“The establishment of the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy,” according to Jimmy Carter, President of the United States. He spoke those words to a conference of Jewish leaders last October during his campaign, and repeated them after his election in an interview with Pat Robertson, television’s charismatic version of Johnny Carson. Carter’s convictions echo the beliefs of countless fellow evangelicals.
No notion is likely to be more destructive of the Carter administration’s current peace initiatives in the Middle East than the belief that God has a vested interest in the amount of real estate controlled by the state of Israel. Further, a genuine dialog between the Christian and Jewish communities today, and a deep understanding of what the Jewish heritage of the Old Testament has to contribute to our grasp of faith, are both gravely injured by the evangelical tendency to sanctify contemporary Israeli nationalism and aggrandizement with spurious interpretations of Old Testament “prophecy.”
At the conclusion of Hope in a Time of Abandonment, protestant theologian Jacques Ellul suggests that the church today could learn much about its true identity from observing the profound sense of peoplehood maintained by the Jews in varied cultures, and through two thousand years of persecution. In their steadfastness of hope they give to the Christian church a model for its own life.
As they have lived in touch with their roots, the Jewish people have served as a prophetic presence in a myriad of societies, where they have been a sign of faith in the faithfulness of God, even amidst the most horrifying of historical experiences.
For Christians, not to have learned from the experience of the Jews, and thus not to know more deeply of their own tradition, is unpardonable. But what has been infinitely more tragic is the extent to which anti-semitism has found support in circles which claim to be Christian. Few sins have so blighted the church of Jesus Christ as its silence, its numbness, and its complicity in the face of the Nazi holocaust.
One result of nurturing an authentic dialog with the Jewish community will be a far deeper appreciation by Christians of the Old Testament. Increasingly, biblical studies are shedding light on how the roots of Jesus’ teaching lie in the stream of the Old Testament prophets. Scholars of the scriptures like John Howard Yoder are exploring how even Christ’s commitment to nonviolence and the love of one’s enemies, as well as his rejection of nationalistic means for achieving the kingdom of God, were expressive of the most faithful prophetic tradition to emerge from the Old Testament.
In carrying out his calling, Christ acted as a Jewish rabbi whose deep insights and interpretation of Israel’s prophetic tradition continually stunned and angered the Jewish religious establishment of his time--an establishment which, like modern Christendom, had constructed self-serving versions of their faith molded to ratify their own power and righteousness rather than to live in fidelity to their prophetic roots. When Christ said that he came to fulfill the law and the prophets, he meant that his teaching of the kingdom of God, his messiahship, his untainted vision of God’s justice, his posture of servanthood, and his suffering love which led him to the cross were the full embodiment of God’s unfolding revelation to the people of Israel.
An exclusive focus on Christ’s divinity has obscured for many Christians the fact that God chose to enter human history as a Jew. The full meaning of the incarnation cannot be grasped apart from recognizing the Jewish roots of our Lord’s mission; and the full meaning of being the body of Christ cannot be known apart from understanding the promises of God to the people of Israel.
God’s message through the prophets of the Old Testament challenged kingship, eventually rejected Jewish nationalism, and eliminated the hope that God’s kingdom would be equated with earthly political sovereignty. As the history of the people of Israel unfolded, God’s calling of a covenant people to be his own was spoken against the back drop of the nationalistic aspirations of the Jewish nation. The chosenness of God’s people became understood as those who carried forth God’s purposes of justice in the world, and on this count the prophets continually condemned the rulers and the people for their unfaithfulness. Finally, God’s covenant to the people of Israel was promised fulfillment through the creation of a new people, to be guided by a suffering servant, who would give his life sacrificially for the purposes of God’s justice and love.
The contention that the modern state of Israel is a fulfillment of God’s intentions for the Jews and for the world seriously misconstrues the message of the scriptures. It also warps one’s view of justice in the Middle East conflict, and short-circuits the possibilities for genuine Jewish-Christian dialog. Modern Zionism is as foreign to the heart of Judaism and the biblical message as the violent schemes of the Zealots were in Christ’s time, and the procession of kings in the Old Testament were who claimed to politically incarnate the Lord’s rule in their disobedient geographic kingdoms.
