Many of them said they were being cruelly oppressed by their Israeli occupiers. I knew that the Palestinians claimed that it was their land too. For example, I wondered if Israel was breaking international law by its continued occupation of the West Bank. Some proponents seemed to think the State of Israel was beyond reproach. There were other reasons I could not accept that kind of dispensationalism. And in the early Church, Jews and gentiles usually fellowshipped together in the same churches. In the Bible, Israel’s history always intersected with the rest of the world. But one kind of dispensationalism in particular held that Israel and the gentile nations were running on two separate tracks, and the God dealt with each track separately. I knew that in one sense all Christian theologies are dispensationalist insofar as they believe God works differently with people in different eras or dispensations. (I say “unfairly” because there have been Jewish Zionists for thousands of years who denounce terrorist acts.) The Christian Zionism that I heard about in the 1970s and 1980s was inspired by a kind of dispensationalist theology that I did not share. I knew it was not the Jewish Zionism that some in the West unfairly associated with the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946. There was a term used for the belief that today’s State of Israel was prophesied by the Bible and would play a major role in events at the end of the world, which was said to be coming very soon. I had serious misgivings about what was called Christian Zionism. There was a time when I had similar questions. Should the Jews have waited for the Messiah to return them to the land? Was their fight for the land perhaps turning their backs on God?” “So I have questioned whether that was right. They felt they had to take the land for themselves, and they did it by violence. As I read the novel, it seemed that Israel reclaimed the land not as a faith-filled people finding their God-given inheritance but as a people who, crushed and disillusioned by the Holocaust, decided they could not and would not wait any longer for a messiah. “But then in college I read The Promise by Chaim Potok.

We were led to believe that God had given the land of Israel to his people, the Jews, and their fight for their land in 1948 was a religious act by a religious people looking to their God.

“I was raised in a conservative church,” she wrote, “and naively supported whatever Israel did. She is an intellectually curious, committed Christian who attended an elite Christian college. Some months back, a young Christian leader wrote to me about Israel. Here we let him introduce his thinking himself-the “Introduction” to his book. You may have listened to our interview with him already. Gerald McDermott wants you to know that you don’t have to be a dispensationalist to believe that the Bible prophesies that Israel will again be restored to her land.

The promise chaim potok sparknotes