The PC(USA) has made several momentous decisions this week. One smaller one is the decision to accept the Confession of Belhar that was written in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle. For me as a South African who now is a member of the PC(USA), this has been momentous. It is an affirmation of the PC(USA)'s commitment to racial inclusion and social justice.
Another big decision from this week's General Assembly is the one to let our clergy marry same-sex couples. This decision will still have to be ratified by local presbyteries, as is the case for all decisions made by the General Assembly (our structure is not top-down like that of the Catholics). We will probably lose more members due to this, as we did when we made the decision a few years ago to ordain gay clergy. But so be it. The church believes in its prophetic witness for social justice.
And now this decision. The PC(USA) has money in the stock market to fund its pension funds as well as other activities. This decision is to divest those funds from companies that aide Israel in its occupation efforts. This is by no means an anti-Semitic move. As a matter of fact, Presbyterianism is probably one of the least anti-Semitic denominations within Christianity. (I won't go into a lot of boring theological details, but for one, we don't operate with a law vs. gospel dichotomy in our views on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments like Lutherans do - not that Lutherans are necessarily anti-Semitic - but the affirmation of continuation between Judaism and Christianity is a Presbyterian tendency, which leads to less of a temptation to fall into historical Christian anti-Semitic patterns.) The PC(USA) is well aware that this move might be construed as anti-Semitism, but knowing this church, and indeed knowing several individuals who were at General Assembly this week, I know with absolute certainty that this is born from a strong sense of social justice, and not out of rejection of Jews, Judaism, or Israel. (One of the ironies in this country is that many of the churches who support Israel uncritically are also deeply anti-Semitic in their theology - they basically support Israel because they believe that the Jews must all go back to Israel and then be converted to Christianity en masse before the return of Christ. Presbyterians do NOT hold to that kind of view at all. We tend to respect Jews as Jews, and not as vehicles to the fulfillment of our own faith.)
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