World Council of Churches
Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches
Reformed Churches Bern-Jura-Solothurn
Palestine Israel Ecumenical Forum (PIEF)
INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL CONFERENCE
“Promised Land”
Church Center Bürenpark, Bern, Switzerland
10 - 14 September 2008
The Promised Land
A Historical Perspective
Fr Dr David M. Neuhaus SJ
Pontifical Biblical Institute, Jerusalem
PDF version for downloads
A new division is evident among Christians, not because of a theological or a Christological debate, but rather because of the events that have been unfolding in the biblical heartland, alternatively called Israel or Palestine and known by Christians as the Holy Land or the promised land. One group of Christians, sincerely committed to nurturing reconciliation with the Jewish people, voices support (sometimes not absolute but nonetheless determined) for Jewish political claims on the land of Israel. Another group of Christians, equally sincere and committed, promotes a Christian witness to the values of justice and peace and within this context voices a passionate solidarity (sometimes not absolute but nonetheless determined) with the Palestinian people who are struggling to liberate their homeland.
Christians involved in the dialogue with the Jewish people that developed in the wake of the shoah [Holocaust], welcomed a document, signed by more than 200 Jewish religious leaders in 2000, entitled Dabru Emet [speak the truth]. Welcoming dialogue with Christians, it enunciated a Jewish position on the dialogue. The third of eight points states:
Christians can respect the claim of the Jewish people upon the land of Israel. The most important event for Jews since the Holocaust has been the re-establishment of a Jewish state in the promised land. As members of a biblically based religion, Christians appreciate that Israel was promised—and given—to Jews as the physical centre of the covenant between them and God. Many Christians support the state of Israel for reasons far more profound than mere politics.
What would a Christian response to this be?
On the other hand, many Christians have witnessed the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people. Thus the Amman Call of June 2007, part of the motivation for our gathering, ends with the plea:
Together we will act and pray and speak and work and risk reputations and lives to build with you bridges for an enduring peace among the peoples of this tortured and beautiful place—Palestine and Israel—to end these decades of injustice, humiliation and insecurity, to end the decades of living as refugees and under occupation. We will work with you to seek peace and pursue it.
Can all Christians join in this call?
For many Christians, there is a blurring of boundaries where the Bible meets the modern Israel/Palestine conflict. Central to this blurring is the theology of the land, a promised land, a holy land. Has a biblical promise now been realized (again?), or is the Bible being manipulated for political and rhetorical ends? In this brief presentation, I would like to pose some questions that I hope will be clarified during our deliberations.
Christian readings of the “promised land” in history
The words “Israel”, “Palestine”, “holy land” and “promised land” have clear biblical resonances, particularly in the Old Testament. They are also important markers in the designation of a geographic land mass at the centre of a conflict that is more than 60 years old. This encounter between the Bible and contemporary conflict is particularly volatile. How have Christians read the concept of land in their Bibles and what have been the consequences of these readings for Christian engagement with the world?
From Old Testament to New
The “promised land” is a fundamental part of Israel’s story with God in the Old Testament. Within the New Testament, however, there is a movement from a focus on the particular land of Israel to a more universal land mass called “the face of the earth”—“land” and “earth” being the same word in both Hebrew and Greek. This is the programme of the Acts of the Apostles where the disciples of Jesus move from the confines of Jerusalem and the land of Israel to the extremities of the earth. A Christian biblical reading of land posits that something fundamental changes with Christ’s resurrection. Borders disappear; walls of enmity come down; what were once separated becomes one. The land that was separated from other lands in the Old Testament becomes a land that is the face of the earth in the New. This universal vision undoubtedly was fundamental in Christian praxis from the beginning.
For many Christians throughout the ages, though, the land of Israel was a treasury of sacred memories of Jesus and of the events that prepared for his coming. For them, the land became a fifth gospel. Many Christians visit the land as pilgrims, not to stay there but to return home, fortified in their faith, having touched the places where the divine met the human in the history of salvation.
Figure and allegory
Faced with the crude literalism of Marcion and other heretics in their rejection of the scriptures of Israel, the church fathers developed figurative and allegorical interpretations of the Old Testament that helped to weld together the two parts of the Christian Bible. These methods obscure the concreteness of a particular land and emphasize more a space for intimate living with God. The “figure” of the land in the Old Testament reaches its definitive fullness in the reality of a church founded on Jesus Christ. The material reality of the land of Israel hides a superior spiritual reality that is heaven.
The Jews were accused of being blind to the meaning of the scriptures, revealed in Christ. They were seen as clinging to the letter rather than the spirit. Christians appropriated Jewish Old Testament history as their own, believing that these texts prepared for the coming of Christ, and saw themselves as a new chosen people, replacing the Jews once the latter had refused Christ. Jewish exile from the land was seen as proof that the Jews had been rejected by God. The promised land had become a desolate and abandoned land, evidence of God’s curse on a people often depicted as being in the image and likeness of Cain, the fratricidal murderer become eternal wanderer. This facile application of biblical idiom to a historical event, the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD, smacks of fundamentalism and had disastrous consequences for Christian attitudes to Jews.
