If you want to understand Christian Zionism, evangelicals’ understanding of Israel, or dispensationalism, you need to be familiar with the work of historian Daniel Hummel. (Check out his work at Current here and our podcast interview with him here). In a recent essay at Aeon, Hummel argues that Christian Zionism is “one of the most successful, and in some way unlikely, interfaith movements in the modern world.”
Here is a taste:
Christian Zionists are seeking to enact what they consider the values of Jewish-Christian cooperation in political and religious terms. Starting with a specific political issue – the wellbeing of Israel – Christian Zionism structures the interfaith relationship in its service. The movement is built to make the case that this goal is vital to evangelical Christians and their identity.
Christian Zionism projects a specific vision of God’s covenantal guarantees and their eschatological fulfilment. In short, it makes God’s promises and their scope more certain, more selective, more exclusive in understanding God’s dealings with humanity. This specificity sets Christian Zionism apart from other interfaith movements, and goes far in explaining its affinity to a certain understanding of Jewish identity.
The issue in which this specificity pays interfaith dividends is in securing Jewish possession of Israel’s covenanted land. The ‘land’ consists of the sites of biblical history and the biblically mandated borders that God in Genesis grants to Israel’s patriarchs. For Christian Zionists, these make up the ideal borders of the state of Israel and include the contested West Bank.
It’s key that US evangelicals’ political Zionism took shape after the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967. This timing meant that, post-1967, evangelical understandings of Israel became preoccupied with its sovereignty over the covenanted land. In the wake of that war, which saw Israel take control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, Jews themselves were undecided on Israel’s significance. The trend, more obvious and expected in Israel, was to emphasise the centrality of land to Jewish identity. The entirety of Judaism could be distilled, in the words of the Israeli official Yona Malachy, to ‘the tripartite union of religion-people-land’. ‘The recognition of the tie between the Jewish people and their country must become the central theme of any future dialogue between Christianity and Jewry,’ he warned in 1969.
Among American Jews, there was less consensus on the preeminence of land to the meaning of Israel, though certainly many came to see the success of Israel as core to their own identity. One of the leading US conservative rabbis, Arthur Hertzberg, claimed in 1971 that ‘the state of Israel … is necessary for the continuity of Judaism and Jews’. Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious affairs and an organiser of Graham’s 1969 meeting, insisted that ‘Christians face and accept the profound historical, religious, cultural and liturgical meaning of the land of Israel and of Jerusalem to the Jewish people’.
American Protestant evangelicals found these demands compelling, mostly for reasons related to their own ideas about the ‘end times’ and Christ’s second coming. For some evangelicals, Israel represented ‘God’s timepiece’ and the centre of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy. For others, it was a testament to God’s fidelity to his chosen people. Many of these eschatological interests also emphasised the central role of Israel in the end times.
Read the entire piece here.