What about Christian Zionism?

Question 60071.

Christian Zionism has become a term of abuse in a good deal of Christian writing, used to describe a caricature that almost nobody actually holds. Before I defend anything I want to say clearly what I do and do not mean by it.

What I hold is that God made unconditional promises to the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that those promises include a specific land, that they have not been transferred to anyone else, and that they will be fulfilled literally. That conviction shapes how I read prophecy. It does not make me an apologist for every act of a modern government, and the confusion of those two things is the source of most of the heat in this argument.

The covenant that starts everything

Genesis 12 records God calling a man out of Ur with promises attached. A great nation, a name, blessing for those who bless him, and a land.

Genesis 15 turns that into a formal covenant, and the manner of it matters. In the ancient ceremony both parties walked between the divided animals, invoking the same fate on themselves if they broke the terms.

Abram does not walk. He is put into a deep sleep, and God alone passes between the pieces as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch. The covenant is one-sided by design.

That is the foundation of everything I would want to say under the heading of Christian Zionism. If the covenant depends on Abraham’s descendants keeping their end, it can be forfeited. If it depends on God alone, it cannot.

And the boundaries in that chapter are not vague. From the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates. Israel has never yet held that territory, which means the promise remains outstanding.

Unconditional promise and conditional blessing

The usual objection is that Israel broke the covenant and lost the promises, and the exile proves it. That confuses two different things.

The Mosaic covenant, given at Sinai, was conditional. Obey and be blessed in the land, disobey and be removed from it. Israel disobeyed and was removed, exactly as promised.

But the Abrahamic covenant was not the Mosaic covenant, and Paul says as much in Galatians 3, arguing that the law which came four hundred and thirty years afterwards does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God.

So exile from the land is consistent with the permanent ownership of the land. A son may be sent to his room without being disinherited.

This distinction is the hinge of the whole discussion, and where it is missed, Christian Zionism and replacement theology simply talk past each other.

What Paul says in Romans 11

If you want to know whether God has finished with Israel, Paul asks the question in those words and answers it himself. Has God rejected his people? By no means.

He describes a partial hardening that has come upon Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in, and then says and in this way all Israel will be saved.

The natural reading is that Israel means Israel throughout the passage. Paul has been speaking of his kinsmen according to the flesh, of the olive tree and the natural branches, and it takes considerable effort to make Israel mean the church in verse 26 when it plainly means ethnic Israel everywhere else in the chapter.

Then comes the line that settles it for me. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable. Not renegotiable, not conditional on performance, not transferred.

I have set this out more fully in what all Israel will be saved actually means.

Christian Zionism and the return of 1948

Here I want to be careful, because this is where overreach usually begins. I do believe the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the land after nineteen centuries is remarkable and consistent with what the prophets describe.

Ezekiel 37 pictures dry bones coming together into a body, with breath entering afterwards. A national restoration that is physical first and spiritual later fits what we see, since modern Israel is a largely secular state.

What I will not do is claim that 1948 was the fulfilment of a specific prophecy on a specific date, or that it starts a clock. Date-setting is forbidden and the church’s record on it is humiliating.

So Christian Zionism at its best says the pieces are being positioned in a way consistent with Scripture. It does not say we can read tomorrow’s news out of Daniel.

See the prophetic significance of 1948 for more on this.

What Christian Zionism is not

Now the corrections, and there are several I would want to make firmly.

It is not the claim that the modern state of Israel can do no wrong. Governments are governments. The prophets were harder on Israel’s rulers than any modern critic has managed, and a theology that cannot criticise Jerusalem has stopped being biblical.

It is not indifference to Palestinian suffering. There are Palestinian Christians whose families have worshipped in Bethlehem for centuries, and they are my brothers and sisters. Any version of Christian Zionism that shrugs at their situation has failed the second commandment.

It is not the belief that Jewish people are saved apart from Jesus. That is dual covenant theology and I reject it entirely. Paul’s heart’s desire and prayer for Israel was that they might be saved, which presumes they need saving.

And it is not a mandate for political lobbying as the church’s primary business. The church’s commission is to preach the gospel to all nations, Israel included, and not to run a foreign policy.

The charge of using Jewish people as props

The sharpest criticism levelled at Christian Zionism is that it supports Israel not out of love for Jewish people but because Jewish people are needed on stage for the end times drama.

Where that is true it is a disgrace and I will not defend it. Treating a nation as a prophetic prop is dehumanising, and some popular prophecy teaching has come uncomfortably close.

The test is simple. Do you want Jewish people saved? If your eschatology makes you enthusiastic about a coming tribulation for Israel while leaving you indifferent to Jewish evangelism now, something has gone badly wrong in your heart.

Paul’s model is the right one. He preached to the Jew first, he grieved over their unbelief, and he would have been accursed himself for their sake. That is not using anyone.

The replacement alternative and its history

The main alternative to Christian Zionism is the view that the church has replaced Israel and inherited the promises, with the curses left behind.

I find that reading exegetically weak, since it requires the word Israel to change meaning without warning, and it requires the land promises to be spiritualised into something the text never mentions.

It also has an unhappy history. When the church concluded that the Jewish people had been written out of God’s purposes, the consequences across European history were not theoretical. Ghettos, expulsions, forced conversions and worse were often justified from pulpits.

I am not saying every theologian who holds this view is antisemitic. Many are godly people and I have learned from them. I am saying the doctrine has a track record and it is worth knowing.

See also whether the church has replaced Israel.

Israel and the church remain distinct

The framework underneath all this is the distinction between Israel and the church, which is the heart of dispensational reading.

The church began at Pentecost, is composed of Jew and Gentile in one body, and has promises of its own including the removal of the church before the day of wrath. Israel is a nation with land promises and a national future.

