faith

Christian Zionism vs. What the Bible Actually Says

A Christian examination of how modern Christian Zionism diverges from Scripture — and why the story of Palestinian Christians changes everything.

Chris Groves

21 Feb 2026 — 9 min read

Let me be clear about where I'm standing when I write this.

I am a Christian. I love the Jewish people. I believe God's covenant with Abraham was real, that God's faithfulness to Israel throughout the Old Testament is a cornerstone of our faith, and that Romans 11 is as much a part of inspired Scripture as John 3:16. I do not write this to score political points or to platform Palestinian politics. I write it because something has gone theologically wrong in American evangelical Christianity, and it matters — not just abstractly, but in the lives of real people, including real Christians.

The question is not whether Christians should love or care for the Jewish people. We absolutely should. The question is whether a specific 19th-century theological innovation — one that barely existed before the Civil War — has been mistaken for the clear teaching of Scripture, and whether that mistake has produced consequences we can no longer ignore.

The System Has a Name

Modern Christian Zionism — the kind that fills megachurches, funds political lobbying, and sends American pastors on tours of Israel without stopping to meet Palestinian Christians — is built almost entirely on dispensationalism.

Dispensationalism was systematized by John Nelson Darby, an Irish lawyer turned Plymouth Brethren preacher, in the 1840s. His core innovation was a radical distinction between two peoples of God: Israel, with an earthly program and earthly promises including land, and the Church, a separate entity with separate promises. In Darby's framework, the Church Age is a kind of parenthesis in God's plan — an interruption before the real story (the fulfillment of Jewish national promises) resumes. The Rapture doctrine — nowhere explicitly named in Scripture, assembled from fragments of Daniel, 1 Thessalonians, and Revelation — was Darby's mechanism for removing the Church from the scene so God's Israel program could restart.

This was not the teaching of the Early Church. It was not the teaching of Augustine, Athanasius, or Chrysostom. It was not the teaching of the Reformers — Luther, Calvin, or Zwingli. It was not the teaching of the Puritans. It represented a sharp break from 1,800 years of Christian consensus that read the Old and New Testaments as a continuous covenant story with one people of God, expanded through Christ to include both Jew and Gentile.

The Book That Changed Everything

Darby's ideas might have remained a footnote if not for a mass-market vehicle: the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909 by Oxford University Press.

C.I. Scofield was a Kansas City lawyer with no formal theological training. His Reference Bible was the first English Bible since the Geneva Bible (1560) to print commentary alongside the biblical text. Its cross-referencing system linked prophetic passages in ways that made Scofield's dispensationalist interpretations feel like the natural, obvious reading of Scripture. It sold over two million copies by the end of World War II and has been described as "perhaps the most influential annotated Bible in the twentieth century."

For millions of American evangelical readers, the Scofield notes weren't commentary. They were Scripture's meaning. And that meaning included a clear teaching: God's land promises to Israel remain unfulfilled and await a literal future completion. The modern state of Israel, when it was established in 1948, looked to dispensationalists like the beginning of that fulfillment. The eschatological clock had started.

Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) — the bestselling nonfiction book of the 1970s — translated this theology for a Cold War audience. Every political event became a sign. Every military victory in Israel became a prophetic checkpoint. Millions of American Christians learned to read the news through Scofield's grid.

What Genesis 12 Actually Says

Christian Zionists reach frequently for Genesis 12:3: "I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse." This verse has become the proof-text for political allegiance — the claim that any failure to support Israeli government policy is to invite divine curse.

Read the full passage.

Genesis 12:1–3 is Abraham's calling. God tells Abram to leave his country and his people. God promises descendants, provision, protection, and land. And then the passage ends: "and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you."

That final clause is not a footnote. It is the telos of the entire covenant. The blessing of Abraham is not for ethnic Israel alone — it is the conduit through which all peoples on earth receive blessing. The Apostle Paul quotes this very passage in Galatians 3:8 and calls it "the gospel announced in advance." The blessing of Abraham is fulfilled in Christ. It is the Great Commission. It is the good news.

Using Genesis 12:3 as a foreign policy mandate — arguing that political support for a modern nation-state is theologically required of Christians — disconnects the verse from both its context and its New Testament fulfillment. Galatians 3:16 is explicit: the promises were made to Abraham "and to his seed," singular — referring to Christ. Galatians 3:29 follows: "If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise." The inheritance of Abraham's promise comes through belonging to Christ, not through national alliance.

The One Olive Tree

Romans 11 is the passage dispensationalists rely on most heavily for a future national salvation of Israel. "And so all Israel will be saved" (v. 26).

But the passage contains imagery that cuts against the two-peoples framework. Paul's metaphor in Romans 11:17–24 is a single olive tree. There are not two trees — one for Israel, one for the Church — with separate root systems and separate futures. There is one tree. Jewish unbelievers have been broken off. Gentile believers have been grafted in. Jewish believers remain as part of the natural branches. And Paul warns the Gentiles against arrogance, because the power to graft back in the broken branches remains with God.

One tree. One covenant community. One people of God.

The word translated "and so" in verse 26 is the Greek houtōs — meaning "in this manner" or "thus." It is describing a process, not a future event. Paul is not saying, "After the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, then at that point all Israel will be saved." He is saying: this is how all Israel will be saved — through this mysterious, ongoing ingrafting of Gentiles and remnant Jews into one covenant community.

And even among those who do read verse 26 as promising a large-scale future conversion of ethnic Jewish people — John Stott, Douglas Moo, Thomas Schreiner among them — this is a far cry from CUFI's political program. A hope for Jewish people to come to faith in Jesus Christ is not the same thing as lobbying the U.S. Congress to fund Israeli settlements.

