For the Church, a Purely Neutral Approach to the Existence of Israel is Theologically Unsustainable

In his essay “Confrontation,” the great Talmudist and philosopher Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik responded to the mid-1960s advent of the Second Vatican Council by emphasizing that certain root theological concepts—like, for instance, “covenant” and “election”—are approached by different faiths through the lens and language of their respective religious experience. Therefore, he wrote, while Christians and Jews should discuss certain matters of vital concern to both communities, no good could come of their debating or entering into “public dialogue” about core theological issues.

For the same reason, I would certainly not undertake to instruct Gavin D’Costa, or Catholics in general, on how they should think theologically. Instead, drawing on D’Costa’s eloquent essay in Mosaic on Catholic Zionism, I hope in what follows to reflect upon where, from my own perspective, Catholic theology presently finds itself on the subject of the state of Israel, and where it might find itself in the future.

For centuries, Church theologians were largely united on the premise that all eschatological predictions in the books of the Hebrew prophets that invoked the restoration of Zion were to be read not literally but as referring proleptically to the Church. Thus, when, in an episode cited by D’Costa, Pius X refused to consider Theodor Herzl’s request for Vatican support of a Jewish return to the Holy Land, the pope was not merely expressing a skeptical disdain for the right of Jews to aspire to the status of a nation but drawing on a long tradition of biblical exegesis.