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Notes -
You raise excellent points.
I would add that in two millennia of Christianity, the amount of blessing that the Christians bestow on Israel (e.g. the Jewish diaspora) seems pretty limited, on the level of "unlike pagans, we will suffer you to live on our lands as second class citizens (until we turn extra faithful and kick you out or murder you as a warm-up exercise for a crusade)".
I think one thing which might have changed this attitude is Christian Zionism:
I am by no means an expert on Christian prophecy -- my knowledge of that link was mostly due to horror movies and alt-history novels -- neither of which are known to be super reliable, but it seems that a significant fraction of the evangelicals believe that the second coming (optionally followed by the end of the world, seals breaking and all?) will happen Really Soon Now, and that the Jews being in control of the holy lands is a prerequisite to that for some reason.
More pragmatically, Christians have long cared about the holy lands, which was generally what the Crusades were fought about. From a modern Christian point of view, Israel controlling Bethlehem and Jerusalem is tolerable -- Christian pilgrims are allowed and generally not hassled too much. If the ayatollah regime took over Israel, that would likely change for the worse.
They're prayed for on Good Friday that they might repent their sins and find salvation through Jesus. What better blessing is there?
What liturgical book is that from?
1549 Book of Common Prayer
Though the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is much the same
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Interesting question that one. The tradcath version before any liturgical changes would be:
With partial liturgical changes it is:
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I believe it's to do with dispensationalism and particularly with Cyrus Scofield?
For the unfamiliar, dispensationalism is a theological belief - some, probably including me, would say it's a heresy - that says that God divides the history of the world up into several phases. These phases are called 'dispensations', and the conditions, both material and moral, of the world depend on the dispensation in question. Thus what is required of people in the age of grace may be different to that in the age of law, and then also different to that in the age of the church, and so on. Great events in the world may mark shifts between dispensations.
As far as that goes it may seem harmless. It's unbiblical, but if you want to invent a scheme to guide you through your understanding of history, why not?
The thing is, Scofield felt that the nation of Israel played a role throughout the various dispensations, that particular promises to it endured, and most tellingly, he identified 'Israel' in the biblical sense with a visible nation even down to the modern day (which for him was the late 19th century). This predates the establishment of the state of Israel, but Scofield was a Zionist, albeit due to his understanding of Christian prophecy.
This is in itself a somewhat unbiblical move. Notably in Romans 9, the apostle Paul distinguishes between those that are Israelite 'according to the flesh', and those included and justified on the basis of faith. He asserts that 'not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham's children are his true descendants', but rather membership of the true Israel is to be reckoned on the basis of faith. In this you may see parallels to Matthew 3:9 and John 8:39, where both John the Baptist and Jesus appear to place one's deeds and one's character above one's descent according to the flesh. So whatever it is New Testament authors are doing with Israel as a concept, it's not simply identifiable with a hereditarian group or an ethnicity, much less a political structure.
I understand Cruz to be roughly in the Scofield-ian camp, but this camp would not be recognisable to most historical Christians, including many around the world today. Cruz has a weird obsession with Israel that doesn't play well with everyone - famously he was booed off-stage by actual Middle Eastern Christians back in 2014.
For what it's worth my understanding, from a Christian perspective, is that the state of Israel is, theologically speaking, completely irrelevant. It is of no greater or lesser value than any other nation on Earth. There is no special reason to support it and no special reason to oppose it. The biblical category of Israel - and the covenant with Israel - is continuous with and contained within the new covenant of Christ, particularly insofar as Christ himself becomes a kind of microcosm or representation of Israel itself. The promises made to the Jewish people according to the flesh remain valid so far as they go, but where they were always intended to go was towards the redemption of the world in Christ. As such, insofar as contemporary Jews hold to those promises, that is good, but the promises are incomplete without their fulfilment. And any further that direction lies a more complicated discussion about what evangelism means in the admittedly unusual context of evangelising to Jews, but we don't need to get into that now.
This is an excellent summary. I'd add that while dispensationalism is common among American evangelicals, it's losing ground.
Dispensationalists often frustrate me, but I wouldn't call them heretics unless they move beyond dispensationalism into dual covenant theology. Dual covenant theology holds that while gentiles are saved only through faith in Christ, Jews can be saved by keeping the Mosaic Law. Since this is approximately the least evangelical take it is possible to have, and since dispensationalism is an evangelical phenomenon to begin with, this is mercifully rare.
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The one thing I have never grasped about Christian Zionism is implication that God is waiting for humanity to gather all 7 dragon balls before Jesus can be summoned. I'm pretty sure the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to, and that human efforts to bring it about are at best ridiculous and at worst extremely presumptuous. Jesus clearly says that nobody knows the hour or the day, so what's the point? I'm genuinely curious, do Christian Zionists have some theological justification or rationalization for this?
I grew up around many Christian Zionists. I think they would agree that "the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to" but would add that (1) God puts his plans into motion largely through the actions of people and (2) the Bible sets forth the outline of what that plan looks like. Because people have free will, it's therefore important for them to choose to follow God's plan as laid out in the Bible.
To them, your critique would sound a little like if someone said: "What's so bad about murder? Everything happens according to God's plan, therefore if someone commits murder that must be God's plan."
Don't Christians say this all the time? When good or bad things happen, it's "all part of God's plan". Either God exerts agency in this world or he does not.
Christians generally believe humans have free will that enables them to act contrary to God's will. Those bad actions are still "part of God's plan" in the sense that he anticipates them and "plans around them" so to speak, but those sinful actions are "contrary to God's plan" in the sense that he does not want them to happen.
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It is the ISIS ideology of building a caliphate and invoking the return of Jesus. The idea of commanding god and ordering Jesus back to Earth is an antithesis to what pretty much 99% of Christians throughout history have believed. It is a big part of the rift between Al Qaeda and ISIS in which Al Qaeda considered ISIS to be completely out of control.
I think the whole idea is frankly pagan. I don’t think it’s very Christian to say that God has to do anything we decide he should, and the idea smacks of magical thinking.
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Iran is actually pretty friendly to apostolic Christianity, so long as it doesn’t proselytize. Hezbollah controlled Jerusalem would probably maintain Christian religious sites unde the current arrangement.
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