Hudson New York
23 December '11
http://www.hudson-ny.org/2697/kairos-palestine
Late in 2009, a small group of Palestinian Christian clergy and laity banded together to produce a document entitled "Kairos Palestine." Basically, it promoted familiar Palestinian aspirations, dressed up with some theological flourishes. Even by current Palestinian standards, it was an extreme statement. For instance, it avoided endorsement of the two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.
Now, two years later, the hard core of the original authors has held an anniversary conference in Bethlehem together with foreign supporters. This time they constituted themselves a tribunal before which to arraign all the churches of the world for not showing enough enthusiasm for their original document. Thus mendacity morphs into megalomania.
The utterances emerging from this conference manifest a mixture of triumph and fury. Triumph, because a number of church bureaucrats, mainly at the Middle East desks of some Protestant churches, made considerable efforts to promote their document. Fury, because the reception in churches at large has been mostly lukewarm. For instance, an attempt to promote the document in the Netherlands produced a backlash, as prominent church leaders rejected its propositions.
Indeed, there has been considerable criticism of the document by such serious Christian theologians as troubled themselves to deal with it. This writer was one of the earliest to expose its pretentions and deceptions.
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