MetaCatholic

Last Thursday Mike Bird revealed the remarkable and difficult question he set his students: “Are Christians theologically obligated to support the present state of Israel?” He’s a brave man, and asking for trouble. It seems to me that it is almost impossible to say anything about either the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, or just about anything at all about the State of Israel, without offending somebody. By contrast, it seems almost impossibly easy for people to say crass, naive and both theologically and politically illiterate things. Mike also referenced a popular (Christianity Today) and an academic (Bruce Longenecker in April’s JTS) article, both of which have things to say on aspects of the question.

Any such discussion has to start, it seems to me, from an acknowledgement of history, that Christian attitudes to Jews and Judaism have more often than not been quite sinful, and regularly been the cause of behaviour that can ultimately only be described as blasphemous as well as evil. It also has to start from the open recognition that today’s community of Judaism has grown up as essentially a twin-track of development with Christianity from the shared ancestor of Second Temple Judaism. Identifying either with their common parent is probably unhelpful to fully appreciating the integrity of both as they have developed historically. Christians entering into dialogue with Jews today do not themselves have the same theology and practice as those first Christians and are not engaging Jews who have the same practices and theology of those engaged by Paul (himself one of them) and others.

Even while I believe we need to recognise and engage with one another in large part on the basis of the scriptural books we share in common, we need to be very patient in attending to the different ways our developing traditions have engaged with those books, often to the point of their seeming to be books with very different messages. That said, I think there are specific Christian perspectives that can’t simply be denied or set aside when it comes to the political realities of today’s State of Israel, or the theological realities of Judaism. Dialogue is not well served by concealing, denying or simply rejecting one’s own heritage.

In the JTS article mentioned above, Longenecker demonstrates, I think successfully, the weakness (as readings of Paul) of both two-track views (that Christianity represents a way in which salvation is made available to the Gentiles, and Judaism for the Jews) and replacement views (that the Church has simply superceded Israel in every respect). But it seems to me, both as a reading of Paul, and as the more developed view of incarnational theology that sees in Jesus the decisive engagement of God with humanity, that Christianity, to be true to itself, must and does insist that God’s salvation of humanity, Jew and Gentile alike, has something essentially to do with the particular history and eschatological destiny of the Jew Jesus.

How that works out (in history or eternity) may indeed surprise us, and may (indeed, I suspect will have to) look quite different from any mass conversions. Christians today (and in ways somewhat different from the intra-Jewish polemical disputes of much of the New Testament) must also insist on recognising the grace-full ways in which the God of the Word and the Covenants is still and always making his presence known among those who live in the light of Torah. It is possible to see rather more clearly than Paul did, what Paul himself said, that God’s promises are irrevocable, and how that divine faithfulness is being worked out.

One of the features of the early Christian developments in their Jewish matrix was a relocating of the promise of the land to a greater fulfilment in a new creation, marked by and tasted in the immanent presence of the Spirit. That view, which surfaces in various ways, draws strongly on readings of the prophets, a shared apocalyptic symbolism, and the experience of Jesus’ resurrection. The language of God’s promised renewal had become so extravagant, that it is hard to see how any simple earthly kingdom could actually be seen to fulfil it. I also wonder whether some of the ways in which belonging to the people of the land, while being dispersed amongst the “whole inhabited world” were in fact making this sort of re-interpretation of the prophecies more widely acceptable for both those who saw Jesus as Messiah and those who did not.

In the light of this expansion of the prophetic vision to a renewed humanity as heirs to a promised new creation rather than a promised land, I simply can’t see how any Christians can still invest the fulfilment of those promises in a single human state of Israel, or, indeed any other. To do so goes against a central thrust of the New Testament. I also wonder if this wider vision of the promises is a topic that Christians, engaged in dialogue about our common scriptures, can tentatively and humbly explore with Jews as a way of theologically reframing the political issues. Theological thinking about the State of Israel begins then for Christians at least in terms of its witness to a wider reality of new creation as a social and visible entity, not as a spiritual and invisible substitute for it. Israel’s existence bears witness against the Church’s Platonizing tendency. Furthermore, if the new creation is about the provision of a peaceable home for all humanity, then creating a peaceable home for those to whom the hope and the promise were first given is an integral part of that witness.

That has implications for political relations with Israel, that other countries, and especially those where Christians are influential in politics, should be committed to the peaceable existence of a Jewish homeland in Israel. It implies also that the internal policies of the State of Israel should not only be aimed at creating a state in which Jews can live at peace, but that the peace of Israel is always intended to be shared with all humanity, and therefore can’t ultimately be built on the misery of others. The prophets themselves repeatedly said as much. Exactly what political solutions can be imagined, devised or implemented to make that work is sadly beyond my scope.