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[url=http://www.catholictradition.org/cfn-apr03.htm#ZIONISM]http://www.catholictradition.org/cfn-apr03.htm#ZIONISM[/url]
THE INTERNATIONAL REPORT Christian Zionism: A Contradiction in Terms by Robert A. Sungenis and Thomas E. Woods, Ph.D.
Anyone who has been watching any of the major news networks in recent months has been subjected to a barrage of propaganda from so-called Christian Zionists-----that is, Christians who support the territorial claims of the State of Israel. News programs that wOuld ordinarily have little use for the opinions of men like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are suddenly very interested to hear what these men have to say about American foreign policy.
Robertson, Falwell, and other Christian Zionists in effect suggest that unswerving support for some of the most aggressive Israeli politicians is the only legitimate position for Bible-believing Christians. Yet their position constitutes an utter novelty in the history of Christian thought, and it is long past due for Christian Zionism to be refuted, from a traditional Christian perspective, once and for all.
Zionism itself was born in the late 19th Century. Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl played an especially important role in spreading the idea throughout Europe, consolidating numerous strains of Zionist thought into a single political program. As Herzl put it in his influential book Der Judenstaat [The Jewish State] (1896), "Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation; the rest we shall manage for ourselves." He specifically pointed to Palestine as the "historic homeland" of the Jews.
At first, Palestine was not the exclusive site where Zionists supposed that their plans would be realized [though by the early years of the 20th Century Palestine had become well established as the center of Zionist efforts], and even the idea of establishing a Jewish state as opposed to the lesser goal of a Jewish homeland was not necessarily in the minds of some Zionists as the 20th progressed. The Balfour Declaration, the British Government's crucial 1917 statement in favor of Zionism, limited itself to calling for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Ultimately, of course, it was precisely a Jewish state in Palestine that the Zionist movement succeeded in erecting when, on the heels of the United Nations partition plan proposed in 1947, the new state of Israel declared its independence in June 1948.
Among the Old Testament verses cited most frequently on behalf of Zionism is God's promise in Genesis: "That day God made a covenant with Abram, saying: To thy seed will I give this land, from the river of Egypt even to the great river Euphrates . . . And I will give to thee, and to thy seed, the land of thy sojournment, all the land of Canaan for a perpetual possession, and I will be their God." [Gen. 15: 18, 17: 8] Since God promised this land to the Jews, the Christian Zionist contends, His will is done when human effort hastens their return.
This is, however, at best a half truth. From the time Israel worshiped the golden calf and God nearly destroyed them; [Ex. 32-33] to the time they complained of manna and God caused a plague among them; [Num. 11] to the bad report of the spies of Canaan which God punished by having them wander in the desert for forty years; [Num. 13] to the wish to go back to Egypt and Korah's rebellion, [Num. 14, 16] and about a dozen other such incidents, the land of Canaan was not given to them because of their own human effort. In fact, Deut. 9: 5 indicates that Israel was so sinful during their trek through the desert that the only reason God would reluctantly give them the land of Canaan was due to the unbreakable oath He had made with Abraham [which oath Abraham received for his obedience in offering Isaac as a sacrifice to God].
This fact is confirmed by examining the numbers. According to the census in Num. 2: 32, there were 603,550 men who came out of Egypt, not including the Levites, or the women and children. Out of those, only two men were allowed to enter the land of Canaan, Joshua and Caleb. Six hundred years later things were not much better. God tells Elijah that only 7,000 Israelites had not bowed the knee to the false god Baal, out of a nation of approximately 10 million-----a mere .07% of the people.
In addition, much in the Old Testament indicates that God has, indeed, fulfilled the promise of land to Israel. Not only did He fulfill it, but the same Scriptures are also quite adamant that God did so in every minute detail that He promised to Abraham. Notice how the following passages make a point of saying that God did everything He promised regarding the land.
"Joshua 21: 43-45: Thus the LORD gave to Israel all the land which He swore to give to their fathers; and having taken possession of it, they settled there. And the LORD gave them rest on every side just as He had sworn to their fathers; not one of all their enemies had withstood them, for the LORD had given all their enemies into their hands.. Not one of all the good promises which the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass.
"1 Kings 8: 56: Blessed be the LORD who has given rest to His people Israel, according to all that He promised; not one word has failed of all His good promise, which He uttered by Moses His servant.
