“The establishment of the modern state of Israel is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy,” according to Jimmy Carter, President of the United States. He spoke those words to a conference of Jewish leaders last October during his campaign, and repeated them after his election in an interview with Pat Robertson, television’s charismatic version of Johnny Carson. Carter’s convictions echo the beliefs of countless fellow evangelicals.
No notion is likely to be more destructive of the Carter administration’s current peace initiatives in the Middle East than the belief that God has a vested interest in the amount of real estate controlled by the state of Israel. Further, a genuine dialog between the Christian and Jewish communities today, and a deep understanding of what the Jewish heritage of the Old Testament has to contribute to our grasp of faith, are both gravely injured by the evangelical tendency to sanctify contemporary Israeli nationalism and aggrandizement with spurious interpretations of Old Testament “prophecy.”
At the conclusion of Hope in a Time of Abandonment, protestant theologian Jacques Ellul suggests that the church today could learn much about its true identity from observing the profound sense of peoplehood maintained by the Jews in varied cultures, and through two thousand years of persecution. In their steadfastness of hope they give to the Christian church a model for its own life.
As they have lived in touch with their roots, the Jewish people have served as a prophetic presence in a myriad of societies, where they have been a sign of faith in the faithfulness of God, even amidst the most horrifying of historical experiences.
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