The most embarrassing moment for Senator Ted Cruz when he appeared on Tucker Carlson's show was when Tucker asked him where in the Bible he read that he was supposed to lend political and military support to modern-day Israel, and he did not know.
He could have said something very general, like "the Book of Genesis." But he knows so little that he couldn't even say that. Even I was surprised.
Now if you think the U.S. relationship with Israel is beneficial for strategic reasons, or because of intelligence and technology sharing, or whatever other secular reason, we can debate that.
But this "the Bible requires me to support Israel" argument really has to be taken on. It is based on novel theology (in the Christian tradition "novel" is not a compliment) and stands in defiance of the consensus of Christendom for nearly two millennia.
I have plenty of readers who are not Christians, and a handful of you will write to tell me that today's email was so much mumbo-jumbo. But I trust most of you understand that this material has a profound impact on real-world events in the here and now, and it's therefore useful to know something about it.
From the earliest centuries of Christianity until well into the modern era, the Church held a consistent and largely uncontested understanding of what "Israel" means in the light of Jesus Christ. Christian Zionism, the belief that the modern State of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy and that the Jewish people retain a divine, territorial claim to the land of Canaan, represents a sharp break from that tradition.
Traditional Christianity reads the Old Testament as a structure of foreshadowings, of "types" and shadows that find their fulfillment in Christ and the Church. This is not a later imposition on the text, as critics allege; it is the method the New Testament itself employs.
Thus the book of Hebrews calls the Temple, the priesthood, and the sacrificial system "copies" and "shadows" of heavenly realities now made actual in Christ (Hebrews 8:5; 9:23-24; 10:1). Paul calls the manna in the wilderness a foreshadowing of the Eucharist (1 Corinthians 10:3-4), and circumcision a foreshadowing of baptism (Colossians 2:11-12).
The Promised Land, on this reading, foreshadows the heavenly inheritance -- which is why Hebrews can say of Abraham himself that "he looked for a city that hath foundations; whose builder and maker is God" (Hebrews 11:10), and that the patriarchs, "confessing that they are pilgrims and strangers on the earth," desired "a better, that is to say, a heavenly country" (Hebrews 11:13-16).
Thus the land was real and the promise was real, but its ultimate meaning pointed beyond itself.
The early apologist Justin Martyr, writing around 155, declared that Christians are "the true Israelitic race" -- the heirs of Abraham's promises by faith rather than flesh. Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen, and Augustine all maintained variations of this position.
Augustine gave it its most enduring form, distinguishing the earthly Jerusalem from the heavenly Jerusalem and arguing that the Church was the true Israel, the community of all who belong to God by faith. He also taught that the Jewish people were preserved by divine providence as living witnesses to the scriptures that prophesy Christ -- scattered, not restored, and certainly not promised a return to the land as a matter of ongoing divine obligation.
The Protestant Reformers maintained the substance of this consensus. Calvin wrote that "the Israel of God" in Galatians 6:16 referred to the Church ("all believers, whether Jews or Gentiles, who were united into one church") and that any "restoration" promised to Israel meant restoration to faith in the Messiah, not restoration to territory.
Did God "break his promises," then, as Christian Zionists accuse traditional Christians of believing? To the contrary: the land promise to Abraham was fulfilled, explicitly and emphatically, in the Old Testament itself. Joshua 21:41-43 tells us that God "gave to Israel all the land that he had sworn to give to their fathers: and they possessed it and dwelt in it," and that "not so much as one word, which he had promised to perform unto them, was made void, but all came to pass."
The traditional argument is not that the promise was left unfulfilled but that it was fulfilled, and that the New Testament then reveals its deeper, universal scope. That is the proper relationship of the New Testament to the Old Testament. Paul writes in Romans 4:13 that Abraham was promised not Canaan but the world. The trajectory runs from a piece of land, to the whole earth, to the new creation. Nothing is canceled; everything is expanded, in Christ.
Against this background, Christian Zionism appears as a 19th-century theological novelty with no roots in the patristic, medieval, or Reformation Church.
Its systematic form was created by John Nelson Darby of the Plymouth Brethren in the 1830s and 1840s, and was embedded in American Protestant culture through the Scofield Reference Bible of 1909, which printed dispensationalist interpretations alongside the biblical text in a widely used edition.
Darby's dispensationalism sharply separated God's plan for ethnic Israel from his plan for the Church, treating them as two distinct peoples with two distinct programs, a distinction the mainstream of Christian theology had never made and which requires reading the Old Testament as though the New Testament's reinterpretation of it does not exist.
Traditional critics identify several specific errors. First, Christian Zionism reads Old Testament land promises physically and applies them directly to a modern political state, thereby bypassing the New Testament's own interpretation of those promises. Appealing to Old Testament texts alone while ignoring what the New Testament does with them is, from a Christian standpoint, to read the Bible backwards.
Second, some forms of Christian Zionism imply that Jewish people stand in a covenantal relationship with God that does not require Christ, a "dual covenant" theology that traditional Christianity regards as a denial of the universal necessity of the gospel ("there is no other name under heaven given to men, whereby we must be saved"; Acts 4:12).
The third error is the argument from novelty: a theological position with no representation in eighteen centuries of Christian thought bears a heavy burden of proof that Christian Zionism has not met.
I might add that you will hear some Christian Zionists even accuse the fathers, apologists, and martyrs of "anti-Semitism" when you try to explain the traditional view, but I think that kind of argument speaks for itself.
This is the tip of the iceberg of a much deeper examination of the issue at the Scott Horton Academy by Lutheran theologian Adam Francisco -- who served as professor of history, dean, and assistant provost in the Concordia University system (a network of universities under the authority of the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod), for nearly two decades.
As I said yesterday, if you believe as I do that the neocon war machine is doing terrible and lasting damage to the United States, you owe it to yourself to become a formidable, indeed practically invincible voice for peace and common sense. The Scott Horton Academy makes that easy, even enjoyable.
Scott's just added brand new courses -- on the new cold war with Russia, and on the Israel Lobby and the tip of its spear, AIPAC -- that will have you salivating, and all of which are included in the membership.
To commemorate these new additions to the Academy, for just a few more days coupon code WOODS gets you a bigger discount than usual:
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