Feature

Sharonism, the Gaza pullout and the birth of Kadima, the new Israeli centrist party, are expressions of an evolution in internal Israeli thinking, just as the political victory of Hamas is an expression of an internal evolution of Palestinian thinking in response to corruption and lack of progress. Taken by themselves, these are healthy evolutions. The problem is that none of these developments evolved in conversation with the enemy next door. There is no peace without conversation, secret or public, nor will there be realistic internal debate that will yield peace or coexistence with enemies.

As master of the Temple Church in London, one of the sites featured in The Da Vinci Code, Robin Griffith-Jones has had the chance to talk to hundreds of people about the claims of the best-selling novel. His own book, The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of the Temple (Eerdmans), is based on a regular talk he gives to visitors at the Temple Church. Griffith-Jones was educated at Cambridge University and ordained a priest in the Church of England. Before coming to London, he was a minister at a housing project in Liverpool; he also worked with Mother Teresa’s sisterhood in India. The Century talked to him about the popularity of The Da Vinci Code and how it has affected his life at the Temple Church.

By 2010, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promises, Israel will have a border on the east. Who needs the agreement of the Palestinians and the approval of the world when we Israelis alone have been determining things since 1967? After all, the U.S. is on our side. Let us assume that the plan is possible. Is this going to be a regular border, that is, a clear line with walls and fences, beyond which there are no Israeli forces? Absolutely not. The very fact that there is no partner on the Palestinian side obliges the Israeli army and the Israeli General Security Service to be present on the other side of the line.

Christians of good heart and good faith sincerely disagree about whether or how biblical passages regarding homosexual behavior relate to the current debates. Exegesis is not solving the problem. What to do? One way is to seek help from a parallel situation in the Bible, like the one Israel faced following the exile. The question was how to reconstitute the nation. With its institutions shattered, how would Israel move forward?

When war causes us to suppress our deepest religious and moral convictions, we cave in to a “higher religion” called war. Yes, there is beauty in patriotism, in its unselfishness and love of country. But this beauty makes for what Reinhold Niebuhr called the “ethical paradox in patriotism”—a tendency to transmute individual unselfishness into national egoism. When this happens, the critical attitude of the individual is squelched, permitting the nation to use “power without moral constraint.”