"Christian Zionism"

This article on self-styled “Christian Zionists” isn’t likely to tell you anything you don’t already know, but, as I’ve been working my way through Romans lately with the help of a couple of commentaries, this brought me up short:

“Our Christian Zionism – and we readily endorse that term – grows out of God’s promise in Genesis 12:1-3,” [Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry] executive director William Sutter said, flipping his Bible open to read the vow from God to Israel’s patriarch Abraham: ” ‘And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing. And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.’

“We take this literally,” Sutter said. “The land of promise is Israel, and the recipients of the promise are the Jewish people.”

Now, I’m no biblical scholar, but it seems that the promise to Abraham is one of the hinges of Paul’s argument, and he interprets it to refer to God’s promise to bless all people – Jews and Gentiles – through the salvation wrought by Christ. In other words, Paul seems to be explicitly contravening the “literal” sense of the promise as entitlement to a particular piece of real estate.

It’s strange, to say the least, that Christian Zionists would embrace a position that seems to entail denying a crucial part of the gospel message as proclaimed by Paul. (Needless to say, there may be other good reasons for supporting the state of Israel, but that’s a different debate.)