At a seminar held at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in November 2002, some two dozen pastors, academics, journalists, and members of the public-policy community heard an abridged form of the paper below and then engaged in a discussion with the author. Gerald McDermott is professor of religion at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. He is the author of three books on Jonathan Edwards and of several other books, including Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? (InterVarsity, 2000). Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, gave a brief response to the paper, and then he and other participants joined in a lively conversation with Dr. McDermott, moderated by Center vice president Michael Cromartie. Notes for the paper appear at the end of this "Center Conversation." The "Evangelicals and Israel" seminar was part of the Center’s Evangelicals in Civic Life project, which is made possible by a generous grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The Tension Between Land and Peace: Evangelical Christians, Israel, and the Jews

For understandable reasons, Jews have long been wary of evangelicals. In a tape of a 1972 conversation that was made public in 2002, Billy Graham told Richard Nixon that Jews had a “stranglehold” on the American media and that if the stranglehold was not broken, “this country’s going down the drain.”¹ This fueled the fears of many Jews that even the pro-Zionist sentiments of evangelicals masked an inner hostility.

Jews also remember the recent Southern Baptist evangelistic campaign targeting Jews, thereby making the point that the Jewish religion itself was inadequate. As Yaakov Ariel has put it, while evangelical and fundamentalist missionaries to Jews have shown much good will and appreciation for Jews and their cultural heritage, they have not believed that the Jewish religion could “provide its adherents with spiritual comfort, moral guidelines, and, most important of all, salvation.”²

Most Jews, then, are not surprised to learn that evangelicals think Judaism is only a stepping stone to something else. But they may be surprised to discover the role that evangelicals have played in the history of modern Israel. Consider the following vignettes:

• Evangelical William Hechler was Theodor Herzl’s “first . . . most constant and most indefatigable . . . follower.”³ Hechler helped open doors to Europe’s palaces and corporate boardrooms for Herzl and helped Herzl formulate his vision for a Jewish state. Interestingly, in the decade before his death in 1931, Hechler repeatedly warned his Jewish friends of an impending massacre of Jews in Europe that would make the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition look like “child’s play.”⁴ But Hechler’s warnings were dismissed by all who heard them.
• President Harry Truman, an active Baptist with a conservative approach to the Bible and its prophecy about Israel, defied the State Department and nearly all his advisors both when he supported the U.S.-led United Nations resolution to establish the state of Israel in 1948, and when he declared U.S. recognition of the fledgling state. When he was introduced at the Jewish Theological Seminary as “the man who helped create the state of Israel,” Truman protested, “What do you mean ‘helped to create’?! I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!”⁵
• Jimmy Carter, a self-declared evangelical, was the architect of the 1978 Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel.
• When Benjamin Netanyahu came to Washington in January 1998 to discuss Israel’s stalled withdrawal from parts of the West Bank under the Oslo Accords, he was feted at a rally organized by Voices United for Israel, an organization of conservative Christians and Jews. His advisor David Bar-Illan told journalist Gershom Gorenberg that “the applause Netanyahu received at the Washington rally, and when he spoke to the [evangelical] Christian Embassy’s Tabernacles gatherings, exceeded any reception he got from his own Likud party.”⁶
• In April 2002, a major pro-Israel rally in Washington, D.C., featured Janet Parshall, a prominent evangelical talk-show host. That same month evangelical leader Gary Bauer defended Israel against Palestinian spokesmen in several TV debates. Two Republican lawmakers linked to conservative Christians, Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell and Texas congressman Dick Armey, collaborated with Jewish Democratic colleagues on several congressional resolutions supporting Israel and castigating Yasser Arafat. In May 2002, seven prominent conservative Christians, among them leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention and the National Association of Evangelicals, implored President Bush to “vigorously” condemn anti-Semitism. They said this was “keeping faith with our own virtues.”⁷

 In what follows, I will address four main points. First, I will define what I mean by “evangelical”—both historically and theologically—and distinguish evangelicals from fundamentalists. Second, I will discuss evangelicals’ historical relationship to Zionism and the modern state of Israel. Third, I will examine how evangelicals have approached the question of land theologically. Finally, I will look at evangelicals and peace, commenting on Israeli and Palestinian claims for justice.

WHAT IS AN EVANGELICAL?

The word “evangelical” is derived from the Greek noun euangelion, which means “gospel” or “good news.”⁸ An “evangelist” is someone who proclaims the “good news” that Christ died for our sins. There are signs of what could be called an evangelical spirit throughout church history, from the early church and its fathers, through Augustine, Ambrose, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and Pascal, to the Reformation precursors Wycliffe, Hus, and Savonarola.⁹ But the word was first used of Catholic writers who early in the sixteenth century tried to revert to beliefs and practices more biblical than those current in the late medieval church. Then at the Reformation the name “evangelical” was given to Lutherans who focused on the doctrine of justification by grace through faith in Christ, and who sought to renew the church according to what they found in Scripture.¹⁰

The more recent roots of today’s evangelical movement lie in the revivals on both sides of the Atlantic during the 1730s and 1740s led by Jonathan Edwards, John Wesley, and George Whitefield. These evangelists highlighted the authority of Scripture, the work of Christ in making salvation possible, and the “new birth.” This movement was shaped by the Puritan legacy of preaching and conversion, but stressed more emphatically the sense of assurance of salvation. It was also molded in part by Pietism, which emphasized warmth of feeling, sometimes at the expense of doctrine. And it was influenced by Enlightenment modes of thinking, which appealed to the authority of John Locke and used his method of testing opinions by experience.

These Enlightenment influences were strengthened in the nineteenth century during the high tide of commonsense philosophy, which proclaimed the value of intuition. While Edwards had insisted that man with his fallen reason can never know the majesty of God, Charles Hodge suggested that to know the words of Scripture was to know the realities to which the words pointed.¹¹ In the twentieth century and beyond, Carl F. H. Henry has put more emphasis on the intellectual principles derivable from Scripture than on the biblical narratives, a pattern that Hans Frei has identified as characteristic of the Enlightenment mentality.¹²

Today’s evangelicalism emerged as a self-conscious reaction against fundamentalism, which began shortly after 1910 with a series of pamphlets making reasoned arguments against Protestant liberalism but then degenerated into a reactionary “oppositionalism” that lost its link with the historic creeds of the church and tended to ignore the social demands of the gospel. One scholar has described fundamentalism as “too otherworldly, anti-intellectual,” legalistic, moralistic, and anti-ecumenical.¹³

The deliberate use of the term “evangelical” in this century dates to 1942 and the formation of the National Association of Evangelicals, in a careful attempt to distinguish evangelicalism from fundamentalism. In contrast to the fundamentalist separation from modern culture, the “new evangelicals” (led by E. J. Carnell, Harold Ockenga, Carl Henry, and Billy Graham) were committed to engaging with culture in an attempt to transform it through the gospel.¹⁴

In the half-century since, evangelicals have become prominent players on the American scene.¹⁵ They have gained political clout and numerical strength. Recent studies suggest that “evangelicals now constitute the largest and most active component of religious life in America.” A 1992 survey identified 25.7 percent of the population as “white evangelicals” and another 7.8 percent as “black Protestants,” most of whom could be classified as evangelicals.¹⁶ Evangelical theology has matured even while many evangelicals have concentrated on peripheral matters (such as the “rapture” and other questionable eschatological details) and have equated some logical conclusions of dogma (such as particular formulations of biblical inerrancy, “double predestination,” and the “second blessing”) with dogma itself.

Although Karl Barth is not an evangelical in the American or British sense of the word, his definition of the term aptly summarizes what I consider to be the best work in evangelical theology today: “Evangelical means informed by the gospel of Jesus Christ, as heard afresh in the 16thcentury Reformation by a direct return to Holy Scripture.”¹⁷ Alister McGrath’s six “fundamental convictions” seem to capture the most important distinctives of evangelical theology:

(1) The supreme authority of Scripture as a source of knowledge of God and a guide to Christian living. (2) The majesty of Jesus Christ, both as incarnate God and Lord and as the Savior of sinful humanity. (3) The lordship of the Holy Spirit. (4) The need for personal conversion. (5) The priority of evangelism for both individual Christians and the church as a whole. (6) The importance of the Christian community for spiritual nourishment, fellowship, and growth.¹⁸

These six distinctives are shared by most other Christians. What makes this list “evangelical,” however, is the degree of emphasis that evangelicals place on the six marks, and the forms the marks take. For example, all Christians say evangelism is important at one level or another, but not all define the evangelistic message in the Christocentric terms used by evangelicals. Some Christians regard social service as evangelism. Some do not consider “conversion” to faith in Christ to be necessary. Nor do all regard evangelism with the same urgency. When Billy Graham conducted his first crusade in New York City, leaders of some Protestant churches ridiculed his efforts— not only because he did not emphasize structural social reform, but also because they regarded personal evangelism as theologically wrong-headed.¹⁹ Now some of those same churches speak of personal evangelism as essential to the growth of the church in the world, but they send out fewer missionaries and do less to train their members to evangelize than their evangelical counterparts typically do.

Evangelicalism is often confused with fundamentalism, so I will also identify points at which these two approaches diverge. As is always true of generalizations, there will be plenty of exceptions to these. They are meant to indicate tendencies or directions in which members of these two constituencies move; there may be no one person who fits either type perfectly.²⁰

1. Interpretation of Scripture. Fundamentalists tend to read Scripture literally, while evangelicals tend to look more carefully at genre and literary and historical context.²¹ Another way of saying this is that fundamentalists tend to assume that the meaning of Scripture is obvious from a single reading, while evangelicals want to talk about layers of meaning. For example, more fundamentalists than evangelicals will understand the first three chapters of Genesis to contain scientific statements about beginnings; evangelicals will focus more on the theological character of those stories—understanding that the author/editor was more interested in showing that the earth has a Creator, for example, than in explaining precisely how the earth was created.

