Rethinking Holy Land

Engaging Jesus and the Land, by Gary M. Burdge

Marlin Jeschke

In Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge to Holy Land Theology, Gary M. Burge, professor of New Testament at Wheaton College Graduate School takes on America’s Zionists, even naming notable ones such as the late Jerry Falwell, Hal Lindsay, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, John Hagee, and the late James Kennedy. An evangelical who has traveled and studied in the Middle East, Burge is also a competent biblical scholar who reviews what the Bible has to say about the "Holy Land."

He notes the Old Testament land promise of the patriarchs with its conditions. Then already in chapter 2 he shows that in the Diaspora (exile) many Jews were redefining Judaism’s "land theology." Scattered Jews were "a people widely distributed throughout the [Roman] empire without a necessary territorial base" (23, italics in original), and their redefinition deeply influenced "the formation of Christian thinking in the New Testament" (24).

In his examination of the Gospel,s Burge essentially follows W. D. Davies in holding that in the apostolic church concern for land is transmuted into faith in Christ. Jesus himself shows "disregard for territorial interests" and "does not value Jewish nationalism tied to divine claims for the land" (56).

The Book of Acts reports the establishment and growth of a global church embracing Gentiles. It was a church that saw "a territorial theology springing from Jewish faith as utterly foreign," a church that "would have been astonished if they came upon men and women who promoted a Christian variation of Jewish nationalism" (71).

As for Paul, he "inevitably had to abandon a Christian commitment to Jewish territorialism" (92). Thus when Paul writes in Romans 4:13 that God gave Abraham the cosmos, the world, this promise, Burge says, "is no longer for Canaan—but for the world" (59). Or as Burge says elsewhere, "Abraham was promised the world, not the land of Canaan" (95). I would prefer to say, "Abraham was promised not only the land of Canaan but also the whole world" for reasons I will mention presently.

In his concluding chapter Burge explains how "Christian Zionists fail to think Christianly about the subject of theology and the land" (124). "Ownership of land is not a Christian question" (127, italics in original). "Pilgrimage is a good thing . . . so that we can revisit the events of history that save us. . . " (128). Yet "God is everywhere but ultimately cannot be located anywhere" (130).

I laid down Burge’s book with gratitude for his courage as an evangelical to counter the almost fanatic promotion of Zionism by many Christians, most of them from the evangelical camp.
But Burge somehow overlooks an essential point in the Bible’s land theology. Of all the things God could have promised Abraham, it was descendents and land. Why land? Because land desecration in bloody conquest has been and is one of the most fundamental sins of humanity, as Burge illustrates in an opening reference to Serbian "Christian" butchery of Muslims in Kosovo. 

Abraham receives land as a gift, not through conquest, as Walter Brueggemann reminds us (and Burge quotes him). Abraham is a godly exemplar of how to possess land. But in the conquest under Joshua and later under the kings of Israel, Abraham’s descendants desecrate the land by exterminating earlier inhabitants or, like David, engaging in bloody wars of conquest. 

Israel is given the task of sanctification of the land. It is because of Israel’s desecration of the land that Israel goes into exile.
At the high point at the end of his ministry, Jesus rides into Jerusalem to fulfill the prophecy of Zechariah of a coming king who will "cut off the war horse from Jerusalem. And the battle bowl shall be cut off. And he shall command peace to the nations. His dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth" (Zech. 9:9). This triumphal entry and its accompanying text are important because they speak of territory and sanctification of it.
Burge does well to underscore the New Testament vision of a global church but should have added this: not that Christians are not concerned about land anymore, but that fidelity to Christ and membership in a global church lays on us Christians the call to sanctify the lands in which we live.

As I attempted to point out in my Rethinking Holy Land (for which Burge wrote a back cover commendation), from the time of Abraham to the present hour God has been at work seeking to coach humanity toward a new way to possess territory—receiving land as a gift and sanctifying it rather than desecrating it by bloodshed, violence, and war.

The New Testament does indeed challenge Zionist "Holy Land" theology, but it also challenges us all to work at what God intended in the promise of land to Abraham—the ultimate sanctification of the whole earth.

—A widely published author, Marlin Jeschke, Goshen, Indiana, is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Religion at Goshen College, where he taught for 33 years. He is author of Rethinking Holy Land: A Study in Salvation Geography (Herald Press, 2005).