Thanks a lot to Keith Pavlischek (an estimable Bob Dylan fan!) for forwarding the link to his piece today at First Things: “Jihad, Jew-Hatred, and Evangelicals and Jews Together”. In it he pulls together the strands of some recent debate and commentary on these both fascinating and crucial topics. Worthy of a complete read.

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And not off-topic from that previous item is this, at the Confederate Yankee blog: It Never Stops: Obama’s Church Published Letter Alleging Israeli “Ethnic Bomb.” An ethnic bomb, for the uninitiated, is a mythical explosive device or weapon that would kill only people of particular ethnicities. In this case, it’s the perpetuation of a unspeakably vile allegation that Israel worked on such a bomb to kill “Blacks and Arabs.” This is just the latest in a never ending succession of horrendous and totally unacceptable garbage that has been emanating from the Trinity United Church of Christ and from Obama’s spiritual mentor Rev. Wright (if I may be so blunt). (And I may.)

Yesterday we heard how Wright attacked Italians in an ethnically offensive way in the midst of a written eulogy.

“(Jesus’) enemies had their opinion about Him,” Wright wrote in a eulogy of the late scholar Asa Hilliard in the November/December 2007 issue. “The Italians for the most part looked down their garlic noses at the Galileans.”

Wright continued, “From the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth (in a barn in a township that was under the Apartheid Roman government that said his daddy had to be in), up to and including the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ death on a cross, a Roman cross, public lynching Italian style. …

“He refused to be defined by others and Dr. Asa Hilliard also refused to be defined by others. The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge, but Asa, like Jesus, refused to be defined by an oppressive government because Asa got his identity from an Omnipotent God.”

Y’know, it is often asked why what are thought of as members of the quiet, silent majority of Muslims don’t speak out in rage when mass murderers and terrorists invoke Islam as the justification for their horrible crimes. That’s a big topic, not for me and not for now. However, although the Rev. Wright and this Trinity United Church of Christ have not been found — as far as I know — to be explicitly justifying mass murder or to be instigating actual acts of violence, I don’t think it’s too soon for all Christians of conscience to speak out and declare without equivocation that the trash being spewed at the pulpit by these individuals has nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity — except to the extent that it attempts to hijack the name of Jesus in the name of a narrow and hateful agenda.

The above quote from Rev. Wright, in which, with such vitriol, he blames “garlic nose[d]” Italians for a “public lynching” of Jesus Christ is many things (bigoted, stupid, and blackly hilarious to start with) but what it demonstrates beyond all question is that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright would not pass Theology 101 as taught by any Christian of sincere and mature faith. Blaming anyone for Jesus’ death is evidence that Rev. Wright has totally missed the point of the creed he wears so arrogantly and hides behind like some protective mantle. Spelling it out in easy words for the Rev. Wright: Christians believe that Jesus died for all of our sins. Christians believe that we are all therefore responsible for the necessity of his act of redemption. Therefore, no one in particular is to blame. Each of us is to blame. The song goes, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The answer is most certainly “Yes,” for everyone. And yet, we are not truly asked to blame ourselves for his death, either, but rather to rejoice that he was willing to be sacrificed for our salvation. In the words of St. Augustine, “O happy fault, O necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer!” Under these circumstances, however, one thing should be crystal clear to all, and that is that angrily blaming Romans, Jews or “Italians” for carrying out the execution is utterly and completely wrong. There is literally no place for it. Of-course, we know that such distortions of the point of the Gospel have been put forth before by those intending ill throughout history. There is no excuse that ought to be made in those cases, and there is even less excuse for it now, in the early part of this 21st century.

As just an ordinary Christian, I think it behooves me to say two things to Rev. Wright: (1) Repent. (2) Go back to school, or find a mature mentor in the faith who can set you right. You are gravely in error, and with the idiotic hatred that you spew, you bring the faith which you claim to represent into disrepute.

Feels good to get that off my chest, I must say.

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