Why are American Christians ignoring their Palestinian brethren

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2024/05/why-are-american-christians-ignoring.html

"Western attitudes toward Palestine-Israel suffer from a glaring double standard that humanizes Israeli Jews while insisting on dehumanizing Palestinians and whitewashing their suffering."--Open Letter From Palestinian Christians to Western Church Leaders and Theologians, Leaders of Bethlehem Bible College, October 2023

The Greek Orthodox Church of St. Porphyrius, in Gaza City, a historic building dating back to 1150, the oldest and largest Christian church in the city, now lies in ruins, after an Israeli bombardment flattened the neighborhood. The Israeli military claimed the bomb hit on the church was "an unintentional result of its fighter jets hitting a command and control center involved in attacks on Israel." In spite of the randomness of this incident, it characterizes much of the conflict in the Middle East from the perspective of conservative, American Evangelicals.

In Evangelical eschatology, the study of the "end times", the view that prevails is a relatively recent development in doctrine and theology, known as Premillennial Dispensationalism. This perspective is the result of some of the more common errors made by American religious conservatives in their interpretation of the New Testament in a literal sense, ignoring the influence and development of its historical context and how that affects the ability to understand and apply accurately what the Bible's writers, mostly Jesus' apostles, wrote and which ended up in the canon of scripture.

This view ignores the apocalyptic symbolism of the book of Revelation, on which it is focused, the application and timing of the prophecy Jesus made regarding the destruction of the Temple, which happened in 70 CE, and how to discern, from the symbolic language he used, as well as that in Revelation, written by his apostle, John, what those events meant and what Christ's "coming in judgment" might actually look like.