A Theology of Life and Death

SOME YEARS AGO, I convened a trip to the so-called Holy Land. It was not a trip about “walking where Jesus walked,” although we did a lot of that. It was a trip to discover facts on the ground in the Israel-Palestine conflict and to meet Jewish, Muslim, and Christian peacemakers in the region. Our band of 20 or so was led by organizers Jeff and Janet Wright, passionate Christians who love the land and all its people.

Nearly everyone on the trip had a breakdown moment, when the tragedy of Israel-Palestine overwhelmed them. My wife, Grace, described a sudden feeling that she had spent her whole life in a totalitarian regime and that “what I thought of as news had really been propaganda all along.” The reality of Israel-Palestine was so different from what she had heard both in the Christian community and in the mass media that she was deeply shaken. We all felt that our trip had exposed so much of the so-called news we had heard from Israel-Palestine as prejudiced, one-sided, and intended to conceal more than reveal.

A trip highlight was a visit to the offices of Sabeel, the headquarters of Palestinian liberation theology, and a meeting with its founder Naim Ateek, a theological hero I’d admired from afar. What Desmond Tutu is to South African theology and Martin Luther King Jr. and James Cone are to North American black theology, Ateek is to Palestinian and Middle Eastern theology. I have since been honored to be an ally in the important work of Sabeel.

Ateek has written a definitive introduction to his work. A Palestinian Theology of Liberation will be especially helpful to three groups of people in the U.S.

Its largest audience: lay Christians of conscience across denominations who care about theology, biblical studies, international relations, and social justice. Since Middle East policy is critical to every significant U.S. election, it only makes sense to hear the voice of a respected fellow Christian of Palestinian identity. (Sadly, too many U.S. Christians aren’t even aware of the existence of the historic Christian community in Palestine and think all Arabs are Muslim.)

Second, Christian pastors, teachers, and seminarians will derive special benefit from this volume. If they are unfamiliar with liberation theology, A Palestinian Theology of Liberation will simultaneously introduce them to the general field and to its unique Palestinian expression.

As preachers, they will benefit greatly from Ateek’s reflections on scripture. American fans of writers such as Rachel Held Evans, Peter Enns, Walter Brueggemann (who wrote the foreword), Brian Zahnd, Shane Claiborne, Rob Bell, and Tony Campolo will find in Ateek a theologian who engages with the scriptures in the same promising way—with the added urgency of living in a context where how one interprets the Bible is, literally, a matter of life and death.

In the middle chapters of the book, Ateek engages directly and powerfully with what are often called “texts of terror,” passages that advocate genocide and crimes against humanity in the name of God. As one whom some present-day Jews and Christians would subject to ethnic cleansing in God’s name, Ateek interprets these texts with both scholarly precision and personal passion.

Third, the most difficult but perhaps most important audience for this book will be U.S. Christian Zionists, followers of John Hagee, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham, Mike Huckabee, and their political and religious allies in the Religious Right. I hope that Christians in the first two categories will read this book, pass it on to their Christian Zionist friends and relatives, and invite them to discuss it together.

Short of taking a field trip to the region, reading A Palestinian Theology of Liberation is the next best thing.