Blasphemy

 I have never understood the Christians who are rabidly pro-Israel, if not really pro-Israeli. The idea that if they foster Israel, this will quicken the Second Coming has always felt blasphemous - that human beings have no business pushing God to action.

From someone more educated than I am, Dr. David Gushee (Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University) wrote American Evangelicals, Theological Fantasy, and the Jerusalem Embassy for Public Orthodoxy.

For many conservative Protestant Christians, the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land, before, during, and especially after the Holocaust, is an event in salvation history. It is seen as a divine miracle, as a kind of resurrection from the dead for the Jewish people, and as a major step in the fulfillment of scripture on the way to the climactic return of Christ – and perhaps even the last-second conversion of the Jewish people to belief in Jesus Christ.

The political and ethical facts on the ground simply don’t matter that much when one is in the grip of a fevered theological dream come true. Among these humble earthly facts are the politically disputed nature of the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and the existence in this land of some of the world’s oldest Christian communities, most of them Orthodox religiously and most of them Palestinian ethnically and nationally. None of it matters to these American evangelicals/fundamentalists because none of it is included in the mythico-theological narrative that is functioning so powerfully for them.

But the State of Israel is a political reality with real needs and real challenges; it is not just the theological dream of eschatologically-minded Christians, and the conflation is frankly disastrous. Too many American evangelicals push American Israeli policy in specific directions, like the embassy move, because they have little or no concern for how those policies effects real people in the region—all they know or care about is the Jerusalem of their mythologies.

sch 7/23