Christian Zionism & Foreign Policy: Irony & Tragedy
A news article by Michele Chabin in the December 14, 2010, Christian Century has reinforced my view about the irony & tragedy of the Christian Zionist movement – now well over 100 years old, yet stronger and more influential than ever.
On the one hand, the movement’s thousands of diverse churches and organizations are tremendously generous. Massive efforts at good works in Israel have funneled hundred of millions of dollars since the 1970s into a host of short- and long-term social and educational programs, hospitals, infrastructure projects, humanitarian aid initiatives, and many others. According to Chabin, Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee’s San Antonio-based church and his Christian Zionist networks have raised an unprecedented $50 million for Israel just since 2006.
On the other hand is the movement’s influential foreign policy lobby, of which the Hagee-founded group, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), has in just a few short years become the paradigm. According to its website, CUFI is now the largest pro-Israel organization in the United States. One of its prominent initiatives has been its tireless foreign policy efforts in Washington DC. Every July, for example, its DC summit attracts thousands of leading American Christians to exert pressure on U.S. policy in the Middle East. (In her story, “Israel finds more to like about Christian Zionists,” Chabin describes a recent sit-down in Israel between pastor Hagee and Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu.)
The organizing principle of the movement’s approach to the Middle East is dispensational theology, which is always on the lookout for signs that its view of history is being fulfilled. To dispensationalists, the clearest of these signs, to date, has been the founding of the modern state of Israel (1948). The next turning-point event would be the second coming of Christ. For Christian Zionists, the history of the world is currently experiencing the time between these two events.
The question must then be asked: What, according to the theology, needs to be occurring during this in-between period? To put it crudely, the theology needs to see Israel at war with its neighbors. But not just any old war. It must be war escalating so far beyond anything the world has ever experienced that it can, at some point, rightly be called “Armageddon.” Although ordinary Christian Zionist supporters of Israel may not be aware of it, there is, then, a terribly disturbing militancy at work in the theology, which governs the foreign policy.
The violence needed to sustain the theology boggles the imagination of Christians committed, let us say, to the Sermon on the Mount, with Jesus’ strong emphasis on peacemaking with one’s neighbors. Reconciliation of enemies is at the heart of the gospel, and it is hard to see how this squares with the war theology that shapes the foreign policy of the Christian Zionist movement.
Here, then, is the the irony and tragedy of Christian Zionism. Its adherents believe they are finding their foreign policy in the Bible, their ultimate source of written authority. But the Bible is very clear that it is not dispensational theology but the wisdom tradition – with its strong emphasis on impartial justice, negotiations, common ground agreements, and peaceableness among peoples who are different – that functions as the normative biblical framework for international relations and foreign policy decision-making. This is the great category mistake made by the movement – which, by the way, Palestinian Christians, even the Evangelical ones, see as heretical.
I feel it is important to insert a little historic commentary here since the C-Z movement’s “end of days” theology is largely based upon a series of false assumptions. For example, most C-Zs I have met assume the Apocalypse of John was a “stand-alone” book, a unique creation unlike anything that had been written before it. That simply was not the case, however. John’s Revelation was part of a long series of Jewish Apocalyptic writings that included works like the “Book of Enoch”, the latter chapters of the prophet “Daniel,” which were later additions to that work, the “Apocalypse of Baruch,” “II Esdras” in the Apocryphal writings, the “Book of Jubilees,” “The Psalter of Solomon,” “The Assumption of Moses,” “The Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs,” “The Sybilline Oracles” and, perhaps, many more Jewish writings lost to time. The modern canon of Jewish scriptures, what Protestants today call “The Old Testament,” does not include these works, but when Jesus walked the earth, many groups of Jews considered them Yahweh inspired, especially the Essenes, a Jewish sect whose theological beliefs had a profound effect on the early Christian faith.
Early Jews originally viewed the relationship between man and god as Covenantal, i.e.: there was a covenant (treaty) between Yahweh and Israel. But how did this explain the obvious reality that Israel was constantly being conquered and oppressed by peoples from surrounding nations? Thus, a second world view arose, the Prophetic. Israel had sinned by not obeying Yahweh’s law and was being punished. But that world view could not successfully deal with the reality that many Jews were keeping the law as it was laid out in the Torah. Related to that issue was the question, if Yahweh was in control of all things, why did he permit evil gentiles who never kept his laws, or even worshipped him, to prosper while faithful Jews suffered at their hands? So a third theological approach arose, the Apocalyptic, which said good men suffered because there was an evil force in the universe at war with goodness itself. (Ultimately, this belief would evolve into an autonomous, independent being of power, the devil, who was at the head of a sort of evil army.) But Jewish Apocalyptic literature, which includes, in my opinion, the Apocalypse of John (a final chapter, so to speak), said good would ultimately triumph over evil. Yahweh would intervene, bring down the powerful, heathen nations and raise his chosen people to their rightful place of supremacy in this world.
