A defence of 'Kairos II' against Ray Gaston – and a call to revisit 'God's Unfailing Word'

On 12 July, a highly critical article on Kairos II appeared, hours before the Church of England’s General Synod debated a momentous motion calling on Synod to ‘receive’ Kairos II and three other documents, and to ‘engage with’ their challenges. During the debate ‘receive’ was amended to ‘hear’, to allay concerns that ‘receive’ meant ‘endorse’. The motion was overwhelming supported, but it was made clear by proposers that voting for it did not entail agreeing with everything in any of the documents.

The author of the article is Revd Ray Gaston, an Anglican parish priest, Inter Faith Enabler for the Wolverhampton Episcopal Area, Advisor on Inter Faith relations to the Bishops of Wolverhampton and Lichfield, and member of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland’s Inter Faith Theological Advisory Group. I am grateful to him for writing it because it raises the highly pertinent question whether Kairos II is compatible with the current teaching of the Church of England, notably as expressed in the landmark Faith and Order Commission document God’s Unfailing Word (2019) (GUW) (for which Gaston was a consultant). I note, however, that the author simply assumes that, were it not compatible, Kairos II would thereby be indicted, instead of asking whether Kairos II might contain a timely word of challenge to GUW.

I only wish the author had published it earlier, allowing GS members to reflect on his argument fully prior to the debate. For it would hardly be the first time that the CofE had committed itself to a stance in seeming tension with its official views. GUW has not been formally endorsed by General Synod but it was commended for study by the House of Bishops in 2019 and is the nearest thing to received teaching on the theme. Much of it is compelling. It rightly repudiates supersessionism and replacement theology, as well as the pernicious ‘teaching of contempt’ that fuelled murderous antisemitism for centuries. While I will raise questions about aspects of GUW, I fully endorse its central proposition: ‘The Christian–Jewish relationship is a gift of God to the Church, which is to be received with care, respect and gratitude, so that we may learn more fully about God’s purposes for us and all the world’ (xiii).

Against the benchmark of GUW, Gaston advances a series of severe criticisms of Kairos II, concluding that, ‘In light of God’s Unfailing Word, the theological judgement is clear. Kairos II is not a document that the Church of England can adopt as a theological resource, and it needs extensive critique….’ He is not alone in judging Kairos II negatively, so it is right that the Church reflect on the compatibility of the two documents and what any tension between them implies for the ‘hearing’ of Kairos II. This article is a contribution to that reflection.

What immediately struck me about the article, however, was that it indicts Kairos II against GUW without adequately taking account of their radically different authorships, contexts and audiences. For example, Kairos II is not presented primarily as a theological document; the theology behind it was articulated in, inter alia, Kairos I (2009). It is an urgent, updated appeal for Christian solidarity: a call for western churches, finally, to pay heed to the cries of pain, outrage and protest from our brothers and sisters in Christ in Palestine when their very existence is in question – ‘in a time of genocide’, as they judge. ‘This moment demands from us a new stand, one unlike any before it. It is both a decisive moment and a moment of truth’ (KII 24). It is prophetic contextual theology delivered from the eye of a catastrophic storm.

It names that storm in terms widely used by many international human rights bodies and authorities: genocide, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, settler colonialism, repression, displacement, and ecocide, ‘turning Palestinian existence into an unbearable hell’ (KII: 1.3). I think there is abundant evidence to support most of these terms (though I would query whether ‘settler’ colonialism is a fully adequate description of Zionist actions towards Palestine since the start of the twentieth century). It is entirely reasonable to use them, even if they remain contested. Remarkably, in spite of that devastating context, Kairos II still wishes to echo the ‘message of faith, hope and love’ of Kairos I, ‘offering a faith-inspired vision for the time after genocide’ (Introduction, §2).

