When you think of anti Semitism the first thing that comes to your mind might be the holocaust and the senseless death of six million people just because they were Jewish. The first person you think of probably is Hitler. The last place you would think you would find anti Semitism would be in the church or in a pastor; but sad to say anti Semitism is in the church and it is being taught from the pulpit.
Let’s go back in church history; most people hail Martin Luther as one of the great church reformers and the founder of the Lutheran church. Few of us know that Luther's attitude toward the Jews changed over the course of his life. In the early phase of his career—until around 1536—he expressed concern for their plight in Europe and was enthusiastic at the prospect of converting them to Christianity through his evangelical reforms. As time went on and the Jews refused to convert to Christianity, Luther became angered with the Jewish people, denounced them and urged for their harsh persecution. In a paragraph from his On the Jews and Their Lies he deplores Christendom's failure to exterminate them.
Luther writes that the Jews are a "base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth." Luther wrote that they are "full of the devil's feces ... which they wallow in like swine," and the synagogue is an "incorrigible whore and an evil slut". He argues that their synagogues and schools be set on fire, their prayer books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, homes razed, and property and money confiscated. They should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these "poisonous envenomed worms" should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time. He also seems to advocate their murder, writing "we are at fault in not slaying them."
It doesn’t take long before you see how the hatred of Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler against the Jewish people was reinforced. In his rhetoric Hitler also fed on the old accusation of Jewish Deicide (a belief that places the responsibility for the death of Jesus on the Jewish people as a whole.) Because of this it has been speculated that Christian anti-Semitism influenced Hitler's ideas, especially such works as Martin Luther's essay On the Jews and Their Lies and the writings of Paul de Lagarde. Hitler biographer John Toland opines that Hitler "carried within him its teaching and that the Jew was the killer of God and their extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God.
Look at the church today. The United Methodist Church and Presbyterian Church (USA) both divested from companies that support or supply material or equipment to Israel. The United Methodist Church published a church-sponsored report referring to the creation of the State of Israel as the “original sin.” The Presbyterian Church called on American Jews to “get a life” instead of focusing on defending Israeli policies.
How can you say you love God and not the Jewish people. If you don’t love the Jewish people then you don’t love the God of the Bible; God loves the Jewish people. God made an everlasting convent with the Jewish people; how long is everlasting, until Jesus came? If you say God has replaced the Jewish people with the church because of their disobedience, what makes you think He will not replace me or you because of our disobedience? If you say God has given up on the Jew then you have made God a liar.
Sad to say anti Semitism is ‘alive and well’ in the church, maybe not as blatant as burning crosses on they front lawn but in more subtle way.
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