"Nehemiah 9: 7-8: Thou art the LORD, the God Who didst choose Abram and bring him forth out of Ur of the Chaldeans and give him the name Abraham; and Thou didst find his heart faithful before Thee, and didst make with him the covenant to give to his descendants the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite; and Thou hast fulfilled Thy promise, for Thou art righteous." [RSV]
Notice especially in the last line of Nehemiah 9: 8 that God had fulfilled the promise of land He made to Abraham based on the fact that He is "righteous." In other words, it is a matter of preserving God's integrity that the promise of land to Israel has already been fulfilled. Thus to claim that the promises have not been fulfilled and that we are still waiting for God to act upon them is to accuse God of dishonesty.
Moreover, the above passages took place at completely different times. Joshua occurs in the 15th Century B.C.; 1 Kings occurs in the 10th Century; Nehemiah in the 5th Century. Thus, we have the whole history of Israel represented, and they all insist on the same message-----God has already done His work regarding the land, and there is no more promise to fulfill. The curious are unlikely to find much if any commentary on these passages coming from Christian Zionists. The reason is obvious: such passages fly in the face of the prediction Christian Zionists maintain for a revival of national Israel based on the promises of land to Abraham.
As for whether Israel could keep the land that God gave them, Deut. 28: 62-68 is clear that the continued possession of the Land of Canaan was contingent on whether Israel obeyed the voice of the Lord. The very reason the Jews went into captivity in Assyria in 722 B.C. and Babylon in 586 B.C., which resulted in the loss of their inherited land, was due to their unrelenting disobedience.
The traditional understanding of the Jews' exile, among Christians as well as Orthodox Jews, was that it constituted a Divine punishment for their sins and their lack of faithfulness to God. It was to be ended by miraculous means at a time of God's choosing. As one anti-Zionist rabbi recently put it, until the late 19th Century "no believing Jew thought that the Biblical prophecies concerning a return to the land were to be fulfilled via human initiative". Rather, these prophecies were read as "a God-initiated, miraculous event that will end history as we know it".
The original Zionists, say anti-Zionist Jews [mainly but not exclusively Orthodox], were atheists who wished to substitute the worldly glory of an earthly state and army for the supernatural promises in which religious Jews placed their hopes. Neturei Karta, a well-known group of anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews, puts it this way:
"Jewry always viewed their exile as a Divine punishment for sins. Thus, exile is the result of metaphysical forces. It cannot be rectified by force, political efforts or any other worldly means. Jews yearn for the Biblically promised redemption of the entire world to be ushered in by the Heavenly appointed Messiah. This yearning manifested itself over the centuries only in prayer, good deeds and a spirit of penitence. This is the only Divinely sanctioned methodology to end the punishment of exile. Zionism, at root, rejected this sacred view of history. Its vision was and is limited to material cause and effect. Hence, to the Zionist mind -----which has come, tragically, to dominate much of contemporary public discussion-----exile was simply the result of Jewish political weakness. Their solution was to establish political sovereignty over the Holy Land." Neturei Karta has also denounced what it describes as Zionist attempts "to ruin Gentile politicians and writers who in some small way challenge its demands." If Zionism is a historically recent innovation-----or corruption, as anti-Zionists would have it -----then any Christian defense of Zionism runs into an immediate difficulty. If the Jews are meant to return to the Holy Land and end their exile through natural, human means, as Christian Zionists claim, why had the Jews themselves, who might reasonably be expected to know something about such things, never heard of this idea until the 19th Century?
But by far the more decisive argument against Christian Zionism involves the traditional Christian understanding of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. Christians do not, of course, reject the Old Testament; that would be the heresy of Marcionism. But what Christians have always done, from the days of the Fathers to the present, is to read the Old Testament in the light of the New.
In the Old Testament we are presented with the shadows that become New Testament realities. The Old Testament is filled with what are referred to as types of things to come under the New Covenant of Christ. The sacrifice of animals [and foodstuffs, as with Melchisedech] was a type of sacrifice of Christ and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The manna from Heaven prefigures the Eucharist. St. Paul speaks of the festival days of the Old Covenant as having been ". . . a shadow of things to come . . .". [Col. 2: 17] The old law, likewise, is a shadow of the new.
A Protestant writer, O. Palmer Robertson, astutely observes that not only are we dealing here with type and fulfillment, but that the fulfillment is always qualitatively superior to the Old Testament foreshadowing.
