Lesson 2: Whose land? Whose rights? Theology and Politics of the Land, and the Power of the Cross
[For Lesson 1, see here]
Certain weighty
questions need consideration when discussing Israel’s existence as a people
occupying a particular territory and governed by a particular government. Several of these questions are:
1.
On what grounds does any people
lay claim to the land they occupy?
2.
Does that claim justify
continued possession of the land, or are there other conditions that must be
weighed along with such a claim?
3.
What is the relationship
between a people’s claim to the land and the state and government by which they
are governed?
4.
And how do answers to such
questions get further defined for particular states?
As to the first
question in the case of Israel, the answer is complicated by considering
factors in different historical periods.
One mistake is to treat the answers from the time of Biblical Israel as
part of the answers today for the State of Israel. I will note certain Old Testament answers in
later lessons, but I am not suggesting that this is the final answer for the
situation of the State of Israel today.
The legitimacy of today’s nation of Israel is not based on Biblical
Israel’s theocracy; arguments for its legitimacy are grounded, like any nations’,
on the grounds of what the Romans called ‘the law of nations’ (jus gentium). The Israel of today occupies some of the same
territory of ancient Israel, whose borders also fluctuated, but it is a secular
state.
In the Old Testament, Israel’s theological claim to the land is tentative rather than absolute because it is based on the promise of God, Divine Covenant, obedience of the people to God, and fulfillment of Israel’s mission to the nations. Israel’s political claim to the land, on the other hand, is based on her ability, as with any nation, to control her borders and provide what is good and just for those within them. The Old Testament presents both theological and political trajectories of thought in regard to Israel and the land. These trajectories sometimes overlap and sometimes conflict.
Theologically,
the land of Israel does not belong to the Israelites but to God. They are His people and tenants on His
land. Their right to the land is,
therefore, dependent on their obedience to God’s Law in regard to their right worship
of Him and their just treatment of one another.
The Law under which they live is a standard for the whole world, not
just their peculiar law for their own people.
They therefore have the burden of not only providing justice within
their borders but showing forth the righteousness of God to the nations. Such theological reckoning provides particular
answers to the questions posed above, and they cannot be answered in isolation
from one another. Nor can they be
answers that Israel gives just as any other nation: they alone worship the One,
true God; they alone celebrate life under His Law; and they alone are a light
and guide to the nations about what is good and what the LORD requires of us
all.
This theological
argument in the Old Testament is not what Israel gives for itself today, though some Jews certainly
believe this as they continue to live religious lives under the Old Testament
and not just under the modern state of Israel.
Over against this, Islamic states justify their existence theologically,
based not on the Old Testament but on Islamic teaching. There are, to be sure, different views within
Islamic teaching, and there are different forms of government in Islamic
majority states. Some are more democratic
and less theologically directed than others.
Islam itself, however, notably does not distinguish ‘secular’ from ‘religious’
in the ways that the West is accustomed—especially the ‘West’ outside Europe,
where no state religion (Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican) has existed.
Throughout the
West, however, people are accustomed to base answers of legitimate occupation
and rule on political reasoning. Theological
reasoning is now excluded from public discourse. This is why the situation in Israel and the
Middle East is so confusing to many: who argues theologically anymore in the secular West? When a Muslim is invited to a cathedral in
the Church of England and reads from the Koran, the secularized, Western priest
imagines he is being welcoming and friendly and promoting peace. The Muslim, however, knows (theologically)
that this act lays a claim on the cathedral for Islam, just as, throughout
history, Islam has taken over churches and lands and laid theological claim to ecclesiastical
and political territories of ‘Christendom’.
One of the many
frustrating factors in today’s news is to watch secular Westerners, trained in (anti-Christian)
Marxist critical theory, defend Islamic theological claims to Palestine. Trained to read political situations only in
terms of a fight between the privileged and the victimized and forgetting (never
learning?) how a Jewish state was needed because
the Jews were victimized in Europe over centuries and especially in the 20th
century, these empty-headed, social justice warriors end up marching behind an
anti-Semitic and genocidal flag.
Imagining themselves to have taken a just political stance, they have
taken a theological stance they know little to nothing about. To be sure, Islamists leading or marching
with them do understand this, and they must be ever so pleased to avail
themselves for the time being of the fools among them.
Also
frustrating, however, is the argument of certain Christians in today’s
situation in Israel. Some Christians approach
the situation in the Middle East on purely secular grounds, reasoning only from
contemporary, Western notions of government.
This separates Israel from any of the Old Testament obligations it had
towards God or its mission to the nations.
The result is that the desired solution such Christians put forward is
completely unrelated to issues of faith, God’s justice, and God’s purposes.
Alternatively,
other Christians take a highly theological approach to Israel, making the
interpretative leap from the Old Testament prophetic books to today’s secular
state without blinking. Some among these
have developed a prophetic vision for Israel of rebuilding the Temple and,
being Christians, the Jews turning to Jesus as their Saviour. There is some justification to the hope of
Jews turning to Christ (e.g., Romans 11.25-27), but this is completely separate
in the New Testament from any vision of Israel as a state, Israel as a Jewish
religion reconstituted around the Temple, and therefore from any theological
justification by Christians of a Jewish state.
In fact, to follow the teaching of both Old and New Testaments, God’s
blessing of the Israelites in the land was always contingent upon their
singular devotion to Him, their righteousness in obedience of Him and love of
their neighbour, and their mission to the nations of showing forth His glory,
truth, and justice. As we read in the
Old Testament, the uniqueness of this ‘land’ belonging to God was that it ‘vomitted
out’ inhabitants, Jews or otherwise, who were unclean and iniquitous (Leviticus
18.25, 28; 20.22). This applied to the
Canaanite tribes and to Israel in equal measure, and if any theological
argument is raised in our day, it would then have to apply just the same to any
in the land.
Christians
believe, or should believe, that this role of God’s people has fallen to them,
not to the nation of Israel, and it has fallen to them without ethnic or
national distinctions. We consist of
people from all nations, Jews and Gentiles, who have acknowledged Jesus Christ
as our Lord and Saviour. We worship
neither on Mt. Gerizim (Samaria) nor Mt. Zion (Jerusalem) but in Spirit and in
truth (John 4.17). We provide a
different, theological answer to the situation in the land of Israel
today. What God chooses to do in this
land politically is not a matter to be determined by interpreters of ancient
prophecy—prophecies pertaining to the restoration of Israelites to the land
after the Babylonian captivity in the 6th and 5th
centuries BC. God may well do something
new with the Jews and/or with Israel, but we certainly do not have a plan in
print for this. Whatever political
solution can provide a semblance of justice in the land today is not the peace
of Christ that we, the Church, are called to announce through the Good News of
Jesus Christ. As Paul said, ‘He himself
is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the
dividing wall of hostility…that he might create in himself one new man in place
of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body
through the cross, thereby killing the hostility’ (Ephesians 2.14-16, ESV).
A theological
teaching that promotes hostility (Islam) or that aims toward ‘peaceful
coexistence’ without drawing people to Christ is not a Christian theological
position. A political solution that aims
at measures of justice in a fallen world may be the best we can offer, but it
is not to be confused with God’s greater purposes. In fact, God’s solution is one of power in
weakness, salvation on a cross, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to
Gentiles, but to us, it is the power and wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1.23-24).
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