5 Theological Problems with Christian Zionism

With tensions flaring yet again between Israelis and Palestinians, many conservative evangelicals -- such as the 1.6 million belonging to the organization Christians United for Israel (CUFI), founded by John Hagee and currently led by Gary Bauer who was an Under Secretary in the Reagan Administration -- are rushing to Israel’s side and loudly proclaiming the right of "God's chosen people" to defend themselves against the Palestinians. 

While many others have written about the politics of the situation, I would like to focus on the theology that has persisted in keeping American evangelicals solidly behind the modern secular nation-state of Israel, regardless of how contradictory their behavior may be to biblical teachings.

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Here are five theological problems with the movement CUFI represents, known as Christian Zionism:

1. Zionism hinges on a (Calvinist) belief that God loves some and hates others.  

Granted, some Christians do accept this view of God, but I don't.  "God is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9).  I take this to be central to the heart of God.  When approaching the issue of Israel and Palestine, a fundamental question each Christian needs to ask is, "Do I believe that God loves Palestinians any less than He loves Israelis?"  If you believe that God truly loves the world, as Scripture claims in John 3:16, then you will be concerned that, for example, in the last three days seventy-six Palestinians have died -- at least sixty of whom were innocent civilians -- and not a single Israeli has.  If you agree with the Epistle of James that "God does not show favoritism" (James 2:9), then the foundations of a blind support for Israel against the Palestinian people will begin to crumble.     

2. Zionism misunderstands the nature of apocalyptic literature.

Armageddon.  The Anti-Christ.  666.  The Beast.  The Whore of Babylon.  The United Nations, the Pope, Obama, Palestine, expanding the boarders of the nation-state of Israel?  There is a reason that the Left Behind series and now The Harbinger have been best sellers:  they claim just enough plausibility among those committed to a literalist interpretation of Scripture that they just might be partly right.  But there's just one problem:  The book of Revelation (and parts of Daniel too) were written in an ancient genre called apocalyptic.  Apocalyptic is nothing even remotely like anything we have today.  It was written to be deliberately obscure so that, should the manuscript fall into the wrong hands, it would not be understood.  Zionism is a product of our modern desire to solve puzzles and riddles (see point #3).  But apocalyptic literature was not meant to be taken literally!  I say again: It wasn't written to be read literally and it shouldn't be read literally.  When we do, it's not just a whoopsie doo; people can die.

John Nelson Darby

3. Zionism rests on a relatively new innovation called premillennial dispensationalism.

In the 1830's, a Calvinist Anglican named John Nelson Darby invented how CUFI reads the book of Revelation.  He spread a theory, now called premillenial dispensationalism, which claims that God works in different ways during different periods of human history, that Israel and the Church are two totally separate entities, that Christians will be raptured up into the sky someday, and that after the rapture there will be seven years of tribulation under the rule of the anti-Christ after which Christ will return to reign for a thousand years.  These views spread across the United States especially via the Scofield Reference Bible and are still taught today at places such as Dallas Theological Seminary, for example.  The point, however, is that the interpretive foundations for Zionism are about 180 years old and do not represent historic, orthodox Christianity.

4. Zionism violates a basic law of biblical interpretation: Let obscure texts be interpreted by the clear texts.

All of Darby's interpretations are speculative at best.  Today modern evangelicals tend to "see" certain realities in the Bible because they have been taught to see them.  But a good interpreter knows that anything unclear should be understood in light of what is clear.  And here is what is clear:  Jesus (he's pretty central, I would maintain) taught that we should love one another.  In fact, we should love our enemies.  He ushered in a new covenant based not upon ethnicity, but upon the cross and resurrection which is efficacious for all(see Acts 10, for example).  Zionists like John Hagee need to spend less time speculating about the symbolism behind the seven horns on the beast's head and more time meditating on Paul's instructions, "Let no debt remain outstanding except the continuing debt to love one another, for love is the fulfillment of the law" (Romans 13:8).

