A Short History of Christian Zionism: From the Reformation to the Twenty-First Century, by Donald M. Lewis. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2021. x + 373 pp. $36.00.
Writing a few years after the end of World War I, the British War and Air secretary Winston Churchill avouched his support for Zionism, a movement that afforded in his view a welcome counterpoise to the rising menace of communism in Russia and Europe: “Some people like the Jews and some do not; but no thoughtful man can doubt the fact that they are beyond all question the most formidable and the most remarkable race which has ever appeared in the world.” Churchill then championed Britain’s role in the formation of a Jewish state: “It has fallen to the British Government, as the result of the conquest of Palestine, to have the opportunity and the responsibility of securing for the Jewish race all over the world a home and a centre of national life…. [I]f, as may well happen, there should be created in our lifetime by the banks of the Jordan a Jewish State under the protection of the British Crown, which might comprise three or four millions of Jews, an event would have occurred in the history of the world which would, from every point of view, be beneficial, and would especially be in harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire” (“Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People,” Illustrated Sunday Herald, 8 February 1920, 5). Churchill’s aspirations for the creation of a Jewish state would not come to fruition for nearly another thirty years, but his consistent backing of the Jewish people and of Zionism would earn him over his long career a reputation as one of the most philo-Semitic British statesmen (see W. D. Rubinstein, “Winston Churchill and the Jews,” Jewish Historical Studies 39 [2004]: 167–76). Still, the roots of British state support for the creation of a Jewish homeland antedate Churchill by centuries, going back to the Victorian-era Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) and further still to Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) and a number of the Westminster divines (see B. Horner, Future Israel, 28–29; W. C. Watson, Dispensationalism before Darby, 22–45).
Churchill’s avowal of a Jewish state offers a window for assessing a recent publication that assays to outline in brief the history of Christian Zionism. In recognizing that few topics are likely to raise such ire as this one, the sympathetic reader approaches such a book with a degree of deference. Yet in this case and for the present reviewer, the sympathy soon soured. By the time the author had derisively dismissed Churchill’s endorsement of a Jewish state as mere “Sunday School Zionism” (219), the lines had well coalesced into an unfortunate shortcoming that the book never escapes. In short, Lewis oversimplifies the causes of Christian Zionism, over-generalizes its supporters, overlooks alternative streams of support, and ultimately misreads the theological grounds for why so many Christians have championed a Jewish homeland.
Until his recent death Donald Lewis was professor of church history at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. One of his specialties concerned the origins of Christian Zionism (hereafter CZ) in Victorian England, distilled in his The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Given this backdrop, the author is, one the one hand, well-qualified to write a history of CZ and yet, on the other, predisposed toward a certain understanding of the origins of CZ in mid-to-late nineteenth century England. While the present volume by title claims to cover nearly 500 years of church history, the book actually begins with the first century to provide context for the church’s views on a Jewish state from its inception. The volume comprises fifteen chapters, with nearly half covering the period up to the twentieth century and a little more than half treating the history of CZ following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. The final chapter surveys CZ in the present and toward the future, interacting with the recently published The New Christian Zionism, edited by Gerald McDermott (InterVarsity Press, 2016).
Lewis begins by surveying Christian views concerning the nation of Israel from the early church to the Protestant Reformation. He interacts with a few biblical texts used to support Zionism, such as Genesis 12:1–8 and Romans 11:25–32. Early on, however—inside the first page of chapter 1 in fact—he betrays his hand as sympathetic to supersessionism, with a subtle dismissal of interpreters who see a distinction between Israel and the church and with nary a footnote to cite an opposing view: “Gentiles…have historically understood themselves as ‘the Israel of God,’ a phrase Saint Paul uses to describe Christians in Galatians 3:29 and Galatians 6:16” (17, emphasis mine). From there Lewis merely gains steam for his conclusions. He suggests that the land promise of the Abrahamic covenant was fulfilled historically in the conquest of Canaan (19) and that Paul uses “Israel” in different senses in Romans 11, both to mean the Jewish people and to mean “the new Israel of God made up of both Jews and Gentiles” (22).
Lewis is, by all accounts, a historian and a sociologist, not a theologian or biblical scholar. Yet his glib survey of the Scriptural passages sets an infelicitously cavalier tone that never subsides. It comes as no surprise, then, when he argues that “modern exponents of…premillennialism have tried to find historical precedents for their views in patristic premillennialism, but this is not supported by the evidence” (27). Here he cites a lengthy quote from Stanley Grenz in his volume The Millennial Maze (InterVarsity Press, 1992). The quotation is early evidence of another troubling trend: Lewis almost never cites primary sources. In nearly every case in which he affirms one conclusion or another he cites a secondary source, nearly always antagonistic rather than sympathetic to the church leaders or biblical interpreters he is surveying. Such a tack is deeply disconcerting to the dispensational reader who could well list a litany of books and articles that demonstrate exactly the opposite, viz., that primary evidence does support patristic premillennialism together with widespread support within the church to the present day for the future salvation of the Jewish people (see, e.g., L. Pettegrew, ed., Forsaking Israel: How It Happened and Why It Matters, 2nd ed. [Kress, 2021]; J. C. Morris, Ancient Dispensational Truth [Dispensational Publishing, 2018]; J. I. Fazio and C. Marsh, eds., Discovering Dispensationalism: Tracing the Development of Dispensational Thought from the First to the Twenty-First Century [SCS Press, forthcoming]).
In similar fashion, Lewis parades out a number of tired tropes and outright untruths that are often given rein in the mainly antidispensationalist writings he cites: that evangelicals cling to CZ because their own experience “on the margins” has created an affinity for the Jews (130), that all dispensationalists since Darby hold that Jews and Christians are forever separate peoples in God’s redemptive program (138), that Darby invented the doctrine of the rapture while recovering from an injury (140), that Darby and dispensationalists hold that all human institutions including the church are in full apostasy and ruin (148), that many fundamentalist supporters of CZ were also secretly anti-Semitic (201, 208), that Zionism was the chief culprit for the Arab revolt of the 1930s and the Arabs’ alliance with the Nazis (231), that CZ has so secularized evangelical theology that it lost the centrality of Christ and the universal claims of the gospel (266), that the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s led to widespread dismay among dispensationalists because biblical prophecy had putatively failed (279), and on and on. The foregoing provides a smattering of the questionable conclusions and unlikely lines of evidence that Lewis advances. Not only does Lewis lack sympathy for his subjects, but perhaps more to the point he universally applies a sociological lens for understanding CZ and its proponents rather than a theological one. And this is perhaps his greatest shortcoming: he fails to understand the Christians who support a Jewish homeland because he fails to understand them doctrinally. Most, I would aver, champion a Jewish state not because their own sense of marginalization compels them to do so nor for a raft of other social causes but for a much simpler reason: they read their Bibles.