When Gaston writes the following paragraph, his inattention to the Palestinian context seems almost intentional: Kairos II ‘offers no theology of reconciliation, no vision of shared flourishing, no account of mutual recognition. It is a document of protest rather than a document of ecclesial hope; whilst that spirit may be understood from the context of Palestinian Christians, it is not the context in the Church of England and simply affirming that approach runs counter to the understanding of God’s Unfailing Word’. As if ‘protest’ were the antithesis of either ‘reconciliation’ or ‘ecclesial hope’; and as if our Palestinian brothers and sisters’ context cannot challenge ours. It does not occur to Gaston to invert the question: if the voice of protest in Kairos II ‘runs counter’ to GUW, might that not rather be an indictment of GUW’s failure to heed the voices of Palestinian Christians?^[1]

Nor is Kairos II an Anglican document, but a product of a widely representative ecumenical alliance of Christian leaders across the region; it is not obliged to prove its consistency with a statement on Christian-Jewish relations from an English church far from the eye of the storm.

Yet it is legitimate for members of the CofE to ask, when General Synod calls on the Church to ‘hear’ Kairos II, how far it might be compatible with CofE teaching and if not, what then? But Gaston’s article levels harsh criticisms against Kairos II without at any point actually quoting it. I pressed the author to supply such citations, but he has declined to do so. I judge that this is because he is unable to do so: what he offers is a series of tendentious interpretive glosses not supported by the text of Kairos II.

Gaston writes:

‘At the heart of God’s Unfailing Word is an affirmation that the covenant with the Jewish people remains unrevoked. This is a key anchor that directs its entire theological landscape. It means that Judaism is not a failed Christianity awaiting fulfilment. It means that the Jewish people remain beloved of God and that Christian theology must honour their ongoing covenantal identity. This is central to God’s Unfailing Word because it undermines any form of supersessionism. It requires that Christian speech about Jews and Judaism be signified by reverence, humility, and restraint’.

I wholly support this proposition. But there is nothing in Kairos II that is incompatible with it. Gaston remind us of this theology of covenant in order to critique Kairos II. But Kairos II at no point addresses ‘Jews’ or ‘Judaism’.^[2] Its exclusive target is with Zionism as a political movement originating in the late nineteenth century – one whose mostly secular founders appealed to ‘Judaism’ to legitimate their controversial political goals.

Now ‘Zionism’, of course, admits of different definitions. GUW defines it as ‘the historic and continuing desire of the Jewish people for a homeland in the Middle East’ (76).^[3] This is already problematic for three reasons. First, the unqualified term ‘the Jewish people’ implies that Jews share a single view on the question, but this was obviously not true at the inception of Zionism (when it was widely resisted by Jews) and nor is it today. Second, the all-important term ‘homeland’ is undefined. What political structure does it imply? Third, the definition doesn’t even specify that such a homeland had to be in ‘Israel’, only in ‘the Middle East’.

There are further problems: GUW has already asserted at the start of the chapter in question (chapter 5, ‘The Land of Israel’) that ‘all Christians should accept’ that ‘the State of Israel has a right to a secure existence within recognized and secure borders according to the common principles of international law’ (74). So is the current state of Israel after all the ‘homeland’ referred to in the definition? Where is the argumentation for that? And why must ‘all Christians’ also accept, in stark contrast, that the Palestinian people are only entitled to ‘rights and security’, not statehood? (74). Such loose and ambiguous formulations on issues where absolute clarity is required are lamentable in a FAOC document.

Nor does Gaston’s assertion that ‘Christian accounts of the land of Israel and the theological significance of Zionism be determined by the recognition that Jewish identity is rooted in covenant and peoplehood’ add any clarity. Christian accounts may well ‘recognise’ the significance of Jewish readings of covenant, but they should in no sense be ‘determined’ by them, still less by Zionist readings.

