Abstract
The question of the relationship between the teaching of Jesus and Israel as the land of God’s promise is of interest to at least three different scholarly communities. There are those who study Christian origins and the Gospels in particular. Then there are theological ethicists concerned with the relevance of the New Testament for political ethics. Finally, there are academics whose focus is Jewish–Christian relations, where issues around the land and state of Israel today raise very significant challenges. For the Nation deals with literature from each of these, though more extensively with the first and second than the third. It presents a serious challenge to the consensus view about that relationship in all three, however, and it deserves a careful hearing.
Brown’s book invites Christian theologians to look again at the evidence of the Gospels for how Jesus positioned himself in relation to expectations prevailing at the time about the fulfilment of God’s promises. He notes that over the past fifty years, much New Testament scholarship has come to locate Jesus of Nazareth squarely in the context of first-century Jewish hopes for the restoration of Israel. Yet this scholarship has almost universally claimed that Jesus did not share the specific expectation of a return of exiles to the land of Israel for all to live there under a regime in accordance with God’s law following liberation from Gentile rule—an expectation that was normally an integral part of those hopes. Brown sets out, in some detail, the exegetical arguments for this claim and finds them weak and unconvincing. Moreover, he is able to show on the basis of passages from Jeremiah and Isaiah, as well as intertestamental literature, that arguments asserting that, for Jesus, the kingdom was about ethics or about inclusion of Gentiles and therefore had nothing to do with the land of Israel, are inherently flawed. In the milieu of Jewish restorationist eschatology, hopes for the land of Israel were bound up with hopes for justice, and both the return of exiles and the upholding of divine law could also be seen as bringing blessings for Gentiles in and beyond Israel’s borders.
Presenting a parallel version of that assessment, Brown critiques also the prevailing consensus in theological ethics over the past half century, with Yoder’s work being a particular focus here (indeed, he acknowledges reading Yoder as the catalyst for the research that led to the book in the opening pages). Rather than looking past the concrete social and political setting for Jesus’ ministry to identify abstract principles of timeless relevance, ethicists have sought to learn from how Jesus acted within that setting and the transformations for which he called. Yet they have generally wanted to render incidental to this project the fact that he called for these transformations within a particular place, the land of Israel—a place that would have been likely, given his context, to have had for him a unique and determinative role in the fulfilment of the purposes of God. Brown is able to argue that there is an underlying assumption in this respect within much writing about Jesus and political ethics that needs to be acknow-ledged and interrogated.
Beyond these challenges to the consensus positions in New Testament studies and Christian political ethics, Brown also wants to make some far-reaching claims about the cost of these failures to attend to the restoration of Israel in the teaching of Jesus and therefore the corresponding benefit of bringing it into focus. Drawing on R. Kendall Soulen’s The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Augsburg Fortress, 1996), a seminal text for the theology of Christian–Jewish relations, Brown adapts its argument that there is something docetic about the ‘supersessionism’ of mainstream Christian tradition to argue that what he calls the ‘de-territorialization’ of Jesus’ teaching in the scholarship he has analysed implies a denial of the embodiment of God’s saving purposes (e.g. p. 13, and then at greater length in chapter 2). The somewhat impressionistic nature of his treatment here tends to elide two contrasting positions, however. One might be called ‘spiritualizing’ and the other ‘diasporic’ (his own term for Yoder’s approach). In relation to the first, he finds passages in W. D. Davies and Marcus Borg, for instance, that imply the kingdom for Jesus exists solely in some dimension beyond space and time (pp. 29–45). Yet this is clearly not the case for N. T. Wright, for instance (pp. 46–50), whose interpretation we may see as ‘diasporic’. Indeed, for the ethicists he surveys, the crucial point is that the kingdom can come in any place, any society, and not only in first-century Roman Palestine. While at times Brown appears to recognise the distinction between these positions, he nonetheless wants to argue that the fundamental implications of both approaches are the same: both entail a denial of the unique role of the land of Israel in the promises of God, and therefore a denial of the election of the people Israel and of the rooting of God’s promises in created materiality. Both therefore ‘resurrect the haunting and menacing spectre of supersessionism’, and both are tainted with unbiblical Platonism (p. 91).
Yet it is not all that easy to distinguish the ‘diasporic’ tendency he castigates in chapter 2 from the approach he himself advocates in the final eight pages of the book, when he finally starts to sketch out his own alternative to all this. Questioning the academic consensus is one thing, and developing a credible alternative is another. For the Nation may achieve some success with regard to the former, but it struggles to make much ground with the latter. It remains unclear at the end of the book what would actually follow were one to be convinced by Brown’s claim that Jesus hoped for a territorial restoration of Israel that would involve a radical practice of justice for all its inhabitants, based on his teachings and perhaps with a special role for his apostles. After all, that is not something that came to pass; should we conclude that this first-century Jewish prophet was simply mistaken? If not, then is the goal of Jesus in this matter something for which we should still be hoping, praying and even working—and what would its achievement look like? It is hard to see how any clear answer to this could be given without plunging straight into a thicket of difficulties around not only Zionism, Christian and Jewish, but also Brown’s bête noire of supersessionism. Yet, insofar as the question remains unanswered, it also remains unclear how the claim that ‘Jesus presupposed an eschatological, territorial restoration of eretz Israel’ actually ‘has applicable normative and theological content for fashioning a Christian ethic of territorial governance’ (pp. 5–6). At least this is so unless we can somehow re-read that presupposition in a way that detaches it for practical purposes from rooting in the actuality of eretz Israel—which is the interpretive strategy Brown has just spent nearly two hundred pages criticising.
Brown’s insistence that there is a link between a proper theological appreciation of the land of Israel and an adequate theological account of territory more generally parallels the treatment of nationhood in Carys Moseley’s Nationhood, Providence, and Witness: Israel in Protestant Theology and Social Theory (Cascade Books, 2013), a work that does not feature in his bibliography. While he ventures beyond the Gospels at one point to discuss chiliasm in Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, he does not comment on the significance of Jerusalem for Paul and the first generation of Christians, nor on the extensive literature on later Christian speculation (from the Middle Ages to the present) about what will happen to the land of Israel, the city of Jerusalem and the Jewish people as history draws to a close. Nor does he venture beyond reference to a few of the most strident voices in the contemporary debate about Christian Zionism (p. 191) to review some of the more measured contributions to Christian theological reflection on the land and state of Israel today. His focus on the teaching of Jesus enables him to keep the work within relatively manageable proportions, but to answer adequately the questions he raises is likely to involve painting on a rather broader canvass.