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
“Israel” in the Bible and the State of Israel
Rev. Dr Henri Veldhuis
Protestant Church in the Netherlands
The ambivalence of “Israel”
Who are meant by the name “Israel”? This question gets an urgent and biblical direction when we remember Paul’s remark, “Not all Israelites truly belong to Israel” (Rom. 9:6).
A double and sometimes ambivalent meaning of the name “Israel” is not the invention of Paul, but belongs to the core of the Bible in both Old and New Testaments. It is expressed, for instance, in Hosea 1-2, in the emotional prophecy where Hosea speaks of Israel as lo-ammi (not God’s people) and ammi (still God’s people).
Generally speaking, “Israel” has two meanings. They are involved in a common history but are certainly not identical. “Israel” is on the one hand the name of an ethnic unity—since the Babylonian exile, the people of the Jews. On the other hand, it is a religious community, a people united by faith. The dialectic of ethnic and religious identity plays a decisive role in the Bible and in the history of Israel.
No ethnic base for election
Jacob was the first to be called “Israel” by God (Gen. 32:29). With the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, God began a new history of election and salvation. God starts with an ordinary man, an ordinary family, an ethnic unity that is not special in itself; God has to start somewhere.
Jacob is the twin brother of Esau, but although they are brothers and belong to the same ethnic unity, it is Jacob alone—Jacob, the second, smaller and weaker twin, Jacob the jealous liar—who receives the name “Israel”.
So from the beginning it is clear that Israel is not a people chosen on the basis of special ethnic qualities, e.g., being an especially strong race, or having an outstanding character. No, the special quality of Israel as a religious community is rooted in God’s election of Israel and observed in Israel’s faithfulness to the God of Israel.
God’s promise will never be abolished. When God, by free election, makes a new beginning with someone, God always remains loyal. Ethnic Israel, which is not special in itself, can always turn again to God’s eternal promise and become again a special people united in faith.
But time and again the prophets warn their people that the real meaning of “Israel” is that of a religious people that adheres to the promises and commandments of God. And with this religious community, the Lord makes an extraordinary history in incarnation, resurrection and the break-through of Pentecost, a revolution of the Spirit through which the faith of Israel finds its centre in the love of Jesus Christ, through which it finally crosses every ethnic and racial border.
So the core meaning of “Israel”, as a religious name, is precisely this: that by the power of Jesus Christ, by the power of Spirit and truth (John 4:23), it overcomes all ethnic boundaries, even the boundary of “Israel” as an ethnic entity.
The state of Israel and our theology
Now I come to actual history and politics. Our world and often also our own minds are full of ethnic sentiments that may lead to racism and anti-Semitism. Church history is also a history of anti-Semitism, and Christian Western Europe could not prevent Adolf Hitler persecuting the Jews as an ethnic entity, in a holocaust fuelled by fiery ethnic sentiments.
So as Christians we should always be on the alert, as Jews are again and again persecuted as a religious and as ethnic entity, hated on the basis of deep ethnic sentiments. But for exactly the same reason we should not make the mistake of founding our own theology, our “Israel theology”, on the ethnic meaning of “Israel”. My own church, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, has partly done so. Without clearly distinguishing the two meanings of the name “Israel”, our church order confesses an “unrelinquishable solidarity with the Jewish people” (Art. I,7). And in all related documents it is explained that this phrase also means a special solidarity with the state of Israel.
Captivated by this view, my church still isn’t free to see all the injustice that resulted from the founding of the state of Israel and its politics until the present day. It is of course fully understandable that after the holocaust the Jewish people fought desperately for a state in which they could be safe. But the state they live in is a state of Israel that is not a full democracy, without a democratic constitution. It has an ethnic foundation, in which the principle of being a Jewish state precedes the democratic principle of the equality of all citizens.
The God of Israel made a new start with some family, with some ethnic group, because God had to start somewhere. God began his project of “Israel” with Jacob the liar and remains faithful in reaching out to unfaithful people (as we all are). Israel as a religious community is not founded on ethnic qualities, as Paul realizes when he tries to understand the mystery of “Why not Esau?”
As a church of Christians from Jewish or gentile backgrounds, we participate in an “Israel” without ethnic boundaries. And as church we are united with religious Jews on the basis of common scriptures, not on an ethnic basis.
Actual and urgent
From the beginning, the name “Israel” promised a peaceful revolution to the world, being “Israel” by God’s blessing alone. That revolution challenges us to transcend all ethnic boundaries and sentiments. A revolutionary message that is still urgent in the present day, so full of ethnic dramas.
The state of Israel has to remain a place where every Jew can live in peace and freedom. But that is not enough. Israel has been establishing itself since 1948, not just as a secular state—which is how it should be approached by the churches—but also as an ethnic state, practising apartheid and occupation, a state in which Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, a state from which so many Palestinians have had to flee.
In the encounter and confrontation with such a state we should strongly remember the core meaning of “Israel” in the Bible: Israel as an universal community of people who share the dream of God’s kingdom in which all ethnic distinctions between Jew, Greek and Arab are overcome by the justice and love of Jesus Christ.
