.png "English"){kind=small}
The uncritical US evangelical embrace of the Trump US embassy move,
as well as of the hard-line Netanyahu government in Israel, has
important but odd theological roots.
America’s most visibly pro-Israel evangelicals, fundamentalists, and
dispensationalists act as they do, in large part, because for them what
the modern State of Israel does matters far less than the fact that a modern State of Israel is.
Their interest in Israel is theological, even mythological, rather than
ethical or this-worldly political. Their unwavering defense of Trump’s
Jerusalem policy and his partnership with Netanyahu is rooted not just
in their loyalty to Trump but also in their highly questionable
eschatological scenarios, in which a return of the Jewish people to
their ancient homeland is viewed as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy
and a decisive event in the end-times before Jesus returns.
Christians who are serious about the Bible have long tended to feel
an electric sense either of attraction or repulsion to the Jewish
people. Repulsion, as in theological anti-Judaism, has been the dominant
tendency, and it has been more than disastrous. (I have fought it my
whole career, including through sustained attention to the Holocaust and
its implications.) Attraction, as in theological philo-Judaism, is also
a strand of Christian history, though certainly not a dominant one.
Both this attraction and this repulsion have been tied to the fact
that over 2/3 of the Christian Bible is the Hebrew Bible, that many
Christians are schooled in a detailed knowledge of (a version of, a
reading of) the Hebrew Bible, and that Christians have deeply desired to
find a coherent theological narrative that ties together Hebrew Bible
and Christian New Testament, our “Old Testament” and “New
Testament.” Christians have forever felt the need to make theological
sense of Jewish scripture, religion, history, and peoplehood, and this
theologizing has taken some fateful, even dangerous, turns.
For many conservative Protestant Christians, the return of the Jewish
people to the Holy Land, before, during, and especially after the
Holocaust, is an event in salvation history. It is seen as a divine
miracle, as a kind of resurrection from the dead for the Jewish people,
and as a major step in the fulfillment of scripture on the way to the
climactic return of Christ – and perhaps even the last-second conversion
of the Jewish people to belief in Jesus Christ.
The political and ethical facts on the ground simply don’t matter
that much when one is in the grip of a fevered theological dream come
true. Among these humble earthly facts are the politically disputed
nature of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and
the existence in this land of some of the world’s oldest Christian
communities, most of them Orthodox religiously and most of them
Palestinian ethnically and nationally. None of it matters to these
American evangelicals/fundamentalists because none of it is included in
the mythico-theological narrative that is functioning so powerfully for
them.
But the State of Israel is a political reality with real needs and
real challenges; it is not just the theological dream of
eschatologically-minded Christians, and the conflation is frankly
disastrous. Too many American evangelicals push American Israeli policy
in specific directions, like the embassy move, because they have little
or no concern for how those policies effects real people in the
region—all they know or care about is the Jerusalem of their
mythologies.
Many Christians, like me, feel a different kind of theological
loyalty to Israel. We too feel a deep ancestral connection to the Jewish
people, the people of the Book that we share with them. We are
especially moved by the prophetic tradition of Israel, the tradition of
Isaiah, Amos, Micah, and Jeremiah, including its demands that justice
roll down like waters, righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. We are
loyal to the Jewish prophetic tradition to which, we believe, Jesus was
also loyal. We therefore have an ethical interest in what happens in
modern Israel, a compassion-based and justice-oriented interest, not
just an eschatological interest.
We would be quite supportive of a modern State of Israel that
demonstrated deep attentiveness to Israel’s own prophetic tradition,
which would force attention to the plight of the Palestinians and indeed
to the plight of marginalized Christians in the Holy Land.
But that justice-oriented, compassionate, prophetic strand is not
terribly visible in the Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu. It is also not
terribly visible among America’s pro-Trump court evangelicals, who in
their eschatological zeal have “neglected the weightier matters of the
law, justice and mercy and faith” (Mt 23:23).
David P. Gushee is Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University.
Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a
forum for diverse perspectives on contemporary issues related to
Orthodox Christianity. The positions expressed in this essay are solely
the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors
or the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.
