Why I Am Not a Christian Zionist
September 30, 2021
By Fred Martin
One day in the mid-1960s, I was looking for something to read. For no particular reason I picked a novel off my parents’ bookshelf. It was Leon Uris’s bestseller, Exodus. Written in 1958, it told the story of the founding of the modern nation of Israel. I found myself captivated by the novel and also by Israel itself. How astounding that a nation called Israel had come back into existence after an absence of 2000 years!
A few years later a family friend invited me to attend a Bible class. I attended with some reluctance, but much to my own amazement I came to faith in Jesus Christ during that two-week class. In my new-found excitement about God, I devoured all the books that I could get my hands in order to grow in my faith. One of those books was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. Lindsey explained how God’s prophets in the Old Testament had predicted the restoration of the Jews to their homeland. He claimed that the establishment of Israel in 1948 was a miraculous fulfillment of God’s ancient prophecies. The capture of Jerusalem in 1967 was another sign from God that the end-times were coming soon.
In 1975 I started work on my Master of Divinity degree at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I do not recall any particular stress on supporting modern Israel, but neither do I remember any serious questioning of the views of prophecy teachers such as Lindsey. The tenets of Christian Zionism were like the air evangelical Christians breathed; they were simply assumed without any examination or discussion. The Bible taught that God would return the Jews to their ancient homeland, and all Christians should provide unquestioning and unconditional support for them. In the early 1970s I did not know of any evangelical Christian who thought otherwise.
In 1978, I became the pastor of an Evangelical Free Church in northern Minnesota, and in 1985 the church granted me a sabbatical so that I could attend the Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem for a class in historical geography. On one of the class’s field trips, we ate our box lunches in a rest area overlooking the Sharon Plain and the Mediterranean Sea. While we ate, one person mentioned what a scenic spot it was. In response, our teacher made a brief comment. She told us that prior to 1948 and the founding of the modern nation of Israel that rest area had been the site of an Arab village. It was just a brief comment. She didn’t elaborate on it, but it proved to be a turning point for me. Had the Israelis really destroyed an Arab village and displaced all of its residents?
I started reading everything that I could find so that I could learn about what had actually taken place in the Middle East. I read authors who came from the Christian Zionist perspective, but I also discovered writers who questioned the assumptions of Christian Zionism. Colin Chapman’s Whose Promised Land? was particularly eye-opening and challenging. In 2012 I attended the Christ at the Checkpoint Conference in Bethlehem and listened to Palestinian Christians describe their experiences. After the conference I spent a few days with Palestinians in East Jerusalem and Ramallah who further opened my eyes to the realities of Palestinian life. During an unforgettable visit to Hebron, I saw how oppressive the Israeli occupation of the West Bank could be.
Christian Zionism is historically misleading, but I’ve also learned that it is theologically incorrect. American Christians today usually rely on prophecy teachers to interpret the words of the Old Testament prophets. Those teachers ignore the prophets’ call for the people of God to return to Him and to repent of their selfishness, greed, and injustice. In addition, Christians in every generation over the last 2000 years have made predictions that have proven to be wrong. When Time Shall Be No More by Paul Boyer documents how pervasive and obsessive such fascination with prophecy has been in American culture. The mistakes of the past should caution contemporary Christians from making confident theological pronouncements about God’s plans for modern Israel.
It’s been said that a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth. Unfortunately, that summarizes the knowledge of most American evangelicals when it comes to the Middle East. Anti-Semitism was and still is horrendous, and the Holocaust cannot be denied. But that’s just half the truth. The expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 Nakba is also real. Home demolition, settler violence, administrative detention, the creeping annexation of the West Bank, and the virtual imprisonment of the people of Gaza are ongoing injustices practiced by Israel that must be acknowledged and addressed. Furthermore, the role of the United States in giving unqualified support to Israel’s policies and practices in spite of Israel’s refusal to follow international law must be reckoned with in order to grasp the complete untruth of Christian Zionism.
Fred Martin graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University with his B.A degree. He received both his Master of Divinity and Doctor of Divinity degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Ordained by the Evangelical Free Church of America, he served as pastor of a church in northern Minnesota for 36 years. He now resides in Eugene, Oregon. He is the author of “American Evangelicals & Modern Israel: A Plea for Tough Love.”