Considering Christian Zionism. Part 1: Zion
What is Zion? If you decide it is a place, where is it? if you count yourself a Christian Zionist then you'd better be clear about Zion.
Historically we learn from the Old testament that Zion is the name of a hill in Jerusalem, Israel, where Solomon built The Temple that was then inhabited by a deeply mysterious phenomenon referred to as the Glory of God. This Presence of God dwelt between the wing tips of two golden cherubim (angels) that were mounted onto the lid of the wooden box known as the Ark of the Covenant, that was in turn situation within the innermost chamber of the Temple that was known as the Holy of Holies.
The Holy of Holies was separated from the inner temple court by a large, heavy, curtain. No one was allowed into the Holy of Holies because no-one is holy enough. If you tried, you'd come face to face with the Glory of God and you would die.
Once a year, God graciously allowed a representative human, the High Priest, into the Holy of Holies, and then only after a very serious regimen of purification. His job was to offer sacrifice for the sins of the people. He did this on the Day of Atonement once a year. On that day he would take off his beautiful priestly clothing, stripping down to just plain garments. He would then make his way through the 3 foot thick layers of the curtain, and into the holy of holies. In there it was completely dark, illuminated only by the Glory of God. He would take in blood from a perfect sacrificed lamb and sprinkle it on the 'mercy seat' - the lid of the Ark of the Covenant - right where the Glory of God would be. In this way he made 'expiation', that is, a remedy for the guilt of the sins of the people, by having someone else (in this case a perfect lamb) pay for the people's sins by its death. He then offered up incense - a symbol of the prayers of the people now made acceptable to a Holy God.
Zion thus became a word synonymous with the idea of a special place where it was possible to come face to face with God - to experience His holy presence - a place of meeting with God - a place where God deigned to meet with humankind.
Zion is thus primarily a physical place. It is, secondarily an idiom, an idea - a notion of a place where our human existence intersects with the presence of Almighty God - notably a place of God's choosing and not of ours.
In the mind of Jews, their worldview, land and the presence of God are very closely tied together. God gave the patriarch Abraham the land by covenant and again lead the Israelite nation (together with many foreigners in their company) out of slavery in Egypt, across the wilderness and into the promised land of prosperity. Land=God's blessing. A lack of land=God's cursing or at very least an absence of God's blessings. For Jews today, the notion of a homeland is very powerful - it is a strong aspect of their racial, ethnic, religious identity. At least for non-Christian Jews and for some Christian Jews too.
Fast forward to the early 20th century and the rise of radical political Zionism in Palestine under the leadership of Menachem Begin at first a guerrilla leader - later in life a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate; the rise of sympathy for a theocratic homeland for the Jews in some British evangelical circles who (I believe erroneously) conclude that if the Jews have a homeland it will somehow encourage Jesus to return; British Zionism is born; Nazi Third Reich rises; World War II; the tragic, awful, Holocaust happens; The Balfour declaration; The British Mandate of Palestine after the war (of which my father was very much a part); UN General Assembly Resolution 181. Meanwhile British Zionism cross the Atlantic and finds a fertile hom in 20th Century American Christian churches, especially those who adhere to strong sense of pre-destination and dispensationalist theology. The history is all there to study. The result is the creation of the nation of Israel designed to be a majority Jewish state (why else call it Israel?) where Muslims and Christians and Jews could live happily in a democracy...peace in our time.
Politically - and there is certainly more than one opinion on this - Christians and Muslims have been harried to the point of persecution by the majority Jewish authorities. In 1947 there were once 300,000+ Arab Christians in Israel, there are now so few that they could all be removed on three 747 jets. Meanwhile the Muslims rally around nationalistic factions, the PLO is born under Yasser Arafat as a resistance response to Jewish-Israeli aggression, later Hamas and Hezbollah and the dreadful civil war in Lebanon develop. Israel is surrounded by Arab/Muslim neighbors that want her to either be gone or to change back to a secular democracy. Israeli Jews are split between radicals and moderate, secularists and orthodox factions. It's a mess. My interest is not to take a political position, but to establish a sound theological view of Zion that will inform any number of possible political positions.
In the middle of it all a central, polarizing idea is Jewish Zionism which again means different things to different groups: the desire for a Jewish Theocracy in the land of Israel; the re-establishment of a Temple of Temple Mounts and the re-assumption of the Old Testament sacrificial system. For others, the establishment of a well funded, heavily militarized nation state of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish Diaspora to call home - secure from it's enemies.
So what does Zion mean to you?
