On Mon, 01-31-05 1:00 pm
This is the second of a two-part post reviewing Gary M. Burge’s book Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are Not Being Told About Israel and the Palestinians. The first part followed the author’s exploration of the problems in the Middle East (which center on the land), the geographical and historical aspects of the struggle, and the Old Testament’s testimony about the land of Israel/Palestine and the promises made to Abraham and national Israel. This installment will discuss Burge’s handling of the New Testament arguments concerning the land and the promises, as well as the author’s suggestions for what can be done and should be done.
The New Testament and The Land
Burge begins his examination of the New Testament’s teaching by quoting a Palestinian minister, whose theological position is representative of many Christians from a variety of theological traditions.
“The church . . . has inherited the promises of Israel. The church is actually the new Israel. What Abraham was promised, Christians now possess because they are Abraham’s true spiritual children just as the New Testament teaches” (p. 67) – Father George Makhlouf, St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Ramallah.
Those who participated or read some of the excellent comments in the “Americanism and Its Enemies” forum at Evangelical Outpost may remember that the Puritans made similar statements as they prepared to come to the New World. Most Christian traditions do not maintain a clear distinction between ethnic Israel and the church, with the result that many of the promises made in the Old Testament are claimed for and applied to the New Testament church. In order to do that, some theologians find it necessary to “spiritualize” or allegorize passages and promises. This is apparently Burge’s solution, as well.
Arguing from the silence of the New Testament regarding the land, he first seeks to demonstrate that Jesus was not interested in a physical kingdom, Jerusalem, or the temple. To some extent, he is correct: Jesus’ kingdom was to be markedly different than that for which the Jews yearned. Even after the Resurrection, his disciples questions centered on if Jesus was going to restore the physical kingdom at this time.
An explanation of the nature and timing of the kingdom is beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to point out at this juncture, however, that Christ’s reply was not that there would never be such a kingdom because the church would fulfill the promises, but only that it was none of the disciples’ business when God was going to act.
Burge then moves on to spiritualize the meaning of the land itself. “Jesus himself becomes the locus of holy space. The aim of the old covenant was the land of promise; now the aim is Jesus Christ, who walked in the land” (p. 175, emphasis his). Space, the author is saying, has been redefined: it is no longer physical but holy, spiritual space. It no longer exists on earth but in the heavenlies, in the Body and Person of Jesus Christ.
Once again, according to this reviewer, Burge is partially right. The emphasis at this time is on the spiritual kingdom of God (that is, the rule of God in and through those who have believed in Jesus as the Messiah) and only secondarily on material things. But the church is an intercalation, not a replacement: the clock has stopped for Israel and for the land promises made to Abraham, not to start again until some undisclosed point in the future.
“To sum up,” Burge says, “we observe a cycle of responses to the question of land: (1) land is rejected as the aim of faith; (2) land is spiritualized as meaning something else; (3) the promise is historicized in Jesus, a man who lives in the land; (4) the promise is sacramentalized – that is, as a sacrament bears testimony to things beyond what we see and touch (without denying these properties), so too Jesus’ ‘landness’ (his physicality) is a reality, but believers are urged to push further, to find the ‘living water’ and ‘bread of life’ that he offers” (p. 177).
This is a remarkable reading and understanding of the New Testament, made all the more amazing by what follows: an argument in Israel’s defense based on Paul’s teaching in Rom 9-11.
“Finally, Paul retains a special place for unbelieving Israel even though they are ‘broken off’ from God’s people. During the present time, Israel has become ‘hardened’ (11.25), but in the future, after the Gentiles have been ‘grafted in,’ all Israel will be saved once more (11.26-27). Paul thus anticipates a future redemption in the plan of God that will include the Jewish people who originally rejected Christ. Israel might be reattached in the present era, but this can happen only through belief in Jesus (11.23). For the most part, Paul’s hope for Israel is future, at the end of time.” (p. 187).
How this is to be reconciled with his earlier arguments that Israel has lost the land, Burge does not say. Also left unexplained is whether or not, according to Rom 9-11, the Abrahamic and Palestinian Covenants are to be physically fulfilled by Israel in an earthy kingdom. One would assume that Burge’s answer would be that the church is the recipient of those promises. What that leaves redeemed Israel is hard to fathom, unless he is saying that all Israel will be subsumed in the church.