Many, if not the majority, of Jewish Pharisees, Essenes and Zealots considered this Apocalyptic literature canonical in Christ’s day, and it was this Apocalyptic world view that ultimately led to two (many historians, including myself, would say three) disastrous uprisings against Rome. The temple would be destroyed. Judea would no longer be a Jewish province and millions of Jews, the guilty and the innocent alike, would perish. No wonder then the Rabbis would strike Jewish Apocalyptic writings from their canon.
The Christian “Apocalypse of John” was structured like these other works. Like other Jewish Apocalyptic literature, it tried to help believers deal with the harsh realities of THE TIME IN WHICH THEY LIVED, and not necessarily a distant future. When the “Revelation of John” was written, no reader would have doubted that it was about the fall of Rome. The beast with seven heads that a divine being described to the author as a great city could only be Rome, which was called the City of the Seven Hills. The number 666 (or 616 in many of the earliest manuscripts) is the numerical equivalent of Caesar Nero’s name. (Drop an optional ending from the name and you will get 616.). Nero persecuted Christians horribly about 25 years prior to the writing of the “Revelation of John.” Also, his immediate successors, Vespasian and Titus, leveled the temple in Jerusalem, and during the time this book was written (between 90 and 95 A.D.) Domitian was Emperor of Rome and had begun a state-sponsored persecution of Christianity. Christian communities, like Jews in Christ’s time, were looking for reasons for all of the darkness surrounding them and Apocalyptic writings provided those answers.
The current “end of days” C-Z ideas were born in the early 1800s with Dispensationalism. They were created in a theological vacuum, before crucial archaeological discoveries took place in the Twentieth Century that shed so much light on the early Jewish and the early Christian religions.
There are 2 kinds of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
I’ve seen that all to often, when people present an idea, they declare that there are two perspectives on the subject: their idea and the wrong idea. Anti-evolutionists do this all of the time. They say that a person has two choices, He can believe in God as his creator, or he can believe that godless forces of nature evolved us from monkeys into people.
In this essay, there seems to be either a dispensational approach to understanding Israel and a wisdom approach. “Dispensational” is a term that is difficult to understand because it is a complicated term. “Wisdom” seems all fuzzy and warm and correct and easy to support. I understand that you are using “wisdom” to mean that you have developed your approach from reading the wisdom books of the Bible, rather than having decided right and wrong by listening to the diatribes of religious pundits. Am I right?
I think it too simple to say that Jesus is a lamb, rather than a lion. (Aslan is not a tame lion.) I sang with gusto a Brazilian chorus that championed the Lion of Judah, saying that one day, the lion would govern this world. When I sang it, I was thinking about the injustice that I saw all around me. To this day, I pray for God’s will to be done, and that His kingdom would reign. This implies the strong fight of a military man who has, and Paul wasn’t averse to using military terms to describe it. Violent men take the kingdom by force. Jesus was not only a man of peace and reconciliation (though Paul did admonish us to be at peace with all men). Jesus was a man of action and of war. Don’t color Him with only the primary colors that match the niceness that we would like to believe in.
Luke 12
51 Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. 52 From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. 53 They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law.
But I don’t know why C-Z’s need to raise money for Israel. I didn’t know they were hard up for funds. And I certainly agree with you that God did not accept everything Israel did as being good. He is not averse to judging this nation…and harshly because it represents Him. Speak out against the destruction of Israel, yes. Insist that Israel’s neighbors allow it to have firm borders. Help tear down that wall that separates Israel from Palestine. Stop the insanity.
What I really mean to say is that dispensationalists do not salivate at the prospect of armageddon and pray for destruction and death. They are telling us that the world is heading for destruction and that only following Jesus will save us. It is wrong to think that C-Z’s want to help fuel this impending disaster, even though their actions do help to encourage militarism in a questionable way.
Thank you for this thoughtful post. Your post bristles with many ideas, so I’ve only chosen some to reply briefly to. Hope this helps. E.g., To answer your question, yes, I have developed my approach to international relations and foreign policy from years of exploration (still on-going) deep within the mines of the biblical wisdom tradition.