Return to the literal
The Middle Ages saw a return to the literal sense of Scripture, because allegorical method had led to a dissolution of the concrete aspects of the history of salvation. All had been reduced to a single Christ moment and the richness of God’s preparation of salvation had been lost. Medieval exegetes were fascinated by the letter and the details of the history of salvation.
However a return to the letter meant a return to the materiality of the land, and it is perhaps not coincidental that at this time Christians sought to regain control of the land, inspired by biblical texts of God-ordained wars. The Crusaders took the holy land by force from Muslims. Again, a textual fundamentalism provoked violence and bloodshed. Later, in the 19th century, when Christian exegetes again focused on the letter, some Western Christians sought to make the land of Christian origins Christian once more. The result was an influx of missionaries and colonial powers with territorial ambitions. Both periods have left deep historical scars on the area.
Historical critical exegesis
The modern age of science and critical thinking led to a reading of the Bible that did not distinguish it a priori from any other book. The central questions were when and why the text was written, by whom and for whom. The scientific methods determine that meaning is first and foremost the intended meaning of the original author. The archaeologists who flocked to the biblical heartland, first trying to prove the veracity of the biblical text, finally saw that what the earth revealed as they dug began to point out where the Bible resembled story rather than history. The resulting crisis of meaning remains a burning issue today.
The exigent criteria of a modern reading of the Bible in the world preclude that it be read naively because we know too much about the world that produced it and the epistemological abyss that separates us from that world. Although the Bible remains the locus par excellence for developing Christian “God talk” (theology), the interpretative act has socio-political consequences that cannot be ignored. If story is not simply history, then what is the significance of the promise of a land to a particular people? Can the Bible serve as a document that determines socio-political realities?
Fundamentalism
Perhaps the most vocal response to the crisis of meaning provoked by historical-critical method is fundamentalism, it being first and foremost a reading of the Christian Bible. The text is read detached from historical context and critical thinking, denuded of hermeneutic method. Current events are read into the text, and the text is imposed on current events. Any mediation between word and world is opposed. Fundamentalists once interpreted loss of land in history as divine punishment; now they propose the gain of land as divine pleasure and benediction. The biblical word is God, a powerful form of idolatry that imprisons God in a plot that has already been written. Biblical fundamentalism is a frightening locus where the Bible meets history. God help those who get in the way!
The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 refocused attention on the biblical “promised land”. Zionism claimed the status of modern nationhood for the Jews and proposed a state, established within the biblical heartland, as the solution to the Jewish problem. Western powers, strongly influenced by both shoah and Bible, accorded this state legitimacy. The very name of the state, Israel, has clear biblical echoes and is no innocent choice. Many Christians saw this as a moment of fulfilment of biblical promise.
In the aftermath of 1948 and particularly after the birth of the Palestinian resistance movement, many Christians discovered the Palestinians. Who are they in the encounter between Bible and history? Are they to be assimilated to the nations driven out of the biblical land by the people led by Joshua? Or is there more to a Christian formulated, biblically based position in the violent struggle we are witnessing? It is up to Christian exegetes not only to point out the errors and dangers of fundamentalism but to provide alternative readings.
Theological interpretation
The crisis of meaning provoked by historical-critical method has led to a plethora of new methods for reading the Bible. Today, the faith perspective of the reader and the canonical context of each text have become central to the search for meaning. The text, preserved and classified by tradition, is a place of encounter, and the community as reader is an active participant in defining meaning. Meaning cannot be reduced to the question of a supposed original meaning, intended by the author. It is increasingly evident that biblical texts can and do mean different things for different communities of readers. Although much is to be gained from Jews and Christians reading shared biblical texts together, there must be space in the dialogue for different readings. What does the “promised land” mean when the hermeneutical key to the biblical text is the person of Jesus Christ? What does it mean when a unity is posited between Old and New Testaments? These are central questions that will surely distinguish a Christian reading from a Jewish, Muslim or secularist reading.
Conclusion
Interpreting the Bible has real consequences for Christian understanding of and behaviour in the world. It is here that the Bible meets history. This is true of biblical readings of the promised land, especially when Israelis and Palestinians call out for Christian solidarity and invoke biblical texts. I would hope that in our deliberations we might begin to clarify not only what we, as Christians, mean when we say “promised land”—promised by whom, to whom, when, where and why? We might also clarify how biblical exegesis and theological formulation about land enter into the realm of history and have real consequences for the lives and aspirations of individuals and nations. Finally, can we, as Christians, seek to speak in harmony and in respect for one another even if the concrete solidarities that define our lives and mission are quite different?