2. Culture. Fundamentalists question the value of human culture that is not created by Christians or related to the Bible, whereas evangelicals see God’s “common grace” working in and through all human culture. For instance, evangelicals would say that while Mozart probably was not an orthodox Christian and quite possibly was a moral failure as a human being, his music is a priceless gift of God. Like all other human productions, culture is tainted by sin. It nevertheless can reflect God’s glory. f

3. Social action. There was a time when fundamentalists saw efforts to help the poor as a sign of liberal theology, because proponents of the “social gospel” during the modernist controversy of the 1920s were theological liberals.²² Until recently, many fundamentalists viewed Christian social action as limited to struggles for religious freedom and against abortion. Evangelicals have more openly declared that the gospel also calls Christians to fight racism, sexism, and poverty.²³

4. Separatism. For many decades in this century, fundamentalists preached that true believers should separate themselves from liberal Christians and even from conservatives who had fellowship with liberals. This is why some fundamentalists refuse to support Billy Graham: Graham asks for help from mainline Protestant and Catholic churches, and sends converts back to these churches for further nurture. Evangelical theology puts more emphasis on engagement with culture with the aim of transforming it, and on working with other Christians toward common religious and social goals.

5. Dialogue with liberals. Fundamentalists have tended in the past to believe that liberal Christians (that is, those who do not accept such doctrines as the bodily resurrection of Jesus, man’s sinful nature, the efficacy of Jesus’ atonement for man’s sins, and biblical inerrancy strictly interpreted) were Christian in name only; there was nothing to learn from them, and there was no use trying to talk to them. The evangelical approach is to talk with more liberal Christians in an effort to persuade and perhaps even learn.²⁴

6. The nature of Christian faith. Most fundamentalists preach salvation by grace; yet they focus a lot on rules and restrictions and may give the impression that the heart of the Christian faith is a set of laws governing outward behavior. While that danger is present in evangelical churches as well, evangelical theology focuses more on the person and work of Christ as the heart of the Christian faith.

7. Factiousness. Many evangelical groups have fractured and divided over issues that later generations see as minor. But the tendency seems worse among fundamentalists. Differences of doctrine, often on rather minor issues, are considered important enough to warrant starting a new congregation or even denomination. Because evangelical theology makes more of the distinction between essentials and non-essentials, evangelicals are more willing to remain in mainline Protestant churches.

8. Israel. Fundamentalists and evangelicals agree that the biblical promises relating to the Jews are connected with modern-day Jews and the land of Israel. But evangelicals more than fundamentalists question the justice of the modern state of Israel, and some make a theological argument based on the conditions attached to the biblical promises. These promises and their conditions will be the subjects of the last two sections of this paper.

EVANGELICALS AND ISRAEL

Eighteenth-century evangelicals inherited from their Puritan forebears an interest in the land and people of Israel as they related to the end-time. Increase Mather and other American Puritans in the seventeenth century, for example, had predicted that Israel would be restored politically and spiritually before the Millennium, the thousand year reign of Christ after his return to earth. Cotton Mather throughout his life yearned for the restoration of the Jews.²⁵ So when Jonathan Edwards (1703–58) defended Judaism against the deists, he was drawing out lines started by others.

For the first time since Marcion (died c. 160), Jews in the eighteenth century were regarded as religiously unrelated to Christians. Deists launched the attack, charging that Judaism was essentially pagan, unspiritual, unnecessary to Christianity, and in fact the source of all that was wrong with traditional Christianity.²⁶ Edwards argued strenuously against this deist severing of the religious link between Jews and Christians by positing one covenant (between God and mankind) binding the two religions. The Old Testament and New Testament covenants, he asserted, are different but integrally related modes of a single plan of redemption. The Old Testament covenant was the “cortex” that envelops the “medulla” of the gospel, the covenant of grace.

For Edwards, then, the two covenants were two phases of the same covenant. As he put it early in his career, “The gospel was preached to the Jews under a veil.”²⁷ The process of conversion was the same for Jews in the Old Testament as for Christians in the New: they were “convinced so much of their wickedness that they trusted to nothing but the mere mercy of God.” This included all those who lived since “the beginning of the world.” Even the rate of conversion was the same, Edwards said: there were wicked and godly then, and conversions were just as frequent then as in the current day (Misc. 39). Christ saved the Old Testament saints just as he saved their cohorts in the New (Misc. 1283), and they believed in Christ, but under the name “angel of the Lord” or “messenger of the covenant” (Controversies Notebook, 213). In fact, Christ appeared to Old Testament Jews: Moses saw his back on Mount Sinai, and Christ appeared in human form to the seventy elders (Exod. 24:9–11) as well as to Joshua, Gideon, and Manoah (HWR, 197). For that matter, every time God was said to have manifested himself to human beings in a voice or otherwise tangible form, it was through the second person of the Trinity (HWR, 131).

Although the two covenants had two federal heads, Adam and Christ, and one was a “dead” way but the other “living” (Misc. 35), “in strictness of speech” they were not two but one, said Edwards. For they shared the same Mediator, Christ (Misc. 875), the same salvation, and the same medium of salvation: the incarnation, suffering, righteousness, and intercession of Christ. Under both covenants, the Holy Spirit applied Christ’s redemption, and the method of obtaining salvation was the same—faith and repentance.The external means (Scripture, and ordinances such as prayer and praise, sabbath and sacraments) were not different. Nor were the benefits and future blessings. For both, the condition was faith in the Son of God as Mediator, expressed with repentance and humility (Misc. 1353). This is why all parts of the Old Testament point to the future coming of Christ (HWR, 283). In sum, the religion of the church of Israel is “essentially the same religion with that of the Christian church” (HWR, 443).

Edwards also determined that the Jews would return to their homeland. This would happen, he reasoned, because the prophecies of land being given to them had been only partially fulfilled. It was also necessary for God to make them a “visible monument” of his grace and power. Canaan once again would be a spiritual center of the world. Although Israel would again be a distinct nation, Christians would have free access to Jerusalem because Jews would look on Christians as their brethren.²⁸

According to Arthur Hertzberg, this American linkage of Jewish conversion with the Millennium was why “American intellectual anti-Semitism never became as virulent as its counterparts in Europe.”²⁹ Christians in Europe believed the End was in the indefinite future. But to American Christians, the End seemed near, and Jews were needed here and now to help usher in the return of Christ; so the Jewish question moved “to center stage.”³⁰

If Edwards was among those Americans who did not manifest an anti-Semitism as virulent as some European strains, he was nonetheless not particularly friendly to the Judaism of his day. He could never accept it on its own terms but always demanded that it be swallowed up by the religion to which it gave birth. With arrogance he judged Jews to be proud, assuming that their reluctance to convert was obstinate refusal of the obvious.

Yet Edwards declined the invitation of the intellectual elites to minimize Christianity’s debt to Judaism. If Christianity was the logical end of Judaism, its meaning could be found only through Judaism. The antitype (one that is foreshadowed by an earlier figure or type) was to be fully understood only by reference to its type. Hence tension in the Jewish-Christian relationship was a family quarrel. Edwards may have exercised hubris by claiming that his Jewish brothers and sisters were less favored by their common Father, and indeed had been disowned. But he knew they would someday be reconciled to their divine Parent and would regain their status as children in full favor.

No evangelical thinker would ever again approach Edwards for subtlety and theological vision. But evangelicals in the nineteenth century continued to look for a role for Jews to play in the end-time drama of redemption. Yaakov Ariel observes that these evangelicals were unusual: seldom had a large group assigned so much importance to Jews and their return to the land.³¹ In no other case had one religious community claimed for another community a special relationship with God. And nowhere else had Christian missionaries found merit in the religion whose members they were trying to convert, or found authority in their scriptures.³²

Paul Merkley reports that in the quarter century that led to the creation of Israel in 1947–48, “the sturdiest champions of the restoration of the Jews to Israel were the evangelicals and fundamentalists. In the years when Britain was turning away from her commitments under the Balfour Declaration, and was supported in so doing by mainstream Christianity, evangelicals sustained the Zionist cause.”³³ And, according to David Rausch, “the [evangelical] movement on the whole recognized at an early date that the Holocaust was impending and believed that six million Jews had been murdered at a time when most liberal Christians were denouncing ‘Jewish atrocity propaganda.’”³⁴

When Israel was founded in 1948 and then prevailed through the ensuing war to establish its independence, evangelicals and fundamentalists were ecstatic, seeing these events as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Mainline Protestants and Roman Catholics, however, “shifted into the ranks of those denouncing the new state.”³⁵ While evangelicals in the ensuing years preferred to accentuate the positive as Israel consolidated her strength, liberals tended to “dwell on the political embarrassments and the scandals and agonize about the many divisions” among Jews in Israel.³⁶

The June 1967 war was a watershed in Christian attitudes toward Israel. Evangelicals saw this once again as confirmation that Jews and Israel still had a role to play in God’s ordering of history. From this point on, Merkley reports, Christian Zionists were generally (but not exclusively) theological conservatives while Christian anti- Zionists were generally (but not exclusively) theological liberals.³⁷ World Council of Churches documents typically moralized about the human weakness for raising mere geography (“real estate”) to a spiritual status, and treated the creation of the state of Israel as problematic—never as the solution to a problem.³⁸ The National Council of Churches denounced the 1978 Camp David Accords for allegedly ignoring the national ambitions of the Palestinian Arabs.³⁹ According to Merkley, the mainline Protestant churches of the West joined the churches of the East in an attitude of resentment “shading over into active hostility.”⁴⁰

The Roman Catholic attitude was more positive, notwithstanding initial skepticism. The May 14, 1948, issue of L’Osservatore, the semi-official Vatican daily, declared, “Modern Israel is not the heir to biblical Israel. The Holy Land and its sacred sites belong only to Christianity: the true Israel.”⁴¹ Yet the effect of two papal pronouncements that same year was to support the U.N. partition plan, which did not resolve the status of Jerusalem, and therefore to resist Jordan’s claim to the city. In 1967 the Vatican stopped calling for “international status” for the city and began to urge an “international statute” that would protect the rights of two peoples and three religions, and guarantee access to holy places. The Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate stated that the church relates to Jews differently than it relates to members of any other religion because of Judaism’s special relationship to Christianity. Catholic seminaries angered Muslims by beginning to teach more of the Jewish context of the Gospels. In the 1990s the Vatican negotiated its own agreements with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and in 1994, under Pope John Paul II, Israel and the Vatican exchanged ambassadors.

