himself by right (even if he generously gave some crumbs to others) is neither fair nor just.

Of course, the whole point of Ateek's dishonest book is to deny justice to Jews so that Jews can be denied human rights as well. It represents a Marcionite point of view, namely a takeoff on Christianity that tosses the Old Testament into the trash basket. While those who don't subscribe to monotheism may applaud this attitude towards the Old Testament, it is a little surprising coming from a Christian clergyman.

In real life, just about the time when Zionism was about to establish a Jewish state, with hundreds of thousands of Jews already in what is now Israel, genocide in Europe killed most of the Jews who were intending to move to the region. This genocide was abetted by many Arabs, especially by helping to convince the British to stop most Jewish immigration to the region in 1939. Well, Ateek admits that there has been genocidal behavior. But to him, the Arabs are innocent victims, and the Jews, while victims in World War 2, have been perpetrators against the Arabs. And he's willing to forgive the Jews for all this. But only if the Jews apologize for a fabricated set of misdeeds.

The scariest thing about this book is what it does to the image of Christians in the area. I can only imagine how thoroughly Ateek is despised by honest people. And this can't be good for the rest of the Arab Christians, many of whom are obviously decent people and deserve far better representation than this.

Rating:
Summary: Justice and only justice - A Palestinian Theology of ...
Review: Unlike the first reviewer of this book, I am impressed by the author's ability to forgive the occupiers of his native land. After describing the impact of the establisment of Israel and the follow on occupation of Palestinian lands (1967) from a personal perspective (his family was expelled from their home with no notice by the Israeli Army), he tries to find a way for Palestian Christians to understand the situation from a non-literal Biblical perspective.

If more Americans read books like this, we might have a better understanding of what is really happening in the Middle East. Peace will never come until the United States and Israel stand in the shoes of the Palestinians and accept the fact that a huge injustice continues against the Palestinians. Likewise the Palestinians must come to terms with the reality of the modern Israeli State and accept the fact that Israel exists today because of the Holocaust and the resulting sympathy for a Jewish State. This is a position Naim Stifan Ateek proposes.

This is an excellent read, although sometimes a bit depressing.