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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Baptist Confession Recalls Past Sins

Sara Engram Baltimore Sun

This is Holy Week, the days of roller-coaster emotions that take Christians from the celebration of Palm Sunday through the ignominy of Good Friday to the triumph of Easter morning. For Christians, it is an annual pilgrimage that re-enacts the heart of Christian faith, a time to reaffirm life itself.

That has not always been the case for the rest of the world. For people such as Rabbi Leon Klenicke, Holy Week brings painful memories. Klenicke, now director of Interfaith Affairs for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith in New York, recalls the dread it aroused in him as a boy.

In Argentina, where his family had fled to escape the Holocaust, a right-wing Catholic group would mark Holy Week by distributing leaflets in downtown Buenos Aires with quotations from the Gospel of John - specifically, verses naming “the Jews” as responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus.

Those quotations were followed by an unmistakable threat: Just as “the Jews” killed Jesus, so also were “the Jews” trying to undermine Argentina. No bishop in the country bothered to condemn the propaganda.

Flash forward a few decades, to a gathering of Baptists in Vienna, Va., last month. Baptists are the people usually making news for fierce debates about the inerrancy of Scripture and, in recent years, for the searing, take-no-enemies takeover by fundamentalists of the Southern Baptist Convention.

This time, instead of tarring each other as heretics or referring to Jews and other nonChristians as hopelessly lost, these Baptists were engaged in an act of confession - for “our sin of complicity,” “our sin of silence,” “our sin of interpreting our sacred writings in such a way that we have created enemies of the Jewish people,” “our sin of indifference and inaction to the horrors of the Holocaust,” “our sins against the Jewish people.”

They called upon all Baptists to join them in affirming the teaching of the Christian Scriptures that God has not rejected the community of Israel, and in renouncing interpretations of Scripture which foster religious stereotyping and prejudice against the Jewish people and their faith.

Three decades ago, the Second Vatican Council opened the gates for serious, honest examination of the tangled, tragic history of relations between Christians and Jews. Since then, many other Christian groups have joined in efforts to find ways in which two faiths with a common heritage can respect each other while respectfully differing.

Often, these dialogues are undertaken with such caution, such fear of causing offense to the other party or, conversely, of disturbing one’s own comfortable assumptions, that the result is a polite but meaningless conversation.

Not so with with the statement adopted last month by the Alliance of Baptists, a group representing some 120 congregations and 60,000 people who no longer feel welcome in the Southern Baptist Convention. They may have lost the denominational trappings of their heritage, but not the spirit, as their landmark statement demonstrated.

Brief and bold, this confession and call for action may be startling (remember, it was a Baptist who announced that God doesn’t hear the prayers of a Jew), but it is, in historical context, typically Baptist. These are people who don’t mince words, who value forthright, blunt-spoken convictions.

The Rev. G. David Yeager, pastor of College Parkway Baptist Church in Anne Arundel County, drafted the bulk of the statement, in consultation with other Baptist theologians.

The statement was adopted with no dissent by leaders of the Alliance. How is it playing now with people in the pew?

Yeager admits that at first many Baptists did not fully understand the ramifications of such a sweeping statement. “They are not backing away from it,” he says, but they are eager to explore it more, to “unpack its meaning.”

He notes that Christian interpretation of Scripture, particularly of its references to Jews, has lost the historical context of the tumultuous years of first-century Judaism, a time when Christians and Jews were jostling for position.

Reading the New Testament with an understanding of those historical currents can create a very different interpretation of “the Jews” than the one that inspired the pamphleteers in Buenos Aires and countless other anti-Semitic acts.

“The average Christian has been stuck between theology and gut instinct,” says Yeager. “They don’t want to regard Jews as lost or ignorant or people who just don’t get it, but they don’t feel they’ve been allowed that freedom by Scripture.”

But, he insists, the freedom is there, if Christians will only look.

After all, isn’t it the Gospel of John that proclaims, “The truth will make you free”?

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