5.25.2006 | This should not be needed

This being an organization named Anglicans for Israel. Why should it not be needed? Consider AFI's stated aims:

1. To resist the call for a boycott of Israel.

2. To support the people of Israel and to secure defensible borders for the State of Israel.

3. To promote bonds of fellowship and interfaith understanding between Anglicans and the Jewish people.

4. To recall the Church to G-d’s Covenant with the Jewish people and to call the Church to affirm the centrality of Israel to the Jewish faith.

5. To call Anglicans to repentance for the wrongs-of both word and deed- inflicted by Christians on the Jewish people and the nation of Israel.

6. To fight all libels against Israel and the Jewish people and their State.

7. To promote reconciliation and ties of friendship between the people of Israel and the righteous Arabs who oppose terrorism and wish to have peaceful relations with Israel.

8. To protect the Christian communities threatened by Islamic extremism in the Middle East.

9. To bring the Church back to an understanding of the Jewish roots of our faith.

Any confessionally Christian church that claims Scripture as its basis should have zero difficulty with any or all of these aims.

Anglicans are not, generally, considered as evangelical or as fundamentalist in their beliefs. And yet, once you get past the proto-catholic liturgy and its traditions, the Book of Common Prayer is solidly based on Scripture. As is the Anglican Communion. Errors made by the Church of England or the Episcopal Church USA, in apparent active denial of its biblical heritage, don't change that heritage.

Anglicans are a little conflicted, these days. They've got the CoE and other "modern" churches in the Northern Hemisphere pulling them into some postmodern, non-biblical world. Working against this are the Southerners, mainly Africans, who are staunch conservatives -- as in wishing to conserve the biblical heritage of the Communion.

Among other things, what this translates to is, in some of the more "modern" parishes, especially in the U.K. and U.S., a disdain for any notion of messianic thought. Thought that requires that Israel be reconstituted as a nation-state, and including and in-gathering of all Jews from among the nations.

One might think that any church that professed itself Christian would support Israel. One would be wrong, and AFI gives witness to the double standard and worse that afflicts some of today's "Christians."