The Church Fathers, Zionism, and the Great Reckoning
Interrogating The Church Fathers' Presuppositions
I am constantly bombarded by people who accuse me of ignoring the witness of the early Church as it relates to Zionism. I take this flak from both Catholics and Protestants. Outside of the Catholics, who obviously incorporate tradition into their truth claims, there is also a resurgence or new wave of what I can only call trendy-cultural-pop interest from the Protestants, who are slowly re-integrating the Church Fathers back into the Evangelical tradition. Even though I’d guess most in this Protestant group have never read the Fathers. The argument they accuse me of goes like this: “Zionism is a modern fad that came to life via a heresy called dispensationalism. The Church Fathers believed x,y,z, and you are, at best, ignoring the witness of tradition or, at worst, partnering with the anti-Christ.” I’m not kidding, I get some absolutely insane repeat comments.
I want to interrogate this position and see if it holds true.
First, whenever someone says, “the Church Fathers believed,” it reveals that they have never read the Church Fathers, who frequently disagreed with each other.
I also want to define what I mean by Zionism. It is such a loaded term that I think most people have a hard time digesting it outside the current conflict in the Middle East. I’m going to use the term broadly to describe a future belief or expectation that the Jews would be regathered to the physical land of Israel. I am making no claims about Netanyahu, the ongoing conflicts, foreign aid, a political party, critiquing modern Israel, eschatology, or anything else outside the simple view that the Jews would return to Israel.
The outline of this essay will be 3 parts: evaluating the claim that there was a Zionist belief in the early church, examining the clearly anti-Jewish suppersessionistic beliefs in the early church and the presuppositions this belief was built on, and then attempting to reconcile these positions with the unflinching reality in front of us.
Question 1: Was there anything that could be reasonably described as Zionism in the early church?
Short answer: yes.
Some of this will come analysis will come down to the main eschatology of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.1
Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) is the first one to mention the return of the Jews to Israel when he says, “he believed that God would gather up ‘the people of the Jews’ in Jerusalem where they would repent of their rejection of Christ.”2 He articulates this as well in his Dialogue with Trypho, when Trypho asks Justin whether he believes Jerusalem will be rebuilt and that the righteous Jews will have an inheritance there.
Tertullian (c. 155-220) has a great quote that I used in Chapter 1 of my recent book in which he says that Christians should “rejoice . . . at the restoration of Israel” because “the whole of our hope is intimately united with the remaining expectation of Israel”.3 It is not difficult to see what that expectation was, at least in part. John Chrysostom (c. 347 - 407) wrote about it when he said, “They never stop whispering in everybody’s ear and bragging that they will get their city back again”. 4
St. Jerome (c. 347–420) wrote about the regathering of Israel when he said that “in the latter days” God would gather the called remnant from the people of Judah to Jerusalem.5 Jerome specifically distinguishes between the future restoration of Israel and the past Babylonian exile when he says: “Clearly he (the prophet) is predicting the future restoration of the People of Israel and (God’s) compassion for Israel after the captivity, which was fulfilled in part iuxta literam under Zerubbabel, Joshua the priest, and Ezra.” Jerome then uses the same description as Irenaeus: when this future event occurs, Israel will no longer call God the God who brought them out of Egypt, but the God who brought them back to Israel from all the nations. This is described as a future event. Jerome then ties this to what Paul says in Romans 11 about the future salvation of Israel, and sees these two events happening in the same era.6
Irenaeus (c. 125-202) uses the same proof as St. Jerome regarding Jeremiah 16, where Israel will no longer call God the God who brought them out of Egypt, but will now call him the God who brought them back from all of the nations. He also speaks of the future regathering of Israel in multiple ways: “Now I have shown a short time ago that the church is the seed of Abraham; and for this reason, that we may know that He who in the New Testament “raises up from the stones children unto Abraham (Matthew 3:9) is he who will gather, according to the Old Testament, those that shall be saved from all the nations. Jeremiah says: ‘Behold, the days come, says the Lord, that they shall no more say, ‘The Lord lives, who led the children of Israel from the north, and from every region whither they had been driven; He will restore them to their own land which He gave to their fathers’”7 (Jeremiah 23:6-7). He then ties the God of the “Old Testament” to the regathering of Israel, when they will no longer call him the God who delivered them only out of Egypt, but will now call him the God who brought them back from the four corners of the earth. Irenaeus also believed that the Lord would construct the temple in Jerusalem, where the antichrist would eventually sit.8 In addition to Irenaeus, Victorinus of Pettau (c. 230–304 AD), the author of the first commentary on Revelation, also believed there would be a third temple.9
Cyril of Alexandria (c. 376–444) also believed that “the entire multitude of the Jews in the dispersion will (once again) possess the region of the nation” as a “sign of blessing from God.”10
In these views, you can get the basic contours of a minimal Zionism if we define that as the future regathering of the Jews back to the land. It certainly could never be labeled a fundamental belief among the Church Fathers, but it was discussed in certain ways.
