Christian Zionism and Jewish Zionism

Shalom Goldman writes about The Christian Roots of Zionism Religion Dispatches 10/10/10, in an excerpt from his book Zeal for Zion: Christians, Jews, and the Idea of the Promised Land (2009):

In the United States, The Fundamentals, a series of essays published between 1910 and 1915 by conservative evangelical theologians, emphasized the necessity to believe in the literal truth of scripture. This helped reify the relationship between the Jews of the present and the Israelites of old. In the view of many in the Christian West, Palestine was understood to be "empty," and this emptiness should be filled by Jews, the descendants of the land’s ancient biblical inhabitants. The phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land" conveyed this view in a very concise and pithy manner. The idea was first promoted by Christians.

In 1853 Lord Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper) wrote that Palestine was "a country without a nation" in search of "a nation without a country." He made this observation during the Crimean War, when the continued viability of the Ottoman Empire came into question. With the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, continued Turkish rule in Palestine came into question. In Shaftesbury’s view, first expressed two decades before the Crimean War, Christians needed to support a Jewish restoration so as to prepare the stage for the Second Coming. As Shaftesbury was a friend and relative of Henry John Temple Palmerston, the British foreign minister, his views had considerable weight. Palmerston opened a British consulate in Jerusalem in 1838. Two years later, Shaftesbury wrote that "Palmerston has already been chosen by God to be an instrument of good to His ancient people." A half century later, the phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land" was popularized by Anglo-Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill.

That series The Fundamentals was the basis of assigning the name Fundamentalists to the Christian Protestant religious trend that had begun forming around 1870 in the US. It's two primary theological hallmarks were their "dispensationalist" apocalyptic beliefs, which assumed that the Jews of the world would be regathered into ancient Israel, and a belief in the "inerrancy" of the Bible.

The American Fundamentalists' beliefs about the Last Days were heavily influenced by Irishman John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), an Anglican clergyman who split from the Church of Ireland to form a Protestant sect called the Plymouth Brethren. Their views about the ingathering of Jews to the Holy Land dovetailed with British imperial ambitions in the Middle East.

Yet another irony in the strange ideology of Christian Zionism.

Tags: christian zionism, john nelson darby