CHRISTIAN ZIONISM canauk seminar
paper given by William J Spring Orange Street Congregational Church London 24/02/07
"Are you the one who was to come or should we expect someone else?" Luke 7 v 19
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Christopher Booker in The Neophiliacs says fantasy follows a number of stages and applies his analysis to UK post second world war history. There is the anticipation stage, then the dream stage, when the fantasy appears fulfilled, followed by the frustration stage, when things begin to go wrong, the nightmare stage, when things go very wrong, then there is the Death Wish stage, finally the wakening to reality.
"If carried far enough all fantasy evolves into an obsession with sex or violence .
Right wing fantasies have tended to be concerned more with the rightness of power and the wrongess of sex, while left wing fantasies have been concerned more with the wrongness of power and the rightness of sex. But in the end both right and left wing fantasies are only complementary symptoms of the same basic disturbance."
On this basis I want to examine the rise of Zionism, the establishment of the State of Israel and events since.
1967. I was at University @ the time of the Six Day War. I remember standing in front of the television when the news came from the BBC - I think the correspondent was Michael Elkins - that the Israelis had broken through.
In those days Israel was respected, for its apparent efficiency and military prowess.
A roar of approval went up in the Junior Common Room.
No one particularly liked the Arabs, they were rag heads, the British had generally shot at them or been shot by them, as in Aden. Israeli atrocities against the British at the end of the Mandate period were rather forgotten.
I came from an evangelical background. From quite young it was drilled into me by my brother who was a teenage convert to Pentecostalism, as I also became, that the 1917 Balfour Declaration and the return of the Jews to the Holy Land was the best thing since sliced bread.
One book he showed me was the Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool.
This necessarily evoked a sense of horror and sympathy for the Jews at what had happened to them during the Nazi period. All this was coupled with a lot of superstition. The bad weather in 1947 my mother told me was because of the Jews, because we tried to stop their ship.
The Jews we knew were very amiable. A Mr Katz wd often visit us and make us laugh and he wd always leave a Birmingham Jewish Recorder. a glossy magazine. We didn't know any Arabs, except one Egyptian who occasionally came to see my father. Then one day in 1956 he stopped coming.
The Pentecostals were a strong denomination in Birmingham.
There was a thing called The Pentecostal Jewish Mission. Its Director, Whitfield Foster told us how one day Jerusalem wd be united, that the Mosque on the sacred site of the old Temple wd be pulled down, then Muslims all over the world wd work themselves up into frenzy. All nations wd come against Israel to battle.
A new temple wd be built in Jerusalem in which Anti Christ wd sit, and the entire crisis resolved by the Lord's Triumphant Return , who on the way wd zap the enemies of Israel.
It was all so simple. When Jerusalem was taken in 1967, and the Ram's Horn s sounded, we really believed ,as I still believe, howbeit for different reasons, that we were and are living in apocalyptic days.
Jerusalem wd be trodden underfoot of all nations until the time of the Gentiles were fulfilled, said the Lord.
Now Jerusalem under Jewish control, the times of the Gentiles were over. It was indeed extraordinary how teachings developed by a small group of Victorian Bible moths have worked out on the world stage.
In 1967 in dingy student flats we perused The Scofield Reference Bibles amazed to discover how C I Scofield had already prophesied in his footnotes that the Jews wd return to the Holy Land, "in unbelief." We saw the secular state of Israel as in some way a precursor to the theocratic state yet to be established.
As well as Belsen and the Pentecostal influence, there was Muggeridge.
Everything the sage of Robertsbridge told us we his acolytes hung on to as if he were Tolstoy.
He had interviewed Ben Gurion, how Hebrew had become established as the language of Israel, surprising really when one considers before the state was established it was in many respects a dead language.
Muggeridge viewed the West as decadent but " our final betrayal will be of Israel."
In 1984 I was on the island of Cyprus. A book had been issued by a mainstream UK evangelical publisher. I forget the title, but it may have been "Children of Abraham." In it the author attacked the view described above. At that time I was working for an evangelical mission, the war was going on in Lebanon, and most of my colleagues were very pro Arab, I the odd man out, being pro Israeli.
I remember sitting up one night in Limassol writing a furious letter about ten pages long to the author of this dangerously unsound book.