Question 2: What about the witness of the early church that didn’t see things this way?
I am less interested in trying to show hints of the regathering of the Jews in the early Church than I am in showing why the rest didn’t see it this way. It is obvious that much of the early church held deeply anti-Jewish perspectives and generally thought the Jews were an accursed people who would be forced to endure eternal wandering. And it’s easy to see why. The “proof” for this belief was that the Jews had been scattered outside of Israel and had lost Jerusalem. When one reads the Church Fathers’ statements on the Jews, they are always predicated on the belief that the Jews being out of the land and the temple being destroyed was proof that God had rejected the Jews. In other words, being outside the land and losing Jerusalem was the entire crux of the argument.
To give some examples of this, Augustine discusses the destruction of Jerusalem and the dispersal of the Jewish people in works like City of God (Books IV, XVIII) and his sermons, viewing these events as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies and as evidence of divine judgment. Augustine went on to create an entire witness doctrine (doctrine of Jewish witness) around the belief that the Jews would be permanent wanderers.
We may quote John Chrysostom to get a sense of how this worked, “However, there is no longer any hope that they will recover Jerusalem”, Chrysostom argued, “for that city shall not rise up again in the future, nor will they return to their prior form of worship.”11
Didymus the Blind (c. 398), an authority at his time, explicitly stated that the Lord fights against the Jews “not for a brief time, but for every age to come, even to the consummation of the world”; and this is because “they wander as fugitives and captives among all nations, having neither a city nor their own region”.12
You get the idea. What’s important to understand is that the Church Fathers’ argument against the Jews was a presuppositional argument. The argument’s substratum was always stated to be the loss of land and the destruction of Jerusalem, and that this was to be a permanent feature of the Jewish punishment. To quote the Orthodox Christian archimandrite and theologian Serafim Seppälä, “The rejection and forsakenness of Jews was strongly connected with their loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and the loss was presented as proof for the former.”13 What is funny about this view - or ironic - depending on your perspective - is that the Jews also believed that their diaspora and loss of Jerusalem was best explained by their own sins.
Everyone who wrote about the Jews in the early Church talked about the loss of land and Jerusalem as being the visible sign of God’s rejection of the Jews. Justin Martyr, Hippolytos, Cyprian of Carthage, Athanasius the Great, Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Augustine, etc. They all used the Jews’ dispersion as evidence for whatever negative thing they would say following this “proof” about the permanent forsakenness of the Jews. The argument was never “we inherited this witness or belief from the Apostles,” or even the murky “God told us so,” or “we can see the permanence of this rejection in the biblical text” We must also be honest and say that none of the doctrine we now call “replacement theology” was ever mentioned or confirmed at any of the 7 major church councils. So, while it was the consensus patrum of the majority of the Fathers, it was predicated on the belief of the permanent scattering of the Jewish people.
Now that this “proof” has been proven false in the light of history, what does that mean? To quote Seppälä again, as it relates to the Jews being back in the land, “Logically speaking, this must mean that either the Jews have recovered the Land in spite of God willing them not to do so, or that they have recovered it in accordance with God’s will.”14 Now, the former part of Seppälä’s statement, as he rightly knows, is a theological and logical dead end when compared to the fullness of what the patristic argument is. To quote Seppälä again, “This (regathering to Israel) cannot be dealt with by arguing that people do act against the will of God, and the establishment of the state of Israel is merely one of those kinds of acts. Because the patristic argument is that it is impossible for Jews, being forsaken, to return to rule the Holy Land, and this is due to divine oikonomia.”15
In other words, were we to be true and fair to the patristic argument, it was impossible, from their perspective, for the Jews to ever return due to divine judgment and the subsequent belief that God had permanently rejected them. This judgment cannot be overcome by the UN, dispensationalism, the Rothschilds, sympathy after the Holocaust, or any of the other modern fads that blame the Jewish return on the outward schemes of man. None of these is stronger than God’s judgment, if this judgment were actually true. To blame the return on these factors is to misunderstand the patristic argument. The patristic argument is that due to God’s divine judgment, it was impossible for the Jews to ever return to the land of Israel or Jerusalem.
