Israel, Palestine, and the Promise from God

Just as the conflict in Gaza and southern Israel was heating up in December, the January 13, issue of Christian Century, arrived at my house. The Century is a venerable publication whose writers are thoughtful, fair, and generally, from what's called Christianity's mainline denominations. Some would call it "liberal" by comparison with Christianity Today, a magazine of a similar ilk founded by Billy Graham and more associated with the evangelical camp of Christianity.

The January 13, cover emphasized an essay and three responses composed by four different Christian scholars of the Old Testament. The questions which the four pieces seeks to answer are simple:

• Does the promise of the land of Canaan which God gave to Abraham and his descendants, the Jews, still hold? (see Biblical passages below)
  
• If so, in what way does it hold?

I must confess that through the years, I have taken a rather facile approach to this matter. When parishioners have asked me about modern Israel relative to the Old Testament, I've answered, "I don't equate ancient Israel with modern Israel."

The implications of my response were several. First, I didn't have to deal with the nettlesome business of God's election of the descendants of Abraham and Sarah and how that stood today in light of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection. Second, I didn't have to get involved in discussions of the disputes between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

If people pressed me, I would say that modern Israel had a right to exist as a matter of realpolitik.

But, without realizing it, I think that I subscribed to a kind of supercessionism, the idea that the new covenant in Jesus Christ supercedes the old covenant God made with Abraham and his descendants. I wouldn't have admitted that and, I should add that I have always abhorred antisemitism, a notorious result of past Christian adherence to overt supercessionism. But the upshot was the same: This Lutheran Christian who affirms the authority of the Word of God was, in a way, denying the authority of that Word. How? By saying that a claim God had made for all time on earth had been abrogated.

I didn't see that abrogation in the so-called "Jewish rejection of Christ," as centuries of Christian antisemitism has claimed. I have always felt that the crucifixion of Jesus came as part of the fixed plan of God and that He was killed by Gentiles and Jews, that He died for the sins of all the world, Gentile and Jewish. My sins killed Jesus. I killed Jesus.

But I saw the old covenant superceded, rendered irrelevant, by Christ and the new covenant He instituted, namely that all who turn from sin and follow Him live with God forever.

I still believe that all who repent and believe in Jesus have eternity with God, of course. I also still believe that all who reject Christ condemn themselves for eternity.

But I no longer believe that the new covenant renders the old covenant irrelevant or inoperative. As Gary Anderson asserts in his Christian Century essay, "If the promises of God are inviolable, then Israel's attachment to the land is underwritten in God's decree."

Does that mean that as Christians we are duty bound to support any and all actions undertaken by the modern Israeli government? Are we bound to support Israel in its policies in Gaza, for example? Some evangelical Christians say yes and yes to these questions. But I think that many do so for sick and selfish reasons. They want Israel to incite a conflict which, they believe, will trigger Armageddon and force the hand of God to bring about the Second Coming. There is no faith in God in that. It is faith in self, in human action, a belief that God is a puppet we can manipulate.

I won't get into the thicket of current politics and conflict here. But my bottom line answer to the two questions in the previous paragraph is no and no.

Anderson argues, and I think convincingly, that the promise to God's people is both eternal and conditional. In occupying the land that God has given them in perpetuity, they must do so justly. In Old Testament times, God's people were only to drive peoples out of the land who failed to live justly. Otherwise, they were to live as co-inhabitants of the land God gave to them, enacting God's justice and grace. When Israel failed to exercise just stewardship of its land, including worshiping God alone and the just treatment of the foreigners in its midst, the Old Testament says that, as part of God's covenant, Israel was overtaken by foreign armies, such as in 587BC.

Eminent Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says that while Anderson's essay is "good," his theological framework is essentially useless in addressing the real life political situation in the modern Middle East. As deeply as I respect Brueggemann, I think that his view veers close to my own previous facile thinking. There were really no good political reasons for world powers to recognized the modern state of Israel in 1947. In other words, the underpinnings for the existence of today's Israel are theological. One cannot understand the realpolitik of the Middle East in 2009, without acknowledging the power, if not the validity, of God's promise of land to Abraham and his descendants.

Marlin Jeschke rejects Anderson's notion that God's promise to Abraham was meant for the patriarch's genetic descendants or for a crescent-shaped piece of land on the eastern rim of the Mediterranean Sea. Abraham was called, he claims, to show people how those who follow God are to treat whatever land they occupy and the neighbors with whom they share it. But, to me, this approach risks making God into a removed general principle-giver. Both the Old and New Testaments affirm God is One Who gets involved in specific lives--our specific lives, in specific places. God called a specific person named Abraham. God came into the world in a specific person named Jesus. It's true to say that Abraham was called to become, if you will, a prototype of faith. In Romans, Paul says that Abraham shows all people how sinners are made right with God: Abraham believed and God counted his belief as righteousness. (See here and here.) But Jeschke both universalizes and, I think, over-spiritualizes God's promise to Abraham.

Read the essays and the responses: here, here, here, here, and here.

Genesis 15:13-20
Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; ¹⁴but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. ¹⁵As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. ¹⁶And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

¹⁷When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. ¹⁸On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, ¹⁹the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, ²⁰the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephaim, ²¹the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.”

Romans 3:1-4
Then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision? ²Much, in every way. For in the first place the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. ³What if some were unfaithful? Will their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? ⁴By no means! Although everyone is a liar, let God be proved true, as it is written, “So that you may be justified in your words, and prevail in your judging.”