I am not sure quite what caused me to change. I think it was the accumulated weight of evidence, Sabra and Shattila, etc but also I came to another view of scripture.
But before I examine that, I want to define terms. What do we mean by Zionism?
The short answer is that it is a belief that the Jews have a right to return to The Holy Land and establish themselves there in a state.
Zionism has a particular appeal to the English. We too regard ourselves as elect. I am now going to quote extensively from an article by Wager:
"The British have had a long-term fascination with the idea of Israel and its central role in biblical prophecy that dates back to their earliest recorded literature. The Epistle of Gildas (circa. 6th century AD) and the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History (735 AD) both saw the British as 'the new Israel' God's chosen people destined to play a strategic role despite repeated invasions by their Nordic neighbours. In the British perception of being an elect, these battles were understood in the context of Israel's battles against the Philistines,Babylonians and others.
"A clear resurgence of such themes was evident in the 16th century, perhapsinfluenced by the Protestant Reformation and its emphasis on the Bible andvaried interpretations of its texts, now that Rome had lost its control overthe new clergy and theologians. One of the early expressions of fascinationwith the idea of Israel was the monograph Apocalypsis Apocalypseos, writtenby Anglican clergyman Thomas Brightman in 1585. Brightman urged the Britishpeople to support the return of the Jews to Palestine in order to hasten aseries of prophetic events that would culminate in the return of Jesus.
"In 1621, a prominent member of the British Parliament, attorney Henry Finch,advanced a similar perspective when he wrote: "The (Jews) shall repair totheir own country, shall inherit all of the land as before, shall live insafety, and shall continue in it forever." Finch argued that based on hisinterpretation of Genesis 12:3, God would bless those nations that supportedthe Jews' return. However, his idea did not find support from fellowlegislators."Wager says" While these writers cannot be classified as Christian Zionists, they mightbe viewed as proto-Christian Zionists, as they prepared the way for thosewho would follow. Gradually their views receded, but the turbulencefollowing the American and French revolutions provoked significant feelingsof insecurity across Europe ... During the decade that followed the year 1800, several Christian writers and preachers began to reflect on the events leading to Jesus' would-be imminent return, among them Louis Way, an Anglican clergyman.
Way taught that it wasnecessary for the Jews to return to Palestine as the first stage prior tothe Messianic Age, and he offered speculation as to the timing of Jesus'second coming. Within a short period of time, Way gained a wide readershipthrough his journal The Jewish Expositor and counted many clergymen, academics and the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge as subscribers.
"A number of influential proto-Christian Zionists emerged in the generationthat followed Way. John Nelson Darby (1800-81), a renegade Irish Anglicanpriest, added several unique features to Way's teachings, including thedoctrine of "the Rapture," whereby "born again Christians" would beliterally removed from history and transferred to heaven prior to Jesus'return. Darby also placed a restored Israel at the centre of his theology,claiming that an actual Jewish state called Israel would become the centralinstrument for God to fulfil His plans during the last days of history.Only true ("born again") Christians would be removed from history prior tothe final battle of Armageddon through the Rapture based on his literalinterpretation of 1 Thessalonians 4:16."Darby's extensive writings and 60-year career as a missionary consolidated a form of fundamentalism called dispensationalism. Darby made six missionary journeys to North America, where he became a popular teacherand preacher. "
One of the resolutions adopted by the 1878 Niagara Conference gives clearevidence of the influence of Darby's dispensationalism.
"We believe that the world will not be converted during the presentdispensation, but is fast ripening for judgment, while there will be fearfulapostasy in the professing Christian body; and hence that the Lord Jesuswill come in person to introduce the millennial age, when Israel shall berestored to their own land, and the earth shall be full of the knowledge ofthe Lord; and that this personal and premillennial advent is the blessedhope set before us in the Gospel for which we should be constantlylooking."
Wager concludes "what is now known as Christian Zionism is the direct product of this unusual form of Protestant theology. Found primarily in North America and England,it is now exported around the globe via satellite television, the internet,best-selling novels such as the Left Behind series, films and a new breed ofmissionaries. "
Another article, by John Scott, goes into dispensationalism in great detail and examines some of the organisations and individuals associated with these ideas.