The Trap Called "Replacement Theology"

If you raise any of this in evangelical circles, you will likely be accused of holding to "replacement theology" — the idea that God replaced Israel with the Church, stripped the Jewish people of their promises, and is finished with them forever.

The accusation is a rhetorical trap, and it is worth naming it as such.

There is a real thing called replacement theology, and it is wrong. It historically fueled anti-Semitism by teaching that Jewish suffering was God's judgment for rejecting Jesus, that God had no further purpose for the Jewish people, and that Christians had nothing to learn from or owe to them. This view has caused immense harm and should be rejected.

But covenant theology — the historic teaching of Reformed, Presbyterian, and most Protestant Christians — is not replacement theology. It is better understood as fulfillment theology: the God who gave promises to Israel is faithful. He kept every single one, perfectly, in Jesus Christ, who is himself the ultimate Israelite, the Son of Abraham, the seed of David. And in keeping those promises, God expanded the covenant community to encompass all peoples — exactly as Genesis 12 promised. The Church is not Israel's replacement. The Church is Israel's extension, the wild branches grafted into the cultivated olive tree.

Dispensationalists chose a name for their opponents — "replacement theology" — that made covenant theology sound like it hates the Jewish people. In doing so, they made it very hard to have a theological conversation. But the global church across two millennia does not agree with them: Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican — none of these traditions hold to dispensationalism. American evangelical Christian Zionism is a geographically and historically bounded phenomenon that has mistaken itself for universal Christianity.

The Christians Nobody Talks About

Here is where the theological abstraction becomes human.

Palestinian Christians are not newcomers. Many of their families have worshiped in the same churches since the first century. They are among the oldest Christian communities on earth. They celebrate Easter in Bethlehem, in Nazareth, in Jerusalem — in the same towns where the events of the Gospels took place.

And they are disappearing.

The Palestinian Christian population has collapsed from approximately 18% of Palestine in 1948 to less than 2% today. The Nakba displaced around 90,000 Palestinian Christians and saw the forced closure of some 30 churches. In the current conflict, the Greek Orthodox Church of Saint Porphyrius — one of the oldest Christian sites in the world — was bombed. The Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza was struck. Families who had lived in Bethlehem for two thousand years are leaving, because they cannot survive what is being done to them.

When over 1,000 American pastors and Christian influencers traveled to Israel in recent years, they did not meet with Palestinian Christians. Not one stop in Bethlehem. Not one meeting with the evangelical pastors in the West Bank. Twenty-one Middle Eastern evangelical leaders issued a collective public plea to the global church. The mainstream American evangelical establishment largely ignored it.

A pastor in the West Bank said it plainly: "Palestinian Christians are just totally absent from American evangelical thought. I can't speak for everyone, but in my experience I think most don't think about or know that there are Christians in the West Bank at all."

An open letter from Palestinian Christians to Western church leaders and theologians, written in the wake of the October 2023 war, said: "We are profoundly troubled when the name of God is invoked to promote violence and religious national ideologies... Silence has consequences. It sends an unspoken message that some lives matter less."

This is what happens when a theology has no room for Palestinian Christians. When the entire land is seen through a single eschatological lens — Jews must return for Jesus to return — the people already there become invisible. Or worse, they become an obstacle.

The Question Christian Zionism Doesn't Ask

Christians United for Israel has over 10 million members. It is one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the United States. Its founder, John Hagee, gave the benediction at the 2018 ceremony marking the US Embassy's move to Jerusalem. He has met with every Israeli prime minister since Menachem Begin. CUFI members sent 135,000 emails to the Trump White House supporting that embassy move.

The organizing theological premise is that the return of Jewish people to the land of Israel is a necessary precondition for the Second Coming of Christ.

Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, put the problem in direct terms: "It is for their own salvation, not for Jewish salvation; it's so they will see the Second Coming of the Messiah."

This is the question Christian Zionism tends not to ask: Is this love for the Jewish people, or is it love for our eschatological timeline?

If Jewish people are understood primarily as instruments in a prophetic narrative — necessary actors whose return to the land triggers the events of Revelation — then the support offered is not for their flourishing as human beings made in God's image. It is for their role in someone else's story.

What a Faithful Theology Looks Like

None of this means Christians should be indifferent to the Jewish people. The opposite is true.

Romans 11:28 says of ethnic Israel: "they are loved on account of the patriarchs, for God's gifts and his call are irrevocable." Paul prays for the salvation of his people (Romans 10:1). The Church owes an enormous debt to the Jewish people — the Scriptures came through them, the Messiah came from them, and the apostles were Jewish men and women. There is zero room in faithful Christianity for antisemitism, indifference to Jewish suffering, or hostility toward Jewish people.

But love for Jewish people is not the same as uncritical political support for the policies of a nation-state. Love for Jewish people is not the same as silence when their neighbors — who also happen to be our brothers and sisters in Christ — are suffering.

Isaiah 19:23-25 offers a vision of the kingdom that American Christian Zionism rarely engages: "In that day Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The LORD Almighty will bless them, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance.'" God calls Egypt "my people" — the same language used for Israel throughout the Old Testament. The promise of Abraham is bigger than any one nation.

A faithful theology of Israel:

Reads the Old Testament through its New Testament fulfillment, not around it
Holds the Jewish people as beloved by God without treating them as pawns in an eschatological program
Sees Palestinian Christians as real members of the body of Christ, not invisible inconveniences
Distinguishes between love for people and unquestioning political allegiance to governments
Recognizes that Christian Zionism as a system is historically recent, theologically contested, and globally a minority position

The Great Commission is not to support a nation-state. It is to make disciples of all nations — including, and perhaps especially, the ones the current theological consensus has made invisible.