What Christians talk about when we talk about Israel
God's people, all of us, called to peace
Gentle reader,
I don’t want to write this post. I don’t want to live in a world of war. My heart aches for that day told by Isaiah, wherein:
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more (Isaiah 2:4).
We’re not there, but even so, might we pray for God to bring us to a place where peace is our whole desire, a place where we reach toward and work for peace, body and soul?
In the United States, when Christians speak of Israel, we’ve come to a place where that speech is often a declaration of allegiance, not to the living God of Israel, but to the SIDE that we’re on.
On one side—you know the one—national Israel can do no wrong and the United States has an uncritical mandate to support Israel’s military at any cost, as if death weren’t evil, as long it happens in Gaza.
On the other side—you know this one too—any mention of the suffering of Israel is only an affront to suffering Palestinians, as if death weren’t evil when it’s sprung on settlers.
I’d hardly had a moment to blink my eyes after October 7th’s attack, when my feeds filled with declarations of allegiance to the “sides.” And not just allegiance: smugness. Declarations of self-right-ness.
a tweet from my feed
In 2001, I was a student in an academic community with a strong tilt toward pacifism (a tilt I still share). The tweet above reminds me of reactions when the planes went into the twin towers.
Some responses discounted the pain, as if acknowledging that pain would require refusal to see the complex dynamics of militarism, capitalism, and American exceptionalism. From the other “side,” came more militarism, more of that version of patriotism that won’t stand for the asking of questions. Suddenly, we were using the word “homeland,” a word from Nazi Germany.
The disorientation of death was quickly organized into sides. Perhaps it was comforting to step out of the pain and into a nice, certain stance on the whole thing. But if you remember that September in 2001, I suppose you haven’t truly been comforted. I suppose you can still feel the sheer horror that took over your gut, the sense that the ground under you had turned to quicksand?
What I wanted was not to hear the “right” side. I wanted to hold my infant daughter close. I wanted to fall before God in grief.
I imagine this is what Israeli and Palestinian mothers want too. Partisan tweets and self-satisfied side-taking are an affront to their pain. The day that babies die is not the day to discount those babies while issuing pronouncements about colonialism, nor is it the day to send bombs in the direction of other babies. It’s a day to wail and a day to turn more resolutely towards peace.
When U.S. Christians talk about Israel, we shouldn’t be talking about which “side” we are on. But there’s a history here.
A certain kind of eschatology (Christian teaching about the “last things”) looms behind the belief that we must support military Israel at any cost. It’s called “dispensational premillenialism” or just “dispensationalism.”
It’s bad theology.
Though dispensationalism is a new phenomenon, it achieved dominance over our imaginations by claiming to be the right reading of scripture, by declaring any other view a rejection of biblical authority.1 It drew more power by preying on desires and fears endemic to Western society. Throw in capitalism and some bestselling novels, and dispensationalism got into churches where it wouldn’t have shown up otherwise.
I won’t try to explain all of dispensationalism here,2 but the bit that matters for this piece is that the system expects certain events to happen in Israel before Jesus can return. It wants to make those things happen. Thus, it sets up politicians to conscript Christians for their war machines, and it teaches Christians to push politicians towards war.
I just wrote “expects certain historical events…before Jesus can return.” That word, that can, is a theological mistake. God’s ends do not depend on our machinations. It is not ours to try to force the kingdom into happening (for just this reason, many Jews opposed the establishment of national Israel in the first place). God certainly isn’t captive to U.S. politics.
The supposedly pro-Israel position of dispensationalist Zionism masks a cancerous antisemitisim. It robs the Jewish people of personhood, dehumanizing by reducing a people to a tool for Christian purposes. This antisemitism is one reason dispensationalism is rightly rejected by most academics today.3 We can believe in God’s good purposes for all things and hope for the return of Christ while firmly rejecting dispensationalist theology.4
Edward Okuń, The War and Us, 1917, public domain via Artvee.
On the other “side,” many Christians seem to believe that rejecting dispensationalism requires excising any sympathy for Israel. It is right to name the grave harm happening to the Palestinian people, but the people of Israel cannot be treated as collateral damage in the quest to make things better for Palestine.
Israel is neither the Roman nor the British empire, because the very existence of Israel as a nation state is a response to great suffering, to the deepest of evils enacted against the Jewish people. At the same time, we must decry the evils perpetuated against the Palestinian people by the state of Israel. Evil is evil is evil.
We can’t justify terrorist attacks. Here, again, antisemitism is a looming threat. Centuries of antisemitic Christian history paved the road that led to national Israel. Now, a door has opened for that antisemitism to emerge with renewed strength.
When we talk about Israel, we have to talk about antisemitism. We have to talk about holocaust. A relentless, centuries long oppression of a people will have consequences. There are consequences for stealing children, forcing “conversions,” rounding up precious human beings and herding them into death camps. A history like that might wound a people who were created to bless the world, and they might turn to protect themselves at the expense of others. If holocaust leads to holocaust, that horrifying cycle magnifies the effects of sin in history. How much more must we magnify the grace of the God Who is peace?
God loves the people of Israel, God’s elect, God’s beloved. God loves the people of Palestine, nestled there among the nations to which Israel is called to be a light. And God hates all the bombs, whichever way they are directed. All those bombs have no place in an eschatology which looks to the kingdom of the Prince of Peace.
We need to stop side-taking and start talking about Israel theologically. There is no Christian theology without Israel, no gospel without Israel, no Jesus without Israel. National Israel is not identical to theological Israel, but the two do overlap: not in the war rooms but in the vulnerable bodies of God’s beloved people.
Jesus “is our peace…” (Ephesians 2:14) and: “in his flesh he has made both into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us” (Ephesians 2:14).
In his flesh, Jesus wants to break down the Gaza-Israeli barrier.
If that sounds like it would take a miracle, we can’t forget that miracle has already happened through the cross.
“So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near, for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone” (Ephesians 2:17-21).
For we who are Gentiles, who’ve been drawn into the household of Israel’s God through the man, Jesus, it is time to speak for the peace we have found in him.
Let us work for peace, grieve the dead, and look to the God of resurrection to work miracles of peace.
And, I suggest that you read this brilliant post by
:“…given the dehumanization I see on social media—the othering, the determination to justify death—the validating the destruction of innocents as long as it’s the innocents on the other team—honestly, we need some new paradigms.”
Almighty Father, we pray that you might turn our hearts towards your peace. Break down our walls. Teach us to grieve, as you grieve, at every wound of every little one, and teach us to bind up those wounds in the mercy of your love.
Grace & peace & peace & peace,
BFJ
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In fact, dispensationalism does a lot of interpretive gymnastics with scripture, playing fast and loose with the texts. (This is largely because it claims to read eschatological texts “literally,” while the texts actively resist that kind of reading.)
For a book that tries to sort it out, try Stanley Grenz, The Millenial Maze. Also see my colleague
’s new book, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple.And some academics who retain the “dispensational” label have radically altered the kind of dispensational teaching that gets us to mandated Zionism. See Progressive Dispensationalism by Blaising and Bock.
For a beautiful introduction to a much truer Christian eschatology, I recommend N.T. Wright’s Surprised by Hope.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. This was the post that finally made me upgrade to a paid subscriber, because MY GOD, we need to hear your voice. Grace & peace & peace & peace to you.
Thank you. May your words bring soul searching and reality checks.