Representative of Christian Zionism is Hal Lindsey. His most famous book, The Late Great Planet Earth (published 1970) went through more than 108 printings with sales of more than 18 million copies in English, with between 18-20 million further copies in 54 foreign language editions. In each of his books Lindsey insists biblical prophecy is being fulfilled and signals the imminent destruction of the world.
Lindsey's last but one book The Final Battle, includes this statement on its cover:"Never before, in one book, has there been such a complete and detailed lookat the events leading up to 'The Battle of Armageddon.' ""
Lindsey claims the world is degenerating and that the forces of evilmanifest in godless Communism and militant Islam are the real enemies ofIsrael. He describes in detail the events leading to the great battle atMegiddo between the massive Russian, Chinese and African armies that willattempt but fail to destroy Israel and offers illustrated plans showingfuture military movements of armies and naval convoys leading up to thebattle of Armageddon. "These will merely hasten the return of JesusChrist as King of the Jews who will rule over the nations from the rebuiltJewish temple in Jerusalem....Obstacle or no obstacle, it is certain that the Temple will be rebuilt. Prophecy demands it...With the Jewish nation reborn in the land ofPalestine, ancient Jerusalem once again under total Jewish control for thefirst time in 2600 years, and talk of rebuilding the great Temple, the mostimportant sign of Jesus Christ's soon coming is before us... It is like thekey piece of a jigsaw puzzle being found... For all those who trust in JesusChrist, it is a time of electrifying excitement."
Hal Lindsey stands for a whole tribe of barmy Americans, mostly Texans. What Bush is to politics Lindsey is to theology. Each of his prophecies tend to be revised as they don't materialise, but one constant is Israel.
Extrapolating the futuristic nonsense, from a theological angle, can any of this be justified?
What is appalling is how Christian Zionism has taken over mainstream evangelicalism in America and provides the main constituency for GW Bush ( together with the pro life movement, which I will not go into at this point). In my view in their support for Gerge W Bush’s foreign policy they are mistaken and their mistake is very simple.
Christian Zionists frequently refer to the Abrahamic Covenant.
To quote Genesis: "On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram and said " to your descendants will I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates .... this is my covenant with you, you will the father of many nations . No longer will you be called Abram, your name will be Abraham ...I will make you very fruitful and I will make nations of you and kings will come from you...The whole land of Canaan ... I will give you as an everlasting possession to you and to your descendants after you and I will be their God."
It is because of this covenant that US Christian Zionists say Israel is entitled to hegemony over the entire Middle East.
But objections the are:
1. Abraham had 2 sons Isaac and Ishmael.
Ishmael is regarded as the father of the Arabs, as Isaac was the father of Jacob whose name was changed to Israel. No one descendant of this family was given a monopoly status in this vast region!
2. In any case the covenant made with Abraham was conditional.
"You must keep my covenant for, you and your descendants after you, for the generations to come."
The Bible recounts many prophetic denunciations of Israel for having the broken the covenant originally made with Abraham and later ratified at Mount Sinai.
Indeed Moses broke the tablets of the law as he came down the mountain, indicating Israel was already in apostasy!
Because of this, and as the prophets had warned, disaster came in the form of the Babylonian and Assyrian Captivities. Ten of the tribes of Israel never returned and were lost entirely to history.
Only the two tribes from the southern of kingdom of Judah went back to Palestine to rebuild the Temple when their captivity was over.
3. The prophets had warned the Jews their revived state had no future. God did not wish to recognise them any more nor their national institutions. " I hate I despise your religious feasts, I cannot stand your assemblies...." Amos 5 v 21
Yahweh would only work through a remnant, the minority of the people faithful to Him.
Christ stood in this prophetic tradition when he said "I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit." Mat 21 v 43
4. With the inclusion of the Gentiles in the previously Jewish church a new ecclesiastical polity developed.
St Paul wrote to the Galatians assuring them they were the true descendants of Abraham . To quote from an 1805 commentary by Thomas Scott on Galatians 3 v 29 " if the Galatians did indeed belong to Christ by faith and the participation of his Spirit they were become the spiritual seed of Abraham and heirs of all the blessings covenanted to him..." (my underlining)
What we can conclude from this is that the Israeli state as currently constituted can defend its claim to Palestine on a number of grounds, but what it cannot do is claim any Biblical warrant for its existence and the continuing occupation of Palestinian land.