To anyone honest enough to say it, this view was obviously mistaken. Possibly an understandable mistake from their perspective. But still mistaken.
To sum up the Church Fathers’ prepositional logic:
Premise 1. The Jews have been kicked out of their land, and Jerusalem has been destroyed.
Premise 2. This means God has permanently rejected them.
Conclusion. When premise 1 is proven false, this inherently undermines the logic on which premise 2 rested.
This leads me to why I can’t stand when people use the Church Fathers in this discussion. The chief cornerstone of their entire argument has been proven wrong. This is not up for debate. And people who continue to use this argument against Zionism don’t seem to realize this. To be frank, they warp the Father’s own arguments. I actually believe that if the Fathers were alive, based on their own logic, they would recognize God’s hand in this very messy miracle called Zionism. If this feels a statement too far, what we can say is that there presuppositional argument no longer stands. What seems inherently dishonest is to continue to use their argument in the light of their entire propositional framework being false in the light of reality. Zionism does not require someone to ignore the witness of the Fathers; in fact, one can simply use their internal logic of the belief to strengthen the case for it.
To quote the Catholic theologian André Villeneuve on the idea that one must ignore the Fathers to hold a belief in Zionism,
This is not only a misrepresentation—it’s historically ironic. In reality, many Catholic Zionists—including this author—arrived at their position precisely because of a careful study of biblical law, the Fathers, and the long arc of church history. It is the weight of that tradition, not ignorance of it, that has led them to recognize the theological errors of supersessionism and the enduring legitimacy of Israel’s place in salvation history. What is often neglected, in fact, is the ugly underside of the Christian tradition when it comes to the Jewish people. For centuries, supersessionism justified contempt, marginalization, persecution, and silence in the face of antisemitic violence. The long and tragic legacy of Catholic supersessionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism is not a mark of doctrinal fidelity, but of theological error. This history does not reflect Sacred Tradition as defined by the magisterium but “tradition” with a lower-case “t.” It is, in fact, a counter-witness to the gospel. To accuse Christian Zionists of ignoring tradition is to ignore the church’s own call to repentance, renewal, and fidelity in how Catholics understand the Jewish people—and Israel’s enduring role in salvation history.
Question 3: Where does that leave us?
Well, to revert to Protestantism briefly, the Protestant witness around Zionism looks something like this, to quote Jon Harris, starting in 1500, “Martin Bucer (1491–1551) and Theodore Beza (1519–1605) emphasized the promises to ethnic Israel in Romans 11. The Geneva Bible (1560) reinforced this interpretation. Soon, major religious figures in England such as Thomas Brightman (1562–1607), Sir Henry Finch (1558–1625), William Gouge (1575–1653), and John Milton (1608–1674), all came to believe in the future restoration of Jews to the land of Canaan. In 1655, Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) convened the Whitehall Conference (1655), which readmitted Jews to England and positioned the nation as a divine instrument for Israel’s restoration.”16 (This belief was also echoed in George Washington’s inner circle regarding the hope that the new America would bring restoration of the Jews to Israel) “Historian J. Van Den Berg said that “virtually all Dutch theologians of the seventeenth century believed ‘the whole of Israel’ indicated the fullness of the people of Israel ‘according to the flesh.’” Theologians in that tradition, such as Jacobus Koelman (1633-1695) also believed ethnic Jews would return to “their land” and “rebuild Jerusalem” (Eschatological Expectations, 145). Pierre Jurieu (1637-1713) said that “the kingdom of the converted Jews who, returned to the Holy Land, would govern the world together with Christ” (151).”17
For my part, I will simply say that many major protestant theologians - from Wilhelmus à Brakel the dutch reformer (1635-1711), Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) who, in my view, is both the greatest American philosopher and theologian, Charles Hodge (1797-1878) , Charles Spurgeon (1834-1892), J. C. Ryle (1806-1900), Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)18, and many others, were all Zionist. If we define Zionism as the belief that the Jews will be returned to the physical land of Israel. Unless the point is to be rhetorically dishonest, people would be wise to stop blaming this belief on dispensationalism. (If someone would like a scholarly treatment of this issue, I can’t recommend Anglican scholar, Dr. McDermott’s work, A New Christian Zionism, enough.)
