Cruz, Conscience and Israel by Anthony McCarthy

Ted Cruz, US senator for the State of Texas, recently took time out to remind us of his literalist illiteracy with regard to the Bible, Christianity, theology and morality.

He informed Tucker Carlson that he was taught, “from the Bible, those who bless Israel will be blessed, and those who curse Israel will be cursed.”

Challenged to find the verse, Cruz appeared unaware of its provenance, while Carlson said it came from the book of Genesis (specifically Genesis 12:2-3).

Cruz then went on to assert that Israel refers to the ‘nation of Israel’ and that “we are commanded to support Israel”.

A command from God must bind a Christian in conscience. Conscience is that faculty of judgement which gives us our best shot at obeying the moral law, so its proper formation is a serious matter. We certainly inherited from the Hebrews of the Old Testament that unique and non-naturalistic emphasis on God as a moral legislator and judge. Clarity over such a jolting divine injunction is therefore required. 

The term ‘Israel’ can mean any number of things but is originally the name given by God to Jacob, grandson of Abraham, after his struggle with the angel representing Him.  From Jacob/Israel, the twelve tribes of descendants take their name. 

For Ted Cruz and for Christian Zionists as a religious group, the Israel of today is quite simply this people, namely the descendants of Abraham either by blood or, more rarely, by adoption. And the covenantal promises are, on this view, unproblematically to be recognised by sincere Christians in regard to physical territory possessed or laid claim to by this ‘nation of Israel’, now existing as a modern State. 

One of the major difficulties with this approach for Christians is that a series of texts brought together under the name of the New Testament radically interpret the Old Testament in the name of the Second Person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, whom Christians adore as God. 

Yet Christ in the Gospels makes it clear that the ‘Children of Abraham’ in theological terms are those who accept him as what He is, namely the promised Messiah. Even before the Incarnation, simply belonging to the ‘nation of Israel’ was never a guarantee of anything regarding blessings from God.  These were contingent on faithfulness and crucially, for the faithful, went far beyond certain time-bound (and biblically fulfilled – see Joshua 21; 1 Kings 8; Nehemiah 9) promises of physical land. It is the new Canaan and the new Jerusalem which are ‘forever.’  

As the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, Abraham “looked forward to the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”   He, Sarah and descendants  

“all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.  For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return.  But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”  

The shocking message of Jesus of Nazareth is that the true ‘people of Israel’ which is a ‘faithful remnant’ can also include Gentiles simply on account of their acceptance of Him and His Message. Moreover, those who reject that message, be they Jew or Gentile, are outside of that special covenant. The message is put especially bluntly in chapter 8 of the Gospel of John when Christ challenges Jewish opponents who had previously believed in Him by sternly warning them that they are not spiritually free on account of their descendance and that in rejecting Christ they reject Abraham also. 

Theologically, one cannot be part of Israel and reject the very Christ whom the prophets foretold. St Paul also suggested in Galatians 4 that Judaizers who keep Gentiles from the fullness of Christ’s message by insisting on the now defunct Mosaic covenant are identified with the sons of Hagar born of slavery, in contrast with the “children of Isaac”, the children of promise who fully accept Christ.  Converts from paganism did not need to become Jews: “If you belong to Christ”, St Paul said in Galatians 3: “then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” 

The Christian Zionist has to ignore or distort a great deal of the New Testament in order to preserve his project. Indeed, the New Testament becomes a mere distraction, in his hands, from the ‘shadows’ of the Old Testament which obsess him and prevent him from understanding the New (and without that understanding he fails to understand the Old either). Part of the Christian Zionist project is to treat the physical ‘Land of Israel’ as somehow promised by God to the Jewish nation in perpetuity. Yet the Old Testament shows us that the presence of Abraham’s children in the land is time-bound and conditional on faithful obedience while the New Testament presents the Promised Land as a spiritual and heavenly reality, with Jesus repudiating an earthly and nationalist kingdom.

English roots

The Anglican William Cobbett once referred to the Reformation in England and Ireland as “a devastation”, seeing in it the seeds of future revolutions, including those eruptions that led to the English Civil War but also the American and French revolutions.

The rupture from the Roman Catholic Church which the Reformation in 16^th century England brought about encouraged the search for a national identity distinct from ‘Rome’.  With Henry VIII mandating the English Bible be placed in every church and the King James Bible completed by 1611, the messianic notion of the ‘nation of Israel’ was found especially attractive to this unique church and to a nation looking to expand away from Rome. 

The Jewish historian of the Zionist movement, Nahum Sokolow, noted this connection between England and Zionism, stating that: “English Christians taught the underlying principles of Jewish nationality.” 

Old Testament heroes defeating ‘idolatrous nations’ became, with the rise of Oliver Cromwell and Puritanism, objects of identification and emulation and the period also saw Jews permitted to return to England for the first time since their brutal expulsion in the late 13^th century. Matthew Arnold described a “revival of Hebraic spirit in reaction to the Hellenic spirit that had animated the immediately preceding period of the Renaissance.”

Yet it was the ‘Romish’ identity that had preserved what Jerusalem and Athens gave the world. The need for a ‘non-Romish’ identity which performed that part was to have lasting effects in the history of England, even if Puritanism became just one theme amongst many in the makeup of English identity. It was no accident that later Jewish Zionists like Chaim Weizmann were to focus their efforts on England in their aim of gaining the necessary political support for the cause of political Zionism.

That Puritan influence on the history of the United States has proven even more profound and helps to explain the ease with which absurd Christian Zionist texts such as the Scofield Reference Bible found such fertile ground in that remarkable country.

We live in what is in many ways a post-liberal age, one in which increasingly fragile and self-created forms of ‘identity’ are invested with extraordinary importance. Yet it was England’s groping for a new identity opposed to the Roman Church, which had formed her as a Christian civilisation, that led her one way or another to trifle with an early form of Zionism in its search for an exciting and perduring model. In doing so she subtly minimised what Christ said as well as the warnings of all the prophets who pointed towards Him, by emphasising a worldly and nation-bound religion at the expense of a heavenly one. New identities, if not rooted in Christ, are ultimately ephemeral and worldly, even as they imitate religious truths. 

That early change of course helps explains the phenomenon of men like Cruz, who in their own way, are as crude, misguided and immoral as the members of other identity cults (often based around sexual degeneracy or victimhood status) they so readily denounce.

That patriotism is a virtue is not to be doubted, but that virtue ceases to be itself if love of nation denies rather than guides us towards the New Israel, the universal Church. And it is something less than a virtue if it inclines us to treat a worldly nation as though it had divine sanction for its actions even as it rejects that very Divine Person who was born of it. Such errors also constitute a direct threat to conscience, threatening to overlay it with strictly non-moral dictates. This antinomianism stands in woeful relation to that “strictness of conscience” which Matthew Arnold rightly associated with the Hebraism of old and which implied a relation to a kingdom not of this world. 

It was a Jewish convert to Catholicism, the philosopher Aurel Kolnai, who captured best the rejection of tribalism when, reflecting on his own experience, he noted that:

“…Christianity, which shook the Roman Empire down to its foundations and contributed to its being torn up into a society of national societies, at the same time made it an immortal State and Rome an eternal capital of mankind.”