Yet Mordecai Waxman complains that what is missing from virtually all church documents is recognition of the state of Israel as the “reaffirmation of the covenant with Abraham and his descendants.” To be fair, one must say that since the Holocaust both the Catholic Church and mainline Protestant theologians have worked hard to affirm their solidarity with Jews and their confidence that God’s covenant with the Jewish people is ongoing. But two issues have been notably absent in most official Catholic and mainline Protestant statements: the possibility that the restoration of the state of Israel has theological significance, and the notion of land as integral to Israel’s covenant.⁴²

Fundamentalists and evangelicals, on the other hand, have generally welcomed the state of Israel as a sign that God’s covenant with the Jews is ongoing. Led by Dutch theologian and pastor Jan Willem van der Hoeven, fundamentalists and evangelicals established the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ) in 1980. This organization sponsors the largest annual tourist event in Israel, a fall festival at the Feast of Tabernacles (Succoth) that in recent years has attracted an average of 7,000 visitors. It has also assisted immigrants from the former Soviet Union; by 1998 it had helped more than 40,000 and paid for fifty-one flights plus buses via Finland.

In addition to the ICEJ, a host of other fundamentalist and evangelical organizations work to support Israelis and their state. Among them:

• Christian Friends of Israel does relief work in Israel and assists Russian Jewish immigrants;
• Christian Friends of Israeli Communities links settlements in “Judaea, Samaria, and Gaza” with American churches;
• Christians’ Israel Public Action Campaign claims to educate Christians on Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy;
• Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary in Darmstadt, Germany, seeks to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust and urges Christians to support the state of Israel;
• National Christian Leadership Conference for Israel organizes clerics and academics to place ads in American newspapers and sponsor conferences;
• Religious Roundtable mobilizes Christians to vote for U.S. politicians who support Israel; and
• Voices United for Israel works with Jewish organizations to sponsor pro-Israeli conferences and statements.⁴³

As if to underline their support for the Jewish integrity of Israel, both the ICEJ and Bridges for Peace (another evangelical group that helps immigrants to Israel) have issued declarations that missionary efforts to Jews are not in the will of God.⁴⁴

While most Christian fundamentalists have expressed solid support for the Zionist project and see it as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy, evangelicals are more divided. Some prominent evangelical leaders such as John Stott, Gary Burge, and the editors of Sojourners magazine flatly reject Zionism, and are more concerned with perceived Israeli injustices toward Palestinians than with modern Israel’s connection to biblical promises. Yet a majority of evangelicals still see the modern state of Israel as in some sense a fulfillment of prophecy.⁴⁵

FUNDAMENTALISTS, EVANGELICALS, AND THE LAND

 It is no wonder that so many have fought for so long over this little strip of land. Four thousand years ago, people recognized its beauty and fertility: in the twentieth century B.C.E. an Egyptian courtier who lived in Canaan wrote, “It was a good land, called Yaa. Figs were in it and grapes. It had more wine than water. Abundant was its honey, plentiful its oil. All kinds of fruit were on its trees. Barley was there and enmer, and no end of cattle of all kinds.”⁴⁶ Its variety of climate adds to its appeal. Within one hundred miles (from Jericho to Mt. Hermon) the range is from the sub-tropical to the sub-arctic. Its land forms and living conditions are almost as varied.⁴⁷

But if the land of Israel has universal appeal, most Christians for most of the last two millennia have believed that the land has no theological importance. According to the general story line, God stopped exercising special care for Jews or for their land upon the advent of the Christian church, which became the New Israel. This is what is known as “supersessionism,” or “replacement theology.” It first arose after suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 C.E., was promoted by second-century Christians such as Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis, and soon became the “standard model” for understanding Judaism’s relationship to Christian faith.⁴⁸

According to R. Kendall Soulen, there are three types of supersessionism: (1) Economic supersessionism holds that Israel’s function was to prepare for the spiritual and universal form of salvation in Jesus, so that once Jesus had come, Israel was unnecessary. (2) Punitive supersessionism argues that God abrogated Israel’s covenant because Israel rejected Christ. (3) Structural supersessionism applies to all versions of the Christian story that make the history of Israel only tangential to the narrative; this means that every rendering of faith that moves from creation and fall to redemption through Christ without making Israel’s story integral to the main story is supersessionist.⁴⁹

Revisions to this story appeared first among the Puritans of the seventeenth century and then among certain of their theological heirs, such as Jonathan Edwards, who argued for a coming, literal millennium with a signal role for Jews.⁵⁰ In the late nineteenth and through the twentieth century, premillennialists envisioned for Israel a future based on their literal reading of Old Testament prophecies.

After the Holocaust, a rereading of Scripture and particularly of Paul led to a new vision for Israel’s future (and hence the land) among some theologians and New Testament scholars, such as Karl Barth, Marcus Barth, C. E. B. Cranfield, Peter Stuhlmacher, and numerous evangelical scholars. Cranfield, for example, concluded that an impartial reading of Paul’s epistle to the Romans demanded a revision of supersessionism: “These three chapters [9– 11] emphatically forbid us to speak of the church as having once and for all taken the place of the Jewish people.”⁵¹ Other scholars also began to notice that Paul seemed to believe that Jewish rejection of Jesus as Messiah did not abrogate God’s covenant with them, for in Romans 11 he says explicitly that “God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew” (v. 2, NRSV). As W. D. Davies noted in his landmark work on the biblical concept of land, “Paul never calls the Church the New Israel or the Jewish people the Old Israel.”⁵²

Elsewhere in Romans 11, Paul suggests the same theme of the continuance of the covenant: “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable” (v. 29); “What will their acceptance [by God] be but life from the dead?” (v. 15); “all Israel will be saved (v. 26) . . . [and] receive mercy” (v. 31). Craig Blaising argues that Paul bases this reading of Israel’s future on Isaiah 59.20–21, where the prophet forecasts the return of divine favor on Zion and follows this promise with another: “Then all your people will be righteous; they will possess the land forever” (Isa. 60.21).⁵³

Evangelical Thomas McComiskey adds that Paul does not drop this last promise of land, even if most Jews in his day were rejecting Jesus. McComiskey argues that in Galatians 3.15–29, Paul refers to God’s promises to Abraham, all of which (Gen. 12.7; 13.15; 15.18; 17.8) refer to the land. Since Christ is the “offspring” to whom Paul refers (“Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his offspring . . . that is, to one person, who is Christ,” 3.16), McComiskey reasons that it cannot be only justification that the offspring inherits. In other words, the promise may function differently under the new covenant, but it has not lost its territorial connotations. In this case, the land has become a world under the dominion of Christ but typified by Israel’s inheritance of Palestine.⁵⁴

If Pauline research has shown new hope for the future of Israel and its land, so too has research into the historical Jesus, with E. P. Sanders, N. T. Wright, John P. Meier, and Ben F. Meyer among the most important thinkers showing that Jesus was far more interested in Israel than scholars had previously imagined.⁵⁵ In a recent book, evangelical Scot McKnight pushes this further by arguing that Jesus intended to renew Israel’s national covenant, not to found a new religion. Jesus wanted to restore the twelve tribes, which would bring in the Kingdom of God in and through Israel. By his death, Jesus believed, the whole Jewish nation was being nailed to the cross, and God was restoring the nation and renewing its people. Hence salvation was first and foremost for Israel; if others wanted salvation, they would need to assimilate themselves to saved Israel. By dispensing forgiveness of sins, Jesus was creating a new community of restored Israel that would inherit the Kingdom of God. Therefore his disciples saw Jesus as the savior of Israel, as God coming to them through Jesus, leading the nation out of exile to regain control of the land.⁵⁶

Roman Catholic historian Robert Wilken has observed that “hopes of restoration and the establishment of a kingdom in Jerusalem were not, it seems, foreign to early Christian tradition.” The angel told Mary that “the Lord God will give to [Jesus] the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever” (Luke 1.32–33). Jesus himself seemed to anticipate the day when Jerusalem would welcome him: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’” (Matt. 23.39). And, according to Wilken, the word translated “earth” in Jesus’ beatitude “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5.5) is the word usually translated “land” in the phrase “possess the land” elsewhere in the Bible.⁵⁷

But if scholarship has eroded support for supersessionism, most Protestant and Catholic scholars have not embraced the countervailing notion that God has a present and future role for Jews in the land of Palestine. That is, while most Protestant and Catholic scholars since the Holocaust fall over one another in reaffirming God’s eternal covenant with Israel, for the most part they ignore what for most Jews is absolutely integral to that covenant: the land. Jews appreciate Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant affirmations that God’s covenant with Israel is eternal, but wonder why they ignore or deny what Jews believe is an indispensable manifestation of the covenant. As the authors of “Dabru Emet: A Jewish Statement on Christians and Christianity” put it, “The most important event for Jews since the Holocaust has been the reestablishment of a Jewish state in the Promised Land.” Yet most Protestant and Catholic affirmations of the Jewish covenant ignore this central component. A recent letter writer to the Christian Century complained that the editor’s approach to the land of Israel “is roughly equivalent to a Jew asking a Protestant teenager: ‘Hey, what’s up with the resurrection thing?’ A Judaism without the [covenantal] component of the land of Israel is a faith shorn of most of its power.” This is in part because, as the National Council of Synagogues argues, “God wants the nations to see the redemption of Israel and be impressed. . . . They will therefore learn, if they had not learned before, that the Lord, God of Israel, restores His people to His land.”⁵⁸

Catholic and mainline Protestant theologians engaged in Jewish-Christian dialogue have proposed an alternative to supersessionism known as “two covenant” theology, in which Jews and Christians are related to God separately through two distinct covenants, one through the Torah and the other through Jesus Christ. (This was the approach taken by the August 2002 “Reflections on Covenant and Mission,” issued jointly by Jews and Roman Catholics but withdrawn shortly thereafter by the Catholic bishops.⁵⁹) Under this scheme, Christian evangelism of Jews is not only unnecessary but actually an insult.

Evangelicals, however, find this approach impossible to square with the New Testament, where: Jews and Christians are in the same church and saved in the same way; Jews are evangelized by both Peter and Paul (Gal. 3.6–14; Gal. 3.26–29; Acts passim); Paul says the gospel concerns “the Jew first and also the Greek” (Rom. 1.16); and Jesus tells his disciples, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles . . . but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10.5–6).