We need a more precise definition of ‘Zionism’. Britannica defines it as a ‘Jewish nationalist movement with the goal of the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews’. We must be even more precise: Zionism’s declared goal was to establish a sovereign Jewish-majority state in Palestine. ‘Jewish self-determination’ was its aim, and that meant a Jewish ethno-nationalist state. For clarity, let us call this ‘political Zionism’, for there are other versions that did not (and do not) aspire to such a specific political goal, to be achieved by human hands.^[4]

The specific and consistent target of Kairos II is the political Zionism dominating the state of Israel since its founding. The only points at which it refers either to Jews or to Judaism are clearly in the context of their problematic use in service of political Zionism (1.3, 1.5, 1.8). Gaston might be technically correct to say that ‘Kairos II does not operate within [GUW’s] theological horizon’, but that is because it is simply not addressing it. It is not concerned with Christian-Jewish relations, least of all in a European country like ours, but with the existential threat to Palestinians at the hands of Israel’s political Zionism. Kairos II is not rejecting GUW’s larger theology. Gaston is also manifestly incorrect to claim that Kairos II’s ‘language about Zionism collapses Judaism into a political ideology and then condemns that ideology in theological terms’. It does no such thing, and I challenge him to support that charge with textual evidence.

Gaston writes:

‘God’s Unfailing Word devotes an entire chapter to the land and its own importance in Jewish faith and identity. It recognises the diversity of Jewish views on Zionism as well as the existential significance of Jewish self-determination after the Holocaust. It calls for Christian speech about Israel to be defined by nuance, restraint, and historical awareness. Kairos II offers no such nuance. Zionism is treated almost entirely as ideological sin. The land is framed as a site of colonial domination. There is no recognition of the covenantal significance of the land for Jews and there is no acknowledgement of the historical suffering that affects Jewish longing for security. It does not meet the standard of theological responsibility articulated in God’s Unfailing Word.’

Let us consider the three distinct issues in this compressed paragraph: the covenantal significance of the land for Jews; the nature of Zionism; and the historical suffering of Jews.

The first two can be treated together. Kairos II does not mention the ‘covenantal significance of the land for Jews’ because it is simply not concerned with describing Jewish views. It does not (and I believe most Palestinian Christians would not) dispute that many Jews do indeed see the land covenantally, and that this is important to many Jews (far from all) to their self-identity. Kairos II is concerned with reporting on the Palestinian community’s experience of political Zionism’s seizure of their land, and of their dispossession and forced expulsion from their historic homeland. Kairos II does not exclude a recognition of the covenantal significance of ‘land’ for Jews, but it does exclude the weaponisation of ‘covenant’ by political Zionism to justify such dispossession and forced expulsion.

It is now accepted even by most Israeli historians that, at the creation of Israel in 1948, 15,000 Palestinians were killed, 750,000 Palestinians coercively and permanently displaced, and 450+ Palestinian villages destroyed. The territory it seized in 1948 also far exceeded even what the 1947 UN Partition Plan generously proposed – and recall that this Plan also proposed a Palestinian state, a promise never delivered. Kairos II does indeed read that seizure and dispossession as ‘colonial domination’, and plausibly so. And while its authors are committed to non-violent (‘creative’) resistance and opposed to terrorism, they do see movements like the PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah primarily as movements of resistance against such colonialism, and especially against Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 (which is not to deny the repugnant strands of antisemitism also present in such movements, and which they would also reject).^[5]

Kairos II also reads Israel’s subsequent oppressive acts towards Palestinians, and especially its devastating onslaught on Gaza and its escalating oppression in the West Bank since 7 October 2023, as continuous with that history of colonial domination; again, plausibly (if not incontestably) so. This judgement is not undermined by the fact that the brutal Hamas attack on 7 October involved the commission of multiple war crimes, which the authors of Kairos II would – and did – condemn (1.6).

Kairos II’s searing description of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is not offered as a comprehensive history of the Holy Land since 1948; obviously Israel and its western supporters would contest part or all of it. It is a report on how that community has experienced their treatment at the hands of the state of Israel. Palestinian Christians are not – and nor is the CofE – obliged to make a Jewish covenantal reading of the land their own, or to defer to how political Zionists have interpreted ‘covenant’ at the expense of the universal obligations of justice, equality and freedom. Palestinians, and many members of the CofE, claim these were plainly flouted at the very founding of Israel and have been systematically and continuously flouted since then.