5. Zionism equates the Hebrew people of the Old Testament with the modern nation-state of Israel.  

The two are not the same.  They simply aren't.  The nation God desired to establish in the Old Testament was to be a Theocracy, directly ruled by Him alone through his Torah.  Remember how the prophet Samuel warned the people against adopting a king, Saul, like the other nations?  He warned them against this because God's people were to be different than other nations.  God's people were not to ride off to war, trusting in horses and chariots, like the Egyptians.  Instead, when God established his original covenant with Abram, he said, "I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing"  (Gen. 12:2).  We forget that last part.  From the start, God's plan was to bless ALL peoples.  The heavily armed secular Jewish state established in 1948 is not the circumcised children of Abraham chosen to bless the nations of the earth.  If they were, they'd start blessing the one next to them instead of… well, doing what they've been doing.

5 Ways to Kill a Church

Today I'm going to tell you how to kill a church in five simple steps.  But first, a preface.

For the past seven months I have been immersing myself in the study of the history of American Methodism.  It's a remarkable story in and of itself, filled with plenty of drama, but it also offers some interesting lessons for the church today.  Those familiar with Methodism at all know that the movement took off like a rocket in the beginning.  In fact, its rapid growth between 1776 and 1850 is almost unparalleled in the history of Christianity.  Just take a look at this chart from The Churching of America, 1776-2005 by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark:

No matter how you slice it, this feat was nothing short of miraculous.  In 1770, American Methodists numbered around one thousand.  By 1820, they were the largest denomination in the nation with over a quarter million members -- all this in fifty years!  To put this another way, in 1775 less than 1 in 800 Americans were Methodist, but by 1812 the ratio was 1:36 (Wigger 3).

But the story of Methodism is also a tragic one.  Methodism's rapid growth entered a prolonged plateau phase between roughly 1870-1950 and then, once the tumultuous 1960's hit, Methodism started rapidly declining in numbers, a trend that continues to this day.  Since that time, the United Methodist Church has lost a whopping 56% of its membership.  

Now books and books have been written about this stuff:  Why did Methodism fly out of the gate at first and then sputter out?  What factors lead to its growth and decline?  And on and on it goes.  

But here I'm just going to offer a few very practical observations from my own study of the history of American Methodism about how to kill a church.  And, by the way, these will likely offend LOTS of people on both the so-called "right" and the "left."  I am an equal opportunity offender.

Here goes.  Five ways to kill a church:

1.  Let the pastors be the professional Christians.  In churches that thrive, there is a strong sense of "ownership" among all of the people, especially among the laity.  In fact, the lines between the clergy and the laity are somewhat muddied.  For example, in early Methodism when it was spreading like wildfire, plain uneducated folk were allowed to become "exhorters," meaning that they could share their testimonies in public when a pastor wasn't around, basically acting like a "substitute" pastor (Wigger 29-31).  Much of the genius of the movement was in its ability to empower regular people -- including women, African-American slaves, uneducated farmers, and so on -- to lead and to disciple others from their rich spiritual experiences.  But over time, as pastors grew more educated and took on more responsibilities in the church, the lay people took a more hands-off, passive role.  Soon, instead of being participants, the hoi polloi were observers as pastors-priests acted out their thing up on a stage to be seen.  The pastors became the "professional Christians" -- as in: "We pay you to reach out to the community, preach, disciple, and do all that spiritual stuff so that we don't have to."  It became a division of labor, reflecting the rest of our capitalist free market.  Soon the men (and women, sometimes) with the vestments on made all the key decisions, leaving the lay people feeling like they had nothing invested in the church at all.  In their minds, the church -- and its mission -- belonged to the pastor.

2.  Try to make your church "respectable."  When the Methodists were growing like gangbusters, they couldn't care less what those wealthy, highfalutin gentlemen and ladies in the cities thought of them.  While the "respectable" Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City looked down their noses at uncultured ruffians like Lorenzo Dow or Peter Cartwright, the circuit-riding Methodists were converting hard-working salt-of-the-earth American farmers, artisans, and pioneers by the thousands.  These simple folk were so enthused by the plain, vernacular message they were hearing that they didn't need something as fancy as a church building.  Instead, they met in homes, town halls, barns, school houses, and outdoors.  In 1785, the Methodists had 60 simple chapels that they had purchased or built, but they had over 800 recognized preaching places! (Wigger 36).  But, alas, people who are taught to work hard and live frugally eventually move up in the world.  And, as the generations passed, Methodists went from lower/middle class to solidly upper class.  By the 1850's they were building fine, large gothic-style stone churches and seminaries like the one I attend now.  The allure of social respectability proved too strong. They ignored the advice of their movement's founder, John Wesley, who said, "Gain all you can, save all you can (as in "live as frugally as you can," not as in "amass a huge 401(k)"), and give all you can." By failing to practice this third principle and turning inward, the church's pursuit of upward mobility would contribute to its eventual decline.  (As a Free Methodist, my own denomination has followed this exact same pattern.  I would refer my Free Methodist readers to Robert Wall's brilliant article The Embourgeoisement of the Free Methodist Ethos, if you haven't already read it).  