Craig Blaising notes that many of those who endorse two-covenant theology say Jesus was not the Messiah for Jews because he did not inaugurate the messianic age. But in the New Testament, “the gospels uniformly present Jesus as the messiah of Israel from the angelic pronouncement to Mary and Joseph to the sign that was nailed to the cross (Matt. 27.37; Mark 15.26; Luke 23.28).” Furthermore, “the proclamation of Jesus as the Messiah of Israel is presented in the New Testament in terms of the fulfillment of Israel’s covenants (Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic and New covenants) in the twofold manner that we commonly recognize as the present and future fulfillment of the messianic kingdom.” Hence God’s riches of salvation are presented not as coming directly to individuals but as mediated by Israel. “Jesus was not promoting Gentilism as opposed to Judaism but a different kind of Judaism that belonged to the Kingdom of God.”⁶⁰

If fundamentalists and evangelicals see a future for Jews in the land of Israel because of their understanding of Paul and Jesus, they also see Old Testament prophecy pointing in the same direction. They take seriously God’s promises in Genesis (Gen. 12.7; 13.15; 15.18; 17.8) to give a land to Abraham’s descendants. They cite Isaiah’s vision for the renewal of Zion (especially as set forth in Isa. 4.2–6), and for the perpetuation of a remnant. They believe that the promise of a kingdom for the new David in Isaiah 9.7 suggests a restored land. And they note both Jeremiah’s promise that the Jews would return to the land (chap. 32) and receive a new covenant (chap. 33), and Ezekiel’s recurring theme of the ingathering of all the scattered Israelites in the land.

Furthermore, evangelical scholars are impressed by the importance of land in the Torah. Elmer Martens has remarked that “land” is the fourth most frequent noun or substantive in the Old Testament, used 2,504 times. He notes that it is more dominant statistically than the idea of covenant.⁶¹ The Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, produced by one of the most respected evangelical publishers of academic works (InterVarsity Press), contends that “next to God himself, the longing for land dominates all others [in the Old Testament].” Land is presented by the Torah as a place of spiritual testing; its pollution by sin and Israel’s consequent exiles are portrayed as analogous to humanity’s fall from grace in Eden and consequent expulsion. Adam, formed from land, failed to protect it and therefore allowed the serpent (evil) access to it. Land also represents the human condition: “Good in principle, land is cursed as a result of humanity’s sin, and people are alienated from it as well as being joined to it.”⁶²

Therefore enjoyment of the land is not guaranteed. With the gift of land come stipulations that the recipients must meet in order to continue on the land. Martens writes of the covenantal obligations that God imposed on Israel as conditions for continued enjoyment of the land. Israel must: establish cities of refuge for murderers; give and carry out religious and moral instruction; follow dietary rules; and observe sabbaths and jubilees for both land and people. Furthermore, the following behaviors are forbidden: harlotry, the shedding of innocent blood, child sacrifice, sexual perversion, and the remarriage of a man to a divorced wife (Deut. 19.7; 6.9; 12.20 ff.; Lev. 19.29; 23.10–11; 25.2; 25.8 ff.; Num. 35.29– 34; Deut. 24.4; Lev. 18. 24–25). Disobedience would bring a curse on the land (Deut. 28.15–68), and the author of Leviticus explains that the Canaanites were expelled from the land because of their sins (Lev. 18.24).⁶³ Thomas McComiskey adds that Deuteronomy guarantees security in the land only if there is a continuing obedience to God’s law (Deut. 5.32–33; 6.3; 8.19–20; 11.8–9, 13–15). The Psalmists, he writes, especially emphasize the necessity of obedience for remaining on the land (e.g. Psa. 37.27–29, 34; 85.1–2, 8–10). Proverbs sounds a similar theme, as in 2.10: “The upright will live in the land, and the blameless will remain in it.” So do Isaiah (60.21; 62.4) and Jeremiah (3.16–18).⁶⁴

Far more than fundamentalist writers, evangelicals have emphasized the conditionality of the promises.⁶⁵ Gary Burge, a New Testament scholar at Wheaton College, has noted that one line of conditions is the repeated commandment of the covenant to “love the alien as yourself.” The Israelites were not to “oppress the alien,” who “shall be to you as the citizen among you . . . for you were aliens in Egypt” (Lev. 19.33–34).⁶⁶ Moses commanded that tithes be collected from Israelites to help poor aliens (Deut. 14.29, 26.12); wages were not to be withheld from aliens (Deut. 24.14); aliens were to use the same system of justice provided to Israelites (Deut. 1.16; 24.17; 27.19).

This was remarkably demonstrated by biblical patriarchs and kings. For example, the Canaanites were not displaced when God promised the land to Abraham and his descendants. Instead, Abraham and the Canaanites became neighbors and trading partners. Abraham refused to accept parcels of that land as gifts from the natives, but insisted on paying (Gen. 23).⁶⁷

Joshua included aliens in public re-committals to the covenant (Josh. 8.33–35),⁶⁸ and kept his agreement with non-Israelites, even when that agreement had been made under false pretenses (Josh. 9). Then he went so far as to risk the lives of his men to protect those non-Israelites in battle (Josh. 10.6–8).⁶⁹

David used foreigners (men from today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Turkey) as soldiers and leaders in his army. Some became his trusted advisors (2 Sam. 23; 1 Chron. 11.10–47). Like Abraham, David insisted on buying land even when the land had been promised to him. Ornan, a Canaanite who owned land in pre-Israelite Jerusalem when it was called Jebus, offered land to David for what was to be the site for God’s temple. David refused the gift and paid Ornan 100 shekels of gold (1 Chron. 21).

But King Ahab stole land and murdered its owner, Naboth. God then arranged for both Ahab and his wife Jezebel to be “executed,” while suggests that God intervenes to avenge the defenseless (1 Kings 21).

Gary Burge points out that the prophets continued this refrain. Amos prophesied exile because Israelites were oppressing the poor (Amos 7.17), Jeremiah criticized the abuse of aliens (7.5–7), and Ezekiel declared that when the Jews returned from exile, they were to make provision for aliens: “They shall be allotted an inheritance among the tribes of Israel” (Ezek. 47.22–23).⁷⁰

The upshot of all this is that keeping the terms of the covenant includes treating aliens with justice, indeed love. Covenant-keeping is a matter not only of avoiding idolatry and treating fellow Jews with justice, but also of extending that justice to non-Israelites living in Israel. If Israel was disciplined for violating the covenant, some of those violations were against aliens living in the land.

Both Martens and McComiskey note the prophets’ interpretation that the Israelites lost the land and were sent into exile because they disobeyed these terms of the covenant. Yet both of these evangelical scholars find the prophets and other biblical authors holding to the promise of land for Israel even after Israel has, by disobedience, forfeited the land. Martens writes,

Israel might and in fact did lose the land, because of failure on their part to live in the land in loyalty to Yahweh. Yet the land was inalienable in the sense that it could not be forcibly taken from Israel. Israel, however, through disobedience, forfeited the land. Prophets in the exile fell back on the inalienable right of Israel to the land, and announced a return from exile to the land, for, they said, it was rightfully theirs still (Jer. 12.14–16; 16.14–15; Ezek. 36.8–15).⁷¹

McComiskey observes that while the prophets expanded the promised inheritance of God’s people beyond the definable boundaries of Canaan to include the world, they nevertheless retained their expectation that Israel would return to the land of Palestine: “We cannot conclude that the prophets considered that promise to have been abrogated.”⁷² In other words, with the prophets we find new promises made for the Messiah and his worldwide reign, but these new promises do not overrule the earlier promises of a particular land for a particular people. “Expansion is not synonymous with abrogation.”⁷³

The relative silence about land in the New Testament does not mean that the New Testament authors believed the Abrahamic promises concerning land had been abrogated. McComiskey observes that Josephus was also silent about land. But Josephus deleted the theology of covenanted land because of its revolutionary implications for the messianism of the Zealots, whom he feared and despised. Political circumstances and Josephus’s purposes thus determined his presentation about the promise of the land; any claim that, in view of his omissions, he must not have shared the Jewish view concerning the land as promised or covenanted, would certainly be precarious. The same is true of any argument from silence concerning the New Testament authors.⁷⁴

McComiskey argues further that while Jesus does not speak directly in the Gospels about God’s promise of land to Israel, neither did the Mishnaic Tractate, “The Sayings of the Fathers.” Yet the “Fathers” were known for their belief in the promise.⁷⁵ Similarly, the Mosaic law never included the earlier promise of Gentile inclusion; yet the earlier promise was never abrogated.⁷⁶ McComiskey links the two promises, both referring to land: they are two aspects of the promise of land in the prophets—restoration to the land of Palestine, and the rule of the world by the Messiah. The first is the earnest of the second.⁷⁷

EVANGELICALS AND PEACE

Although some evangelical scholars believe that the promise of land is not abrogated even with disobedience to the terms of the covenant, none denies the recurring biblical pattern of removal from the land when those terms are violated. For several evangelical thinkers, this pattern is particularly important in regard to the notion of peace.

Peace, for them, is not simply the absence of violence and war but “being uninjured, safe and sound, or whole.”⁷⁸ In fact, according to the (evangelical) Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, “the Bible’s prominent meaning of peace is political.” It refers to complete reconciliation between feuding parties, which means a just and moral relationship.⁷⁹ Mennonite Perry B. Yoder sees a similar emphasis in the three meanings carried by shalom: (1) material and physical well-being, which includes freedom from threats and war, (2) justice and righteousness in relationships, and (3) honesty and integrity. The Hebrew prophets proclaimed that the Messiah would bring shalom justice, and this justice is linked with messianic peace (Isa. 16.3–5; 42.1–4; Jer. 23.5–6). Yoder notes that the false prophets identified shalom only as security and the absence of war: justice was unnecessary for their shalom.⁸⁰

If justice is integral to biblical peace, what can we say about justice and the land of Israel/Palestine? In part the answer is: very little. The issues are too many, and the complexity too great, for a little paper such as this and a little scholar such as me to get much beyond the surface of things. The other part of the answer is that fundamentalists and evangelicals must speak with humility. We are members of a church that for two thousand years has ignored Jews or been their enemy. Some of us have ignored the grievances of the Palestinians and supported Israel out of love for our own politico-theological agendas more than real concern for Jews. And while we are critical of both sides in this conflict, we must remember that most of us have enjoyed the luxury of being armchair critics, far removed from the pain of those who suffer on the ground.