Dispensationalists argue the promises of God to the Jewish people are only suspended during the Church age and then will once again apply to Israel, but there is nothing in scripture to indicate there is such a thing as suspension of God's promises. God's promises are not revocable, so argues Paul in Romans 11 v 29.
This hysterical doctrinal ignorance of the US evangelicals means that they, the US evangelicals, are in fact accelerating and amplifying the possibility of nuclear war.
At the moment there is a real risk that their frightful eschatology will be realised.
I can already see the television broadcast: "My fellow Americans, our strikes on Iran are necessary to prevent that state from acquiring a nuclear weapon and threatening Israel..."
And @ that mantra, defending Israel, the US evangelicals will jump to attention.
This is the end time but not for the reasons put forward by JN Darby.
Not only are the US evangelicals pushing for nuclear war, the efforts of their protege George W Bush have effectively obliterated the Church as a viable institution in the Middle East.
By invading Iraq many Muslims see the so called Christian West as launching a new crusade.
Hundreds of thousand of Christians who have lived in the Middle East for hundreds of years are at risk because of US and UK foreign policy, which makes the position of Stephen Pound MP indefensible.
He has indicated great sympathy for the position of Iraqi Christians, and initiated a debate in Westminster Hall on their plight. Yet he voted for the War, and anyone who knows the Middle East could have told him the invasion of Iraq wd make the position of Christians there far worse.
5. So if we are to defend the right of Israel to exist we have to do so without reference to any spurious Biblical appeal.
I am out of the argument. The only people who can decide whether Jews have the right to be in the Holy Land within a state of their own and within the borders currently drawn are the Jews and the Arabs.
If the Jews think they can survive in their state, as currently constituted, fine. But if I were a Jew I wd probably be thinking packing my bags to go to Patagonia..
I believe every group of people have a right to national homeland , if they can find one.
The political argument after WW 2 for allowing the establishment of a Jewish state was overwhelming. But it did not take account of the Arabs.
To go back to the Victorians, Lord Shaftesbury, a conservative evangelical Christian intimately linked to the UK Establishment in 1839 published an essay entitled "The State and Restoration of the Jews." He argued: "The Jews must be encouraged to return (to Palestine) in yet greater numbers and become once more the husbandman of Judea and Galilee."
Writing 57 years before Zionist thinkers Max Nordau, Israel Zangwill and Theodor Herzl popularised the phrase, Shaftesbury called the Jews "a people with no country for a country with no people." a saying curiously similar to that of the early Zionists, who described Palestine as "a land of no people for a people with no land."
Gradually, Shaftesbury's views gained acceptance among British journalists, clergy and politicians. There was in the end a recognition that it was not an entirely empty land but the indigenous didn't count.
"In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country.The four great powers are committed to Zionism, and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." Balfour speech 1919
I insert here an account from a Mr Rix published in 1907:
"In due time we reached the cross-track from Safed by which we had struck our present route when making our northward journey. After this our road was new to us. The new elements were, however, not those of romance, but those of strict and non-picturesque utility. For here we passed through one of the principal Jewish farm colonies subsidised by rich European Jews ; and the place looks like what it is, the reverse of a natural growth - a bit of Europe plumped down into incongruous surroundings.
Here were European roads and carts, European drivers, dressed in semi-European garments, and beyond all, worst of all, here was European barbed wire. But the mile-long avenue of poplar and eucalyptus, with hedges of mimosa, gave a very grateful shade, for the heat was fierce to-day; and water from a tap, which we could drink without fear of typhoid, was a veritable luxury, albeit the farmyard where we found it was singularly unbiblical.
" Twenty years ago or more," says a recent American writer, " Baron Edmond Rothschild of Paris, who, as a practical man, does not thoroughly sympathise with the Zionist movement, undertook at his own expense to try an extensive experiment to demonstrate the problem. He purchased large tracts of land in different parts of Palestine, and settled upon them some twenty or more colonies, with about ten thousand Jews from Roumania, Poland and other parts of Europe. The experiment has cost him at least ten million dollars, and he admits that it is a failure. He has abandoned this vast scheme of philanthropy, transferred all of the land and other property to the Jewish Colonisation Society of London and has given it ten million dollars more to carry on the work."