As Burge has argued previously, the land is shadow and heaven is substance. The church – which I would argue is not the New Israel - has no claim to the physical land, and neither does Israel have a biblical mandate while they continue in unbelief. In the future, ethnic Israel will again have claim to the land, but only when it has believed in Jesus as the Messiah.
Palestinian Christians
Burge’s most powerful arguments concern the neglect and abandonment of the Palestinian church by American evangelicals In this criticism, he is completely correct. For unknown reasons, evangelicals have denied either the existence or the sincerity of believers in Jesus Christ who are also Palestinian.
Like the Native Americans in America’s own history, Palestinian Christians have by and large been an ignored and invisible people. They have suffered for their faith and for their ethnicity. Their claim, mentioned in Part 1 of this review, is that they share with the 1st century church the dubious distinction of being persecuted by a Jewish majority. It is difficult to argue with that claim.
The numbers provided by Burge of persecution and maltreatment are staggering. Along with other Palestinians, these fellow believers in Jesus Christ have suffered being beaten, tortured, and murdered; the illegal seizure of land and property; deportation; interment in inhumane refugee camps for decades, and the countless indignities of being viewed and treated as subhuman by the Israeli government.
Burge, on one of his many visits to Israel/Palestine, tells the following conversation he had with a young Palestinian believer.
“’How can America, your America, that believes in freedom, support Israel when it acts like this?’ Such questions are frequent in the Middle East and easy to explain to Palestinians: The United States isn’t a perfect country. We make mistakes even among our allies. Then came the bombshell: ‘But why do American Christians support the Israelis as well? Why don’t they help us? Why not even us, the Palestinian Christians?’” (p. 259, emphasis his).
There is no acceptable answer.
What, then, are the Palestinian Christians’ concerns? Burge identifies the primary ones (pp. 196-203):
1. A plea for visibility and fellowship. “Palestinian Christians want us to embrace them as equals and invite them into fellowship. They want their Christian life to be acknowledged and respected, but they are not waiting for our acknowledgment to in some way make their faith authentic.”
2. A cry for justice. “Palestinian Christians are looking to us for support. They claim that they are reliving for the first time in history the conditions of the first-century church, in which a Christian minority is suffering under the rule of a Jewish majority . . . If one Bible passage has become pivotal to the Palestinian Christians experience, it is the story of Ahab and the vineyard of Naboth from 1 Kings 21.”
3. An historic claim to residence. Rev. Riah Abu El-Assal, an Anglican bishop, “feels that American Christians are often given the following scenario, which is one of the great myths of the Middle East: The Jews owned the land throughout the Old Testament era, were exiled by the Romans in 70 c.e., and in their absence, Arabs moved into the region sometime in the seventh century under the inspiration of Muhammad. Now the Arab interlude is over. The Jews have come home – and therefore the Arab residents with no historic tenure cannot make historic claims to land and residence.”
El-Assal goes on to make two points about the historic relationship between Arabs and Jews. “First, ‘Arab’ is a racial designation of people throughout the Middle East. And Arab ‘Jews’ were commonplace in antiquity. The people were racially Arab and yet embraced Judaism . . . When Israel was exiled in 70 c.e., Jews fled to these Arab Jewish communities in Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf. . . .” His second point is that “Arab Jews were among those converted to Christ in the earliest church. Acts 2.11 specifically includes Arabs as among those converted on Pentecost.”
(Burge argues, “If land promises come to Judaism by virtue of tenure in the land and biblical promise, Arabs who embraced Judaism gain these promises as well, and their faith in Jesus does not invalidate their claims to Jewish ancestry. If we ask, Where did the Arab Christians come from? the answer clearly begins with the Day of Pentecost.”)
4. A disappearing church. The Palestinians, due to the conditions in the land, are leaving in droves. “So many Palestinian Christian have left that towns in which Christians were once as many as 75 percent of the population now have Christian populations of 30 percent or less.”