Many evangelicals have unabashedly provided a theological justification for Zionism, granting divine sanction to and even glorifying the violence of modern Israel. After Israel’s military success in the 1967 Six Day War, for instance, L. Nelson Bell, executive editor of Christianity Today, wrote glowingly of how “overwhelming military victory is found in every...area of the Six Day War. We ask again. Did it just happen? One cannot help thinking that in all of this God was working out his own purposes, far above and beyond the capabilities of men or nations!”
More recently, the evangelical brand of Zionism has received support from some leading figures. Late last year 23 evangelical leaders met with Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz and American Zionist leaders to present Dinitz with a proclamation of solidarity and support for the state of Israel. W. A. Criswell, the pastor of Dallas’s First Baptist Church who gained national headlines by endorsing President Ford after he attended Criswell’s 20,000 member church, spoke for the group, saying he is pro-Israel “because I preach the word of God . . . because God says the land is forever theirs, in an unconditional covenant.” Criswell’s interpretation of the scriptures was enthusiastically echoed by Michael Pragai, Advisor of Church Relations in North America for the Israeli Consulate General in New York: “This is what we have in common,” he told the evangelicals, “a belief in the prophecy of the return and restoration of the people of Israel to their ancestral land.”
The official proclamation presented to Ambassador Dinitz had been signed following a July 3, 1976 “Salute to America” bicentennial rally and prophecy conference held in Philadelphia. Other signers included author Hal Lindsey, John F. Walvoord, President of Dallas Theological Seminary, Earl D. Radmacher, President of Western Conservative Baptist Seminary, Larry Ward of Food for the Hungry, and Douglas B. MacCorkle, President of Philadelphia College of the Bible, who also gave Dinitz 7,000 letters from evangelicals “affirming solidarity with you.”
In his Southern Baptist heart, Jimmy Carter seems to believe these convictions about Israel and biblical prophecy. If, with millions of other evangelicals, he becomes convinced about whose side God is on in the Middle Eastern conflict, there will hardly be a sound basis for constructing a foreign policy aimed at reconciliation. Rather, that assumption would provide, as it has in the past, a rationalization for the taking of land and the ongoing displacement of a people.
Biblically speaking, it is justice for all concerned which must be the guiding principle for a Middle East settlement, including justice for the Palestinians whose discarded lives have been so lightly regarded by past U.S. policy, and so grossly ignored by evangelicalism. Holding the belief that the real estate of Israel is divinely sanctioned, and that their cause is righteously ordained, will only make evangelicals accomplices to the injustice and suffering of the status quo in the Middle East. One can only imagine how such a stance impedes the witness of the gospel in Arab lands, whose real estate and whose lives are inevitably devalued by this fundamentalistic economy of God’s favor.
Many will protest that the Christian cannot have an authentic relationship with the Jews in isolation from commitment to the state of Israel. But it was precisely this equation of faithfulness to God with the parochial demands of Jewish nationalism which the Old Testament prophets rejected and condemned. The dialog between Jews and Christians must begin around the mutual obligations of obedience to the saving grace of God rather than the litmus test of unswerving, divinely undergirded loyalty to the claims of the modern Israeli state.
There are legitimate reasons for the state of Israel to have the right to exist--and equally moral imperatives for the displaced and persecuted people of Palestine to also have their own homeland. But the rationale in both cases comes not from selected proof texts about scriptural prophecies, but from the biblical injunctions to seek justice for all peoples--a witness that cuts across the pretensions of both Israeli chauvinism and Arab zealotry. By relativizing what are seen as righteous and holy causes, the climate for authentic reconciliation can be created in these lands and among these peoples, both of whom are the children of Abraham.
Wes Michaelson was on the editorial staff at Sojourners when this article appeared.
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