The Land of Israel: A Spiritual or Material Promise?

Essay Context: I was invited by my University to respond to Dr. Campbells “ The Land Promise in Biblical Perspective” position. This paper is a response to his and G.K. Beale’s scholarship on the land of Israel. Their position is what I would call the relative mainstream Amillennial position. My response is below:

This is a response to Dr. Campbell's essay, The Land Promise In Biblical Perspective. I am honored by the invitation to respond to Dr. Campbell. An obvious feature of Dr. Campbell's work is his love and mastery of Scripture. This magnifies his work in every way, and it is clear that the word of God has formed Dr. Campbell. This reality only increases the honor I feel interacting with Dr. Campbell on the topic of land, covenant, and the Church's understanding of these important issues.

I also appreciate that the land frames the nexus of Dr. Campbell's argument. I agree with Dr. Campbell that the land promise is an important embodiment of the discussion around the Abrahamic Covenant and the outflow of covenantal history. It forces the discussion, often of ethereal and abstract concepts, into the material realm. Nothing outside of the word becoming flesh in the person of Jesus embodies a flash point in the material universe the way the land promise does. In light of the establishment of the modern state of Israel, this discussion becomes even more relevant for the Church. Undoubtedly, any place where we see wars, violence, and conflict that costs blood, tears, and soil should be a concern for Christians, how much more when the discussion revolves around what some consider a biblical mandate for this cost. From the onset, Christian theology, almost paradoxically, must grapple with this embodied and material land promise that seemingly flies in the face of everything that Christian theology has deemed to know of itself and a spiritual kingdom.

Indeed, outside of the last seventy-five years, discussion around the land is almost entirely missing from the history of Christian theology. Were we to remove references in Augustine's contrast between the heavenly city and his observed decay of Rome, we see little reference to the concept of land in Christian theology. The modern state of Israel changes this and creates a flurry of responses from theologians like Davies, Burge, Wright, Bruggerman, Barth, Kaiser, and many others, including Dr. Campbell. I mention this primarily to highlight both the significance of the topic and to point out that the ideas of embodied reality and the material world are rarely discussed within the Christian tradition. It is a foreign corner to where the storyline in our Christian understanding picks up. As wild olive branches grafted onto the tree of Israel, our covenantal starting point is through Jesus. The Jewish branches that remain connected, stay connected through Jesus, however, these remaining natural olive branches contain a historical and biblical ontology that spans back not just to the faith of Abraham but to the concrete promises made to his physical descendants. In this intersection of material land, we see a battleground of theological response that mimics the actual battleground to which the theological response is responding.

Dr. Campbell's essay aims at dispensationalism in multi-faceted ways, and I would like to highlight two areas in which Dr. Campbell and I agree. Hopefully, providing a touch point of agreement from the outset will offer clarity through my response in this essay. The first area where Dr. Campbell and I agree is that we do not see a Soteriology distinction between Jew and Gentile. That is to say, the cross remains an offense to both Jews and Gentiles equally, and nothing changes this offense outside of coming under the atoning work of Jesus, the ultimate Israelite. I do not believe that Jews are “saved” by observance of the law or any other previous covenant. Secondly, I am relatively agnostic about the millennium question and do not believe in a pre-trib rapture. I mention this because these are two areas that Dr. Campbell highlights throughout his essay that I would like to untangle from my response at the outset. I also do not subscribe to a dispensational timeline of Middle Eastern events nor see that as a necessary attribute to the positions I will lay out in this essay. As a forerunner to this idea, I am going to highlight Charles Spurgeon. Spurgeon is instructive for two reasons regarding these previous points. The first reason is that Spurgeon heavily critiqued Darby and dispensationalism in letters directed at John Darby while they were both alive. In all likelihood, Darby didn’t have a living critic that matched Spurgeon, as we can see from Spurgeon's letters to Darby and the “Darby Brethren.” On the other hand, although Spurgeon existed long before the term Christian Zionist existed, he believed God would regather the Jews to the physical land of Israel. Early Christians who thought the Jews would be restored to Israel were called Restorationists, and Spurgeon could rightly be called a Restorationist. In his understanding, the physical seed of Abraham would return to their physical land in Israel. Spurgeon’s belief on this is most clearly stated when he says this in his address in 1864 to the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Amongst the Jew:

There will be a native government again; there will again be the form of a body politic; a state shall be incorporated, and a king shall reign. Israel has now become alienated from her own land. Her sons, though they can never forget the sacred dust of Palestine, yet die at a hopeless distance from her consecrated shores. But it shall not be so for ever, for her sons shall again rejoice in her: her land shall be called Beulah, for as a young man marrieth a virgin so shall her sons marry her. "I will place you in your own land," is God's promise to them . . . They are to have a national prosperity which shall make them famous; nay, so glorious shall they be that Egypt, and Tyre, and Greece, and Rome, shall all forget their glory in the greater splendor of the throne of David . . . If there be anything clear and plain, the literal sense and meaning of this passage [Ezekiel 37:1-10]—a meaning not to be spirited or spiritualized away—must be evident that both the two and the ten tribes of Israel are to be restored to their own land, and that a king is to rule over them.

Spurgeon reiterated this belief throughout his life, and in Spurgeon, we see both a living critic of Darby and dispensationalism but also a man who saw a place in the outflowing of God’s covenantal reality for the physical seed of Israel returning to the physical land of Israel. My hope in mentioning this is that we could move past the claim that one must hold to specific tenets of dispensationalism to believe in the significance of Israel in the flesh being regathered to the land of Israel. If Dr. Campbell is interested in this theme, I give it further treatment in my essay: A Non-Dispensational Case For Christian Zionism and The Permanent Election of the Jews - A Historical Reflection.

Now, let us turn directly to Dr. Campbell’s essay. I will be addressing Dr. Campbell’s essay through five major motifs that I believe create an axis of understanding through his essay. The first and most prominent theme is Dr. Campbell’s meta-narrative, which Campbell tells in a masterful way. In this meta-narrative, Campbell highlights the presence of God that goes from Eden to the Tabernacle, land, temple, to Jesus, where it becomes spiritualized and universal and then, in the final refrain, back to a heavenly Eden. This schema is imagined in an almost closed loop where the fall from Eden finds its way back to the heavenly and eternal Eden that God originally designed. Dr. Campbell visualizes the land promise as a skin shed for more important and divine realities in this meta-narrative. Any return to the land can only be seen as a fool's errand or, at worst, a dog that returns to his vomit. There is much to appreciate about this meta-narrative, but there are also areas I find incohesive when compared to Scripture. The second area I will address is both the disobedience of Israel and the concept that the covenants were originally established primarily for instrumental reasons. Aspects of this theme are inescapable in Scripture and Christian theology, but I will challenge certain assumptions outlined in Dr. Campbbell’s essay. Thirdly, I will critique some of Dr. Campbell’s more specific statements about the Abrahamic covenant and offer what I believe is a more scripturally harmonious way of understanding the Abrahamic covenant that synthesizes section one in the meta-narrative. In the fourth section of this essay, I will address how Messianic Judaism sees itself in light of the land promise and why this should be an area of consideration for Christian theology. Lastly, I will defend how Christians can support the modern state of Israel without falling into the two extremes of blind dispensational support or punitive replacement or fulfillment perspectives, which seems to be the prevailing norm within covenant theology. In this final section, I will also discuss the theme of one or two people of God. This last section will be more ecumenical but will seek to harmonize my defense against Dr. Campbell's essay in a more practical theological format. It is very clear through his writing that Dr. Campbell is not only concerned about theology for theology's sake but so that it may answer the question, how should we live?

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