Ted Cruz and the Meaning of Israel (8)

Senator Cruz’s Christian Zionist argument is basically a bad interpretation of the Hebrew Scripture—particularly of Genesis 12:3a—which is why in responding to him I too have relied primarily on the Old Testament. But Cruz is a self-avowed Christian, and the fact that he bases his politics on the Hebrew Scripture rather than on the New Testament is a curious deviation from what most people would expect. While Christians hold both parts of the Bible as sacred and authoritative, it is the New Testament that plays the dominant role in shaping their theology and ethics. Christians have always interpreted the Old Testament in light of the New. Whenever an opposition or inconsistency is encountered between the two revealed texts, the default Christian approach has been to privilege the New Testament. Yet, when it comes to supporting Israel_S, we find that Ted Cruz and other Christian Zionists are more than willing to abandon the traditional approach. Instead, they take a position that is the exact opposite of how Christians have interpreted the Bible for two thousand years. Specifically, they ignore key passages of the New Testament that are incompatible with their preferred view of the Hebrew Scripture.

From a historical viewpoint, the New Testament reflects an evolving re-interpretation of the Old Testament in the context of the Jesus movement attracting Gentile followers. One example of this re-interpretation can be observed in how the writers of the New Testament sought to privilege faith over lineage. This was a response to the tendency, already noticeable in the Old Testament, towards treating converts as second-class members of the covenant community and of claiming a privileged status for being (allegedly) Abraham’s progeny. To be clear, the Old Testament itself challenges this tendency when it repeatedly shows God punishing, destroying, and cutting off large segments of the chosen people and allowing only a “remnant” (Isaiah 25 & 28) to survive and inherit the mission—suggesting that religious merit is to be found in obedience to the Torah and not in having been born into a particular lineage. This dynamic changes in the New Testament, away from an emphasis on following the law, as symbolized by male circumcision, and towards faith in Christ. In the process, the tendency to take pride in lineage is not just criticized or rejected but is decisively eliminated—opening the way for Gentiles to join the (new) covenant community without going through ritual circumcision and without agreeing to follow the 613 commandments.

The shift in question can be seen in the speech by John the Baptist quoted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In Matthew, John is addressing the Pharisees and Sadducees; in Luke, he is addressing the crowd coming to him for baptism:

You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ”We have Abraham as our ancestor,” for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire” (Matthew 3:7–9; Luke 3:7–9).

In the passage above, John the Baptist seems to be saying to his fellow Israelites that if they don’t produce good behavior, then claiming that they have Abraham as their ancestor is not going to save them from God’s imminent chastisement. The gospels of Matthew and Luke were written in the 80s CE, after the destruction of the Temple; from the perspective of their earliest readers, John’s warning had already come true. As for God being able to raise Abraham’s children from stones, it suggests that the lineage of Abraham is not to be taken in the literal or biological sense, and that true followers of Abraham can emerge from communities that were deemed worthless, i.e., the Gentiles.

The Pauline epistles are even starker on this point. Take Galatians, for example, a letter written between 50 and 56 CE. In a famous passage, Paul argues that obeying the law is not a necessary condition for justification, i.e., for being considered righteous; after all, God chose Abraham centuries before the law was even revealed to the Israelites. Paul quotes Genesis 15:6 to point out that it was Abraham’s faith, and nothing else, that made him righteous in God’s eyes. Next, he quotes Genesis 12:3b to argue that God’s promise to Abraham already anticipated that people other than the Patriarch’s literal descendants will join the ranks of his followers.

Just as Abraham “believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness,” so, you see, those who believe are the descendants of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would reckon as righteous the gentiles by faith, declared the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, “All the gentiles shall be blessed in you.” For this reason, those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed. (Galatians 3:6‒9)

This is one of the passages that directly contradicts Ted Cruz’s Christian Zionist argument. People who find his claim convincing may want to meditate on this passage, despite the discomfort it might cause, and try to understand the point that Paul is making here. According to Paul, who happens to be the greatest Christian authority after Jesus, the only condition for being blessed alongside Abraham is to have faith in Christ. No other criterion is needed.

This could be a great and wonderful news for Christian Zionists, if they only paid attention. The verse “those who believe are blessed with Abraham who believed” needs to be printed on millions of stickers and given to Christian Zionists, so they can keep looking at it day and night until its implications finally dawn on them. I recommend the following design.

What Paul is saying is that if you have faith, then you are just like Abraham; and since God blessed Abraham because of his faith—and not for any other reason—you too are blessed right alongside him because of your faith.

