Christian Zionism with a difference

By LARRY DERFNER
Many Jews, especially on the Left, suspect that evangelical Christians line up on the Right behind Israel for purely instrumental reasons: because the New Testament says Jesus Christ can only return once the Jews have returned to Zion, and that can't happen if Israel gives up Judea and Samaria. Whether or not those suspicions are justified about evangelical Christianity as a whole, they're not with regard to the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem today. Rev. Malcolm Hedding, who's been executive director of the embassy since 2000, agrees that some streams of evangelical Christianity are loaded with "radical Christian Zionists... We get e-mails from around the world from people prophesying war between Gog and Magog - because Putin sneezed. It's kind of crazy." That's not Hedding's brand of theology. "This is a more Eurocentric ministry, and we believe in biblical Zionism, which recognizes that there are lots of things playing out in Israel over which we have no influence," he says. Hedding trusts that God will ultimately fulfill his promise to bestow the Land of Israel on Abraham's descendants, but the Land of Israel goes well beyond Judea and Samaria. "It stretches from the Euphrates [in Iraq] to 'the river in Egypt,' and the people of Israel have never in their history been in control of all that land. So while there may be a more complete fulfillment of this promise in the future, we will leave that to God." Some circles of American Christian Zionism tend more toward the "political, eschatological" form, he says, which believes in idea of "Greater Israel" and insists that Israeli governments adhere to that belief. The embassy itself once leaned more toward that sort of Christian Zionism, especially in response to the 1993 Oslo accords. While Hedding doesn't mention any names, this maximalist Christian Zionism is the politics of some of Israel's best-known evangelical supporters in the US. While Hedding and the ICEJ opposed the disengagement (and the Oslo accord before it) on security grounds, he refused to campaign against it, despite entreaties from many evangelicals. "There were many Christian leaders saying God wouldn't allow the disengagement. We told them, 'Guys, you're playing God now.' "Israel is not a theocracy, it is a democracy," he stresses. "We believe that the people of Israel, through their elected representatives, have the right to make their own decisions on this country's future, and we have said that we will support the State of Israel wherever it chooses, or chooses not, to extend its sovereignty." Hedding speaks of the Jews as a people who have returned to their land, who "have benefited the world," who've won so many Nobel Prizes. "We engage with people as people." By contrast, the rigid demand by many evangelicals that Israel hold onto every inch of territory "is highly dangerous," he says, "because then Jews become pawns in your religious agenda."