And you wrote: “’Wisdom’ seems all fuzzy…’. Actually, you’re on to a good, here, though the rest of your comment on this seems not to imply it. E.g., In an on-going conversation on wisdom with a British Bible scholar, he recently said to me: “We are working with ‘fuzzy concepts’ of wisdom,” and, “Wisdom is not an hermetically sealed unit.” To which I replied, “This, to my mind, is normative of the tradition, quite significant, and difficult for we modern westerners to at first accept. In the new bk, I include a section where I write and develop this thought: ‘Like love, faith, truth, freedom, or happiness, no one definition of wisdom, even a broad one, ever seems adequate. Wisdom, it seems, is not so easily pinned down.’ From my study of the Bible’s wisdom literature and its wisdom narratives, I have concluded that always there seems to be an otherness to wisdom beyond what any one meaning can provide.”
Anyway, there are many good and sufficient reasons for saying that, but a short blog post is not the place to go into it, but you could give this article a go: http://www.charlesstrohmer.com/the-wisdom-project/wisdom-tradition-introduction/.
Also, those who grapple with the wisdom literature will discover that wisdom is not warm and fuzzy and easy. The book of Job, for instance, upsets the “act-consequence” regularities of human behavior that, say, Proverbs instructs us about.
Finally, yes, certainly, and this is hugely reinforced by our news media, we Americans tend think that there are only two perspectives on things. Got to have both sides of the story, you know. This is _not_ a biblical way of seeing. The Bible supports multiple causality of events. I believe that a biblically wise way of reasoning about life gives us a good way of handling this.
Excellent essay, and thoughtful responses by members of the forum.
One name stands out, historically, as a founding father of Dispensationalism: John Nelson Darby, an evangelist in the U.K. during the early 1800s. His broad re-interpretation of scriptures led to the formation of numerous schools of Protestant theological thought in Britain and America in the 19th century. These resulted in the “end-of-days” views of the present C-Z movement.
I have no hesitation in saying those theological ideas are believed by people with little or no understanding of Christian or Jewish history. I have spent the last year and a half studying Second Temple Jewish history (586 BCE to 135 CE) and would advise everyone, Christian or Jew, to do the same. Judaism was born early in that turbulent era and Christianity at the end. (From the post above by Mr. Silverberg, it is apparent to me that Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t studied it either.)
I harbor some hope for peace in the Middle East, but only if firm borders can be established for Israel. Any state that is constantly expanding its territory is a state continually at war with its neighbors. Unfortunately, radicals on all sides are resisting that goal.
The plight for the U.K. and the U.S. is that we were the world powers that established Israel following WWII and agreed to guarantee its survival. Both governments are now stuck with the outcome of that decision. The result for Britain and America is that we are left with the unenviable task of dismantling the offensive military capacity of Israel’s foes either by arms sales or direct intervention. These on-going operations are becoming a huge economic strain for both states.
I’m sure many good Godfearing folk were deceived into preferring Barabbas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barabbas) when offered the choice between him and Jesus. The result of that particular choice was military destruction for Jerusalem and exile for the faithful. Jesus wept as he foresaw the fate that was to befall Jerusalem should its inhabitants make that choice. They didn’t listen then, they probably won’t listen now.
A choice for Barrabus today (military dominance rather than suffering servanthood) will probably yield the same results once again don’t you think?
A big thank you for this post and all you are writing about. C-Z seems to me to be such a denial of how prophecy is responded to in Scripture. The issue is not so much what has it got right / wrong in its interpretation of prophecy, but what are the effects on people who espouse such a viewpoint, and what are the ramifications for the land that they love.
The Lion has overcome, but John’s eyes saw a Lamb slain.
Thank you too to Neil for your story. To love the Messiah is to love Jew and Gentile. A hot potato, Charles, but such a vital subject. I look forward to more.
Martin, you’re hinting at what I consider an over-looked guiding light, or a lost truth, of Christian faith, life, and engagement, which is that it is _not_ the narrative of the Lion but of the Lamb that John emphasizes at the end of it all. My more philosophical way of understanding this is that it is the principle of sacrifice not the power of self-interest that ultimately rules from the throne of the universe. Understanding ultimate rulership that way hasn’t provided me with a definitive eschatology, but it certainly helps me to see eschatologies that betray it!
Charles,
Thanks for this insightful article. Although here in the UK we don’t experience the kind of C-Z that you refer to in the US, it is still present. I travel frequently to the Holy Lands, and I’m always astonished by the scale of financial and political support given by C-Z’s for the state of Israel. Although I myself admire much about Israel, I find it very puzzling and even disturbing that such support should be given without at least equal consideration for the Christian communities who are suffering terribly at this time. Fifty years ago Bethlehem was 70% Christian, now it’s only 10%. The Palestinian and Arab Christians who could leave – have left. And those that remain throughout Israel and the Palestinian Territories are subject to social exclusion and horrendous, sustained persecution by both Muslim and Jewish extremists (the latter being heavily funded by Christians in the US). Although I appreciate your observation about the theology of Armageddon being at work, I’m not sure that many of the C-Z donor base of ordinary American Christians are aware of it in an explicit way. They are more likely supporting the state of Israel through a religious affinity (which the Bible can support). As such, if we are serious about pursuing real peace in the middle-east, and if we believe that Christians have a key role to play, then I think a lot more needs to be done to expose this dangerous theology and to raise awareness of the need for Christians everywhere (particularly in powerful and rich countries like the UK and the US) to help the persecuted church as an urgent priority.