So what follows will be simply some initial commentary on three of the many issues that bedevil this subject: the problem of refugees, the question of religious freedom, and the dilemma of historical claims to the land.

THE REFUGEE PROBLEM

After the end of the Arab war intended to prevent the birth of Israel in 1948, somewhere between 530,000 (Jewish estimate) and 720,000 (U.N. estimate) Palestinian Arabs fled their homes. About 300,000 resettled in the kingdom of Jordan (250,000 on the West Bank and 50,000 east of the Jordan River). The rest settled in refugee camps in Gaza (ruled by Egypt), Egypt proper, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq.⁸¹ In 1967, another 300,000 Palestinians fled from the West Bank and Gaza, to Jordan (200,000), Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Of these, approximately 180,000 were first-time refugees (“displaced persons”), while the rest were 1948 refugees uprooted for the second time. Estimates put the Palestinian population at approximately 6.6 million in 1995. In 1995, data of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) showed some 3,173,000 registered refugees in its “area of operation” (West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon), plus an estimated 335,000 non-registered “displaced persons.” Of these, some 132,000 lived in refugee camps in the West Bank, and 363,000 in Gaza refugee camps.⁸²

A comparison with past Jewish refugee problems provides perspective. According to Martin Gilbert, the number of Jews expelled from Arab and Muslim countries (nearly 568,000) was roughly equal to the number of Arab Palestinians who left Israel in 1948.⁸³ The Palestinian refugees multiplied in 1967 and after; Jewish refugees did the same in the 1980s and 1990s because of the collapsing Soviet empire—approximately 1.5 million were resettled in Israel. All these Jewish refugees were accepted and assimilated by the new state, while the Palestinians remain unsettled, even though the twenty-one states in the Arab League have a total population of 300 million (fifty times that of Israel) and a land mass of 5 million square miles (650 times that of Israel).⁸⁴

Both of these sets of refugee problems are dwarfed by far larger resettlements in the twentieth century. Between 1945 and 1957, some 57 million people became refugees throughout the world; 15 million were dislocated in India and Pakistan alone. Surprisingly, “in all these cases, the refugees were eventually repatriated or relocated or simply ceased being regarded as refugees.”⁸⁵

Yet all this is meaningless if you are among the hundreds of thousands uprooted. Palestinians say that their refugee problem goes back to the original United Nations partition plan, which they claim was inequitable. In 1948 Jews made up only 31 percent of the population and owned or settled only 6 percent of the land; yet they were awarded 52 percent of Palestine.⁸⁶ Then during and after the war, Palestinians charge, Jews destroyed more than 400 Palestinian villages.⁸⁷ When Palestinian villagers try to press land claims going back to before the war, these claims, they say, are generally rejected by Israeli courts.⁸⁸

According to Christine Mallouhi, after the 1967 war Palestinian families in Jerusalem were denied citizen rights and given “residency status.” Then in 1998 tens of thousands of Palestinian residents of Jerusalem were informed that their residency in the city had “expired.” Some families were forced to camp under a hill near Hebrew University with no water or electricity.⁸⁹ Palestinians also report that homes of families of suspected terrorists are blown up without court jurisdiction, creating more refugees. Furthermore, they claim, the Israeli Law of Return “guarantees immediate and automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants of whatever nationality, but excludes native Christians and Muslims who were forced to flee during the 1948 and 1967 wars from returning.”⁹⁰

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM

There are two main religious-freedom issues. The first is whether Israel has accorded religious freedom to Christians, particularly Arab Christians. I have access only to data concerning the relative numbers of Christians in the Holy Land, which is one (albeit very limited) measure of the climate of freedom. Leaders of the Christian Arab communities have insisted for years that, as Greek Catholic priest Elias Chacour puts it, “the Holy Land is being emptied of its Christians.” The Holy Land Foundation (begun in Washington, D.C., in 1994 to alert Christians to the “dilemma that Christians are facing in the Holy Land”) declares, “Because of a policy of systematic discrimination that impinges on every facet of daily life, Palestinian Christians along with Palestinian Moslems, can no longer live peacefully and securely in their native land. Christians are departing from the Holy Land at an alarming rate, and it is possible that they could one day entirely cease to exist in the very land where Christ founded His Church.”

Yet there are demographic indications that this fear is unrealistic. The number of Christians in Israel has not been declining. During Jordanian rule (1949–67), Christians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank did decline in number. But in 1948 Christians made up 2.9 percent of the whole (34,000 in a total population of 1.2 million), while in late 1995 the 160,000 Christians living in Israel still made up 2.9 percent of the population, then 5.7 million. In late 1998, there were 190,000 Christians, which is 3.2 percent of a population of 6 million. The number of Christians in the Christian Quarter (Arab-Christian) is shrinking, but the number of Christians in East Jerusalem has not declined. Since 1967 the number of Christians in Jerusalem as a whole has risen 50 percent, to stand in a recent count at 15,000.⁹¹

In sum, the Christian population of Israel, not including the West Bank and Gaza, rose in absolute terms from 34,000 in 1948 to nearly 180,000 in 1998—a sixfold increase. When Christians in the West Bank (42,000) and Gaza (9,000) are added, the total is 230,000 in 2000.⁹² In Israel, the percentage of Christians in the population is virtually the same after fifty years of Israel’sexistence.⁹³ So while the Christian population in the Middle East as a whole is declining because of Muslim persecution, the number of Christians in the state of Israel has risen.

Nevertheless Arab Christians complain that Israel does not treat them fairly. According to Christine Mallouhi, Palestinian churches in East Jerusalem lost their tax immunity, and West Jerusalem levied taxes on properties and real estate belonging to churches.⁹⁴ The pastor of the Christmas Church in Bethlehem asserts that Muslims, Christians, and Druze receive only 2 percent of the Ministry of Religious Affairs budget even though they constitute 19 percent of the population. Israel denies funding for the preservation of Muslim and many Christian religious sites, and Israel (and Palestine, for that matter) forbids Palestinian Christians to do mission work among non-Christians. ⁹⁵ Messianic Jews are also prohibited under its laws from becoming automatic citizens.

Nevertheless, Paul Merkley claims there is more peace among the various Christian communities in Jerusalem under Israeli rule than ever before:

Any serious student of the history of Jerusalem since the fall of the Second Temple knows that there never was a time when there has been less resort to violence among the religious communities in their dealings with one another than now, under the sovereign auspices of the State of Israel. Jewish custody of Jerusalem is the only arrangement for keeping the religious peace of Jerusalem that has ever worked.⁹⁶

The second religious-freedom issue concerns the character of a future Palestinian state: will it allow for religious pluralism? According to a disparate array of media reports since the early 1990s, when Palestinian Christians came under the regime of the Palestinian Authority, some Palestinian Christians fear the growing influence of what has come to be called “fundamentalist Islam.”⁹⁷ While Bethlehem pastor Mitri Raheb says Christians in Palestine are not persecuted for their faith,⁹⁸ Israeli journalist Judith Sudilovsky reports, “Privately, Arab Christians will say what they dare not say publicly: that most Christians would rather live under Israeli authority than risk living under another Moslem regime.” A Christian merchant in the Christian Quarter has confided: “Our leaders are liars: They tell the newspapers that everything is OK. But when Christians go to the market, they’re afraid to wear their crosses.”⁹⁹ Even Hanan Ashrawi, eloquent spokeswoman for the Palestinians, is said to voice privately increasing unease about the growing control that radical Islamists are exercising among her people.¹⁰⁰ Perhaps not coincidentally, twice as many Christians as Muslims have left the Palestinian Authority, while the number of Arab Christians in Israel (primarily in Jerusalem and Galilee) has risen.¹⁰¹

There is evidence that a future Palestinian state may not provide full religious freedom to Christians. Yasser Arafat’s legal advisor has said that a Muslim who converted to Christianity in a Palestinian state would be treated by sharia (Islamic law), which decrees the punishment of death. While this contradicts official statements that the PLO is committed to a secular state, Dr. Sami Musallam, director of the Office of the President of the Palestinian Authority in Jericho, denied to an interviewer that the PLO ever promised a secular state.¹⁰² Six days after signing the first Oslo Accord, Arafat himself told a mosque gathering in South Africa that the Oslo agreement was a solha donia (“despicable truce”) that should be understood in the light of the peace treaty that Muhammad made with the Quraysh tribe. This was the Treaty of al-Hudaybiya in 628, in which Muhammad agreed with Meccans on peace provisions that were to last ten years. Less than two years later, however, Muhammad took over Mecca.¹⁰³ Sometime later, Arafat told a group of Arab diplomats, “I have no use for Jews. We now need all the help we can get from you in our battle for a united Palestine under total Arab-Muslim domination.”¹⁰⁴ According to a Palestinian scholar who teaches at Bir Zeit University, such radical religious views leave little room for democracy: “From a theoretical and doctrinal point of view, Palestinian Islamists dismiss democracy as a Western concept that has no place in a Muslim society.”¹⁰⁵

History is ambiguous on this question. Some Islamicists have insisted that in past centuries Jews and Christians under Muslim rule were often treated tolerantly and respectfully, which perhaps was more than could be said of non-Christians in predominantly Christian lands over the same centuries, or even of minority Christian bodies that lived independently of Rome. However, Bat Ye’or has argued that the actual condition of the dhimmi—indigenous Jews, Christians, and other non-Muslims under Islamic law as a result of conquest—was one of fundamental subjection that permitted only the private exercise of religion.¹⁰⁶

CLAIMS TO THE LAND

If claims for religious freedom are contested, historical claims to the land are even more contested. A brief review of these claims will show that none can confer clear title.

Jews trace their ancestry to Abraham, whose travels with his family from Haran to Canaan are associated by scholars with two centuries of settlement at the beginning of the second millennium B.C.E.¹⁰⁷ Jewish association with Jerusalem goes back to the biblical character Melchizedek, who is said to have been the priest and king of Salem who received a tithe from Abraham (Gen. 14.8–20). But the city did not fall into Jewish hands until early in the second millennium.

