Last night, while visiting with friends who are heading to a “sensitive” county in North Africa, I was reminded of the crime that is Christian Zionism.
Christians all over the Middle East and the Mediterranean rim have suffered mightily because of Western Christians’ views on Israel, Palestine and the Jewish people as a whole. Fellow Christ-followers have been forced from their homes and traditional sites, places where God has been worshiped and Christ has been taught for twenty centuries, because Jesus will come back if we put the Jews back in the Holy Land.
What a sad state of affairs, when we would side with folks who don’t claim Christ over and against our confessing brothers and sisters…
March 9, 2007 at 10:48 am
I wonder if it’s not necessarily sad but merely a reflection of the Christ who often sided with those outside his own religious tradition in order to offer support for those who were culturally oppressed. This post kind of gets me going on my frustration with religion in general, that religion was never the point of Christ’s entrance into history, that the creation of competitive teams (religiously speaking) goes against the ethical prescriptions in most world religions. I happily support members of other faiths because taking the opposite perspective (namely one of conversion) lends itself to triumphalism, supersessionism, and, at its worst, religious violence (what an oxymoron that is).
March 9, 2007 at 9:40 pm
For the Christian Zionists, I don’t think it’s about siding with the Jews over Christians. Their love for the Jews seems purely selfish. They support the Jews so they will be converted, Jesus will return, and they will be raptured leaving behind loser liberals like us.
How’s this for a evangelistic pickup line: “Hey, Mr. Goldberg. Would you like to be saved so that Jesus’ return will be soon and I can go on up to heaven and leave this shitty world behind?”