[Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash]
I grew up in an evangelical Lutheran world that celebrated Israel relentlessly. I was in high school in 1967 and we cheered Israel’s 6-day victory. In 1972-1973 I spent an academic year in the Middle East (Beirut), traveled widely, and brought with me two books: Hal Lindsay’s Late Great Planet Earth and Dr. John Walvoord’s dispensational commentary on the Book of Revelation. On a trip to Israel, I literally stood in the Valley of Armageddon holding a copy of Hal Lindsay’s Late Great Planet Earth. I read the paragraph about the final battle in Lindsay and looked it up it in the Book of Revelation in my Bible. I underlined it with an orange felt-tip Flair. I stood on the hill of Megiddo and imagined the carnage.
I was a junior in college in the fall of 1973 when we heard stories in church about angels backing up Israeli troops during the Yom Kippur war. In those days, I attended the enormous Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California, and regularly heard Pastor Chuck Smith tell all of us in the Jesus Movement to prepare for the rapture. After I finished seminary and more graduate school in Europe, I settled into my career as a professor and along with a colleague began teaching the historical geography of Israel in Israel. This meant hiking and bussing all over the country with about 30 college students, explaining the geography, and retelling the biblical stories at the right locations. Occasionally we met “the locals” but the Arab was usually the bus driver and
the Jew was at the airport security desk. We ran these trips countless times so that even today I can imagine driving almost anywhere in Israel.
When the first Palestinian uprising broke out in 1987 I wondered what all the fuss was about. This was Israel and the Palestinians were visitors in the Holy Land. The conflicts accelerated in the late 1980s and into the 1990s and they became troublesome to us and our academic tour program. By accident I met a young Palestinian guy in his 20s
whose father was a pastor in Ramallah and this started all of my problems. First, how could anybody be Palestinian and Christian? And second, how could anyone say that this uprising was legitimate?
I then met his father and he invited me to send my group of students home after this trip, change my ticket, and stay in Ramallah while it was under occupation. I did. We spent long nights talking about theology and sneaking out after curfew to watch what was happening on the ground. And here is the truest thing I can say: You can’t understand a story of occupation and oppression or the violence it requires unless you’ve seen it up close — or made friends with those who live it.
This Arab pastor told me that even though I thought I had been to the Holy Land a dozen times, I had only been there once. I had been on the “tourist trail” and never gone astray. He was right. This tourist trail kept people from seeing behind the scenes in order to protect the Israeli tourism industry. But now I had peeked behind that curtain. And there was no going back.
I asked to meet other pastors. And this led to a network of friendships. And more experiences in the second uprising of 2000. I wrote a book about this in 2003 (Whose Land? Whose Promise?) and while it became a best seller my momentary fame evaporated quickly: I foolishly thought my evangelical friends would like to learn what was going on. They did not. By then I was a tenured professor at evangelical Wheaton College, still taking students to “Israel/Palestine” and feeling the growing resentment of my evangelical world. Which culminated in a formal letter from the college that prohibited me from taking any of our students to a Palestinian theology conference because “it was dangerous.” It would be “upsetting.” Some might need counseling afterward. Actually, it was inconvenient for Wheaton’s constituency.
I have returned to Israel/Palestine and about a half dozen Arab countries many times over the years. I have tried to read widely and thoughtfully and discovered that the views of Israel – the theological views promoted by Christian Zionism — are ill-informed and simply not biblical (see my analysis of this in Jesus and the Land). But worse, they
are dangerous. I became convinced that there was a severe moral flaw in my evangelical church’s commitments. We were promoting harm and not representing the gospel or the love and truth of Christ in this part of the world. Our zeal for prophecy, our excitement about Israel and our hope in end times had blinded us. In a word, Christian Zionism had betrayed us.
About Gary Burge: A respected authority on the context of the New Testament, Dr. Gary Burge has authored numerous books on an academic level as well as books for laypeople. His technical works generally focus on the Gospel of John as well as the Israel/Palestine conflict. Gary is Professor of New Testament and Dean of the Faculty at Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI (USA). His works include Life Questions Every Students Asks (edited by Gary Burge and David Lauber), Interpreting the Gospel of John, and John: the NIV Application Commentary.
