Abstract
In 2010, Bethlehem Bible College hosted ‘Christ at the Checkpoint’, an international conference that brought together representatives of Palestinian Pentecostal churches and ‘evangelical theologians, biblical scholars, pastors, activists, and others in an unprecedented way to discuss the situation in Palestine and Israel’ (p. ix). This volume enables a wider audience to engage with the varied contributions to that event. The result is a fascinating, if inevitably somewhat uneven, collection of passionate voices. Alexander, the editor, is Professor of Christian Ethics and Public Policy at Palmer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, USA, and was an organiser of the conference. A second, similar event was held in 2012.
The diversity of the collection reflects in part the different backgrounds and professions of the speakers. The chapters by Munayer and Katanacho end with extensive bibliographies of scholarly works cited, while others present opinion more or less uncluttered by a concern to cite evidence, and in various places one hears clearly the accents of the preacher. Moreover, under the umbrella of ‘evangelical’ perspectives, there has been a concern to include a representative breadth of approach. Cannon and Raheb, for instance, show clear affiliation with liberation theologies of various kinds, while most writers combine a more mainstream Evangelical approach with a strong focus on social justice.
That common concern for justice in the Palestinian context is clearly expressed in the first two aims of the original conference: to ‘empower and encourage the Palestinian Church’ and ‘expose the realities of the injustices in the Palestinian territories and create awareness of the obstacles to reconciliation and peace’ (p. ix). In a collection where the contributors are more or less evenly divided in background between North America and the Middle East, and which reflects an international Evangelical and Pentecostal culture, it should come as no surprise that the third aim is to ‘create a platform for serious engagement with Christian Zionism’ (p. ix). The scale of the influence of Christian Zionism on perceptions of what justice might mean in Israel and Palestine is indicated by Alexander’s claim that ‘Only eleven percent of Assemblies of God pastors in the USA believe that Israel should NOT be privileged over the Palestinians’ (p. 70).
The judgement that Christian Zionism bears substantial responsibility for the refusal of many Christians to face ‘the realities of the injustices in the Palestinian territories’ is more or less explicit in many of the chapters here. Christian Zionism is defined by A. Awad in the opening chapter as ‘a movement within the church that supported and continues to shore up political, economic, and military assistance to the State of Israel through the influence of a theological school called dispensationalism’ (p. 2). He asserts that its pervasive influence has resulted specifically in grave harm to Palestinian Christians and more generally in ‘the spiritual captivity of the Evangelical Church’ (p. 10). Given this perspective, it is hardly surprising that substantial space is also given in other chapters to critiques of Christian Zionism of one sort or another. In his contribution, Campolo sets out the history of dispensationalist theology with which Christian Zionism is here associated, deriving from the teaching of John Nelson Darby in the nineteenth century and widely disseminated in the twentieth century through the popularity of the Scofield Reference Bible. Campolo argues with some cogency that its teaching is ultimately unbiblical, although his appeal to social progress in defence of a less pessimistic eschatology raises questions of its own. Moreover, although Christian Zionism and dispensationalism undoubtedly advanced together in certain sectors of twentieth-century Evangelicalism, Evangelical Christian Zionism preceded the widespread influence of dispensationalism and could well survive its decline; indeed, it is arguable that the connection here is already weakening.
The issues at stake here become clearer in Bock’s chapter on ‘The Land in the Light of the Reconciliation in Christ: A Dispensationalist View’. It is to the credit of the conference organisers that, in keeping with their third aim, they invited a number of dispensationalists to participate and include a talk by one of them in this volume. Bock, however, does not attempt to persuade his fellow Evangelicals of the reliability of Darby as a guide to the Bible’s interpretation. Instead, he focuses on the question of whether God has any purpose for ‘ethnic Israel’ after the coming of Christ (p. 114). His argument is that the scriptural answer to this question must be affirmative; therefore as the identity of ethnic Israel will always be bound up with the land, so questions about the presence of ethnic Israel in the land are intrinsically related to the Christian understanding of God’s purpose in history. It is an argument that brings us close to the historical roots of the origins of Christian Zionism in modernity—and demonstrates that it does not necessarily require adherence to the specific tenets of dispensationalist theology.