5. Messianic Judaism. “In the last ten years, Palestinian Christian leaders (particularly Protestants) have explored new supportive relations with another group of Christians in the country, the Messianic Jews. These people are believers in Jesus – Christians – who live in Israel and preserve in their worship those Jewish cultural features common among Israelis.”
The attention given by American evangelicals to Messianic Jews is astonishing given the numbers and theology of the group. According to a 1999 study, “about six thousand believers worship in eighty-one messianic congregations in Israel . . . Because it frames its theology with reference to its Jewish context, this [messianic] movement will embrace positions that might seem surprising – and which present a hurdle to Arab Christians who have embraced the historic creeds of the church. For example, the divinity of Jesus (which leads to belief in the Trinity) is an open question for some” (pp. 196-203, emphasis mine).
Burge next turns his attention to current evangelical attitudes toward the Middle East and, indirectly, Palestinian Christians. He quotes two visible and vocal examples: Jerry Falwell and Kay Arthur.
“Claiming to speak for 70 million American evangelicals, Falwell urged that ‘the Bible belt in America was Israel’s only safety belt today.’ When President George W. Bush called for Israeli restraint against the Palestinians, Falwell successfully delivered a hundred thousand emails to the White House saying that ‘nothing will bring the wrath of the American people down on a government quicker than abandoning Israel.’ Suddenly Bush’s criticism of Israeli violence fell silent” (pp. 233-234).
He adds that Kay Arthur “likewise saw political support for Israel as a critical aspect of Christian faithfulness. But she went further. Any peacemaking with Palestinians, in her view, was a sin” (p. 234).
Burge employs Christendom’s favorite scapegoats – dispensationalism and premillennialism – to explain evangelicalism’s blind and unbalanced support for Israel. He presents a confused and old form of dispensationalism in an apparent attempt to absolve the rest of the church for being exclusively on the side of the Israelis. Dispensationalism’s firm commitment to an earthly future for ethnic Israel has tragically (to Burge) led evangelicalism down the wrong path. He does not elaborate, however, how it came to be that all other theologies remained silent while dispensationalism led the sheep astray.
Once again, however, Burge puts his finger on a critical and revealing issue that evangelicals need to consider. He ties the Israeli government with what he describes as “Christian Zionism.”
According to Colin Chapman, author of Whose Promised Land? (Baker, 2002),
“Christian Zionism is characterized by four basic assumptions:
1. “The Jews have divine right to the land because of God’s promise to Abraham;
2. “the return of the Jews to the land is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies;
3. “The creation of the state of Israel will lead to the conversion of the Jews and ultimately to the second coming of Christ; and
4. Christians should not only support the idea of a Jewish state, but support what it stands for and defend it against attack.”
Burge is particularly disturbed by the self-proclaimed International Christian Embassy [ICE] in Jerusalem, calling them a vital link in the chain between Christian Zionism and the Israeli government. This so-called Christian Embassy, Burge complains, seems to have no intent to present the gospel to the Israelis.
In all its dealings with the Jews, Burge says, “in the midst of all these efforts, no interest is apparent in carrying on a ministry to Judaism like Paul’s – a ministry that proclaims Jesus as Messiah. In fact, the embassy intentionally avoids any discussion of this ‘divisive subject’ . . . Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the embassy is its overt antagonism toward the Palestinian people. Its leaders readily deny the validity of Palestinian Christianity and compare the spirit of the Arab resistance movement with the ‘spirit found in the Holocaust’”(p. 244).
In short, Burge says, there is no interest on the “embassy’s” part in either evangelizing the Jews or edifying the Palestinians.
Despite the presence of such organizations as the ICE, Burge does see rays of hope: Stanley Ellisen, author of Who Owns the Land? The Arab-Israeli Conflict, believes that “Israel should be treated like any other secular state in the world, giving it both security considerations and expecting from it appropriate human rights” (p. 247).
Ellison’s point is one of the more reasonable and significant statements in the book. It is this position that evangelicals need to adopt, i.e., to treat the nation of Israel will all the respect and rights due any legitimate people, but with no special privileges or favors. Israel, as a past and present ally of the United States, should be given the same status and support - but also evaluated as carefully - as England, Canada, or Australia.
