One Year Later

A theological reflection on Israel’s predicament and why I am a Zionist

It’s been one year today since the October 7 attack on Israel by the terrorist group Hamas, when well over a thousand people were brutally murdered, many were raped, and 240 taken hostage. Over the last year, I’ve become newly convinced that the problem with most talk about Israel and its war with its enemies is that it implicitly comes from no particular theological position, but only from abstract moral principles like opposition to colonialism or oppression or violence. But Jews are not simply an ethnic group, and Israel is not simply another nation-state. 

According to the Christian interpretation of the Bible, Israel is that gathering of an otherwise insignificant human family which God has chosen as his dwelling place on earth and his instrument among the nations; and the whole spiritual reality of Israel is taken up by the individual Israelite Jesus and the whole vocation of Israel is carried out in his individual death and resurrection.

Christian consensus breaks down beyond that point. In my judgment, the New Testament and the Apostle Paul’s writings specifically do not settle the question of the spiritual status of the people of Israel who do not believe Jesus fulfills the Lord’s intentions for his people, i.e., do not believe he is the Christ. On this matter, I believe the brutal facts of history more than biblical exegesis have rightly compelled Christians to conclude that nonbelieving Israel is nevertheless unequivocally and irrevocably God's people, entrusted forever with God’s powerful word spoken by the prophets.

What that means is that Christians and Jews are in a relationship of theological dispute within the same spiritual family: we disagree, not abstractly over the identity and vocation of Jesus, but over what God intends for his people. Because Christians believe that Jesus’ messianic vocation embodies God’s intentions for all Israel, denying that Jesus is Israel’s messiah entails saying that what occurred with him is not what God intends for his people.

From the perspective of Judaism, Christianity’s central teaching—that the exodus from Egypt points to the resurrection, that Mount Sinai was a shadow pointing to a cross, that God is most truly revealed on this cross and calls us to join him on it—is ultimately a heresy. From the vantage of faith in Jesus as the Christ, nonbelieving Israel is resisting its own identity and Lord.

The agony I feel looking at the state of Israel—the political embodiment of the Jewish people—is unavoidably linked to this basic difference. As I see it, Israel’s spiritual situation perpetually offers three dreadful options: fight and kill to live, flee and live as strangers in diaspora, or suffer defeat and death. Israel’s history, ancient and modern, has abundant examples of each option, and none have been easy. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, Jewish people everywhere have had the freedom to choose how they will live, a marked difference against a historical backdrop of constrained choices—not least at the hands of Christian nations who in many and various ways forced Jews in diaspora onto the figurative cross of ghettos, pogroms, compelled conversions, and secrecy. Now, in an ostensibly secular time, secularized Christian values likewise make no room for a Jewish state, which goes against the ideal of a religiously neutral, liberal state, and condemn Israel for violating the moral boundaries of a paternalistic oppressor/oppressed, colonizer/colonized ethical system. (That this never fails to infantilize Israel’s neighbors and to excuse them from moral responsibility for their own actions goes unremarked upon.) How easily Christians forget that we have not been always been friends to the Jews. How ignorant of history, and how confident in their own moral character are secular moralists for assuming that Jews throughout the world can be safe and free without a Jewish state. The state of Israel is the guarantor of Jewish freedom everywhere—and, regardless of how secular Israel’s population is, specifically the freedom to respond to God as they see fit.

Mizrah/Shiviti

The promise of God in the Bible to all people is freedom. Jewish faith and Christian faith are unavoidably theologies of liberation. The Christian looking at Israel today is therefore faced with problems on both sides: the Christian believes that freedom ultimately comes only in the form of Jesus taking Israel’s third option, to suffer death and defeat, and yet the Christian knows history and knows that it is bondage and not freedom to compel Israel to conform to Jesus in this way. All that the Christian can do is accept the partial freedom Israel has, and acknowledge the painful truth that its current predicament is evidence of that partiality. Israel finds itself at war with enemies who want nothing less than its destruction—its enemies have no interest in peace or compromise—and it is therefore compelled into a situation where it must become the aggressor for its own survival. This reality is nothing less than tragic: we might say that Israel risks losing its soul in its work to save its life. Or, more basically: Israel, being compelled to fight, is forced to sacrifice its own freedom in order to be free. But who can sit in judgment? It is not for us for tell Israel to die.

I am a Christian and I am not a pacifist: I believe there is a time to fight, a time to kill, and, when the Lord calls, a time to die. I believe this holds for all of God’s people, Jewish and Christian. For now, Israel’s path is war, and as far as I can discern, Israel’s cause is just: it involves the survival of the Jewish people, whom our world is bent on exterminating. Standing with Israel is no celebration of war, nor is it to trivialize the destruction of innocent life. It is, however, to look plainly at the brutal fact that history is tragic and that freedom in history is partial, ever slipping through bloodied hands.