Onward, Christian Zionists - The Boston Globe
Christian Zionism is shorthand for the idea that the return of Jews to the Holy Land is a pre-requisite for the return of Jesus the Messiah, and the final redemption of the world. Believers who take this notion literally (and are understood, in that sense, to be fundamentalist) have been central players in the drama of Palestine for almost two centuries. A particular biblical verse seized the imagination of such Christians. (“O that the salvation Of Israel were come out of Zion! When God bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice and Israel shall be glad’’ — Psalm 56:6. St. Paul cited this verse in Romans 11:26, and Christians took it from there.)
This idea of Jewish return to Zion as the climax of salvation history has resonance dating to the Babylonian Captivity nearly six centuries before Christ. No surprise, perhaps, that the enthused religious “awakenings’’ of 19th century evangelical Protestants therefore jelled around the literal restoration of Jews to their traditional homeland. We saw in a previous column how Catholicism regarded such return of Jews as anathema, but the so-called “restorationist’’ Protestant concern for Jews was not truly friendly. Rather, the restored Jews were only to be instruments of the final triumph of Christianity. Jews again in Israel would be faced with the choice of conversion or damnation.