Other sources of evangelical hope found by Burge include World Vision International, which provides assistance for both Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, and Christianity Today, which has sought to be an equal-opportunity critic of nations or groups that routinely violate human rights.
He also includes a strong statement from evangelical scholar John Stott. In an interview with The Link, a quarterly journal of the Americans for Middle East Understanding, Stott says, “After considerable study, I have concluded that Zionism and especially Christian Zionism are Biblically untenable” (p. 255, emphasis mine).
Burge adds, “I am now persuaded that the church cannot be entangled in a political agenda in the Middle East that destroys people and pursues injustice . . . The Palestinian is my neighbor. Many Palestinians are my Christian brothers and sisters . . . Evangelicals who stand opposed to the secular nationalism of Israel are not discriminating against Jews as a people. On the contrary, evangelical circles are expressing dissatisfaction with the behavior of a nation that ought to know better – a nation whose possession of the Scriptures ought to give it more light” (p. 258, emphasis his).
He continues:
“From the very beginning, Israel’s founders recognized three dreams, three visions, that the state wanted to embrace: Israel was to be (1) a democracy; (2) a Jewish state; (3) and the owner of the historic land of Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
“David Ben-Gurion understood this vision, and he remarked that it would be impossible to hold all three of these at any one time. If Israel is to be a Jewish democracy, it could not have all the land. If Israel was to be a democracy and hold all the land with its Arab residents, it could not be exclusively Jewish. And if Israel wanted all the land and also be Jewish, then it could not be a democracy . . .
“The third option is for Israel to let go of much occupied land in the West Bank and remain a smaller Jewish state in which democracy is enjoyed by all its citizenry. This path opens the way for genuine Palestinian nationhood” (p. 265).
In closing, Burge offers his outline for creating a foundation for peace (pp. 267-268):
1. Palestinians will respect Israel’s need for security within their boundaries.
2. Israelis will attend to the needs of Palestinians who have lost their homes and villages.
3. Refugees will be allowed to return to their homes and be compensated for their losses; the sin of Ahab will stop.
4. Both sides will end human rights abuses.
5. The unlawful acquisition of land will end.
6. Jerusalem will be a multicultural city, shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
As stated at the onset of this review, The New Testament and The Land
Burge begins his examination of the New Testament’s teaching concerning the land promised to Israel by quoting a Palestinian minister, whose position is representative of many Christians in a variety of theological traditions.
“The church . . . has inherited the promises of Israel. The church is actually the new Israel. What Abraham was promised, Christians now possess because they are Abraham’s true spiritual children just as the New Testament teaches” (p. 67) – Father George Makhlouf, St. George’s Greek Orthodox Church in Ramallah.
Those of you who participate in the “Americanism and Its Enemies” forum at Evangelical Outpost may remember that the Puritans made similar statements as they prepared to come to the New World. Most Christian traditions do not maintain a clear distinction between ethnic Israel and the church, with the result that many of the promises made in the Old Testament are claimed by the New Testament church. In order to do that, some theologians find it necessary to “spiritualize” or allegorize passages and promises. This is apparently Burge’s solution, as well.
Arguing from the silence of the New Testament regarding the land, he first seeks to demonstrate that Jesus was not interested in a physical kingdom, Jerusalem, or the temple. To some extent, he is correct: Jesus’ kingdom was to be markedly different than that for which the Jews yearned. Even after the Resurrection, his disciples questions centered on if Jesus was going to restore the physical kingdom at this time.
An explanation of the nature and timing of the kingdom is beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to point out at this juncture, however, that Christ’s reply was not that there would never be such a kingdom because the church would fulfill the promises, but only that it was none of the disciples business when God was going to act.
Burge then moves on to spiritualize the meaning of the land itself. “Jesus himself becomes the locus of holy space. The aim of the old covenant was the land of promise; now the aim is Jesus Christ, who walked in the land” (p. 175, emphasis his). Space, the author is saying, has been redefined: it is no longer physical but holy, spiritual space. It no longer exists on earth but in the heavenlies, in the Body and Person of Jesus Christ.
