Does the New Testament Support Christian Zionism?

Seeking a basis for reconciliation between Jews and Christians has been a much-pursued enterprise over the past few centuries. For the most part, the quest has been founded upon a mutual willingness to dilute religious conviction or bracket it altogether. In his stimulating essay on Christian Zionism, Wilfred M. McClay, one of the most perceptive observers of American culture, describes a new way forward for Jewish-Christian relations, one found among “people who have serious and unwavering commitments to their respective faiths and are not interested in coming together merely for the sake of achieving a lowest common denominator.”

To be sure, McClay acknowledges that the emerging relationship is “fragile and tentative” and that it is regarded with suspicion by many, and perhaps the majority, of the most committed members of each community. Still, its increasing importance cannot be gainsaid, for it is an experiment that tests a proposition of the utmost importance to the believers of each tradition. Can the “commonality of Christians and Jews,” McClay asks, be founded upon “something that does not require either group to mute its differences or soften its commitments to the distinctives of its faith by resorting to the kind of ‘interfaith dialogue’ that is made possible only by the feather-lightness of those same commitments?”

The principal obstacle to a theologically serious rapprochement of Jews and Christians lies, as is well known, in supersessionism, which McClay defines as the Christian notion that “the promises that God had made to the Jews were withdrawn because the Jews had failed to keep their side of the bargain.” As a result, the older arrangement “was replaced by a new covenant, a second covenant that, superseding the Abrahamic one, was built around the person of Christ and his body, which was the Church, the New Israel.” In McClay’s view, this replacement is, however, self-limiting, for “the Christian story, despite diverging decisively from the Jewish one, can never be intelligible apart from it.” The organization of the two-testament Bible of the church is itself proof: the New Testament “requires Christians to recognize the authoritative claims of the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament.” By the very fact that the New Testament understands itself in relation to the Old, it can never fully supersede it.