"As the Israelites journeyed through the desert, God provided them with manna from Heaven, water from the rock, and a serpent on a pole. All these images found their New Covenant fulfillment, not in more manna and water, or in a larger serpent on a taller pole, but in the redemptive realities that these Old Covenant forms foreshadowed; [see, e.g., John 3: 14; 6: 51; 7: 37; Rom. 15: 16] The very nature of the Old Covenant provisions requires that they be viewed as prophetic shadows, not as permanent realities." The traditional Catholic position has essentially been that the promises made to the Jewish people have been literally fulfilled in the person of Christ and in the Catholic Church, and that to look for physical fulfillment is to miss what separates the New from the Old Testament. Non-dispensationalist Protestants, while of course not looking to the Catholic Church as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, have generally held that the Christian community broadly conceived is what inherits the Divine promises. God still desires the salvation of the Jews, but it must be accomplished in the same way that anyone else is saved: through Jesus Christ. God's special covenant with the Jews came to an end when Christ entered the world and made believers in Him, no matter what their race or geographical location, the new chosen people of God. Beginning with the New Testament and continuing through the Church Fathers, one finds a clear continuity throughout Catholic thought on the question of Israel, the Jews, and the idea of a "chosen people". According to St. Paul's Letter to the Galatians, the idea of the "seed of Abraham" is to be understood in a spiritual rather than a racial or nationalistic sense, for ". . . they who are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham." [Gal. 3: 7] "And if you be Christ's, then are you the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise." [Gal. 3: 29]
In his First Epistle, St. Peter addresses the faithful as ". . . a chosen generation, a kingly priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people: that you may declare His virtues, who hath called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Who in times past were not a people: but are now the people of God." [1 Pet. 2: 9-10] It is the followers of Christ, therefore, who constitute the "chosen generation" and the "people of God." One could easily multiply examples. [cf Luke 3: 8-9; Rom. 2: 28-29]
Another crucial distinction that Christian Zionists consistently overlook is to whom the promises of Genesis 12-22 are addressed. In some places the promises are made to Abraham and his descendants, while in other places they are made only to Abraham's descendants. In Genesis 12-22, these two categories are distinguished by the refrains "you and your descendants" and "your descendants," respectively.
For example, Genesis 13: 14-16 states: "The LORD said to Abram, after Lot was separated from him; Lift up thy eyes and look from the place wherein thou now art, to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west. All the land which thou seest, I will give to you and to your descendants forever. I will make your descendants as the dust of the earth, so that if anyone can number the dust of the earth, then your descendants can also be numbered."
Notice that Genesis 13: 15 specifies "I will give it to you and to your descendants forever." We do not find this language in either Genesis 12: 6-7 or 15: 18-21, the latter of which specifies the very names of the peoples who inhabited the land that the Israelites will dispossess. Both Genesis 12 and Genesis 15 say only that God will give the land "to your descendants," but not "to you," that is, to Abraham.
Since that is the case, the obvious question is: when is Abraham going to receive his promised land? Abraham never received the promised land while he was alive on earth. The only land he owned was a burial plot he bought for Sarah. Thus, Scripture tells us that Abraham's promise of land is going to be fulfilled in a different way. Hebrews 11: 10-16, 39-40 shows how:
"10. For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God. 13. All these died according to faith, not having received the promises but beholding them afar off, and saluting them and confessing that they are pilgrims and strangers on the earth. 14. For they that say these things do signify that they seek a country. 15. And truly, if they had been mindful of that from whence they came out, they have had doubtless, time to return. 16. But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He has prepared for them a city. 39. And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, 40. Since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect." So here we see that Abraham's promise of land will indeed be fulfilled, but it will not be on this present sin-cursed earth. Rather, it is a "heavenly" city that God Himself builds, or as Romans 4: 13 says: "For . . . the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world . . .," [Greek: kosmos, i.e., the New Earth] not merely a piece of land in Palestine. Abraham and his faithful descendants-----the descendants of whom St. Paul says, "And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's descendants, and heirs according to the promise" in Galatians 3: 29-----will inherit the New Heaven and New Earth, and live with God for eternity, and thus Genesis 13: 14-16 will be fulfilled, quite literally. Nothing in traditional Christian theology suggests that it will be fulfilled for Jews on this earth, at least by Divine mandate. The Jews of this earth were already given their land, and God took it back, quite a long time ago. It is only Abraham and his Christian descendants who are still entitled to land, but that promise will be fulfilled in eternity. Since, as we have seen in Hebrews 10: 10-16, the promise of land to Abraham is going to be fulfilled in the New Heaven and New Earth-----a place of peace and contentment in a cosmic land far removed from sin and wickedness-----we can understand why Israel's possession of land by Divine promise in the Old Testament was merely a foreshadowing of a greater glory. According to Palmer Robertson, "Israel's experience with the land had the effect of placing the promise of it in the category of an Old Covenant shadow that would have to wait for the arrival of New Covenant realities for its fulfillment."