Jews were indeed in the land long before Christians or Muslims; yet the question of title is ambiguous because of, among other things, the extent of the promise. The land promised to Abraham and his descendants was said to extend from the Nile to the Euphrates (Gen. 15.18). If we take this literally, it follows that the State of Israel must expand beyond even its present borders—which is what some Muslims fear is Israel’s intent. But if we take the promise symbolically and say it refers to Abraham’s entire known world, the notion of land based on biblical promise changes considerably.

Palestinian claims are perhaps even more problematic. First of all, the name “Palestine” was given widespread coinage more by the Romans than by Arabs. It was chosen to insult the Jews by memorializing the long vanquished Philistines, who have no relation to present Palestinians. Used sporadically in intervening years, the name was given new prominence at the time of the Balfour Declaration (1917), and it was the British—not Arabs—who revived its use.¹⁰⁸

Second, Arab rule of the land was fairly brief, from the 660s to 750 under the Ummayads.¹⁰⁹ Then the region was controlled by a succession of conquerors: European Christian crusaders, Kurds under Saladin, and Ottoman Turks. Even under Muslim rule, Jews and Christians still worked the land, while many Arabs, particularly during the Ottoman period, tended to prefer the nomadic life. So we can speak of many centuries of Muslim rule, but not (accurately) of many centuries of Arab rule.¹¹⁰

Third, Palestinians have thought of themselves as such for less than a century. Bernard Lewis explains that the notion of “‘a group of people with a common homeland, language, character, and political aspirations’ derives from the West, and came into the world less than a century ago.” Before that time, most people in the region thought of themselves primarily as Muslims and only secondarily in territorial terms. Many thought of themselves simply as Muslim Arabs (literally, “nomads”).¹¹¹ This is why Zaheir Muhsin, a member of the PLO Executive Council, could say in March 1977, “The existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes.”¹¹²

Furthermore, very few Arabs lived in Jerusalem until the years of the Mandate. The Muslim traditional belief in Jerusalem as a holy place, the third holiest site in Islam, does not go back to the very beginning of its tradition.¹¹³ Jerusalem is never mentioned explicitly in the Koran, and no Muslim ruler ever regarded Jerusalem as his political or religious capital. Only Ramle and Amman were used as Muslim capitals.¹¹⁴

In his marvelous chronicle The Land Called Holy, Catholic historian Robert Wilken shows why even Christians can feel some claim to the land. Palestine, he says, was a Christian country for more than three centuries (the late fourth through the seventh centuries and beyond), and the Latin crusaders had a kingdom for two hundred years (twelfth and thirteenth centuries). In the earlier period of Christian rule “Christians began to think of Jerusalem as their city, indeed as the Christian city, and Palestine as a place set apart.”¹¹⁵ Wilken suggests that if Muslims had not conquered Jerusalem in the seventh century, Jerusalem might one day have challenged the authority of the church of Rome.¹¹⁶

And finally, Palestinian Christians make their own claim to the land based on residence there from the very beginning of the Christian church. As Pastor Raheb puts it, Arab Christians were among the first Christians at Pentecost (Acts 2.11), the first Christian communities originated in Palestine, and Palestinian Christians see themselves as descendants of the first Jewish and non-Jewish Christians.¹¹⁷

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

I will close with two points. First, most Jews are unaware that evangelicals and fundamentalists have been some of their best friends—at least in the Jewish struggle for a secure homeland. As Merkley remarks, American Jews “are conditioned to look upon the conservative side of the Christian religious spectrum with loathing: these are the bible thumpers, whom everyone is permitted to despise . . . whom not to despise is a sign of cultural deficiency.”¹¹⁸ Perhaps some rethinking is in order on both sides: for Jews to acknowledge what is at least “co-belligerency” and for conservative Christians to recognize Jews as religious cousins. Fundamentalists and evangelicals have already recognized that modern Israel is “prophetically significant,” as R. Albert Mohler Jr. has put it, if not in itself the fulfillment of biblical prophecy that many fundamentalists have proclaimed. But they should also recognize that insofar as the state has served as a vessel of protection for the Jewish people, it is perhaps a judgment on the church and a reminder that God will protect his people even when the church will not.¹¹⁹

Second, on most of these matters, most evangelicals and fundamentalists agree. But it is also fair to say that there is a certain divide over what to emphasize. Fundamentalists tend to stress more than evangelicals the biblical promises of land and future to the Jews, while evangelicals tend to place more emphasis on the need for justice in order to make peace. Hence, more fundamentalists than evangelicals would agree with those who defend the West Bank Jewish settlements on the grounds that the land conquered in 1967 was returned to its rightful owners. They would also argue that the land seizures of both 1948 and 1967 occurred after wars that Arabs started to destroy the (vastly outnumbered) Jewish state, and after they turned down the U.N. partition plan (which Jews had accepted).¹²⁰ But more evangelicals than fundamentalists would argue that, while Israel has a right to its pre-1967 borders and must be guaranteed security, Israel should not control the lives of Palestinians, and the Palestinians have the right to a compact and contiguous state—unlike the patchwork created by the Oslo Accords.

Many evangelicals also deny a one-to-one correspondence between the modern state of Israel and the prophesied return of Jews to the land—because the return is to be accompanied by widespread spiritual renewal triggered by recognition of Jesus as Messiah—while at the same time they affirm a connection between the two. They are disturbed by reports of death squads without arrests or trials (conducted by both Israelis and Palestinians), of torture used routinely in Israeli prison camps, of denial to tens of thousands of Palestinians opportunities for employment, good schools, and health care. They agree with the Wheaton College scholar Gary Burge that “God’s people cannot make a religious claim to the land without exhibiting religious devotion to [the terms of] the covenant.”¹²¹ And they wonder how a secular state can ground territorial claims in religious warrants. While recognizing that they may seem presumptuous after millennia of anti-Semitism, some evangelicals would challenge their Jewish brothers and sisters to consider whether Israel is at a point of spiritual crisis. Can Israel still believe that God cares for it? Is this the time to take seriously both the biblical promises and the conditions attached to those promises, particularly those governing the treatment of aliens? Could this be the time for Israel to realize its spiritual destiny—to show the world the remarkable and glorious kingdom that Yahweh’s covenant calls for, a land of justice and respect for Jews and non-Jews alike?¹²²

But no matter how Israel responds to the current crisis, most evangelicals and fundamentalists will continue to believe that the land of Israel is theologically important and that the Jews still have an important role in the history of redemption. This is the contribution that conservative Protestants have made to the Christian debates about Israel: since the Enlightenment they have insisted that the Christian church has not replaced the Jews without remainder; that the old and new covenants were integrally connected in the time of Jesus and remain so today; and that if the covenant with Israel is eternal, then the promise of land is also still significant. [Note: In the actual seminar, Gerald McDermott gave an abbreviated version of the preceding paper.]

DISCUSSION

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Dr. McDermott. I asked Richard Mouw to start our conversation with comments of his own. Dr. Mouw was for many years professor of philosophy at Calvin College, became a professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, and then several years ago was named the president of Fuller Seminary.

RICHARD MOUW

We want very much to base our discussion on some theological issues and not simply to begin by debating political policy in the Middle East. I want to expand on some things Professor McDermott has said and point toward what I see as key theological issues.

The only “F” I got in my whole academic career was for a seminary course on the Epistle to the Romans. I was doing okay in the course, but I had to write an exegetical paper on Romans 11. I simply could not figure Paul out, and finally I realized that I just couldn’t write the paper. I got an “Incomplete” that eventually turned into an “F.” When I read through Paul, I kept trying to get him to say things clearly. But whenever I thought he was coming down on one side, he would kind of wobble and come down on the other side. Then he ends singing this hymn, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! . . . Who has known the mind of the Lord . . . ? To him be glory forever.” So I gave up on Romans 11.

As I began to develop my own social/ethical/political perspective, I focused primarily on First Peter 2, and especially the manifesto that begins in verse 9, where Peter applies three titles to the New Testament church that in the Old Testament were applied to Israel directly: “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation.” Peter had addressed the epistle “to the exiles of the Dispersion . . . chosen and destined by God. . . .” And so I interpreted First Peter as a kind of tract on the church as the New Israel, having replaced the old Israel in terms of God’s covenantal promises. That fit the Reformed theology I’d been trained in, and for a long time I worked with a supersessionist framework in understanding the role of the church in contemporary society.

Eventually I went back to Romans 11, and I think I could get an “A” on the paper now. Paul, with all the tensions he was struggling with there, was nonetheless, through it all, affirming the continuation of God’s covenantal promises, favor, and blessings to Old Testament Israel. In that light, I agree very much with what I take to be a fundamental thesis of Dr. McDermott, where he says: “There are two aspects of the promise of land in the prophets—the restoration to the land of Palestine, and the rule of the world by the Messiah.” I want to suggest two points: First, God has not forsaken his covenantal promises to Israel. Israel still has a central status in God’s covenantal economy; this has in no way been canceled in the light of what we understand to be the new covenant. Secondly, God has incorporated the Gentiles. It isn’t that we replace Israel; we have been grafted onto the tree or the vine of which Israel was the primary growing entity prior to the coming of Christ. Gentiles have been incorporated into an organic entity with Israel, and the Gentiles now have to be taken into account when we understand covenantal promises, blessings, and warnings that God originally spoke primarily to Israel. This incorporation was always intended; it was always a part of the plan. It wasn’t done simply in response to Israel’s refusal to recognize Jesus as Messiah.

There are some wonderful passages in Isaiah that relate to this, such as 49.6: “It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth” (NIV). See also 19.23–25, where Isaiah says: “In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together. In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The LORD Almighty will bless them, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.’” Isaiah takes those titles that are applied to Israel in other places and applies them to Egypt and Syria. It’s an amazing kind of expansion. And then there’s a verse I really like, Isaiah 25.6: “On this mountain the LORD Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine—the best of meats and the finest of wines.” This is the great eschatological promise of a risk-free cholesterol binge! It’s the same eschatological meal that we read about in Revelation and anticipate in the Eucharist. Those promises were already there.