One more note on respectability:  today this same impulse is often masked in terms of the search to "be relevant."  I challenge one to show me in Christ's teachings where we are instructed, as Christians, to be relevant.  No, we must be far more concerned with being faithful than being relevant.  If you want to kill your church, do anything you can to make it acceptable to the cool, the wealthy, the successful, and the prosperous in our culture.  It's a sure-fire way to not only destroy your church's growth, but to also violate biblical principles at the same time.

3.  Pay your pastors lots of money.  Yep.  I said it.  I don't really think I need to elaborate on this point very much except to note that if you study the correlation between church growth and an average pastor's salary, you will find that they are in an inverse relationship to one another (Finke and Stark).  However, that's not really why I would argue that pastors shouldn't get paid tons of money.  Mine is based on something else:  the gospels.  "He told them, 'Take nothing for the journey--no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt.'" (Luke 9:3).  Sure, a worker is worth his wages.  Paul defends the right of an apostle to be paid.  I'm not saying to stop paying your pastor.   Just don't pay her so much that it causes the average person in the pew to ask, "Is she doing this for the money?"  Remarkably, the church has thrived the most when pastors are bi-vocational.  Not only does this free the church financially and empower the laity (see point #1), but it enables the pastor to relate to people in their everyday lives.

4.  Focus on making church a comfortable experience.  If you want to kill your church, allow people to slip in and out anonymously.  Entertain them by putting on a performance up front.  When there is congregational singing, dim the lights on the people and shine all the lights on the song leaders or band or tattooed hipster or robed liturgist up front.  Doesn't matter really whether you're a high church or low church, just make sure that the people are nameless.  Pad their seats.  Give them lattes.  Use smoke, lights, and a laser show.  Use power points that have moving  If you're a preacher, give them what they want to hear. If you live on the liberal northshore of Chicago, preach a sermon praising universal healthcare.  If your church is in rural Georgia, then glory in the second ammendment.  If you church is in a small college town, then throw in a sanctimonious jab at those uneducated evangelicals who foolishly still don't believe in global warming.   However you can, seek popularity.  Put your finger to the cultural winds and, whatever it is telling you to say, say that.  Just make them happy.  Offer them "their best life now."  None of this "pick up your cross daily" stuff.

5.  Adapt the gospel message to the "modern mind."  To kill you church, you really need to stop talking about all this hocus-pocus that is found in the Bible.  That is soooo pre-Enlightenment.  You need to thoroughly commit yourself to the liberal project of demythologization so that rational, secular human beings will be able to swallow the message of the church.  Otherwise, after all, that church will become irrelevant, right!?!  So scuttle the whole narrative about Israel and Exodus, Incarnation, Virgin birth, Crucifixion and Atonement, Resurrection and Eschatology.  People don't want to hear that.  Instead, present Jesus as a nice guy who was a good moral teacher and then switch over to social justicey stuff.  Title your sermons things like "Be nice" and "Let's all get along."

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Here's a chart that shows the beliefs of differing groups of Christians according to denominational affiliation:

Combine the observations of that chart with the fact that the UCC, the United Methodists, the Episcopal Church, and other mainline denominations are rapidly in decline, while those churches that still affirm their belief in the "traditional" doctrines of Christianity are growing.  Pentecostal sects are the fastest growing group of Christians in the world today.

Now just because something is growing doesn't make it necessarily right.  After all, ISIS has grown quite rapidly too, I hear.  But what I have offered above has at least hopefully sparked some thought, if you've managed to read this far.

At the very least, I am sure I have accomplished one goal:  I have offended basically everyone.  I told you I was an equal opportunity offender.