"In the time of David and Solomon, the full extent of the land was described as stretching from the Tigris-Euphrates River to the border of Egypt. [3 Kings 4: 21] In this restored paradise of the kingdom, every man would sit under his own vine and fig tree. [3 Kings 4: 25; Mic. 4: 4; Zech. 3: 10] Yet from the beginning, the actual experience of the people was quite different. From Solomon's day onward, the people experienced oppression rather than paradise, which had the effect of placing this promise firmly within the category of an Old Covenant shadow that would have to wait for the arrival of New Covenant realities for its fulfillment." 1 Put in another way, although Israel's acquisition of the land was based on an oath God made to Abraham, Israel's dispossession of the land due to their disobedience is the other side of this story. Sin always had a way of putting conditions on God's promises. As in the time of the monarchy cited above, oppression was a common characteristic in the Judges period. Over the span of about 400 years, from the conquering of Jericho to Israel's first king, Isrsael's disobedience caused God to raise up various nations, especially the Philistines, to oppress them. When Israel repented, God would raise up a judge to defeat the foreigner, and then Israel would have "rest in the land" for a certain period of time. This cycle of "oppression-rest" occurred six times in the Judges period. Along with Scripture, the consensus among the early Fathers is that there is no Divinely mandated future glory for national Israel. Divine promises made to Israel are said to have been already fulfilled in the Old Testament. Remaining prophecies concerning "Israel" are said to be fulfilled in the New Testament Church, or in the eternity of the New Heaven and New Earth.
There are only a few personalities who even address the issue of Israel in the future. Some give commentaries on Romans 11: 25-27, e.g., Origen, Theodoret, Chrysostom, Jerome, Cyril, Augustine, Pelagius [not the heretic of the same name, of course].
Of those, Origen admits that he does not know what "all Israel" means. He writes: "What all Israel means or what the fullness of the Gentiles will be only God knows . . ." 2 Chrysostom refers only to a spiritual restoration: "God's covenant will be fulfilled not when they are circumcised . . . but when they obtain the forgiveness of sins . . . it will certainly come to pass." 3 Augustine states that Romans 11: 26 applies only to the remnant of Israel, and spiritually to the Church: "Not all the Jews were blind; some of them recognized Christ. But the fullness of the Gentiles comes in among those who have been called according to the plan, and there arises a truer Israel of God . . . the elect from both the Jews and the Gentiles." 4 Theodoret takes the same track as Augustine: "All Israel means all those who believe, whether they are Jews, who have a natural relationship to Israel, or Gentiles, who are related to Israel by faith." [Interpretation of the Letter to the Romans, Migne p. 82, col. 180] Pelagius challenges those who interpret Romans 11: 25-27 as applying to the future, stating that if it does, what does that leave for those Jews in the present: "Some interpreters regard all these events as future. To them one must reply. . . what will become of those who are now perishing as unbelievers." 5
Only two Fathers hold out for any future large restoration of faith in Israel. Jerome states: ". .. because when the Jews receive the faith at the end of the world, they will find themselves in dazzling light, as if Our Lord were returning to them from Egypt." [Commentary on St. Matthew, Ch. 2] Cyril of Alexandria says: "Yes, one day, after the conversion of the Gentiles, Israel will be converted, and the Jews will be astonished at the treasure they will find in Christ." [Commentary on Genesis, Bk. 5] But although Jerome and Cyril look for a spiritual movement in the future, neither of them specify or imply that such movement includes a national and physical restoration of Israel to the land of Palestine, and neither did any other Father. Indeed, the earlier Fathers do not even envision a large conversion of Jews.
That this has indeed been the traditional Christian understanding of Israel and Old Testament prophecy likely accounts for the Popes' lack of sympathy toward Zionism. According to Herzl, who obtained an audience with Pope St. Pius X in 1904, the Pope concluded, after some discussion between the two, "We cannot be in favor of it . . . And so, if you come to Palestine and settle your people there, we shall have churches and priests ready to Baptize all of you."