Once again, Burge is partially right. The emphasis at this time is on the spiritual kingdom of God (that is, the rule of God in and through those who have believed in Jesus as the Messiah) and only secondarily on material things. But the church is an intercalation, not a replacement: the clock has stopped for Israel and the land promises made to Abraham, not to start again until an unknown time in the future.
“To sum up, we observe a cycle of responses to the question of land: (1) land is rejected as the aim of faith; (2) land is spiritualized as meaning something else; (3) the promise is historicized in Jesus, a man who lives in the land; (4) the promised is sacramentalized – that is, as a sacrament bears testimony to things beyond what we see and touch (without denying these properties), so too Jesus’ ‘landness’ (his physicality) is a reality, but believers are urged to push further, to find the ‘living water’ and ‘bread of life’ that he offers” (p. 177).
This is a remarkable reading and understanding of the New Testament, made all the more amazing by what follows: an argument in Israel’s defense based on Paul’s teaching in Rom 9-11.
“Finally, Paul retains a special place for unbelieving Israel even though they are ‘broken off’ from God’s people. During the present time, Israel has become ‘hardened’ (11.25), but in the future, after the Gentiles have been ‘grafted in,’ all Israel will be saved once more (11.26-27). Paul thus anticipates a future redemption in the plan of God that will include the Jewish people who originally rejected Christ. Israel might be reattached in the present era, but this can happen only through belief in Jesus (11.23). For the most part, Paul’s hope for Israel is future, at the end of time.” (p. 187).
How this is to be reconciled with his earlier arguments that Israel has lost the land, Burge does not say. Also left unexplained is whether or not, according to Rom 9-11, the Abrahamic and Palestinian Covenants are to be physically fulfilled by Israel in an earthy kingdom. One would assume that Burge’s answer would be that the church is the recipient of those promises. What that leaves redeemed Israel is hard to fathom.
As Burge has argued previously, the land is shadow and heaven is substance. The church – which I would argue is not the New Israel - has no claim to the physical land nor does Israel have a biblical mandate while they continue in unbelief. In the future, ethnic Israel will again have claim to the land, but only when it has believed in Jesus as the Messiah.
Burge’s most powerful arguments concern the neglect and abandonment of the Palestinian church by American evangelicals: he is correct. For unknown reasons, evangelicals have denied either the existence or the sincerity of believers in Jesus Christ who are also Palestinian.
Like the Native Americans in America’s own history, Palestinian Christians have by and large been an ignored and invisible people. They have suffered for their faith and for their ethnicity. Their claim, mention in Part 1 of this review, is that they share with the 1st century church the dubious distinction of being persecuted by a Jewish majority. It is difficult to argue with that claim.
The numbers provided by Burge are staggering. Along with other Palestinians, these fellow believers in Jesus Christ have suffered being beaten, tortured, and murdered; the illegal seizure of land and property; deportation; interment in inhumane refugee camps for decades, and the countless indignities of being viewed and treated as subhuman by the Israeli government.
Burge, on one of his many visits to Israel/Palestine, tells the following conversation he had with a young Palestinian believer.
“’How can America, your America, that believes in freedom, support Israel when it acts like this?’ Such questions are frequent in the Middle East and easy to explain to Palestinians: The United States isn’t a perfect country. We make mistakes even among our allies. Then came the bombshell: ‘But why do American Christians support the Israelis as well? Why don’t they help us? Why not even us, the Palestinian Christians?’” (p. 259, emphasis his).
There is no acceptable answer.
What, then, are the Palestinian Christians’ concerns? Burge identifies the primary ones (pp. 196-203):
A plea for visibility and fellowship. “Palestinian Christians want us to embrace them as equals and invite them into fellowship. They want their Christian life to be acknowledged and respected, but they are not waiting for our acknowledgment to in some way make their faith authentic.”
A cry for justice. “Palestinian Christians are looking to us for support. They claim that they are reliving for the first time in history the conditions of the first-century church, in which a Christian minority is suffering under the rule of a Jewish majority . . . If one Bible passage has become pivotal to the Palestinian Christians experience, it is the story of Ahab and the vineyard of Naboth from 1 Kings 21.”
