The State of Israel in Biblical Perspective

Extract

Christians cannot look at Israel from a purely human point of view, for they must see Israel as an essential part of God’s plan for men. In a sense, of course, every nation is a part of God’s plan; human history is governed, or at least supervised, by God, and all the national groupings that arise in the course of history fall under his Providence. But Israel belongs to the plan in a unique way, not just as one people among others, but as the People of God. Israel has no significance as a nation except in a divine perspective. For Israel is the Chosen People, chosen as a people, loved by God as a people.

The life and destiny of Israel then is a mystery in the strict sense. This is a word which is often abused, but I am using it as the Fathers of the Church used it to mean ‘that which plays a part in the realization of God’s plan’. This is the sense in which the Fathers could call the events of the Old Testament mysteries; the episode of Jacob and Esau, David’s flight from Saul and later from his sons, the sufferings of the prophet Jeremias. All these were stages in the realization of God’s plan, types and figures of fulfilment to come, types and figures of Jesus Christ. Christian thinkers have always been aware that Israel was a mystery in this sense. But in the last two decades our attention has been increasingly directed to the fact. We have realized, for instance, that anti-semitism has a theological significance for us: it is an attack upon God, upon charity, upon the continuity of biblical revelation ; an attack in fact upon the roots of Christianity itself. Must we not also say then that the recent establishment of a free Jewish state, the re-emergence of a Jewish nation—and that in the Land promised to them by God—is theologically significant? an answer indeed to the innumerable prayers addressed to God by the Jews since the occupation of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D.? There is no valid reason to think that such fervent and continuous prayers should remain forever unanswered.