Pope Pius XII, ludicrously slandered as "Hitler's Pope," performed many acts of kindness and charity toward the Jews, but the Vatican was always careful to distinguish between charity and support for Zionism. Thus when Pius XII helped to save 4,000 Slovakian children and transport them to Palestine, the apostolic delegate to Washington, Archbishop Amleto G. Cicognani, hastened to note that the Pope's action was not meant to indicate support for Zionism. "It is true that at one time Palestine was inhabited by the Hebrew," Archbishop Cicognani wrote in a June 1943 letter to President Roosevelt's special envoy to the Vatican, "but there is no axiom in history to substantiate the necessity of a people returning to a country they left nineteen centuries before". He added: "If a 'Jewish Home' is desired, it would not be too difficult to find a more fitting territory than Palestine. With an increase in the Jewish population there, grave new international problems would arise."
Even Pope Paul VI, far more liberal than his predecessors on every important matter, upon visiting the Holy Land in 1964 refused to meet with the country's chief rabbi, never once mentioned the word Israel, and made clear that his trip to the Christian holy sites should not be interpreted as conferring legitimacy upon the Jewish state. John Paul II, while establishing diplomatic relations with Israel in 1993, continues to be critical of Israel's policies in the occupied territories. Patriarch Michel Sabbah, the present Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem, rejects the biblical claims of Zionism. Himself a Palestinian, Patriarch Sabbah asked in a 1993 pastoral letter: "Does the Bible as the Word of God give the right to the Jewish people today to appropriate the land for themselves and, in doing so, dispossess the Palestinian people?" Clearly not, for "God cannot permit His love for one people to become an injustice for another people."
Patriarch Sabbah likewise insisted that it would be wrong to imagine the Old and New Covenants ''as though they were two entirely separate, parallel or autonomous Covenants". The material and temporal aspects of the Old Covenant have given way to the spiritual meaning of the New. This is an especially important point with regard to the question of land and God's promises: "The concept of the land had then evolved throughout different stages of Revelation, beginning with the physical, geographical and political concept and ending up with the spiritual and symbolic meaning. The worship of God is no longer linked to a specific land. A specific land is not the prime and absolute value for worship. The sole and absolute value is God and the worship of God in any place in the world."
[Readers can decide for themselves the pertinence of this digression, but Zenit news service reports that in January of this year Patriarch Sabbah was detained by Israeli security at the airport in Tel Aviv when he attempted to fly to Rome to attend a conference at which he was to be a speaker. In apparent violation of Israel's 1993 agreement with the Vatican, Israeli security officials searched the Patriarch's suitcases, and also demanded to examine his personal papers. L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's semi-official newspaper, reported that such conduct violated the respect routinely accorded to a Vatican diplomatic passport. Patriarch Sabbah never got to the conference.]
Patriarch Sabbah is joined in this matter by Fr. Majdi al-Siryani, a legal advisor to the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem. "[F]or the extra-majority of the believers in the Bible," he writes, "the restoration of Israel came true in a greater spiritual reality, that is the coming of the Messiah and the election of the Church. In this understanding, the realities of the Old Testament are not abolished or replaced but raised to a greater reality. For any Christian to accept the Israeli claims is to deny a basic dogma in Christian theology." [emphasis added]
Likewise, Fr. Labib Kobti, who holds a doctorate in canon law from the Lateran and has worked and written extensively on issues relating to Zionism and the Middle East, recently remarked:
"Note that as the Lord is speaking about a 'New Covenant' in Jeremiah the Prophet, the Lord declares that the 'First Covenant,' a covenant of flesh and of Land, was abolished by the new one, and that the old one was only a symbol of the conversion of our hearts to Him. He does not speak in Jeremiah about a right to return to a Land but about a kingdom of peace, love and truth open to all people, as He [has] put the 'Law within us and written it upon our hearts.' . . .The Bible does not give to Jews any moral 'right to return' and repossess all the land, nor even a part of the land exclusively, or make the people who have lived there for thousands and thousands of years submit themselves as illegal immigrants." God is a "God of righteousness, justice, peace and love," Fr. Kobti observed, and "not a real estate agent, for one people." This, in sum, is why Catholics must reject the idea that their adhesion to Biblical truth commits them to Israeli territorial claims. To the contrary, eighteen centuries of Christian tradition say just the opposite, just as they also testify against the entire system of dispensationalist theology on which Christian Zionism is based. Although the Christian Zionists routinely claim the moral and Biblical high ground, their boasts rest on a foundation of novelty and fallacy.
Footnotes: 1. Robertson, p. 13. 2. Commentarii in Epistulam ad Romanos, ed., T. Heither, (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1990-1995) Volume 4, p. 304. 3. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Volume 11, p. 493. 4. Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, (Catholic University of America, 1947), Volume 20, p. 253. . 5. Pelagius Commentary on Romans, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 129.