c. 1996 Religion News Service

JERUSALEM (RNS)-“Woe to those who plan iniquity, to those who plot evil on their beds!” says the biblical prophet Micah. “At morning’s light they carry it out because it is in their power to do it. They covet fields and seize them, and houses, and take them. They defraud a man of his home, a fellowman of his inheritance.”

If the Old Testament prophets were walking the streets of Jerusalem today, they would be denouncing Israeli policies of land confiscation, house demolition and unreasonable taxation of Palestinians, asserts the Rev. Canon Naim Ateek, a Palestinian cleric and prominent Anglican theologian known for adapting the liberation theology of Latin America’s barrios to the Arab refugee camps of the Middle East.

“In terms of the debate over solutions for the future, we feel as if the Christian community has been marginalized,” says Ateek, pastor of an Arabic-speaking Anglican parish in Jerusalem and director of Sabeel (The Way) Liberation Theology Centre.

Ateek was the key organizer of an ecumenical Christian conference on the future of Jerusalem scheduled to begin here Sunday (Jan. 21). The conference brings together liberal Christian theologians from the West with Palestinian clergy and lay people of all denominations to discuss their vision of the city’s future-both religious and political.

Ateek argues that Christians, who have traditionally stressed biblical themes such as stewardship and universal redemption, can make an important contribution to peacemaking in the region.

“In Leviticus 25:23, it is written, `The Land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine, for you are strangers and sojourners with me,’ notes Ateek, author of the 1989 book “Justice and Only Justice, A Palestinian Theology of Liberation.”

“The Land of Israel, as Jews see it, and Palestine, as Palestinians see it, all belongs to God. And if God has placed us here, we need to share it. We are stewards in looking after the land.”

In relation to Jerusalem, as well, modern Christian theology is fairly unique in that it rejects the exclusivist claims to the city, which have been promulgated both by mainstream Jews and Muslims, says Ateek.

While both Jews and Muslims anchor their claims, to an extent, on past eras when they enjoyed absolute political control over the city, Christians “willingly accept the movement of history,” asserts Ateek, a history that saw numerous nations and faiths dominate the city in different periods, each leaving its own rich legacy.

“Instead of wanting Jerusalem to belong exclusively to us, we should recognize that we all belong to Jerusalem,” he says.

Christian Zionists, who are not taking part in the upcoming conference, argue that liberation theology dances too glibly around the connection between Jews and the land of Israel.

“Even Jesus himself talked about the centrality of Jerusalem to his own faith,” says Stan Goodenough, a staff member of the International Christian Embassy. “The Bible makes a very strong emphasis of how the Jewish people should treat the strangers in their midst. But the stranger in Israel, in order to warrant that good treatment, has to respect the sovereignty of the people in their land and the God of Israel.”

But Ateek takes a different view of the land.

Sites where Jesus preached and walked are certainly important to Christians as a living witness of his ministry. But, Ateek suggests, Christian theology, unlike Muslim or Jewish thinking, places less emphasis on the intrinsic holiness of land per se-and more emphasis on the holiness of all creation.

“For Christians, the whole world is sacramental,” he says. “Jesus and the writers of the New Testament are not at all preoccupied with the issue of land. Jesus’ emphasis is on the Kingdom of God. And the Gospel is a universal message, no longer linked with any one people.”

Holiness is expressed in Christianity in the form of Christ rather than in sacramental worship sites, Ateek says. “The holiness of the (ancient biblical) Temple is replaced with the holiness of Christ.”

Holiness, moreover, must be linked with concepts of ethical behavior, he says. “We cannot in the name of the holy commit the unethical or the immoral.” Jews who want to rebuild the temple, whose ruins sit on a hilltop in the heart of Jerusalem’s ancient Old City, should not perpetuate further injustice by seeking to displace the Islamic Al Aksa mosque, which now occupies the bedrock summit, Ateek argues.

“I do not deny that 2,000 years ago there was a Jewish temple built on that site, but history has moved on and for the last 1,300 years this area has been sacred for Muslims, and now the Dome of the Rock and Al Aksa are there,” he says.

“Would God be so very angry if they were to build the temple adjacent to the Western Wall, a few meters away from where the Temple was built before?”

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Ateek’s personal history has been marked by the traumas of displacement that now preoccupy him theologically.

As he relates in his book, his family was evicted by Jewish forces from their home in what was formerly the Arab town of Beisan. The date was May 1948, less than two weeks after the State of Israel was declared.

Although as Christian refugees the family was allowed to relocate to the Israeli-Arab town of Nazareth, rather than being transferred to Jordan, the upheaval left a lifelong mark on Ateek.

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Ateek criticizes Western evangelical Christians for the “unconditional support” they award the Jewish state.

“Most of these Christian Zionists have not taken seriously God’s impartial demand for justice,” says Ateek. “Their love for Israel has prevented them from seeing the oppression of the Palestinians and the human rights violations they have suffered,” he says.

Christian Zionists such as Goodenough deny such claims, however.

“We do see the suffering of the Palestinians,” Goodenough says. “It’s very visible. We just don’t blame Israel for it, we blame the Arabs for it because they refused to recognize Israel and provoked the wars which led to the Palestinian problem in the first place.”

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The six-day Sabeel conference is scheduled to include sessions on the political problems facing Jerusalem’s Christian communities under present-day Israeli rule, plus environmental problems facing the changing city, whose ancient beauty has been undermined by traffic congestion, air pollution and overdevelopment.

Prominent Western theologians scheduled to attend include Rosemary Radford Reuther of Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill.; the Rev. Peter Walker, a scholar at Tyndale House in Cambridge, England; and the Rev. Don Wagner, director of Middle Eastern studies at North Park College, Chicago, and coordinator of Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.

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