October 15, 2023 at 5:12 pm
thank you Professor Burge. I had been involved in a Christian Zionist church for a number of years until I changed churches and starting going to a Presybterian Church of Canada congregation called Knox near Hamilton, Ontario. your above two books I am attempting to get on my Kobo ebook reader. Your article on this website confirms what I had been feeling at the previous evangelical church I went to. I have been a member of Knox Presbyterian Church in Waterdown (Hamilton, Ontario) for over 10 years now.
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October 15, 2023 at 5:12 pm
thank you Professor Burge. I had been involved in a Christian Zionist church for a number of years until I changed churches and starting going to a Presybterian Church of Canada congregation called Knox near Hamilton, Ontario. your above two books I am attempting to get on my Kobo ebook reader. Your article on this website confirms what I had been feeling at the previous evangelical church I went to. I have been a member of Knox Presbyterian Church in Waterdown (Hamilton, Ontario) for over 10 years now.
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October 17, 2023 at 9:36 pm
I recommend Rev. Munther Isaac’s book *The Other Side of the Wall.” https://www.amazon.com/Other-Side-Wall-Palestinian-Christian/dp/0830831991
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October 21, 2023 at 10:52 am
Dr burge,
I so appreciate your take on these matters. I’ve recently gotten a copy of Jesus and the Land, and plan to make time for it once my diss. first draft is submitted (in a couple months). I suspect it will have much in common with Goldsworthy, Beale, New Covenant readings, and much patristics.
I find myself a square peg in a round hole as a baptist pastor who is not a Zionist and is tired of the obsession (idolatry?) with it and the end times.
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November 19, 2023 at 2:56 pm
Did Yahweh revoke His covenant with Abraham Isaac and Jacob and their descendants – the Hebrrw people?
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November 30, 2023 at 10:22 am
Antonio,
The Abrahamic Covenant is fulfilled in Christ. The New Covenant with Christ as the Prophet, Priest & King.
Hebrews 8.
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April 14, 2024 at 6:07 pm
I am a lot like you, Dr. Burge, in my early background. I have never gone to Israel though. I am 63 years old. My father’s grandfather was pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tyler Texas 1915-1946 (the buckle of the Bible Belt.) He emigrated from Belfast Ireland in the late 1880s. He was a Calvinist, but he bought into the Scofield version of modern-day Israel fulfillment of Ezekiel 38-39, Matthew 24 fig tree, this generation means race, Revelation rebuilt Temple, etc. It made more sense back in his day and my father who was a Hyper-Calvinist, was still convinced of that interpretation when he died in 2016. Dad’s mother even had to have her Bible always be a Scofield reference one. I was a teenager and got into Hal Lindsey also in the 1970s. I went to college thinking Jesus would come back in the 80s. I didn’t know what dispensationalism meant then other than God revealing Himself to mankind in different ways at different times. I thought, “Well that’s true.” I even became somewhat Charismatic without speaking in tongues, even Baptist by 1998 because the PCA and OPC churches were too far away from where my family and I lived. My dad’s 4 siblings migrated to the Baptist Church so I thought, maybe for a few years, it’ll be okay. Then I figured out in the 1990s dispensationalism meant Jews. Everyone I knew except for one elder at the church, which became PSA (not First Pres.) was a dispensationalist. He stood up against it once at church, saying it was an obstacle to progress. He was right. You couldn’t have a Session not be unified. He and another pastor started a Covenant Pres. Church in Tyler. By that time I had to move away after college to Dallas. Anyway, when Jesus didn’t come back by 1990, I thought we had been lied to by Dallas Theological Seminary and Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. What amazed me is they didn’t admit they were wrong, but just kept on teaching premillennialism. I sought out the truth and was led to Covenant theology, and preterism except for a New Earth to come. I believe all other prophecies in the Bible were fulfilled by 70AD, because of reading the Bible with discernment and Josephus, who is not inspired but is historically probably accurate and detailed. Something that helped me was a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, Don Matzat, writing “The Great Premillennial Hoax.” My contention now, after reading “The Names of God Bible” is that Yahweh is not the Father nor Jesus Christ. What about that? Am I a Marcionite?Thank the Trinity some of us who seek will find.
Richard Johns
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