Tag: Israel

That is the title of James Parkes’s patient historical narrative. The subtitle is A History of the Peoples of Palestine. “Palestine,” we have collectively forgotten, names a remnant of the Roman Empire, a remnant that has been occupied by many peoples. He wrote it in the late ’40s, long before “the Palestinian people” was popularized by Yassir Arafat in the ’60s to refer exclusively to its Arab inhabitants, a ruse the world fell for and seems stuck with.

Whose Land? came from the pen of a theological liberal. By “liberal” I mean (in part) that he did not believe that the creation of the modern secular state of Israel in 1948 (hereafter simply “Israel” unless the context indicates the biblical House of Israel) fulfilled Old Testament prophecy of the ingathering to The Land of the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—simply because he did not think that any event can do such a thing.

Unlike today’s “liberals,” however, he conditionally supported the Zionist response to European antisemitism, the ghoulish rise of which he witnessed in the ’20s and ’30s and which he made the focus of his professional life. In Whose Land?, Parkes affirms the historical and moral right of Jews to national restoration in their ancestral land, but insists that—I’m paraphrasing Parkes—justice and respect for the Arabs with whom the Jews had to deal must (ethically must) inform the Jew in his exercise of his right to, say, purchase a plot of land from a Palestinian Arab. He defends Israel’s legitimacy while warning that Jewish nationalism must never mirror the exclusivism or oppression that Jews themselves had suffered. He bases his non-Scriptural case on commonly shared assumptions—which, in my view, make no sense unless grounded in Scripture. I encourage you to find a copy of Whose Land? and take Parkes’s eloquent, empathetic, and learned historical tour.

I agree with Parkes that Israel fulfills no prophecy, but that’s because I follow the Scriptural exegesis of Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992). Sellers rarely commented on current events, so what his view on Israel was is a matter of speculation. (I invite his descendants to settle the matter, if they can.) He was neither pro-Zionist or anti-Zionist as we use those terms. Where Sellers and I differ from Parkes is that we accept the Bible’s self-attestation that its words are God-breathed, a proposition no self-respecting theological liberal takes seriously. (My Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers will, God-willing, be published in 2026.)

Sellers held that Israel must be judged by the same standards to which one would hold any other nation. In the present Dispensation of Grace, resurrected descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob have not yet been ingathered to The Land, nor have Christ’s Apostles been resurrected to sit on twelve thrones judging the Israel’s twelve tribes (Matthew 19:28); Israel is not yet mediating between God’s throne and the nations in the eon of the manifest Kingdom of God. Israel is but one of the nations, on equal footing with them. The status of “most favored nation” is reserved for the time when God will govern all nations.

That is, because the Gospel is freely authorized to all nations (Acts 28:28), they are “joint bodies” (σύνσωμα, sussōma: plural; Ephesians 3:6). As we are living in the pre-Kingdom Dispensation of Grace (and the “Silence of God”), however, we who follow the course of history’s “secular surface” still need to know what trend to promote or impede. We’re left to our theoretical devices guided by biblical precepts, one of which, I’d argue, is the just acquisition of property. Continue reading “Whose Land?”