Critics might suggest that it would have helped had Kairos II distinguished explicitly between different varieties of ‘Zionism’, and made clear that its opposition was specifically to a form of political Zionism that would inevitably have to expel masses of existing Palestinian inhabitants and destroy hundreds of Palestinian villages in order to secure a sovereign, majority Jewish state. But the form of Zionism they have overwhelmingly confronted since 1948 (indeed well before), is just that. It is abundantly clear that this is what Kairos II is talking about. It is not conflating Judaism with Zionism. Rather it is the critics of the document that are guilty of that.

Consider this counterfactual: imagine in the 1920s, early on in the British mandate, the establishment of a ‘homeland’ of some sort for Jews in the Holy Land, perhaps an autonomous region within a single independent Palestinian state, which was initially promised by Britain to the then Arab majority (and was the assumed expectation in other mandatory territories after 1918). Imagine it had been created with the consent of that Arab majority and on the basis of equality, fair distribution, shared political power and internationally guaranteed security, perhaps by the then League of Nations. (In fact, Palestinian consent was never sought, and political Zionists never intended to seek it.) Arguably, this could have satisfied the covenantal hopes for a homeland of many Jews who held them, had they been willing to renounce the political Zionist demand for the coercive imposition of a single sovereign, majority-Jewish state.

Note that, if such a model could have satisfied Jewish covenantal hopes, it could also have satisfied Christian supporters of a Jewish homeland. There is, in any case, nothing in the OT doctrine of covenant that demands a future Jewish-majority sovereign state in what was once the territory of biblical Israel; there is even less in the NT. GUW fudges this critical exegetical issue.^[6]

In fact, a political vision something like this – a single independent state for all in the Holy Land on the basis of equality and justice for all – seems close to what Kairos II seeks in the future (4.3, 4.4, 4.5). Kairos II does not seek the ‘destruction’ of Israel, but rather its reconstruction to meet that demand of equality and justice for all. Its objection, as noted, is to the forced expulsion and dispossession of the indigenous Palestinian Arabs from a territory they had inhabited continuously for centuries (alongside a small minority of longstanding Jewish communities with whom they had lived largely peaceably), in order to satisfy the majoritarian and ‘exclusionary’, ‘supremacist’ aspirations of political Zionists.

GUW itself explicitly affirm the universal mandates just mentioned. It argues that ‘the Church must be clear that there can be no justification in Christian doctrine for setting aside the ordinary requirements of justice for the sake of supposed prophetic fulfilment, when justice is at the heart of God’s promises for us’ (82-3). Precisely: the Palestinian claim is that their forced dispossession and the coercive occupation of their ancestral land by others was and remains a blatant violation of the ‘ordinary requirements of injustice’, and that no appeal to a Jewish notion of a covenantal tie to the land could override those requirements. Christian defenders of political Zionism have never offered a convincing answer to that challenge. GUW, in the chapter in question, simply ducks it. GUW has astonishingly little to say about the actual creation of the state of Israel, the enormous controversy surrounding it, or the widespread violence it occasioned.

When we recognise that it this variant of political Zionism, and Palestinians’ decades-long subjugation by it since 1948, that the authors of Kairos II have in mind, it is less shocking to hear how they describe their experience of it. Gaston is indeed correct to say that ‘Zionism is described as a theology of ethnic supremacy and tribal particularity. The State of Israel is framed as a colonial and exclusionary entity.’ For that is how Palestinians have overwhelmingly experienced political Zionism at the hands of the state of Israel.

Thus Gaston is fundamentally wrong to assert that, ‘The effect of this language is to delegitimise Jewish covenantal identity by proxy’ and that ‘Judaism appears only in the form of political power. It never appears as a people bound to God in faithfulness and hope’. To repeat: Kairos II is not talking about ‘Jewish covenantal identity’ or ‘Judaism’, but about the political Zionism it has actually encountered.