So I think that in the present dispensation, the present age, God’s promises have been expanded in scope. God has not replaced the object of the promise, but rather, still focusing on Israel in part, God has expanded those promises of covenantal blessing. When we think of the land of Israel, we need to think of God’s continuing concern about his promises to Israel with regard to the land; but at the same time we need to think about the expansion that the messianic kingdom of Jesus is a light unto the nations, and that all nations can be gathered in under those promises. I think the right way to put all that together is to say that the promises regarding the land of Israel—which are very real and cannot be spiritualized— are, to use Professor McDermott’s term, an earnest of the larger plan God has for the messianic kingdom, when people from every tribe and tongue and nation on earth will say of Jesus, “Worthy art thou to take the scroll” (Rev. 5.9).

What does that mean in terms of thinking theologically about some practical concerns regarding the Middle East today? Just some quick comments here. I think the crucial theological issue to focus on is that there is an important status of the people of Israel—the Jewish people— in God’s continuing covenantal economy. Then what is the current status of Palestinian Christians in that economy? What do we do when a Palestinian Christian comes to us with legitimate complaints about how Israeli policy affects the lives of Palestinians? What does that mean in terms of our understanding of the promise? It seems very clear to me that we need to hold Israel responsible for the conditions of the covenant, for the proper use of the land. We cannot simply quote God’s promise to bless those who bless Abraham and his descendants, because truly to bless Israel is to do what the prophets taught us to do: to work under the assumption that God will never bless Israel if the people do not do justice, show mercy, and walk humbly before their God.

And so the conditions of the covenant, even with regard to the promises to aliens, are crucial. We might think of that whole area that God promised in the Old Testament as one in which Israel is especially called to administer justice. There may very well be a variety of political arrangements whereby Israel might administer justice over the land God promised to it, rather than simply taking those as literal borders in which it can do anything it wants. I hope that in our discussion we can focus on the important question of the covenantal promises to the body of Christ in Israel as it is manifested today in the Palestinian church, and also on the promise of the land as an earnest of God’s purposes for the messianic kingdom. The question is, what is God calling Israel to do with that land? Doing justice and showing mercy toward the aliens in its midst are very important parts of that.

Michael Cromartie: Thank you, Richard. Now I invite others to join the conversation. David Neff, you’re first. [All participants are identified below.]

David Neff: I feel very much the force of the argument that we tend to spiritualize a lot of the very concrete notions in the Hebrew Scriptures. I think we have lost a lot, not simply in terms of the land of Israel, but in many other ways, by following this kind of spiritualizing trend. But I think we also need to recognize that spiritualization happens within the New Testament. It doesn’t wait for Justin Martyr and Origen and Ignatius of Antioch to get it started. The land isn’t talked about a whole lot in the New Testament. But certainly the book of Hebrews—as it marches through sacrifice and temple and priesthood and all those issues pertaining to people who are going through a transition from Jewish identity into a Jewish-Christian identity—does talk about “Jerusalem,” even though it doesn’t talk about land. It does say that we have come now to a “heavenly Jerusalem.” So there’s an interesting combination, in Hebrews, of rabbinical forms of argument with Hellenistic metaphysical thinking that was typical of diaspora Judaism in the first century.

We can’t ignore those kinds of “Jerusalem hints.” Yes, we need to think more concretely in our theology, but we also need to recognize that those spiritualizing tendencies are present in the New Testament and can’t be erased.

Gerald McDermott: Basically, I agree with you, but rather than thinking of this in terms of either/or, I would say both/and. Yes, there is a kind of spiritualizing in the New Testament, but it does not abrogate the Hebrew emphasis on the concrete.

Donald Wagner:I want to thank Dr. McDermott for a terrific and really comprehensive paper. But I wanted to raise the question of his not saying much about futurist pre-millennial dispensationalism, which I find is becoming the major container of the “Christian Zionist” movement. This, I think, has significant moral and political implications for the church. It’s another kind of two-covenant theology. It really raises a number of issues, such as supporting Israel’s exclusive claims to the land by interpreting Scripture in kind of predictive, literal, futuristic way, and not allowing for a shared dimension to the land.

The church in Palestine was significantly eroded and damaged by tremendous injustices that Israel is responsible for, and the world community is responsible for. Today, with Palestinian Christianity really diminishing, I think you need to be very careful in using sources like Paul Merkley, who is a Christian Zionist. Palestinian Christians are telling us from the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza that the church is dying, that the numbers are under 2 percent now. In Israel proper, yes, the church is holding. But the policies today—really, the injustices that are now buttressed and supported by Christian Zionism along with the pro-Israel lobby—have very disturbing implications for the future of Christianity there. And I don’t think they’re good for Jews, either.

David Aikman: I was a reporter in the Middle East for quite some time and have been a frequent visitor there in recent years, doing television documentaries and the like. In my experience, the stronghold of pro-Israel sentiment among Christians is among the charismatics. I spent some months in China recently, and I found that the majority of house-church Christians are actually charismatic, and are overwhelmingly pro-Israel. Now, why is that? What have they been reading? Bits and pieces here and there, but mainly they are listening to the teachers who have gone there from overseas Chinese Christian communities in the United States and Japan. These people who have done a lot of teaching of the leadership of the underground house-church groups have been predominantly charismatic, and they have been overwhelmingly Christian Zionist.

In my experience, looking at evangelical Christians in a lot of different countries over the years, charismatics seem to be intuitively pro-Jewish. They have a sort of sense that we’re cousins, or even, as Pope John Paul has said, that the Jews are the elder brothers. The sense of identity that seems to be part of what some people might call a subjective experience is a very important part of Christian Zionism today.

Richard Mouw: That’s an important point to explore. I think that a lot of the teaching that is going into those Chinese charismatic house-churches is from people who basically hold to a confused position on the eternal purposes of God for the Jews. Charismatic theology is incompatible with dispensationalism in that the promise to Joel that charismatics make so much of— that in the last days God will pour out his spirit on all flesh—just doesn’t fit the idea that the promises of the Old Testament were promises of a Jewish kingdom.

Michael Cromartie: Let’s get a few more comments or questions on the table before Dr. McDermott responds.

Victor Pentz: The issue in the Middle East is land. The conflict is not about world religions—it’s about land. So the implications of our theology having to do with specific land assertions are very critical. I want to ask a couple of questions based on some of the assumptions in Dr. McDermott’s paper. If there is continuity into the New Testament from the Old Testament promises, then when I become a Christian, wouldn’t it follow that I inherit land? If I’m an Israeli Jew and I convert to Christianity, do I forfeit my right to the land? Is my claim to the land based on my Judaism, or on my blood and race? When you get down to specifics, I’m not sure there’s much clarity in some of the assertions being made here, or maybe we don’t carry them out far enough to be helpful.

Diane Knippers: Dr. McDermott says, “Some of us have ignored the grievances of the Palestinians and supported Israel out of love for our own politico-theological agendas more than out of a real concern for Jews.” I need some help in figuring out just what those political-theological agendas are.

Richard Land: Dr. McDermott’s paper is a very provocative one that can promote a lot of discussion. But I think it’s flawed by a stereotypical definition of evangelicalism that would leave out the majority of American evangelicals, people who do not perceive themselves as fundamentalists and are certainly not accepted as such by people who do perceive themselves as fundamentalists. By this definition, I don’t think Francis Schaefer would be considered an evangelical, but he certainly considered himself one. Nor do

I think Carl F. H. Henry would be considered an evangelical according to this definition, though most evangelicals I know consider him one, and he considers himself one.

Michael Cromartie: Why wouldn’t Francis Schaefer be happy with Dr. McDermott’s distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists?

Richard Land: I think Schaefer would say that some of the covenant promises are conditional and others aren’t. Israel’s right to the land in Genesis 12 and Genesis 17 is not conditioned on behavior. God sends them into exile when they’re disobedient and when they practice injustice, but the covenant of the land is not an “if/then” promise. God gave it to the descendants of Abraham through Isaac. I would say a majority of American evangelicals would accept that. But according to Dr. McDermott, it is fundamentalists who believe that, while evangelicals believe that Israel’s right to the land is conditional on its behavior.

Marilyn Borst: One observation about Dr. McDermott’s remark that if you’ve ever visited Israel/Palestine you’ll understand why people have been fighting over it for so many centuries: I hold a very different opinion. With the exception of the north, I’ve never quite understood the mystique of the land of Israel. I find it a very forbidding landscape with bitter winters and very inhospitable summers. Frankly, I think God could have exercised better judgment by choosing Switzerland as a territory to be fought over!

That observation aside, I really want to ratchet up one of the points that Dr. Mouw made. What we do we do with the voice of someone like An Abuna Schakur, asking why we fail to hold the state of Israel accountable for some basic human rights and issues

of peace and justice? That is not a major concern only for the fairly small Christian community within Israel/Palestine; it is the number-one issue for the 14 million Christians throughout the Middle East. They cannot understand why Christians in the West have not spoken to these issues.

Richard Mouw: When a woman who heads up a theological seminary in Beirut came to our campus, I asked, “What do people argue about theologically back home?” And she said, “Whether we can use the psalms in worship, because they talk about God’s blessing Israel, or blessing the rulers of Israel, and our ordinary Christians have a very hard time praying those prayers when Israel has invaded southern Lebanon.” It seems to me a profound theological challenge to work with that. When we talk about our special covenantal bond with Israel, we also need to think about our special covenantal bond with our brothers and sisters in Christ in the Middle East.

These are tough questions.

Gerald McDermott: I’d like to respond to the question Diane Knippers asked about this claim I make that evangelicals support Israel more because of their own political-theological agenda than because they really care about the Jews. I hear this from some of my Jewish friends. Some evangelicals seem to be saying, “Well, we’ve got to get the Jews saved, because that will bring Jesus back.” But are we really concerned about them as persons rather than just as players in the eschatological drama?

Richard Mouw: Your comment reminds me of how little work has been done on the Holocaust in the dispensationalist community. The big event of the twentieth century is the reestablishment of the state of Israel, not the Holocaust. I think a mapping out of twenty different perspectives would be very helpful. I find that Professor McDermott’s paper sorts it through better than anything else I’ve read thus far, but I think there could be even more nuancing done.

John Wilson: I think this paper is very important in the context of a long period in which evangelicals have paid less and less attention to the Old Testament. Of course they would all say, “We take the whole Bible; we’re not throwing out two-thirds of it.” But in practice, in the texts that are preached on, in everything about evangelical piety, the Old Testament has been increasingly deemphasized. This wasn’t always true of evangelicals, but it has been true for some time.

