Zoomtard

I am going to write a little bit about Christian Zionism (which is the [unwavering] support for theological reasons of the modern state of Israel) over the next few weeks. The Israeli budget was announced recently with another quarter billion for illegal settlements in Palestinian territory. The idea that Christians back this kind of thing up is like something from the Twilight Zone. If I could travel back in time, I’d advise Lenin to rename the USSR the Promised Land. American Christians would have swallowed communism whole if only the socialists had marketed right.

Students of religion talk about the innovation at the heart of the Jewish idea. Wander round the world or the anthropology section of your nearest library and you will find that the concepts of god that most societies have come up with falls under what we might call numen locale. They are local gods.

Kind of like I am here in Maynooth. Pregnant women stop me to ask me to kiss their bellies for luck. Children think they receive a blessing if they poke my hairy neck. It gets tedious, I tell ya.

Now a local god exists as a result of a religious experience, either individual or communal, that then becomes mythic. So a spring or a tree or a stone is invested with significance because of the remarkable thing that happened there. Wisdom sits in places and all that. Ratzinger acknowledges that this kind of thing happens in mariolatry. He writes:

A faint echo of these tendencies can be noted even now in Christianity: to less enlightened believers the Madonnas of Lourdes, Fatima or Altotting sometimes seem to be absolutely different beings and by no means simply the same person.

It is from this idea of numen locale that we have in all societies the idea of sacred space and holy ground. If we follow the theology implicit in it to its logical conclusion, then the soil itself at a space of sanctity is invested with meaning.

Surely then, if we had some appropriate means of transport, we could just dig out the soil and move it to some uncontested spot somewhere else. We’ll move the Dome of the Rock to Roscommon, where no one will really mind. And we’ll move L. Ron Hubbards house to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

With the El of Judaism, we find an entirely new idea, the numen personale, the Personal God. The “God of our Fathers” that is revealed through Moses is not the god of a particular place, but the god of men. Ratzinger says of this idea that, “God is seen on the plane of the I and You, not on the plane of the spatial”.

This God that Moses encounters is personal to all men, is the source of all power and is bound by the promises he has made to Abraham. In other words, his character goes beyond the qualities of God that we mostly assume. He is not simply a “prime mover” or a “first source”. He is not the essence behind the changing tides of time and the callous hands of fate. He has an intention and a project and a people he intends to involve in it. Therefore, there are a whole host of things he is not about.

This is drawn out for us in the enigmatic name he gives Moses, YHWH. “I AM”. Or “I am what I will be”. Or “I am what I am”. Moses asks for his name, and this God says, “Name? You can’t label this. Not even “Label-less” is a good enough label for me”. Before that he is known as Elohim. A single plurality. He is more than One but totally unified. He defies the flatness of monotheism but subverts the incoherence of polytheism. (He is what makes atheism possible.)

So what has this got to do with Christian Zionism? If YHWH was numen locale, then the idea of claiming the historical Israel and making it a the land of the nation for Jews would make sense. If YHWH was the spirit who invested Mount Horeb, where he first revealed himself to Moses with some divine spark, then we should maybe have the descendants of Moses take control of that territory. Or we could move all the soil of the Holy Land and spread it out in the Argentinian plains and settle everyone happily there to continue their tribal religion.

To describe Judaism however as a tribal religion would be to commit a particularly heinous intellectual and historical sin.

But YHWH is not just LORD of Arabia. He is the God of our Fathers, the God of men who can be known personally by all men. He is the God of promise, a promise made to one man, Abraham, that extends to all people, everywhere. As such, we can see how the message of Jesus and the community he formed fulfills the Old Testament hopes of the Hebrews. The numen personale cannot be kept captive inside a temple or inside a nation or the plaything of just one people. His whole purpose was to break down the dividing walls between people and use the people of his covenant to complete it. To disagree with this and to insist that the land of Palestine ought somehow to be controlled by the secular state of modern Israel seems to be stretching way outside the bounds of orthodoxy, as well as justice and wisdom.

Your Correspondent, Cries, “Donuts! Is there anything they can’t do?”