David Gushee and Glen Stassen
Thank you so much for paying our letter the honor of your responses, pro and con. Healthy dialogue is important for the healing we need in the Middle East and here at home.
The point of our letter was to challenge biblically the claim of Christian Zionists that God’s covenant with Abraham in Genesis says all the land should belong to Israel. We were hoping for dialogue on the clear meaning of the biblical covenant with Abraham. Our claim is that misconstruing the biblical teaching is misleading many Christian Zionists to support settlements on Palestinian land that are unjust, that violate God’s will as well as international law, and that cause dangerous hostility against Israel. We ask responses to focus on the biblical teaching.
We focus first on Genesis 15 and 17, and then on a few of the fifteen passages in the prophet Jeremiah that discuss the prerequisite for being able to stay in the land.
The responses that disagreed did not discuss the biblical passages, but shifted the topic to the politics of the present government of Israel and the West Bank, and Hamas, and whether Israel forced Palestinians out of their homes or not.
These are important topics, but we are hoping for biblical discussion.
What we are asking is whether our readers see Genesis 15 and 17 saying that Abraham is the father of many nations, with descendants as many as the stars of the universe. And whether the territory includes all the land between the Nile and the Euphrates, which of course includes many nations, most all Arab. We believe ours is the plain, literal reading. No one has explained a different reading in response.
And whether our readers see Jeremiah’s warnings differently than we do? And if so, how?
We are sincere in raising these biblical questions and hoping for a sincere answer. We are deeply serious about biblical authority.
Genesis 15:18 reads: “The Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to… the river Euphrates.’” That territory includes something like modern-day Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, half of Iraq, half of Egypt, parts of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the occupied Palestinian territories. This verse must not mean all that land belongs only to Israel, because then the population of Israel would be 90 per cent Arab, and Israel would be an Arab country.
The next verse names the various peoples to whom the land belonged. Genesis 15:4-5 and 17:4 promise Abraham that his descendants will be a multitude of nations, as numerous as the stars of the heavens. The land belongs to many nations—Arabs as well as Israelis. Both Israel and Palestine have the human right to a state of their own, without occupation, and without violent attacks.
The promise to possess the land includes the offspring of Isaac, and the offspring of Isaac includes Esau, with his five Edomite sons and their offspring, and that includes multitudes of Canaanites (Gen. 17:19, 28:6-9, and chapter 36).
The prophets warned repeatedly that Israel’s ability to stay in the land depends on doing justice to the aliens in the land. We cited a few verses that say that (Jeremiah 6:6-8; 7:9-10 and 15), but in our longer version, we cite about fifteen different places where Jeremiah warns this repeatedly. Jesus prophesied that Jerusalem would be destroyed because they did not know the practices that make for peace (Lk 19:41-44). That is a call for all of us to learn the practices that make for peace, and prevent dangerous war.
What we deeply yearn for is an Israel that recovers the biblical vision of a nation that does justice and peace for its neighbors, and therefore that we all—Israelis and outsiders—can celebrate. So we can come streaming to Zion to learn the ways of the LORD, and nation will not take up sword against nation or learn war anymore (Isaiah 2:1-4).
We yearn for security for Israel and justice for Palestinians, and it seems clear that the way to that outcome is for Israel to make peace with Palestinians, and Palestinians to adopt the way of nonviolence. Many in Israel and Palestine are urging exactly that.
It is hard to think of evangelical scholars more truly pro-Jewish than we are. But real friends don’t let friends drive off the cliff without trying to warn them.
David Gushee’s PhD dissertation became his first book, Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust. It is a study of those gentiles named at Yad Vashem, asking what features of their theology and ethics helps explain their coming through rightly, rescuing Jews during Hitler’s Holocaust, while so many others failed. It advocates that the rest of us learn from their ethics to form ourselves in similar ways. David is deeply committed to opposing anti-Semitism. This helps explain his organizing and leading Evangelicals for Human Rights, which focused on opposition to torture, and has now expanded to New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. He has engaged in extensive conversation and learning from many Jewish scholars, including in conferences organized to study the Shoah and prevent something like that ever happening again. His book presently in press at Eerdmans is on the Sanctity of all Human Life–a consistent life ethic.
Glen Stassen’s father was given the national Bnai Brith Award for support for Israel. Because his father was then negotiating with the Soviet Union on nuclear arms control for the Eisenhower administration, Glen received the award on his behalf and spoke for him. His father took many actions throughout his career to break barriers for Jews, to support Israel, and he set that example for Glen. Both supported the founding of the state of Israel, but hoped it would respect its borders. Glen’s seminary teacher of New Testament was W.D. Davies, who influenced many of us to recover the roots of the New Testament in the Hebrew Bible and in rabbinic Judaism. Glen is known for his work showing Jesus’ roots in the prophet Isaiah. He specializes in the Christian ethics of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was the earliest and clearest to speak out for all Jews from the beginning of the Hitler regime. His brother-in-law was Martin Berger, now deceased, and his four nieces are all Jews.
We told our students the theme of our course was to get inside both an Israeli narrative and a Palestinian narrative, because peace requires that understanding. We spent extensive time at Yad Vashem. Glen wept. Rabbi Marc Gopin and professor Rob Eisen were faculty throughout our whole course.
For years we have also supported Christian Palestinians who have been successfully persuading Palestinians to switch to nonviolence in their strategies, and that was a major theme of our course. Glen was deeply involved in the nonviolent strategies of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, and also to some extent in East Germany’s nonviolent revolution. Nonviolence and just peacemaking are his deep commitment.
Again, we ask that responses discuss the biblical covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15 and 17. That is the basis of all these claims.
David Gushee and Glen Stassen. November 11, 2011.
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