Paul can speak of Jews, Greeks and the church of God as three categories in one sentence, which he does in 1 Corinthians 10, and that is difficult to explain if the church has simply become Israel.

Keeping the distinction protects both. It stops the church stealing Israel’s promises, and it stops Israel’s national future being read as the church’s political programme.

For a fuller treatment there is a helpful body of work at Ariel Ministries, though as always I would ask you to test everything against the text.

What about the church’s political voice?

A Christian may hold everything I have written and still disagree with a particular government policy, and there must be room for that.

My own practice is to distinguish three levels. What Scripture says about God’s purposes for Israel, which I hold firmly. What I think about the moral conduct of a particular military or political decision, which is a judgement I hold provisionally. And what my country’s foreign policy should be, on which the church as church has no revelation at all.

Collapsing those three into one is where Christian Zionism most often does damage, and it is also where its critics most often attack a position nobody defends.

Keep them apart and the conversation becomes possible again.

Loving Jewish people in practice

If the theology is right then something ought to follow in ordinary life, or it is just a chart.

Learn something about Jewish history and about the antisemitism that runs through our own country’s past, including the expulsion of 1290 and the massacre at York. Know what you are speaking about.

Support work that brings the gospel to Jewish people with respect and without deception. There are faithful ministries doing this and they need help.

Refuse antisemitic tropes wherever they appear, including in Christian circles where they sometimes arrive dressed as concern about finance or media or influence. Name them for what they are.

And pray for the peace of Jerusalem, which is a command in Psalm 122 and remains one whatever your eschatology.

The land promise and its boundaries

A good deal of the argument turns on whether the land promise was ever literal, so let me press on it.

The word for land, erets, occurs over two thousand times in the Hebrew Bible and in the covenant passages it is repeatedly given boundaries, described in terms of specific rivers and named peoples, and granted as an everlasting possession.

Genesis 17 calls it an everlasting possession. Psalm 105 says God remembers his covenant for ever, to a thousand generations, the covenant he made with Abraham, saying to you I will give the land of Canaan.

Those are not the sort of statements that comfortably dissolve into a metaphor for heaven, and the burden of proof lies with the reader who wants them to.

This is the exegetical core of Christian Zionism, and it is a hermeneutical argument before it is a political one. If the prophecies about Israel’s first coming Messiah were fulfilled literally, and they were, consistency asks that we read the rest the same way.

Christian Zionism and the return of Jesus

There is a further point that critics rarely address. The prophetic passages tie Israel’s restoration to the personal return of the Messiah to a specific place.

Zechariah 14 says his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives, and describes the mountain splitting. Acts 1 says he will come in the same way as the disciples saw him go, and they saw him go from that same hill.

If those texts are literal, then a literal land, a literal city and a literal people are already presupposed. You cannot spiritualise Israel and keep a bodily return to Jerusalem without inconsistency.

That, more than any newspaper, is why Christian Zionism matters to me. It is downstream of how we read the promises about Jesus Himself.

Common objections answered briefly

Let me take the usual objections in turn, since they come up in every conversation.

Galatians 3 says believers are Abraham’s offspring, so the promises are ours. Yes, the spiritual blessing of justification by faith comes to all nations through Abraham’s seed, exactly as Genesis 12 said it would. That does not cancel the national and territorial promises made separately to his physical descendants.

Joshua 21 says God gave Israel all the land he swore to give. Read on. Judges records the land not taken, and centuries later God is still promising a future gathering, which He would not do if the matter were closed.

The modern state is secular, so it cannot be a fulfilment. Agreed that it is secular, and Ezekiel 37 describes bones assembled before breath enters, which is precisely a physical restoration preceding a spiritual one.

Supporting Israel means endorsing injustice. It does not, and no serious form of Christian Zionism requires it. Criticise policy freely. Just do not conclude from a policy dispute that God has revoked a covenant He swore by Himself.

A note on the term itself

Finally, a word about the label. I use Christian Zionism here because the question uses it, but I am not attached to it and I would not put it on a church noticeboard.

It is a nineteenth century political term applied retrospectively to a theological conviction, and it now carries so much freight that it obscures more than it reveals. What I actually hold is that the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional and that God keeps His word.

If a brother wants to argue with me about that, let him argue about Genesis 15 and Romans 11. Arguing about a label is a way of avoiding the text, and I would rather we did not.

So, now what?

If you have been told that Christian Zionism is a nineteenth century invention with no biblical basis, go and read Genesis 15, Romans 11 and Ezekiel 36 to 37 for yourself before accepting the verdict. The land promises are not hiding.

If you hold this position already, examine the fruit of it. Does it make you pray more for Jewish people to know their Messiah, or does it mostly make you argue online? One of those is discipleship.

And if you are somewhere in the middle, unsure and a little wary of the whole subject, that is a reasonable place to stand while you work. Read the covenants, watch how Paul handles them, and let the text set the boundaries rather than the headlines.

The question I would leave with anyone on any side of this is simple. Do you actually want to see Jewish people come to faith in Jesus, and what are you doing about it?

As regards the gospel, they are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Romans 11:28 to 29, ESV

For Further Study

Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Israelology is the fullest treatment of this subject from a dispensational and Jewish believing perspective, and his Footsteps of the Messiah works through the prophetic programme in detail. J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come remains the standard survey of dispensational eschatology and handles the Abrahamic covenant carefully. John Walvoord wrote extensively on Israel in prophecy and is worth reading for his caution as much as his conclusions. Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism sets out the hermeneutical framework and answers the common objections, and his Basic Theology gives the shorter version. Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology is older and denser but establishes the distinction between Israel and the church at length. For the opposing case, read a careful covenantal writer directly rather than relying on a dispensationalist’s summary of him, since arguments are best met in their strongest form.