Contra to this belief, we may quote Martin Luther (1483 - 1546) who makes his claim based on the logic of the Church Fathers: “Listen, Jew, are you aware that Jerusalem and your sovereignty…. have been destroyed for over 1,460 years? . . . For such ruthless wrath of God is sufficient evidence that they assuredly have erred and gone astray. . . . Therefore this work of wrath is proof that the Jews, surely rejected by God, are no longer his people, and neither is he any longer their God”.19 Now we may safely say, in the light of history, that Luther’s entire presuppositional argument no longer stands.
To revert back to the Catholic witness that was produced out of Vatican II, I will simply quote this line regarding the Jewish people, “Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets.”20
To tease this our further I will pull from the Gifts and Callings are Irrevocable produced by the Catholic Church which also deals with the Church Fathers’ statements on this narrow issue when it says,
On the part of many of the Church Fathers the so-called replacement theory or supersessionism steadily gained favour until in the Middle Ages it represented the standard theological foundation of the relationship with Judaism: the promises and commitments of God would no longer apply to Israel because it had not recognized Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God, but had been transferred to the Church of Jesus Christ which was now the true ‘new Israel’, the new chosen people of God. With its Declaration “Nostra aetate” (No.4) the Church unequivocally professes, within a new theological framework, the Jewish roots of Christianity. While affirming salvation through an explicit or even implicit faith in Christ, the Church does not question the continued love of God for the chosen people of Israel. A replacement or supersession theology…. is deprived of its foundations.21
I am not Catholic, so I tread these waters carefully, but on the issue of Zionism and the Catholic Church, this matter does not yet seem to be solved. It is certainly not as solved as the podcast-pundint-class would lead you to believe.
Catholic theologians André Villeneuve and Antoine Lévy, OP’s, through personal dialogue, have shared with me a statement regarding what they believe is a faithful interpretation of the Catholic Church’s theology on these matters:
that the covenant between God and the Jewish people “has never been revoked,” for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.”22
that the Jewish people retain a historic and theological bond with the land promised to Abraham’s descendants. Indeed, Israel preserved “the memory of the land of their forefathers at the hearts of their hope,” and “Christians are invited to understand this religious attachment which finds its roots in Biblical tradition…”23
that the re‑establishment of a Jewish homeland in the modern State of Israel bears significance in light of God’s enduring fidelity to His people, a point expressed by PopeBenedict XVI when he noted that “in the creation of the State of Israel the fidelity of God to Israel is revealed in a mysterious way.”24
that Catholic theology should “include the recognition of the unique and unbroken covenantal relationship between God and the Jewish People and the total rejection of anti-Semitism in all its forms, including anti-Zionism as a more recent manifestation of anti-Semitism.”25
What we can say is, to reference the Church Fathers, and any argument put forth that rested on the claim that the Jews were permanently rejected due to their expulsion is a dishonest way to use the Fathers. By their own logic, they have been proven wrong. In regard to the Jews, the Church Fathers wrote about what they were witnessing in front of them - that witness has now changed. To use their arguments as if the foundations of their arguments have not changed is fundamentally a misuse of those arguments.
Conclusion: Reality Is A Stubborn Teacher
I want to offer what I believe happened in this part of Church History. I am going to make this claim by pulling from Deuteronomy 28 and 29. The jew-haters should love this chapter as it deals with the curses that would be put on Israel if they disobeyed God. (Hint, God knew they would disobey) Part of the curse in 28, 29 is the response that the nations would have towards God’s judgment of the Jews.
Specifically it says two very interesting things:
“And you shall become a horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you away.” (28.37) In other words, the Jewish people would become a warning of what happens when you sin against God.
