{"id":11076,"date":"2025-12-03T15:00:31","date_gmt":"2025-12-03T15:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=11076"},"modified":"2025-12-03T15:00:31","modified_gmt":"2025-12-03T15:00:31","slug":"is-christian-zionism-a-heresy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/?p=11076","title":{"rendered":"Is Christian Zionism a heresy?"},"content":{"rendered":"


By Gerald McDermott<\/span><\/span>, Op-ed contributor Monday, December 01, 2025<\/span>Israel flag with a view of old city Jerusalem and the Western Wall. <\/span> | Getty Images<\/span><\/p>\n

By now it is old news that Tucker Carlson is splitting the MAGA world by interviewing a racist podcaster who praises Hitler and Stalin. But few if any have challenged Carlson\u2019s claim in that softball interview that Christian Zionism is \u201cChristian heresy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Christian Zionists say that Jews have a right to a homeland, and that this right is supported by the Bible. They say this support is not only in the Hebrew Bible (which Christians call the Old Testament) but also in the New Testament.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The apostle Paul, for example, wrote that \u201cthe gifts and calling of God are without repentance\u201d (Romans 11:29). Paul was writing about Jews who had not accepted Jesus as messiah. He wrote that \u201cas touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers\u2019 sake\u201d (Romans 11:28). In other words, they were still the Chosen People because of the promises He made to the patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac and Jacob).\u00a0 And the \u201cgifts\u201d he gave to them were irrevocable.<\/p>\n

What did Paul mean by \u201cthe gifts\u201d? In the first century Jewish thinkers such as Philo the philosopher and Josephus the historian wrote of God\u2019s gifts to the Jewish people, and the land as one of the greatest of those gifts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Paul taught the same thing. Luke tells us in Acts of the Apostles that Paul told a synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia (now in Turkey) that \u201cthe God of this people Israel chose our fathers … and when he [God] had destroyed seven nations in the land of Canaan, he gave them their land as an inheritance\u201d (Acts 13:17-19).<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t only Paul. The author of Hebrews says God led Abraham to a place <\/em>to receive as an inheritance<\/em>, and that Isaac and Jacob were heirs with him of the same promise <\/em>(Heb 11:9). Before his martyrdom deacon Stephen said God promised <\/em>to give Abraham this land as a possession and to his offspring after him <\/em>(Acts 7:4-5).<\/p>\n

Many think that Jesus implicitly denied the land promise when He preached in the Sermon on the Mount, \u201cBlessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth\u201d (Mattew 5:6).<\/p>\n

But scholars are starting to recognize that Jesus was quoting Psalm 37:11, and that the Hebrew word for \u201cearth\u201d can also be translated \u201cland.\u201d Since the phrase \u201cinherit the land\u201d occurs five times in Psalm 37, it is probable that Jesus meant \u201cland\u201d and not \u201cearth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides, Jesus also taught in his most famous sermon that every \u201cjot and tittle\u201d \u2014 which means every stroke of the pen \u2014 in the \u201cLaw and Prophets\u201d was from God (Matthew 5:17-18). When one realizes that the Law and the Prophets (Jewish shorthand for the Old Testament) contain more than one thousand references to the land promise, it is clear that Jesus endorsed the land promise.<\/p>\n

These claims have nothing to do with dispensationalism, a 19th-century theology fixated on \u201cthe rapture\u201d (a lifting of true Christians off the planet years before the Second Coming) and detailed charts speculating about the precise schedule of last things.\u00a0Christian theologians like Increase Mather (17th-century New England) and Jonathan Edwards (18th-century Massachusetts) taught the continuation of the land promise long before the rise of dispensationalism. And Karl Barth, the hugely-influential 20th-century Swiss theologian, rejected dispensationalism but believed the emergence of the state of Israel in 1948 was a \u201csecular parable\u201d whose history \u201ceven now hurries relentlessly\u2019 toward the future of God\u2019s redemptive purposes.<\/p>\n

It’s not only Protestants. In 1991,\u00a0Pope John Paul II referred to the return of Jews to the \u201cmountains of Israel\u201d\u00a0in the last centuries as a fulfillment of Ezekiel\u2019s promise in 34:13. English Catholic theologian Gavin D\u2019Costa sees in recent magisterial documents a trajectory toward a \u201cminimalist Catholic Zionism\u201d whose building blocks are the assertions that \u201cthe Jewish covenant is irrevocable; that this covenant applies to the Jews today; that part of this covenant has been the promise of the land; that this promise is not superseded or annulled in the New Testament and is firmly based in the Old Testament.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no conflict between a proper Christian Zionism and justice for the Palestinian people. The God of the Hebrew Bible is a God of justice, so Christian Zionism is not a blind endorsement of every Israeli state policy. Neither is it Christian heresy, as Tucker Carlson alleges.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, Christian Zionism explains why Jerusalem is called the \u201choly city\u201d or its equivalent three times in Matthew and three times in the book of Revelation. It\u2019s why Zionism can be seen in nearly every book of the New Testament, as a number of us scholars have shown in the book The New Christian Zionism<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Gerald McDermott teaches at Jerusalem Seminary and Reformed Episcopal Seminary.\u00a0 He is editor of The New Christian Zionism<\/em> and Understanding the Jewish Roots of Christianity<\/em>, <\/em>and author of Israel Matters<\/em> and A New History of Redemption<\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Gerald McDermott, Op-ed contributor Monday, December 01, 2025Israel flag with a view of old city Jerusalem and the Western Wall. | Getty Images By now it is old news that Tucker Carlson is splitting the MAGA world by interviewing a racist podcaster who praises Hitler and Stalin. But few if any have challenged Carlson\u2019s<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[72,74,1356],"class_list":{"0":"post-11076","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-christian-living","8":"tag-christian","9":"tag-heresy","10":"tag-zionism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblelon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}