Christians and Israel - Christian Attitudes Towards the State of Israel - Book Review

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2002 by R.D. Kernohan

Christian Attitudes towards the State of Israel. Paul Charles Merkley. McGill-Queens University Press. [pounds sterling]22.95. 266 pages. ISBN 0-7735-2188-7.

This book is one of a long series of studies in the history of religion from its Canadian academic publishers. Charles Merkley, already author of a book on the politics of Christian Zionism, is professor emeritus of history at Carleton University. Despite its academic character, and its attempt to research widely and reflect accurately very different opinions, this is bound to be a controversial book. Professor Merkley is ready to swim against some powerful currents in the mainstream Churches and to go against the flow of much liberal or 'progressive' academic opinion. He does not conceal what comes across as a moderately expressed but determinedly maintained conservative disposition both in politics and theology.

The author also appears to have moderate Christian Zionist sympathies which inspire his work without distorting it, and he is impatient with the smooth jargon and expedient evasions which ecumenical organisations, especially the World Council of Churches, have now extended to inter-faith dialogue. That is also his view of much fashionable broadsheet journalese, especially talk about 'fundamentalism', always an unsatisfactory word in analysing Christian trends and even more so for Muslim ones.

It is probably a good thing that the book (so it appears) was completed before September 11, 2001. It is full of what, given the need to keep 'moderate' Muslims in a Western-lead coalition, may appear politically incorrect. Much of Professor Merkley's interpretation of his material is critical not only of Palestinian attitudes but of Islamic ones. He is understandably sceptical of the fashionable historical presentation of mainstream Islam as a tolerant religion, as well as of Arab readiness to accept a Zionist Israel, whatever its boundaries, as a permanent, irrevocable fact of Middle Eastern life. Some of his most sustained criticism, however, is of the Christian Churches in the Middle East, not only for eagerness to be as anti-Zionist as the Muslim majority but for reluctance to speak frankly about pressures on them from Islamic self-assertion. In doing so he may seem insensitive to the plight of Arab Christians, caught between a suspicious and unco-operative Jewish State and a Muslim-dominated political m ovement. Those who suffer most acutely, and emigrate if they can are those least inclined to the radical attitudes Professor Merkley dislikes.

The book should be of value even to those who take different views from the author of the rights and wrongs of what has become a Seventy Years' War over Palestine and the land of Israel. Several reasoned criticisms, however, might come from those sympathising with its general themes. Its view is very much from a North American perspective, both in analysis of liberal and evangelical trends within the Christian

Church -- for the sharp lines of division in the USA and Canada are much less clear in Europe -- and of the way that 'mainstream' Protestantism and liberal as well as unreconstructed Roman Catholicism have been drawn towards sympathy with the Palestinian cause and often uncritical acceptance of its propaganda.

The pendulum has not swung as far as Professor Merkley believes, and many of those who have lost some sympathy with Israel (whether because of its negotiating stances or over-reaction in the early stages of the Intifadas) are acutely aware of the threat from an anti-Zionism which conceals or expresses conscious or unconscious anti-Semitism. He also avoids the awkward thoughts of a some notable Jews, such as the formidable theologian Yeshayahou Leibowitz, admirer of Barth but not of Christianity and fierce critic of Israeli policy in Judea and Samaria.

Prof. Merkley also misses a European point which favours his arguments. Especially in Britain, the emotional vacuum which the Christian Left now often fills with anti-Zionism has not mainly been caused by the decline of Latin American revolutionary fervour, as may be the case for North American 'progressives', but by the end of apartheid and the new complexities of Southern Africa. On the other hand the analysis of the place of Israel in American politics and the mistrust between the Christian Right and liberal opinion-formers, many of them Jewish, will give European readers new perspectives.