Gaston is thus mistaken to claim that Kairos II stands ‘outside the doctrinal commitments articulated in God’s Unfailing Word and expresses grave worries regarding the reintroduction of supersessionist patterns of thought.’ There is nothing supersessionist in Kairos II; that question is not remotely on its agenda. To blame it for such omissions is to treat it as if it were a Palestinian equivalent of a leisurely CofE Faith and Order Commission report.

It is indeed true, however, that Kairos II does present a formidable challenge to GUW’s chapter on ‘The Land of Israel’. That chapter stands out as seriously inadequate compared to others. It is not demonstrably grounded in the theological commitments of earlier chapters but makes a series of unfounded judgments about political Zionism and the state of Israel that are not mandated by GUW’s larger theological vision.

Let me turn to the third theme raised in Gaston’s paragraph cited above: the historical experience of Jewish suffering. He writes:

‘The concern [about Kairos II] is deepened when one considers the silence of Kairos II concerning Jewish historical suffering. God’s Unfailing Word points out that Christian theology must be influenced by repentance for the Church’s complicity in antisemitism. It names the Holocaust as a theological watershed that demands a reconfiguration of Christian speech about Jews. It recognises that Christian commentary on Jewish matters carries particular power to damage and divide because of the legacy of history. Kairos II speaks as though this history does not exist. There is no mention of the Holocaust or the Jewish expulsion from Arab countries. There is no acknowledgement of Christian antisemitism. There is no recognition that Jewish identity has been formed by the horrors of centuries of persecution, often at Christian hands. The absence of this historical consciousness is a serious theological failure. It risks reinscribing the very patterns of Christian anti-Judaism that God’s Unfailing Word was written to counter.’

I have already gone some way to explaining this supposed ‘absence’: Kairos II is not attempting to offer an account of Christian-Jewish relations such as GUW offers, nor of the totality of factors lying behind the creation of the state of Israel, or of the events consequent on the violent way it was established (such as the appalling expulsion of Jews from surrounding Arab countries). It is reporting on its own experience, not that of its political Zionist oppressors. But there is nothing in Kairos II that implies any denial of the reality of Jewish historical suffering. GUW’s attention to that history is essential and salutary. There is no reason to believe that the authors of Kairos II would discount its horror or its contemporary importance. But it is not incumbent upon Palestinian Christians writing in 2025 in the aftermath of Israel’s pulverisation of Gaza – as Palestinians drag the mangled bodies of their children from the ruins created by the IDF’s grotesquely disproportionate and indiscriminate bombing campaigns – to remind their intended readers of Jewish historical suffering. For Gaston to accuse Kairos II of writing ‘as if this [Jewish] history does not as exist’, is, again, to entirely miss the nature and context of Kairos II.

Gaston levels further criticisms of Kairos II which can only be briefly mentioned. One is yet another example of his failure to respect its nature and context. Kairos II, he claims:

‘employs an unsophisticated form of liberationist hermeneutic in which scripture is reduced to simplistic political allegories at best and little engaged with at all, at its worst. It is not theologically adequate. It collapses the richness of Scripture, when used, into a single political narrative and erases the Jewish reading of the Bible as a living tradition’.

But Kairos II is neither a theological nor an exegetical document, and to dismiss its liberationist method as ‘unsophisticated’ is, moreover, an unacceptable example of western condescension.^[7] In any event, its use of Scripture, as far as it goes, seems to me to be entirely defensible hermeneutically. Nor is there any ‘erasure’ of Jewish readings of the Bible, which are hardly on its mind ‘in a time of genocide’.