A historic claim to residence. Rev. Riah Abu El-Assal, an Anglican bishop, “feels that American Christians are often given the following scenario, which is one of the great myths of the Middle East: The Jews owned the land throughout the Old Testament era, were exiled by the Romans in 70 c.e., and in their absence, Arabs moved into the region sometime in the seventh century under the inspiration of Muhammad. Now the Arab interlude is over. The Jews have come home – and therefore the Arab residents with no historic tenure cannot make historic claims to land and residence.”
El-Assal goes on to make two points about the historic relationship between Arabs and Jews. “First, ‘Arab’ is a racial designation of people throughout the Middle East. And Arab ‘Jews’ were commonplace in antiquity. The people were racially Arab and yet embraced Judaism . . . When Israel was exiled in 70 c.e., Jews fled to these Arab Jewish communities in Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, and the Persian Gulf. . . .” His second point is that “Arab Jews were among those converted to Christ in the earliest church. Acts 2.11 specifically includes Arabs as among those converted on Pentecost.”
(Burge argues, “If land promises come to Judaism by virtue of tenure in the land and biblical promise, Arabs who embraced Judaism gain these promises as well, and their faith in Jesus does not invalidate their claims to Jewish ancestry. If we ask, Where did the Arab Christians come from? the answer clearly begins with the Day of Pentecost.”)
A disappearing church. The Palestinians, due to the conditions in the land, are leaving in droves. 200 – “So many Palestinian Christian have left that towns in which Christians were once as many as 75 percent of the population now have Christian populations of 30 percent or less.”
Messianic Judaism. “In the last ten years, Palestinian Christian leaders (particularly Protestants) have explored new supportive relations with another group of Christians in the country, the Messianic Jews. These people are believers in Jesus – Christians – who live in Israel and preserve in their worship those Jewish cultural features common among Israelis.”
The attention given by American evangelicals to Messianic Jews is astonishing given the numbers and theology of the group. According to a 1999 study, “about six thousand believers worship in eighty-one messianic congregations in Israel . . . Because it frames its theology with reference to its Jewish context, this [messianic] movement will embrace positions that might seem surprising – and which present a hurdle to Arab Christians who have embraced the historic creeds of the church. For example, the divinity of Jesus (which leads to belief in the Trinity) is an open question for some” (emphasis mine).
Burge next turns his attention to the current evangelical attitudes toward the Middle East and, indirectly, Palestinian Christians. He quotes two visible and vocal examples: Jerry Falwell and Kay Arthur.
“Claiming to speak for 70 million American evangelicals, Falwell urged that ‘the Bible belt in America was Israel’s only safety belt today.’ When President George W. Bush called for Israeli restraint against the Palestinians, Falwell successfully delivered a hundred thousand emails to the White House saying that ‘nothing will bring the wrath of the American people down on a government quicker than abandoning Israel.’ Suddenly Bush’s criticism of Israeli violence fell silent” (pp. 233-234).
He adds that Kay Arthur “likewise saw political support for Israel as a critical aspect of Christian faithfulness. But she went further. Any peacemaking with Palestinians, in her view, was a sin” (p. 234).
Burge employs Christendom’s favorite scapegoats – dispensationalism and premillennialism – to explain evangelicalisms blind and unbalanced support for Israel. He presents a confused and old form of dispensationalism in an apparent attempt to absolve the rest of the church for being exclusively on the side of the Israelis. Dispensationalism firm commitment to an earthly future for ethnic Israel has tragically (to Burge) led evangelicalism down the wrong path. He does not elaborate, however, how it came to be that all other theologies remained silent while dispensationalism led the sheep astray.
Once again, however, Burge puts his finger on a critical and revealing issue that evangelicals need to consider. He ties the Israeli government with what he describes as “Christian Zionism.”
According to Colin Chapman, author of Whose Promised Land? (Baker, 2002),
“Christian Zionism is characterized by four basic assumptions:
The Jews have divine right to the land because of God’s promise to Abraham;
the return of the Jews to the land is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies;
The creation of the state of Israel will lead to the conversion of the Jews and ultimately to the second coming of Christ; and
Christians should not only support the idea of a Jewish state, but support what it stands for and defend it against attack.”
