Gerald R. McDermott - The New Christian Zionism: Fresh Perspectives on Israel and the Land

I am most appreciative of my wife, Jean, who provides all kinds of support and ideas. I am also grateful to Andy Le Peau, who was willing to entertain and support this sensitive proposal. Drew Blankman has been encouraging, speedy and helpful throughout the editing process. Thanks to Robert Nicholson and Mark Tooley for helping organize this project, and to Robert Bennewho has been a wise adviser throughout. Finally, I am grateful to Yannick Christos-Wahab who prepared the Scripture index.

Gerald R. McDermott

M ost scholars have assumed that all Christian Zionism is an outgrowth of premillennial dispensationalist theology. Originating in the nineteenth century, this school of thought became popular because it was taught in the notes of the Scofield version of the King James Bible and then developed by Hal Lindseys The Late Great Planet Earth and the best-selling Left Behind series.

The traditional dispensationalist version of Christian Zionism puts Israel and the church on two different tracks, neither of which runs at the same time. This version is attached to an elaborate schedule of end-time events dominated by the great tribulation and a rapture of the church that leaves Jews and the rest of the world behind.

The Christian Zionism that this book proposes is not connected to the dispensationalism described in the previous paragraph. It looks to a long history of Christian Zionists who lived long before the rise of dispensationalism and to other thinkers in the last two centuries who have had nothing to do with dispensationalismtheologians such as Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert Jenson and the Catholic Old Testament scholar Gary Anderson, as well as President Harry Truman. More on this in the first chapter.

So what do the scholars and experts in this book mean by the New Christian Zionism? The best answer to this question, we think, is the rest of the book. This introduction will telegraph, as it were, the basic implications of what we mean by this term. The first is that the people and land of Israel are central to the story We believe that the Bible claims that God saves the world through Israel and the perfect Israelite; thus the Bible is incoherent and salvation impossible without Israel. We propose that the history of salvation is ongoing: the people of Israel and their land continue to have theological significance. I will return to Israel and salvation in the next section of this introduction.

We are also convinced that the return of Jews from all over the world to their land, and their efforts to establish a nation-state after two millennia of being separated from controlling the land, is part of the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Further, we believe that Jews need and deserve a homeland in Israelnot to displace others but to accept and develop what the family of nationsthe United Nationsratified in 1948. We would add that this startling event climaxed a history of continual Jewish presence in the land going back at least three thousand years.

We should explain what we do not mean by the New Christian Zionism. We do not mean that the state of Israel is a perfect country. Or that it should not be criticized for its failures. Or that it is necessarily the last Jewish state we will see before the end of days. Or that we know the particular timetable or political schema that will come before or in the final days.

But we do know that the state of Israel, which includes more than two million non-Jews, is what protects the people of Israel. Support for this state and its people is eroding all over the world. Israel lies in a region of movements and governments bent on its destruction. Mainline Protestants have withdrawn their support. Many evangelicals are now starting to withdraw their support, using the same faulty arguments proffered by the Protestant mainline. Those arguments will be reviewed in chapter seven. For these and other reasons, it is time for Christians, not just Jews, to make a case for the Jewish people and their land.

The goal of this book, however, is not simply to make a prudential argument that the state of Israel is needed to provide a shelter for its covenant people. Some of the chapters that follow will make some of those arguments, and some of them need to be made, now more than ever. For example, Shadi Khalloul, a leader of the Aramean community in Israel, argues that the rights of his non-Jewish community and other minority communities will be protected only in the Jewish state. Attorney Robert Nicholson probes and refutes the charge that Israel violates international law. Lutheran ethicist Robert Benne considers the political ethics of Zionism by revisiting the work of Reinhold Niebuhr. Historian Mark Tooley weighs the arguments made by mainline Protestant churches against Israel.

But the purpose of these prudential argumentspolitical and legal and moralis to undergird a new theological argument for the twenty-first century. So the center of this book is made up of chapters three through six, which focus first on theological history and biblical hermeneutics and then on authors of the New Testament. The burden of these chapters is to show theologically that the people of Israel continue to be significant for the history of redemption and that the land of Israel, which is at the heart of the covenantal promises, continues to be important to Gods providential purposes.

This introduction will do two things to clarify further what the New Christian Zionism means. First, I explain here what the New Christian Zionism is not. It is neither dispensationalism nor mere nationalism, nor land theft, nor merely Christian eschatology, nor theocracy. Then I will outline the shape of our argument as it proceeds through the remaining chapters.