In the critical years leading up to the Holocaust the list of “bystanders” – those who declined to challenge the Third Reich – is long and depressing. Acts of rescue and resistance proved to be the exception, not the norm. Tragically, this defined the institutional Christian community as well. The dark threat emanating from Berlin paralyzed large church bureaucracies, inspiring the institutional religious community’s complete failure to pose any meaningful opposition to the Nazi regime. Christian individuals did indeed rise to the aid of the Jewish people, but overall, institutional Christianity behaved as most large bureaucratic institutions tend to: in their own narrowly defined “best” interests.

Turn the pages of history to now. Comparatively speaking, how is the institutional church community behaving as the 21st century “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in the Middle East” builds in energy and ferocity?

Just yesterday (28/06/07), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said a new United Methodist Church report recommending divestment from 20 companies that do business with the State of Israel "borders on anti-Semitism."

Far from being paralyzed, major players in western Christendom have formed openly hostile policies toward Israel, actions even more disturbing than the predominantly passive policies of the Holocaust-era churches. From the World Council of Churches on down, the behavior of Leftist postmodern Christianity has transmutated since the end of WWII, from a grudging toleration of Israel into a brazen form of antagonistic anti-Zionism. Leaders of one major Protestant governing body, the Presbyterian Church USA, actually met with Hizbollah terrorist leadership before instigating punitive divestment efforts against Israel. Such campaigns of divestment only serve to demonize Israel in the eyes of the world while ignoring Islamic-jihadist intransigence, terrorism, and genocidal intent. To assert that there is a moral equivalency between the racist state policy of apartheid and Israel’s defense of its citizens is morally deplorable.

Given all that we’ve learned from the Holocaust, how could any “Christian” organization even indirectly support openly declared genocidal intentions toward Israel? How could this be possible in a post-Auschwitz world? Sixty-five years after the formalization of the Nazi “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem,” mainline institutional Christianity is again behaving as a total stranger to Israel, still in the throes of its centuries-old spiritual identity crisis.

This identity crisis has something to do with either ignorance or distortion of the divinely designed and ordained relationship between believing Gentiles and the Jewish people that is clearly stated in Scripture—a sibling relationship that allows for Gentiles to be “grafted” through Messiah into “the olive tree of Israel.” Distortion of this theological imperative has resulted in centuries of antisemitic teaching to incalculable numbers of trusting church members. As a result, major segments of the institutional religious community have strayed so far from their spiritual roots that they no longer even vaguely resemble the revolutionary, non-institutional, transcultural form of messianic Judaism that Jesus observed and taught and that Paul articulated so clearly. Leftist postmodern Christendom now seems all but clinically dead to the fact that its own spiritual legitimacy has always been totally dependent upon its state of being spiritually grafted into "the commonwealth of Israel.”

Without this self-knowledge regarding its own identity, Christendom has historically behaved erratically, often violently, toward the Jewish people. In its most recent form, having passed through transmutational stages from religious anti-Judaism to racial-biological antisemitism and now, to political anti-Zionism, this ancient hatred still provides tacit approval for millions of churchgoers to behave indifferently and otherwise antagonistically toward Israel. Such a warped perception of Christianity’s biblical relationship with Israel now provides explosive fuel to the genocidal optimism of the Islamic-jihadist demagogues in Tehran and Damascus who seek to finish the work left undone by Hitler. And so it is that institutional Christianity is again behaving more like Cain than Abel toward the Jewish people.

As the people of Israel find themselves in unprecedented peril, they face existential threats without leadership willing to do what is necessary to protect them. Much to its shame, the postmodern institutional church is leading the way toward exacerbation of Israel’s peril, along with the Olmert government’s treasonous land-for peace policy and handling of the war with Hizbollah.  Couple those blunders with the Bush administration’s dual-state policy and anemic handling of the Iranian nuclear crisis, and you have the makings of a storm gathering extraordinary strength and ferocity.

One lesson that careful study of the Holocaust has clearly taught us is that institutional betrayal may influence, but does not necessarily determine, individual betrayal. Individual betrayal, just like the corresponding moral decision to oppose Nazism and rescue Jews, was, and is, a very personal choice.

Looking at faith as a form of spiritual resistance, as Islamic-jihadism moves with escalating fury through the violent working-out of their Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in the Middle East, we who call ourselves Christians have good reason to think hard, think critically, and think biblically, about our relationship with Israel.