Richard Mouw: I want to recommend Shlomo Avineri’s book The Making of Modern Zionism. The argument for secular Zionism as it emerged in the early nineteenth century was a Hegelian argument. Peoplehood requires the historical realization of geopolitical

identity. The diaspora of the Jewish people simply had to be overcome by having the Jews become “landed.” It seems to me that one could argue theologically for that as well. I think those with spiritualizing tendencies— certainly in my Reformed tradition— have been kind of naïve about that sort of question.

David Coffin: I fear that as soon as I open my mouth in this discussion, that label “supersessionist” is going to be laid on me as a term of reproach. Anyway, a couple of things seem strange in the argument of the paper. One is that, at least on my understanding of typology, it is odd to insist on an abiding presence of the type as relevant and significant when the antitype has come. This insistence contradicts a good bit of New Testament teaching concerning the superiority of Christ over the Mosaic economy. In this light I find a “both/and” insistence passing strange. I can’t imagine the writer of Hebrews saying, “Yes, we have the earthly priesthood, and we ought to continue with the sacrifices, even though the antitype of the priest, Jesus, who is superior to the old and all-sufficient, is now present.” It doesn’t strike me—and I suppose this is another example of that baneful spiritualizing—that this is consistent with the New Testament’s teaching. But then, if the New Testament “spiritualizes” the Hebrew Scriptures, shouldn’t we as well?

Second, I can empathize with Dr. Mouw entirely on the difficulty of Romans 11. But it seems to me that if anything is clear in that chapter, it is the significance of the tree metaphor. The tree surely represents God’s covenant people, the outward recipients

of his redemptive promises. But, Paul explains, a portion of that people has been broken off, and a portion that didn’t originally belong has been grafted in. That tree is going to continue to grow. You folks who have been grafted in, says Paul, don’t you get proud, because you’re not the whole deal—you’ve been grafted in. If the Lord wants to graft back the portion that had been broken off, he’s perfectly free to do so.

Now, what Paul says in this text strikes me as utterly inconsistent with the proposal that in fact there is some other tree growing, one that will continue to grow, with respect to which the Lord is going to fulfill some sort of promises apart from the main tree. That is not to say that the Gentile converts or the church supersede the people of Israel—rather, believing Jews and Gentiles together now constitute the true Israel. The church represents the continuance of God’s care for his redeemed people à la the promises of Isaiah that Dr. Mouw mentioned.

And it isn’t just Romans 11; it strikes me that Ephesians 2 is extraordinary in this respect. Paul says to the Gentiles, Look, you folks were once “separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (v. 12, RSV). Here Paul, using a variety of phrases, insists upon the same thing. To be separated from Christ is to be alienated from Israel, is to be without hope and without God.He continues: “But now in Christ Jesus, you who once were far off have been brought near in the blood of Christ.” The point of all this is that we are reconciled into one body with the covenant people, the spiritual descendants of Abraham. Then he goes on to say, “You are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure . . . grows into a holy temple . . . the dwelling place of God” (vv. 19–21). In the light of this teaching it is hard to see how anyone might say, “But in the meantime, God’s covenant promises, which always seem to refer to one people, actually refer to two, and these others have a separate existence as another temple, another commonwealth, and so on.”

A note with respect to Dr. McDermott’s taxonomy: Newsweek magazine used to call Francis Schaefer a fundamentalist, and that always struck me as odd. I studied with Dr. Schaefer, and he was like no fundamentalist I knew. These terms get thrown around rather loosely. In addition, though I liked the first part of the taxonomy, it seems to me that there ought to be further distinctions—for instance, a place for confessional Protestants (cf. D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism).

But more broadly, consider that even a relatively popular theological dictionary (InterVarsity’s New Dictionary of Theology) concludes its entry on “Israel” by saying that Christians should not offer unequivocal support for the policies of the modern state of Israel, “which arguably has no particular theological significance.” It strikes me that a good case could be made for the fact that although God is still dealing with the descendants of Abraham after the flesh, as Paul puts it, this redemptive intention has no relevance to the modern, secular state of Israel, or to the land. There’s nothing untoward about such a stance, since the book of Hebrews itself seems to say, at least on my reading, that the people who were promised the land and didn’t inherit it, but remained in faith, were proving that they didn’t focus their hope on the promise of earthly land in the first place but were looking for a heavenly city built by God. They didn’t inherit the land, but their faith remained because it went through the land to a better promise, which they did inherit.

That’s the whole argument of Hebrews. Calvin understood this. In the Institutes he says that those who want to have Israel focus on the land reduce Israel to a herd of swine who could be satisfied with the things of this world when God was promising them something far more wonderful than a bit of terra firma.

One more thing that I’d like to note—even though I feel a little on the outs of the discussion, since I’m apparently one of these spiritualizing, supersessionist people: I very much appreciate the argument that if you do grant that some promise to Israel with respect to the land remains, then the Old Testament conditions for the present enjoyment of the land are absolutely critical. From this vantage point, a secular state has a very iffy claim on that land. But to carry this argument further, isn’t it true that you can’t conclude ethical injunctions from providential appointments? It seems to me that here is a fundamental failure of moral logic. God says to Moses, “You go tell Pharaoh, ‘Here’s my precept: let my people go.’ But I’m going to harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he isn’t going to do it.” Moses had in view, then, a providential appointment; yet the precept for Pharaoh to follow was “let my people go,” not “bring yourself into conformity with God’s providential and prophetically revealed appointments.” It follows that even if there were some kind of prophetically revealed appointment with respect to Israel and the land, it would still be the duty of people to follow the precepts of God with respect to continuance in the land, and not try to bring to pass God’s providence, which he will effect on his own terms. If someone could say to me, “Dave, God has appointed that you are going to wreck your car on the way home,” it would still be my duty not to go out looking for a place to wreck but to drive safely and leave providence to God.

James Hutchens: My theological education has been Wheaton College, Dallas Seminary, and Fuller Seminary, and as a PCA pastor I was the director of Christians for Israel. So there has been a pilgrimage here. I want to commend the Ethics and Public Policy Center for having this discussion. I hope it is a preface; I think the church at large needs to hear something on these subjects. The “Left Behind” series has sold 50 million copies of its books, study guides, and videos. That’s a fifth of the population of this country.

I think that the interest in this was well summed up by Rod Dreher in an article on November 18, 2002, in “National Review Online.” Dreher started out as a devotee of The Late Great Planet Earth, and he has made a pilgrimage as well. He writes, “What we’re dealing with are people who are scared and confused by what has been going on in the world today, and who aren’t getting the information they need to separate what’s real from what’s baneful and even harmful speculation.” As Christians, we believe Jesus is coming back, and we have to be ready for that to happen at any moment. This game of “plug the headline into the Scripture verse” is a losing proposition. There is a crying need for a clear and certain voice on this.

As I listen to this discussion, I note that there are obviously some differences of opinion here. It seems to me that this is a call to revisit the texts and to reexamine the presuppositions that lead to the differences. Dispensationalists presuppose a separation of the church and Israel, and from that they infer the “pre-tribulation rapture.” I think that needs to be challenged. At the same time, as a covenantal premillennialist, I think some of the presuppositions of our covenant theology need to be examined. One is that there is a total spiritual fulfillment of the covenants by Christ, to the exclusion of the literal. Jesus said, “I came not to abolish the laws of the prophets but to fulfill them.”

Gerald McDermott: To respond to David Coffin: First of all, I think one problem in theology—all kinds of theology —is systematizing. I see this problem particularly where a system is constructed that flattens out the Bible. All the biblical theological data are fed into the system and are processed into a grid that has systematically omitted the rough and mysterious components of Scripture. The problem is not so much the distortions that come through the processing as what doesn’t get into the system and is therefore considered unimportant. I see this in some of the more Melanchthonian expressions of modern Lutheran theology: everything is reduced to forensic justification by faith. Other parts of the Bible, particularly those that other traditions interpret as calling for sanctification, are regarded either as insignificant or as dangerously suggesting works-righteousness. This is a problem not only for some (not all) Lutheran theologians but for theologians of many other traditions, including evangelical: the Bible gets flattened out. Its infinite complexity and fathomless riches are reduced to a limited system.

David Coffin: Yes, you can jam things into a system, but allegations are not arguments; the charge has to be shown. And yes, you can use data selectively; but you have to use some data, that which strikes you as most relevant.

I think one of the elements of genius in the paper is its attempt to show the reader that he cannot pick and choose from the Old Testament with respect to the promise of the land. That is, Professor McDermott grants divine warrant for the claim of the land, but then insists as well on the conditional elements of the covenant —i.e., that there must be justice in the land. This more biblically integrated view is attractive as a theoretical framework for bringing some good to these broken circumstances. I continue to think, however, that it rests on a serious theological mistake. In Genesis 17, we have the covenant in the circumcision of the flesh, an everlasting covenant—and if you don’t keep the covenant, the circumcision of the flesh, you are cut off from the people of God. In Galatians, the Apostle Paul deliberately says that if you are circumcised, you will be cut off from the people of God. So there’s an everlasting covenant that the New Testament says, in fact, is now fulfilled in Christ, and you are not permitted to re-establish it or use it further as a religious rite. Who can argue that the promise of the land is more abiding than the requirement of circumcision?

But there is another theological mistake at play in our discussion. I hope I don’t sound cold and bloodthirsty, but it seems to me that it’s wrong to think about foreign policy in terms of the particular needs of brothers and sisters in Christ in different countries. In the war for the Commonwealth, there were Christians from Scotland who were fighting Christians from England. In the American Revolution, Christians from England were fighting Christians from America. And in the War Between the States, Christians from the South were fighting Christians from the North. In that conflict, in fact, there was the possibility that two of the greatest theologians of that period—Dabney and Breckenridge, say, or one of the Hodges— might shoot each other on the field of battle. One could not properly support a particular side simply because there were believers present; the question turns on truth and justice.

The spiritual unity of the body of Christ is a profound reality for me personally and as a pastor, but the policies of nations cannot be determined by the particular sympathies we may have with brothers and sisters in Christ. There are believers who may have to suffer under a terrible government, a government whose policies lead them to be the subject of the just retribution of other nations, even nations largely made up of their fellow believers. Sound geopoliti