Why I Am Not a Christian Zionist

January 17, 2023

By Colin Chapman

After I was ordained in the Episcopal Church in Scotland, I began my career as a pastor in a church in Edinburgh. Eighteen years of my life since then have been in the Middle East, where I worked with the Church Mission Society - mostly in Cairo, Egypt, and Beirut, Lebanon.

My first trip to the region came in 1960, when I was simply a tourist. I spent a month in Jordan (which at that time included the West Bank) and a month in Israel. At that time, I had no special sympathies either for the Jews or the Arabs, and I was blissfully unaware of the theological controversies about the fulfillment of prophecy related to the Jewish people and the Holy Land.

While I was working in Egypt, it was through Anne, a mission-partner nurse in Jordan, who later became my wife, that I began to understand what the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was all about. She had lived through “Black September,” the civil war between the Jordanian government and the Palestinians in 1970 – a conflict that had started with the exodus of around 750,000 Palestinians from Israel at the time when the state was created in 1948.

Anne and I moved to Beirut, Lebanon, with two young children in September 1975, where I was working with the Lebanon InterVarsity Fellowship and the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. We arrived just six months after the civil war had begun. It wasn’t long before my Lebanese friends helped me to understand that the conflict had been triggered by the presence of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who had upset the balance between the Muslim and Christian communities. 

I therefore set about reading everything I could find about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the big questions about biblical interpretation. The result of my study was the book Whose Promised Land?, published in 1984. Here I brought together a review of the history of the conflict and the way the Bible has been used to interpret the conflict. My understanding of the history, combined with my study of scripture, convinced me that the modern Israel should not be seen by Christians as a fulfillment of biblical promises and prophecies.

During a second period in Beirut from 1999 to 2003 I was teaching Islamic Studies at the Near East School of Theology, and once again found myself trying to understand the “game of nations” that had been playing out in the region over many decades. And my study of Islam persuaded me that the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not Islam, as many Christians believe, but dispossession – Palestinians gradually being dispossessed of their land from the 1880s onwards through the settler-colonialist Zionist movement.

After the fourth edition of Whose Promised Land? was published in 2015, I turned my attention to the book of Ezekiel, because on several visits to Israel over the years I had met Messianic Jews who were convinced that Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones was looking forward to the creation of modern Israel. My interest in this interpretation of Ezekiel spilled over into a study of Zechariah, another book which many Christian Zionists believe is looking forward to a restored Jewish state in the land. My latest book, therefore, Christian Zionism and the Restoration of Israel:How Should We Interpret the Scriptures?, explores all the basic texts that form the biblical basis of Christian Zionism, together with and detailed study of how Ezekiel and Zechariah are interpreted by New Testament writers.

Today, after years of dialogue with Christian Zionists, I still find the biblical basis for their beliefs very weak. I’ve met dozens of Christians Zionists who have changed their minds and no longer believe that the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of prophecy. What has changed their minds is either (a) studying the history of the conflict, or (b) seeing for themselves what has been happening on the ground there for 75 years, or (c) finding a more convincing way of interpreting the biblical story – or a combination of all three.

I’m encouraged by the fact that more and more young people in the West are passionate about justice and see this conflict primarily through that lens. I’m encouraged also by the number of organizations, both Christian and secular, such as Sabeel-Kairos, Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), Embrace the Middle East, the Balfour Project, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), and One Democratic State (ODS), B’Tselem and Amnesty International, which are informing people about what is actually happening on the ground in Israel-Palestine. I’m encouraged by organizations like Musalaha that brings Jews and Arabs together to meet face to face and hear each other’s stories, demonstrating what real reconciliation might look like.

“Aren’t you ever tempted to give up? Isn’t it pointless to engage in advocacy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Aren’t you fighting a losing battle?” This was a question put to me on a visit to the US some years ago by an Egyptian-American friend.

If I’m answering that question today, there are several things keep me going: my engagement with these issues for over sixty years; my experience of living in different countries in the Middle East for eighteen years; my determination to read history and biblical interpretation side by side; my awareness of what is actually happening on the ground in Israel and the Occupied Territories at the present time; and my interaction with Christian Zionists of many kinds. But my biggest reason for not giving up hope is that, if there is a holy and loving God who is the lord of history, then he must be working out his purposes in Israel-Palestine - both in judgment and redemption.  

So when I pray for Israel-Palestine today, these are some of my prayers:

• Lord, please open the eyes of politicians all over the world –and especially in the West - and enable them to see what’s happening on the ground in Israel-Palestine and to understand the dangerous direction in which things are moving.

• Lord, strengthen the hands of Jews and Palestinian Arabs who really believe in the possibility of working towards a peaceful and just co-existence.

• Lord, please bless the work of the United Nations and all the non-profit organizations working to relieve acute human need in Israel-Palestine and the Middle East.

• Lord, at a time when there are so many other big issues facing us in the world, please may we remember the continuing conflict in Israel/Palestine and engage in serious and respectful dialogue with each other about these issues.

• Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, in Israel-Palestine as it is in heaven …

Colin Chapman is the author of many best-selling books on Israel/Palestine, including Whose Promised Land? (current edition: 2015) and Whose Holy City? Jerusalem and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2004). His most recent book is Christian Zionism and the Restoration of Israel: How Should We Interpret the Scriptures? (Wipf & Stock, 2021). He has also written about Christian responses to Islam in Cross and Crescent: Responding to the Challenges of Islam (2007). He is now enjoying retirement in England.