Reviews, Interviews, News, Commentaries, Excerpts, My Top 5 Books, Wilson's Bookmarks, Book AwardsThe Course of Christian Zionism
Carenen shows how mainline influence waned in the 1980s ("the collapse of the liberal vision") while evangelical influence grew. Jerry Falwell's pronouncement in 1980, "To stand against Israel is to stand against God," is a good index of growing evangelical passion. And from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, the influence of evangelical political activists, often working alongside Jewish activists, has been palpable. Today evangelical zeal is less focused on eschatology and centered more on garnering God's blessing for the United States by blessing Israel. The humanitarian Zionism of 1930s liberals has been replaced by an "entitlement Zionism" which supports Israeli statehood for reasons both biblical and pragmatic.
Dissenting Voices
The Fervent Embrace is to be commended as thorough and evenhanded. But for those who live and work in the evangelical world, it is frustrating to see ourselves summarized through the extreme voices of Jerry Falwell or Hal Lindsey—and today, Pat Robertson and John Hagee. Evangelicals are more complex than this.
Another problem is the glaring omission of any account of evangelical dissent to Zionism. Carenen gives brief mention of Sojourners and Jim Wallis's justice-centered theology, but doesn't seem to realize that there are major publications and organizations today that acknowledge modern Israel while denying it has any special status conferred by Bible prophecy—and they lodge strong dissent about Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Moreover, she doesn't realize that there are many evangelicals—700 of them gathered in Bethlehem last March—who feel a strong alliance with the body of Christ in the Palestinian world and will not deny that commitment based on controversial eschatological positions.
For the advanced student of this conflict, Carenen's work is helpful. I benefited enormously from it. But perhaps we need a sure-handed evangelical scholar like Tim Weber to update the discussion on this subject with a more complete evangelical portrait.
Gary M. Burge is professor of New Testament at Wheaton College. In addition to numerous books on biblical studies, he has published two books on Israel and Christian Zionism: Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and Palestine (Pilgrim Press, 2003) and Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to Holy Land Theology (Baker Academic, 2010).
Star Trek Into Darkness
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Gene Kleppinger
Elizabeth, your references to the land acquisition in Jackson's era are very appropriate. But surely you do not mean that the treaties negotiated between the last kings of Israel and Judah, with Assyria, Medo-Persia and Babylon, represented transfers of property that should still be respected and reinterpreted. I thought that the main point was the idea that divine land distribution claims always trump what civil governments might do.
Elizabeth Levesque
Dan: you are right on. Gene: Native Americans have "treaties" with US Government. Native Americans are considered "sovereign nations". Israel has no such arrangement with "Palestine" which is a fiction. "Palestine" is the name Rome gave its occupied territory (Israel) in 63 BC and by 135 AD every Jewish reference to its former territory was expunged. This history is easily accessible. It is not surprising to those of us who support Israel that Hamas/Hezbollah and all other terrorists are using the Roman occupied and colonizing as well as genocidal term "Palestine." However, Native Americans still use their own names, ceded territories for payments, (the Cherokees, Muscogees, CReeks and several other tribes were paid 2 million in Andrew Jackson's treaty arrangements for former lands and relocated to Oklahoma). So, if you enter into a "treaty" and get millions of dollars for your land you can't complain. You can't complain about what you sold. The "Trail of Tears" is another matter.
Dan Bruce
One of the things left out of this review (and perhaps out of the book) is the role of the Palestinians during WWII. The leader of the Palestinians spent the war in Berlin plotting the extermination of the Jews in Palestine with Heinrich Himmler as part of the Holocaust. After the U.N. partitioned Palestine between Jews and Arabs (the Arabs got 89% of Palestine) in 1947, the Arabs rejected the U.N.'s partition and attacked the Jews in Palestine in the war of 1948. After Israel won, more than 700,000 Jews were expelled or intimidated to leave Arab lands, most migrating to Israel. The Arabs have threatened the Jews in Israel ever since. Israel is usually portrayed as the agressor in modern books, but the truth is much more complicated. Most evangelicals have little accurate knowledge about how the modern nation of Israel came to be.--Dan Bruce, The Prophecy Society