And
“The foreigner who comes from a far land, will say, when they see the afflictions of that land and the sicknesses with which the Lord has made it sick— the whole land burned out with brimstone and salt, nothing sown and nothing growing, where no plant can sprout…— all the nations will say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land? What caused the heat of this great anger?’ Then people will say, ‘It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers….Therefore the anger of the Lord was kindled against this land, bringing upon it all the curses written in this book, and the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and fury and great wrath, and cast them into another land, as they are this day.” (29:22-28)
In other words, part of the judgment on the Jewish people was not only the removal from their land, but the fact that the nations would see it and connect it to their unfaithfulness. This is exactly what the Fathers did; they just got the permanence wrong. I would invite people to read Deuteronomy 32 to see how this story ends for the Jewish people.
The hopeful end is a future salvation of the Jewish people reconciled with their messiah, which has been the great hope of the church. Tertullian, Origen, Chrysostom, Jerome, Gregory the Great, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, along with all of the Protestant scholars I mentioned above, held this hopeful view.
At its best, theology and tradition help us map onto reality. But when tradition collapses in on itself - in the face of the stubborn reality before our eyes - it no longer serves us as a guiding truth. It must bow to Divine Truth. To continue to hold it just because it is tradition only reveals that we have become ideologically captured rather than formed by the unbending sturdiness of reality. We used to believe the Earth was the center of the solar system, then, upon new data, we learned it was in fact the sun. When our presuppositions towards reality are falsified, the least we can do is be honest enough to admit it.
Footnotes
1 I have very little interest in eschatology and I generally argue for a Zionism that does not find its emphasis in eschatology, but it is helpful to understand that the early church was predominantly historical pre-millennial in its eschatology. This is something that some in the amillennial position frequently likes to ignore when they attempt to beat Zionists over the head about how Zionism is a “modern-day heresy”. It was actually Justin Martyr (c. 100–165) in his polemic Dialogue with Trypho that called anything outside of the historical pre-millennial position an actual heresy (his words, not mine). So, on this fact, I find it deeply ironic how some in amillennial position trips over itself, as far as those who hold it accuse the Zionist of being a modern fad are concerned. (to the many Amill friends I have who don’t do this, please ignore this) What’s important to understand is that the broad witness of the early Church believed the literal prophecies would happen, well, literally. This held true until Augustine (c. 354 - 430). Now it seems that this amillennial position views these first three hundred years as something akin to the time it took to remove the ghosts from the machine. But, after 2,000 years, we find the center of the world and the attention of all men drawn back to Israel. To what significance this bears, I do not claim to know.
2 Justin Martyr, First Apology c. 155–157, ANF 1:180
3 Tertullian, On Modesty c. 208–220
4 Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos, 7, 1, 4
5 Jerome, The Prophet Joel, in Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina Turnhout, 1953- 76, 198 c. 400s
6 Jerome, In Hieremiam Prophetam CSEL, 3, 6, 2;1. Translation from Michael Graves, “‘Judaizing’ Christian Interpretations of the Prophets as Seen by Saint Jerome,” Vigiliae Christianae 61, 2 (2007): 142-156, 148.
7 Irenaeus’s Against Heresies, 5. 34. 1
8 Irenaeus, Against Heresies Book V.25
9 Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse, ch. XIII.13
10 Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on Obadiah c. 420s, PG 71:593
11 Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos, 5, 4, 1
12 Didymus the Blind, On the Holy Spirit, 217, SC 386; translation in: Athanasius the Great and Didymus the Blind
13 Serafim Seppälä*, Forsaken or Not? Patristic Argumentation on the Forsakenness of Jews Revisited, 2019
14 Ibid
15 Ibid
16 Jon Harris, The New Anti-Jewish Theology - A Biblical and Historical Response, 2026
17 Ibid
18 Christopher Kuehl, A Non-Dispensational Case For Christian Zionism and The Permanent Election of the Jews - A Historical Reflection, 2025
19 Martin Luther, On The Jews and Their Lies, trans. Martin H Bertram, 3-4
20 Nostra Aetate - No 4
21 THE GIFTS AND THE CALLING OF GOD ARE IRREVOCABLE” (Rom 11:29) A Reflection on Theological Questions Pertaining to Catholic-Jewish Relations on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of “Nostra ætate” (No. 4))
22 Rom 11:29; Nostra Aetate 4; CCC 121; 839
23 Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, Notes on the Correct Way to Present the Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Catechesis in the Roman Catholic Church, VI.1.
24 Reply to Rabbi Arie Folger, August 23, 2018
25 International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, 18th Meeting, Buenos Aires, July 5-8, 200