Mr Rix had earlier spoken to numerous Jews who had lived in Palestine for generations, indeed some since before AD 70. These were the indigenous Jews who lived not necessarily happily but @ least not in a state of perpetual war with their Muslim or Druze neighbours.
From Mr Rix's observations I suggest we can perceive the true nature of Zionism, which is that it was an Anglo-American land grab, another experiment in colonisation, at a time when we had already divided up large tracts of the globe. This particular land grab applied the ethnicity and religion of the Jews as cover in order to legitimise it, but paradoxically made the life of the Jews who had lived in Palestine for centuries before the Zionists arrived more precarious.
I feel duped, by this Christian Zionist propaganda to which I was exposed as a child via my brother.
I repent for having supported for so long this continuing atrocity in the heart of the Middle East.
This does not mean to say I want to see the Middle East Islamified. I lived in a fanatical Muslim state for eight years. One of the few things I agree with the neo cons on is my abhorrence of Islamo-Fascism.
But my tactic for dealing with it would be very different.
When you have guys already on the edge do not push them over it, as we have now done by our invasion of Iraq, our plans to attack Iran, our general lack of even handedness, UK support for the siege of Gaza, and for the Israeli attack last year on Lebanon, and Ethiopia's recent invasion of Somalia.
The war on Afghanistan was a cosmetic war served up to convince the US public that George Bush was hitting back over 9/11. But the real culprits, the villains of 9/11 are all sitting in posh villas in Riyadh, protected by the US and UK who train the Saudi security forces.
If they were going to invade anywhere as a reprisal for 9/11 why didn't they take over Saudi? Answer: too many people in Texas wd lose money.
So what shd be our view be as Christians and as UK citizens?
1. We do not want to see this eternal dispute between Arab and Jew wreck our planet.
2. We do not want our national interest tied to the national interest of Israel, although by giving support to Israel in its bellicose polices we are actually acting against Israel's interest, which surely must be to reach out to the Arabs and to face facts about the Nightmare Stage in their fantasy, which is rapidly turning into the Death Wish stage.
In my view Israel can no longer justify its existence.
It is a failed state.
It cannot provide security to its citizens nor justice in the occupied people territories. The people of the Law have incorporated the Law in drones which fly above Palestinian villages arbitrarily zapping anyone on a motor bike.
The prophets who were the first people to define the concept of a war crime wd have something to say abt cluster bombs and abt Israeli techniques of interrogation.
I close with two scenarios to indicate the problem.
I am English. Say in 50 years time this country becomes Muslim and the English are ethnically cleansed out of our land, as indeed the Serbs have been ethnically cleansed by NATO out of their oldest province, Kosovo.
My descendants then go to Canada. In two thousand years time they suddenly get it into their heads to go back to England, expel the Pakistanis and set up an English state once again. Wd this be permissible?
But if I were to accept that the title deeds to a land remain, whatever the lapse of time, I wd also have to confront an alternative scenario: how would I feel if tomorrow Welshmen in large numbers arrived in London and systematically began to expel the English from Hampstead and Haringey etc, appealing for their authority to an antique text of Merlin the Wizard?
This is a paradox.
I cannot solve it. All I can say is Arabs and Jews have to solve this one, and it doesn't appear to me that the Jewish state can survive unless it abandons the two state philosophy.
You cannot expect the Arabs to be shunted off into bantustans.
The best thing might be to start all over again. Awake to reality.
Establish one state in the area of Palestine, and call it whatever you like.
ends
Numerous extracts from an article which appeared in THE DAILY STAR 10/09/03 by
Donald Wagner professor of religion and Middle Eastern studies at North Park University in Chicago and executive director of the Center for Middle Eastern StudiesJohn Scott article obtained via Information Clearing House on web. Provenance and date of 1st issue I am researching.
Rix H, p 112 Tent and Testament, Williams and Norgate, London, 1907 Rix quotes from "Today in Syria and Palestine" WE Curtis p 327 Chicago 1904
