Why I Am Not a Christian Zionist
May 28, 2021
By Bruce N. Fisk
This could go in a few directions. I could describe my exposure in highschool, and rejection in college, of apocalyptic, End Times Dispensationalism, the mother of modern American Christian Zionism. Or I could talk about my moral awakening during Holy Land adventures to the abuses of the Israeli Occupation, and to the complicity of my North American Evangelical kinfolk in (and silence about) the ongoing injustice inflicted on Palestinian Christians and Muslims, some of whom are dear friends. Or I could point to evidence in the New Testament that the earliest Christians understood that the ancient promises made to Abraham and Israel were wondrously fulfilled in Jesus and extended to his circle of disciples.
But rather than offering autobiography, or naming injustices-on-the-ground, or quoting favorite Bible verses—all of which are relevant—let me instead name two further reasons why I push away from Christian Zionism: (1) the lively diversity of voices within Scripture and (2) the scandal of exceptionalism.
Regarding Scripture: how is it that well-intentioned Christian Zionists and non-Zionist Christians alike can cite verses to support their opposite claims? Could it be that various New Testament authors, rereading their sacred texts, found different ways to explain Jewish rejection of her promised Messiah and different ways to describe the new humanity that God is redeeming in Christ? Could it be that the New Testament displays a diversity of perspectives on ethnic Israel’s future and on the Jews’ relationship to the Land?
We read, on the one hand, of a future banquet hosted by the patriarchs (Matt 8, Luke 13), of twelve enthroned apostles ruling the twelve tribes (Matt 19, Luke 22), and of a kingdom restored to Israel (Acts 1). But we also read that Jesus is the destroyed and restored Temple (John 2), that worship will no longer be centered in Jerusalem (John 4), indeed that “Jerusalem” has become a people (Heb 12, Rev 21), and that Abraham’s heirs are defined by loyalty to Jesus, not lineal descent (Gal 3).
If Scripture has a trajectory, it seems (to me) to track away from ethnic and territorial concerns, even if we detect Jewish particularity and territorial aspirations living on in the imaginations of some New Testament authors—powerful testimony no doubt to the enduring theo-political vision of Israel’s prophets.
We should not be surprised if the earliest Christians found different ways to recount the grand story of God redeeming the nations. Do we not see similar variety as they reflected on other weighty matters—say, on gender or slavery or violence or election, or even Jesus’ relationship to the Father? Perhaps our fear of biblical “contradictions” or our zeal for certitude has blinded us to the Bible’s lively, even raucous diversity.
Our task as Christian interpreters is not to amplify our favorite bits and ignore the rest, but to listen closely to the whole, holy conversation. That would surely lead us to cherish Israel’s story, to love the Jewish people, and to grieve Christian antisemitism. But it would not lead us, as far as I can tell, to cheerlead Zionism, a zero-sum nationalist movement that dispossesses and marginalizes non-Jews in the Land.
A second reason I push away from Christian Zionism, full disclosure, is my aversion to exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, also known as Christian Nationalism, is surging these days, alongside its ideological cousin, Christian Zionism. If Christian Nationalists contend that America has always been, and must remain, distinctively Christian, Christian Zionists contend that the Holy Land has always been, and must remain, distinctively Jewish. If Christian Nationalists see divine favor resting upon modern America, Christian Zionists insist that ancient Israel’s God-given privileges apply fully to the modern nation-state of Israel.
Those who claim exceptional status, whether for Christian America or Jewish Israel, affirm perhaps unwittingly a dark corollary: that other groups, say, Mexicans or Muslims or Palestinians turn out to be subordinate outsiders whose claims and traditions merit little or no moral consideration.
Such is the situation in the Holy Land today, where Israeli law and practice privilege Jews and marginalize Palestinians. Widely reported recently, Palestinian dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighborhood of East Jerusalem, is but one example of this legal inequality, as the Israeli Human Rights group B’tselem reported in 2019:
“various bodies representing the settlers seek to evict Palestinians from their homes by applying the Israeli law which enables Jews to claim ownership of property they or other Jews were in possession of prior to 1948. The state also enacted a law that bars Palestinians from taking such action with regard to property they owned before 1948.”
Have any of my Christian Zionist sisters and brothers objected publicly to such glaring asymmetry and state-supported discrimination? (Admitting the obvious, that “Israel isn’t perfect,” doesn’t count.) Might their collective silence reflect a binary, exclusionary worldview that finds Jews in Israel, like Christians in America, with God on their side?
In my view, theologies of privilege are not merely presumptuous. They are dangerous. If Christian Zionists wish to invoke Genesis 12:3 or Exodus 19:5-6 or Isaiah 44:1 or Romans 11:1 and the like, in order to defend divinely-ordained, concentric circles of chosenness, I shall return the favor by quoting verses that celebrate God’s particular love for the marginal, the meek, the outcast, the poor, the Canaanite. If Dietrich Bonhoeffer called us to view the world from below and to put ourselves in the place of the vulnerable, I would invite us to read the Bible from below, and thus to grieve with those who grieve, to honor victims of dispossession, and to resist theologies of privilege and exceptionalism.
Bruce N. Fisk (Ph.D., Duke) is a Senior Research Fellow with the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East. He taught New Testament at Westmont College (California) for almost 20 years.