Bock’s focus on this question also highlights the danger of slippage from the critique of Christian Zionism into a more or less overt supersessionism, sometimes referred to as replacement theology, with regard to the enduring significance of Israel as God’s covenant people. The chapters by Munayer and Burge on theology of the land in the Bible (drawing heavily on Brueggemann’s book on this subject) seek to show that the fixation among some American Evangelicals on the fortunes of contemporary Israel as territory and state has no basis in Scripture. A similar point is made more obliquely by Katanacho’s essay on eschatology in the Psalms, one of the outstanding chapters in the book. Katanacho draws on recent scholarship analysing the theological interests of the final editing of the Psalter to make a strong case, based on detailed exegesis, for ‘a theocentric eschatological reading’ rather than a ‘restorative eschatological reading’, which according to a footnote is ‘foundational for Christian Zionists’ (pp. 154-55). While these chapters demonstrate well the dangers of moving directly from biblical texts to assertions about prophetic fulfilment and Christian duty in relation to the contemporary State of Israel, Munayer and Burge at least want to move beyond that to claim that the weight of scriptural promises has now shifted from one land to every land, indeed the whole earth, and that Israel as place has no distinctive role in the fulfilment of God’s purpose after Christ. It is inevitably more difficult to construct a biblical theology than to show the tensions and difficulties in the efforts of others, but the question also needs to be considered whether the complete displacement of Israel as a particular land in God’s purpose is bound up with the complete displacement of Israel as a particular people in God’s purpose. An affirmative answer to this would need to face, not just the objections of contemporary Roman Catholic teaching and other critiques of supersessionism, but also, in the book’s own context, its distance from historic perspectives of Evangelical thought and rather stronger affinities to the attitudes of other modern Protestant thinkers such as Kant and Schleiermacher.
Reading Bock’s chapter in the context of other contributions to the volume also helps to clarify a critical question that arises here for moral reasoning in Christian theology: what is the relationship between theological positions on Israel as people, land and state and moral commitments regarding ‘the situation in Palestine and Israel’? On all sides, answers here are presumed rather than articulated. At various points, it appears to be taken for granted that Christian Zionism entails the State of Israel’s exemption from ordinary moral judgement, a linkage that might indeed be discerned in some Christian Zionist rhetoric. Bock, however, flatly denies this: ‘I believe that Israel has a right to be here, but I don’t believe she has a right to be here carte blanche, that she can do whatever she wants, to whomever she wants, in whatever way she wants. I think she is accountable to God for how she interacts with people who she has stewardship over as a government. I think the land ought to be shared’ (p. 122). Although he acknowledges that few dispensationalists would agree with him on the final point, his comments indicate that a theological interpretation of the modern State of Israel as existing in accordance with biblical promises does not necessarily require one to deny the rights of Palestinians or to condone actions by Israel that would in any other context be seen as a denial of basic justice. It may be used to do those things, but when it is it is being abused—theology of history cannot be invoked to trump theological ethics—and what needs to be tackled is that abuse and the profound failure of Christian moral reasoning that it represents. This at least suggests that if one wishes to challenge the moral conclusions of the overwhelming majority of American Pentecostals regarding the situation in Israel and Palestine as reported by Alexander, one might usefully engage in a conversation about what moral inferences may properly be drawn from the premise that the State of Israel exists by the particular providence of God, as well as about the validity of the premise itself. Indeed, such a conversation might just have more chance of becoming a productive dialogue. It could illuminate the way that our interpretation of events in the light of Scripture relates to our response to those events in the light of the same Scripture.
Perhaps the best way to approach this collection is to read it as testimony, with some important reflection arising from that. It testifies to the suffering of Palestinians, and to the incomprehension and anger of Palestinian Christians at the indifference they perceive to their suffering among many who claim to be their brothers and sisters in Christ elsewhere in the world, and particularly in the USA. It testifies to the willingness of Christian people to endure hostility of many kinds in responding to Jesus’ call to love the enemy, to preach the good news of reconciliation in costly ways, and to refuse to allow division to become loveless separation. Finally, it testifies to the power of solidarity among Christians across those divisions—America and the Middle East, Israel and Palestine—to witness to Christ who is our peace, and to the huge potential of global Pentecostalism for fostering that, even as it makes us painfully aware of how weak that witness has been, and how easily it has been undone by other loyalties.