What this means for Christian Zionists is that there is absolutely no need for them to organize, raise funds, and lobby the government in order to support and defend Israel_S. There is no need for them to spend so much of their time, money, and energy in ensuring that the U.S. continues to supply Israel_S with deadly weapons, or that it continues to protect the Zionist state from any accountability for its countless crimes. Instead of doing all this hard work on behalf of a foreign country, they can just chill out and take a vacation—for there is no imperative whatsoever, biblical or otherwise, that requires them to “bless Israel” as a condition for being blessed by God. The divine blessing they are hoping to receive as their reward for serving Israel_S is already theirs through faith in Christ.

Let me explain this idea in a slightly different way. Christians Zionists like Ted Cruz claim that they are obligated to “bless Israel” because that’s what the Bible tells them to do. But when we ask what that imperative might means in practice, we find that they have in mind a most unusual definition of the word “bless.” For Christian Zionists, to “bless Israel” means allowing Israel_S to do anything that its government decides it wants to do—no questions need to be asked, no concerns need to be raised, no consequences need to be weighed, and no moral or legal prohibitions need to be considered. In fact, challenging or even doubting the absolute necessity of providing such support raises suspicions, and sometimes accusations, of Antisemitism. And the ostensible justification for all this is the belief that because we “bless Israel” through our support for organizations like the Republican Party and Christian Friends of Israel, God is sure to bless us in return—typically by making us more and “prosperous,” i.e., wealthy. By holding this belief, Christian Zionists are forced to reject Paul’s teaching that all they really need in order to receive God’s blessing is faith in Christ; nor do they realize that their reckless support for Israel_S cannot compensate for any deficiency in faith. More importantly, Christian Zionists seem oblivious that their commitment to “bless Israel” requires their active support for, and their complicity in, the perpetration of horrendous crimes of biblical proportion—settler-colonialism, land theft, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide—and that this makes them potential recipients of whatever is the opposite of divine blessing.

But wait, there’s more!

Senator Cruz said in his interview with Tucker Carlson that contemporary Jews are the “descendants of Abraham,” implying that that’s what makes them a uniquely privileged people. After all, God didn’t promise that those who bless the Norwegians will be blessed—nor the Buddhists, the Russians, the Unitarian Universalists, the Egyptians, the Mormons, the Canaanites, the Iraqi Shi’ites, the Southern Baptists, or any other group of people. No! This privilege has been given to Abraham’s descendants, and only to Abraham’s descendants. Therefore, no community or nation besides the Jews can claim that God would bless anyone who blesses them.

We know that there is no warrant for equating the Jewish people with the biological descendants of Abraham, but it remains a useful belief for certain purposes. Specifically, this belief allows Ted Cruz and other Christian Zionists to further assume that “the Jews” refers to a closed category, i.e., one that outsiders cannot join. I have already commented on these beliefs in previous blog posts. But since we are talking about “Christian Zionists,” who are by definition Christians first and Zionists later, it is important to find out if the New Testament agrees with their position.

Below is another passage from the same chapter in Galatians. Here, Paul is explaining that in the new covenant obedience to the law is no longer a requirement for justification, i.e., for being right with God.

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be reckoned as righteous by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:23—29)

The verse, “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring,” also need to be printed on millions of stickers and given to Christian Zionists so they can look at it day and night and reflect on its implications. You have my permission to use the following design.

Here’s why this matters. In the Old Testament, the word “Israelites” does not refer to a closed category; outsiders could join through conversion and assimilation, just as insiders could be pushed out, or excommunicated—the Hebrew term is kareth, meaning “cut off.” As the passage quoted above clearly demonstrates, the “descendants of Abraham” in the New Testament is not a closed category either. That is because neither of these categories is defined exclusively by birth. In the first case, anyone can join Israel_C by deciding to obey the Torah; in the second case, anyone can become a child of Abraham by deciding to believe in Christ. By emphasizing the spiritual connection to Abraham through faith and downplaying the obligation to follow the law—while ignoring altogether any biological connection to the Patriarch—Paul opens up the category of the “descendants of Abraham” even more emphatically than the Old Testament: “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring.”

Ted Cruz’s Christian Zionist argument relies heavily on the assumption that “the Jews” is a closed category, in relation to which Christians are, and will always be, outsiders. When Cruz says that the Jews get to have a special privilege because they are the “descendants of Abraham,” he implies, at the same time, that Christians are not. But if Cruz were to take Paul’s teachings seriously, he would learn that Christians like him are also the “descendants of Abraham.” He would then discover that while the concept of the literal or biological “descendants of Abraham” is no longer useful, Christians have as much right as the Jews to say they are Abraham’s children in a spiritual or metaphorical sense. However, Cruz is likely to resist this conclusion with all his might, for accepting it would invalidate his belief that contemporary Jews enjoy a special privilege that isn’t available to any other community or nation—a conviction upon which he claims to have built much of his political career.

As if this wasn’t enough, the Senator is going to completely lose his mind when he finds out that the world’s billion-and-a-half Muslims are children of Abraham as well—in the same sense as Jews and Christians.