Gaston does indeed find the document’s use of the term ‘genocide’ objectionable (KII: 1.2); it is ‘rhetoric rather than legal analysis’. It is true that only the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can deliver a legal verdict of genocide under international law. Yet Gaston is confident enough to assert that the term ‘does not live up to serious scrutiny’. How could he know? His only support is a report by the American Jewish Committee, hardly the most impartial of sources. He simply ignores the international human rights organisations and the genocide scholars that have judged Israel’s actions to meet one or more of the criteria of the Genocide Convention, and is silent on the fact that the ICJ itself found already in January 2024 that charges of breaches of the Convention were at least ‘plausible’, warning Israel to refrain from committing any further acts that might breach it (which it contemptuously ignored). Given the number of authoritative sources countenancing the charge of genocide, it is not at all unreasonable or eccentric for Kairos II to use it. Gaston’s claim that, for the Church to give credence to the charge ‘risks the Church falling into repeating antisemitic tropes that undermine the commitments made in God’s Unfailing Word’, is yet another attempt to blur the distinction between antisemitism, and legitimate and necessary critique of the state of Israel. In any case, the General Synod motion does not endorse the charge, only calls on us to ‘hear’ Kairos II’s use of it. Many of us are hearing it loud and clear.

One part of Gaston’s conclusion, however, I can certainly endorse. Given the controversy surrounding the CofE’s decision to ‘hear’ Kairos II, he proposes that the CofE ‘commission a thorough theological response [to Kairos II] formed by the theological understandings articulated in God’s Unfailing Word.’ I agree. But the terms of reference must also remain open to the possibility that GUW (especially chapter 5) be subjected to a word of prophetic rebuke from Kairos II. I would sign up to that.

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^[1] GUW was already critical of Kairos I (83-4), wrongly so I think.

^[2] Gaston also alleges that ‘The Kairos movement often dislocates Jesus from his Jewishness’. His only source for this claim is a very brief article on a strongly pro-Zionist website (‘Honest Reporting’) called ‘The Myth of the Palestinian Jesus’, disputing that Jesus was born in ‘Palestine’. But GUW itself refers to the area as ‘Palestine’, noting that the term is ‘used here in accordance with common academic practice when writing about the period of Roman occupation’ (107n15).

^[3] The definition is taken from an earlier Anglican document, Land of Promise? An Anglican Exploration of Christian Attitudes to the Holy Land, with Special Reference to ‘Christian Zionism’, Anglican Communion Network for Inter Faith Concerns (NIFCON) (2012).

^[4] No terms are fully adequate. But it’s worth noting that ‘political Islam’ is widely taken to be clear in meaning, even though it too is inadequate, for there is no Islam that is apolitical.

^[5] Kairos II recognises ‘a right of all colonized peoples to resist their colonizers’ (2.4). Such a right exists in international law.

^[6] GUW rightly identifies Roman 9-11 as the central NT text on these questions. But there is nothing in these chapters suggesting that God’s covenantal faithfulness to the Jewish people must be or will be expressed in a recovery of the original territory of biblical Israel under a sovereign, ethnically Jewish state. Indeed, in Paul’s listing of the ways that the Jews of his day continue, as GUW puts it, to ‘share in some way in the reality of Israel’ (35), ‘land’ is conspicuous by its absence: ‘They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenant, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises…and the patriarchs’ (Rom. 9: 4-5). This undermines GUW’s claim that there exists a Christian theological case ‘that requires some continuing relation of the Jewish people to the land of Israel’ (85). It is also a fundamental mistake of GUW to grant theological permission for supposedly benign versions of ‘Christian Zionism’ (82). One might mount an argument in political ethics for a ‘Jewish homeland’, but not in NT covenantal theology. There are many other deficiencies in chapter 5 of GUW.

^[7] Gaston also complains that Kairos II ‘casts the Church primarily as a solidarity movement. There is little about the sacramental, reconciling, and catholic nature of the church’. Again, this is hardly going to be at the forefront of its authors’ minds in 2025. And isn’t the Church at least a ‘solidarity movement’, even if much more? Puzzlingly, Gaston holds that the deepest difference between Kairos II and GUW is ‘ecclesiological’. To expect that Kairos II would articulate an ecclesiology of any sort is, again, to impose on it entirely unreasonable expectations.