Responding to a nego

William Haines
April 30, 2010

Today I wrote a response to a quote of Father that had been posted on an anti-Moonie website which tried to give the impression that Father is anti-Semitic. I thought some of you (such as Doris) might find it interesting. It also means I can get more mileage out of my writing!

The posted quote of Father was from a leaders conference a few years ago:

"Who are the Jewish members here, raise your hands! Jewish people, you have to repent. Jesus was the King of Israel. Through the principle of indemnity Hitler killed 6 million Jews. That is why. God could not prevent Satan from doing that because Israel killed the True Parents."

Let's have a look at this statement bearing in mind it is from notes of a speech given in Korean and simultaneously translated into English and so there may be bits missing because they weren't translated or noted down never mind the inherent unreliability of such a mode of translation and transcription.

The call to repentance is eternal. Why shouldn't Jewish people and indeed all the people of the world be called to repentance? This is normal and is what John the Baptist and Jesus called their contemporaries to do. It is not unusual for Christians during Holy Week to repent for the way that Jesus was treated. So who was responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus? One traditional Christian response has been everyone, and so everyone, Jew, Gentile, black and white should repent which means feel sorry that it happened and determine to make sure that such a tragedy never happens again.

Jesus is the King of Israel.

Well, calling him 'King' shows the respect Moon has for Jesus. It is also what Christians believe and that is approximately the title under which Jesus was crucified. From a Jewish point of view he obviously wasn't the messiah because he didn't fulfill the messianic roles -- such as sitting on the throne of David. At best then Jesus was a 'potential messiah' who, had he lived out his natural life, might have fulfilled them.

Hitler killed 6 million Jews.

So no Holocaust denial here. What the principle of indemnity is here is not clear (translation/transcription problem?). It doesn't mean they were punished because they killed Jesus because this is not what the word indemnity means. Indemnity means what has to be done to restore something to its original state. So there is no connection here with the crucifixion as the Holocaust didn't restore it. One explanation given by some Jewish theologians is that the Holocaust was the 'price' to be paid for the restoration or establishment of the state of Israel. That was certainly a consequence of the Holocaust but it shouldn't have been necessary.

From this statement and others it is clear that Moon thinks Satan was the one behind the Holocaust. In other words it didn't happen as a punishment by God for the crucifixion of Jesus. It was an act of Satan, not an act of God. So people, such as the institutional churches, were doing the will of Satan, not the will of God, when they marginalized, persecuted, abused and killed Jews. They might have thought they were doing God's will, punishing Jews on God's behalf, but from Moon's point of view they were doing the work of the devil. This of course is very different to traditional Christian theology and folkolgy.

God could not prevent the Holocaust.

This of course is a problem that has caused much anguish and led to a whole school of Holocaust Theology in an attempt to make sense of what is, and will always be, a problem of theodicy.

Clearly from Moon's statement God wanted to prevent the holocaust but God as we know is invisible. As Saint Teresa of Avila said, "Christ has no body on earth now but ours: No hands but ours, no feet but ours . . ." It was the Christian church that should have stepped in and prevented the Holocaust carried out by the mostly non- or anti-Christian Nazis. That was the body, the body of Christ, through which God wanted to prevent the Holocaust. But because of the latent and not so latent anti-Semitism within the churches this didn't happen. And this anti-Semitism had part of its roots in the historical anti-Judaism of the church. Why was the church anti-Jewish? In part because the early church found it more convenient to blame the Jews for the death of Jesus than the Romans who executed him as a political subversive and potential revolutionary. The title messiah was very political and threatened Roman sovereignty. Jesus was not the only 'messiah' they executed. So because the Christian church has traditionally blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Jesus, they didn't have much compassion when Jews were being persecuted, rounded up and murdered by the Nazis and so God was not able to work through the Christian conscience to prevent the holocaust.

The other interesting point here is that Moon calls Jesus 'the True Parents'. In other words he recognizes him as at least an equal. Elsewhere he has said he was saved by Jesus and it is well known that Amazing Grace is his favorite English hymn that he has often been heard to sing and hum.

Israel killed True Parents.

On this Moon is either misquoted, incompletely quoted, using shorthand or plain wrong as this statement stands. Jesus was executed by the Romans on a political charge. Obviously some Jewish leaders of the Temple were involved. It was their job as collaborators with the occupying Romans to police the people and hand over any potential subversives. When Jesus was proclaimed the 'Son of David' by over enthusiastic supporters as he entered Jerusalem, the Temple authorities were worried. When he 'threw out the money changers' in the Temple they were even more alarmed and decided that he needed to be arrested and killed so as to prevent the Roman authorities destroying the place in their normal brutal way (John 11:45-49) They had to arrest Jesus at night because he was so popular amongst the people. So it wasn't Israel or 'the Jews' that caused the death of Jesus but a small political clique who had their own partially self-interested and partially public-minded reasons. If Israel had not been an occupied country things might have turned out very differently.