Dave, yes, as you note “many of the C-Z donor base of ordinary American Christians are [not] aware of it in an explicit way.” The “it” being the “terribly disturbing militancy at work in the theology,” as I called it (in the original post). And of course you’re right, that “a lot more needs to be done to expose this dangerous theology and to raise awareness of the need for Christians everywhere … to help the persecuted church.” (Some things being done are a bit to shrill for my tastes.)
Perhaps education campaigns need to begin in churches, in which “ordinary” C-Z supporters in America (and elsewhere) can learn about the blowback their support has had (is having) for their brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East, especially in the Palestinian territory. A funded research project, leading to a major report widely circulated might be a good initiative to begin with.
Good to hear from you, Neil. Your experiences are insightful, given your background. This is a topic that bristles with serious implications. To note just one, your post, for instance, where your write that the C-Zs “passively cow tow to anything which promotes the political interests of Israel,” hints at another significant area of concern: what seems to be a double standard of justice applied by the C-Zs to the modern state of Israel. As I see it, they let the modern state completely off the hook when it comes to its politics.
That is, in the old-world Middle East, after the people of Israel became what we today would call a state, Yahweh never let the nation get away with enacting unjust policies, whether domestic or foreign (with neighboring states). The nation would be called to account when necessary, as even a cursory reading of the prophets indicates. What’s deeply troubling to me is that for the C-Zs, the modern state of Israel, evidently, can do no wrong, politically. Well, one never hears them mounting even the mildest critical analysis (never mind prophetic) of any of the modern state’s policies toward its neighbors, especially the Palestinians.
After 60 years of such silence from the C-Zs, what are we to conclude other than the fact that they consider the modern state of Israel incapable of enacting any unjust policies? Or to say it another way, that the modern state of Israel is perfectly righteous in all its dealing with all others? I see no indication in Scripture where any nation extant in this world ever gets a free pass like that. It is often Jewish analysts who mount the fairer assessments (Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim, Aaron David Miller, et al.)
If the C-Zs would revamp their foreign policy using a biblical wisdom-based approach, which at the very least would include the kind of impartial justice that would raise the Palestinian tragedy to a level playing field with Israel, their voice might then start to sound credible. As it is, they have nothing but war to augur for.
Great article, Charles. I totally agree. I have been accused of not loving my people by my refusal to embrace dispensational theology. One Jewish man told me that only by embracing dispensationalism can anyone actually say they love Israel.
You rightly point out the inconsistent nature of dispensational theology which is what fuels Christian Zionism. It is a crass futurism which can only be sustained by severing it from the rest of Scripture. By longing for world war, Christians who embrace this view ignore whole portions of Jesus’ teaching, such as the Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus taught that his disciples must reconcile with enemies and proactively seek peace. No doubt Christian Zionists will give mental assent to this and justify themselves by saying that they are simply believing what God has stated regarding world conflict (Armageddon). But in reality, they passively cow tow to anything which promotes the political interests of Israel in the hope that it might bring closer the final world conflict between Israel and the rest of the nations.
Reconciliation and peace lie at the heart of the Gospel. As a Jew, I recently approached a pastor from Jordan requesting that I might come and speak at a conference there. While he was appreciative of my willingness, he was candid in telling me that not a few of the ministers there would be troubled by my presence. This only increased my desire to go and be an agent of reconciliation. I had no desire to appear in Jordan to tell them that their attitude towards Israel was wrong. I see my role there having nothing to do with politics, but with actively demonstrating that the peace Jesus obtained through his death and resurrection presses us to make peace with those who were former enemies.
Of course, Christians cannot ignore political realities. Yet that is exactly what Christian Zionism does by blindly endorsing any political move Israel makes. And in doing so, it ignores the things that Paul says about Jewish unbelief. I once approached Benjamin Netanyahu after he spoke at a university and told him that I was a Jew who had found his Messiah, Yeshua. Without hesitation he looked at me and said, “You are a traitor and are not welcome in Israel.” This demonstrates clearly where he stands. But Christian Zionism ignores such antichristian realities, focusing instead on God’s future for the nation. This is where it departs from Scripture.