Burge is particularly disturbed by the self-proclaimed International Christian Embassy [ICE], calling them a vital link in the chain between Christian Zionism and the Israeli government. This so-called Christian Embassy, Burge complains, seems to have no intent to present the gospel to the Israelis.
In all its dealings with the Jews, Burge says, “in the midst of all these efforts, no interest is apparent in carrying on a ministry to Judaism like Paul’s – a ministry that proclaims Jesus as Messiah. In fact, the embassy intentionally avoids any discussion of this ‘divisive subject’ . . . Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about the embassy is its overt antagonism toward the Palestinian people. Its leads readily deny the validity of Palestinian Christianity and compare the spirit of the Arab resistance movement with the ‘spirit found in the Holocaust’”(p. 244).
In short, he says, there is no interest in either evangelizing the Jews or edifying the Palestinians.
Despite the presence of such organizations as the ICE, Burge sees rays of hope: Stanley Ellisen, author of Who Owns the Land? The Arab-Israeli Conflict, “concludes that Israel should be treated like any other secular state in the world, giving it both security considerations and expecting from it appropriate human rights” (p. 247).
Ellison’s point is one of the more reasonable and significant statements in the book. It is this position that evangelicals need to adopt: to treat the nation of Israel will all the respect and rights due any legitimate people, but with no special privileges or favors. Israel, as a past and present ally of the United States, should be given the same status and support as England, Canada, or Australia.
Other sources of evangelical hope found by Burge include World Vision International, which provides assistance for both Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, and Christianity Today, which has sought to be an equal-opportunity critic of nations or groups that routinely violate human rights.
He also includes a strong statement from evangelical scholar John Stott. In an interview with The Link, a quarterly journal of the Americans for Middle East Understand, Stott says, “After considerable study, I have concluded that Zionism and especially Christian Zionism are Biblically untenable” (p. 255).
Burge adds, “I am now persuaded that the church cannot be entangled in a political agenda in the Middle East that destroys people and pursues injustice . . . The Palestinian is my neighbor. Many Palestinians are my Christian brothers and sisters . . . Evangelicals who stand opposed to the secular nationalism of Israel are not discriminating against Jews as a people. On the contrary, evangelical circles are expressing dissatisfaction with the behavior of a nation that ought to know better – a nation whose possession of the Scriptures ought to give it more light” (p. 258, emphasis his).
He continues:
“From the very beginning, Israel’s founders recognized three dreams, three visions, that the state wanted to embrace: Israel was to be (1) a democracy; (2) a Jewish state; (3) and the owner of the historic land of Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
“David Ben-Gurion understood this vision, and he remarked that it would be impossible to hold all three of these at any one time. If Israel is to be a Jewish democracy, it could not have all the land. If Israel was to be a democracy and hold all the land with its Arab residents, it could not be exclusively Jewish. And if Israel wanted all the land also be Jewish, then it could not be a democracy . . .
“The third option is for Israel to let go of much occupied land in the West Bank and remain a smaller Jewish state in which democracy is enjoyed by all its citizenry. This path opens the way for genuine Palestinian nationhood” (p. 265).
In closing, Burge offers his outline for creating a foundation for peace (pp. 267-268):
Palestinians will respect Israel’s need for security within their boundaries.
Israelis will attend to the needs of Palestinians who have lost their homes and villages.
Refugees will be allowed to return to their homes and compensated for their losses; the sin of Ahab will stop.
Both sides will end human rights abuses.
The unlawful acquisition of land will end.
Jerusalem will be a multicultural city, shared by Jews, Muslims, and Christians.
As stated at the onset of this review, Whose Land? Whose Promise? is almost a great book. Its lack of balance, however, reduces it to a polemic at times. Had a chapter been included that reported the violence and abuses of the Palestinians in the land, the author’s comments would have been more palatable and credible. Burge preaches to Jerusalem – in the spirit of Isaiah and Jeremiah – but also needs to preach to Nineveh in the spirit of Jonah and Nahum.
The path that leads to blind compassion of the Palestinians is as misguided as the path that follows blind support of a nation, be it Israel or any other. Wisdom finds a middle way. Nevertheless, Whose Land? Whose Promise?, with its flaws and shortcomings, remains an important book and must reading for evangelicals of all theological traditions.