A few weeks ago I had dinner with one of my oldest friends. We both went to college together, protested against the Vietnam war together, and eventually went on to mature together as New York Jewish American Liberals. He remains an anti-war liberal and at dinner asked me how I felt being aligned with crazy, right wing Christian fascists. In response I asked him if he actually knew any Conservative or Evangelical Christians. His answer was typical for a New York Jewish Liberal, "No! Of course not."
I remarked some time ago on a curious (to me) fact:
For a person from New York, immersed in liberal New York thought, a surprising number of the bloggers on my short list were religious Christians. Considering that the usual characterization of religious Christians in the pages of the Times and from the lips of the typical liberal is that they are intolerant religious bigots, indistinguishable from the religious fanatics who live in the Middle East and form the Taliban or al Qaeda, the thought occurred to me to wonder what the meaning of this could be. How was it that I had come to see The Anchoress, Gates of Vienna, Kobayashi Maru, and La Shawn Barber, among others, as making more sense than that paragon of rationality, the New York Times?
The contrast between the traditional view of the relationship between Christians and Jews, from the liberal Jewish perspective, and the powerfully supportive position of Evangelical and Conservative Christians for the Jewish people and the state of Israel has been a source of some curiosity and, I will admit, some unease. I recently finished David Brog's Standing With Israel, which explores this changed and changing relationship and have found it to be extremely thought-provoking and worth describing in some detail, which I will attempt to do in this post and others to follow.
Replacement Theology
The first section of the book deals with the thorny issue of "replacement theology" which supplied the theological underpinnings to so much Christian anti-Semitism for a thousand years. I am not in a position to challenge his explication of Christian theology but think it is important for the purposes of this exploration to offer my understanding of the key points he makes.
"Replacement theology" essentially posited that the followers of Jesus Christ replaced the Jews as God's chosen people. Because of their rejection of the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Jews were no longer afforded God's protection and as time passed and theological beliefs devolved to the lowest common denominator, it became a point of faith for far too many Christians that the "Jews killed Christ" and were fair game for retribution. Many other factors through the years entered into the persecution of Jews, but the theological justification remained the bedrock of anti-Semitism for nearly 1500 years.
This began to change when a group of devout Protestants began meeting for Bible study in Dublin and founded the Plymouth Brethren movement in the winter of 1827-28. John Nelson Darby was one of the founding members ; he believed in a literal understanding of the Bible and thus, when he read that God had made a covenant with the "descendants of Abraham" or "Israel", he took this to mean that the Jews still held a covenant with God. This led to a paradox for Darby (p 42-43):
If God chose only one people to fulfill His divine mission, if there was only one "Israel," then divine election was a zero-sum game. If the Jews were still the chosen people, then where did this leave the church? How could the church of Christ be eclipsed in God's eyes by a people who failed to recognize Christ? Despite Paul's efforts to preserve a special status for the Jews, the church decided early on that the only solution was for the church to replace the Jews as God's chosen people.
Dispensationalism
Darby came up with a wonderful resolution of this problem:
According to Darby, the original script laid out in the Old Testament called for the Jews to recognize Christ as the Messiah. When the Jews failed to do so, God needed to find a different vehicle through which to instruct humanity. Thus God temporarily suspended the prophetic timetable set out in the Old Testament and went to work building the church. ... our current age, one in which God is working through the church, actually takes place in an unanticipated great parenthesis between God's past and future dealings with Israel. At the end of this age, the true believers in Christ will literally be removed from earth to meet Christ in heaven in an event called the Rapture. When the church is thus removed from the picture, God will restart the original prophetic time clock, and the Jews will resume their place at the center of God's original prophetic plan.
The wisdom of Darby's resolution, which Brog suggests is at the heart of Evangelical Christianity, is that it restores the Jews to the umbrella of God's protection. Furthermore, by introducing the idea of Dispensationalism, Darby offered a way for Christians to embrace a more tolerant brand of Christianity.
Additionally, Darby was of a group who believed that Christ's return would precede the Millennium, a belief that came to be known as Premillennial Dispensationalism, later just Dispensationalism. (The theological struggle between Pre- and PostMillennial Dispensationalism has been decisively won by the Premillennial Dispensationalists, to the benefit of all of us.) This had profound implications and is a source of great confusion among those who believe that Evangelical Christianity represents an Apocalyptic faith indistinguishable from Fundamentalist Islam. (Those liberals who spend their time worrying about the creeping theocracy in the United States apparently have difficulty making the distinction between Pre- and Post-millennial Dispensationalism.)
The believers in Premillennial Dispensationalism, the predominant theology of Evangelical Christianity, believe that there is nothing we can do on earth that can alter God's time table. Our actions can neither precipitate nor delay the Millennium. As a result, their behavior and actions are directed toward making this world a better place and preparing themselves for the Rapture and Judgment Day.
[I would point out this is in vivid contrast to the Shia belief of Ahmadinejad, et al, who very much believe that by precipitating the Apocalypse, it will hasten the return of the 12th Imam.]
There is an additional aspect of this belief that the Jews remain crucial to God's plan: The behavior of the church in supporting anti-Semitism through the centuries then becomes a source of great guilt and distress. In response many Christians have made it their goal to support Israel (often more strongly than American Jewish liberals) primarily because to do so is acting in accordance with God's will, but also as a form of contrition for the wrongs done to the Jews in their name.
I found it quite illuminating to learn that Christian Zionism has a much longer history than one would suspect from the disparaging treatment it recieves in liberal discourse, and that is a point I would like to examine further.
In the meantime, I will simply remark that while most American Jews know a great deal about Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, I suspect very few know of William Hechler, a devout Christian who was the only non-family member permitted to sit by Herzl's bedside as he lay dying in 1904.
Tomorrow, I will have more to say about this man, and the birth of Zionism.
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