In August 2008, the Pneuma Foundation offered a link (on our legacy website page called “News & Current Links”) to a transcript of an Arabic TV [Al-Jazeerah] program: “Rare look at Islam: Muslims discuss the annual exodus of 6 million African Muslims to Christianity.” A few weeks later it was learned that this was deliberate misinformation on the part of the speaker, as pointed out in a report by Patrick Sookhdeo of the Barnabas Fund entitled “Exaggerated Convert Figures Could Cost Lives.” The Pneuma Foundation editorial committee asked Dr. Calvin Smith, editor of Evangelical Review of Society and Politics to comment on the situation of secret believers in Muslim dominated nations.

In an article published by the Barnabas Fund, a charity which raises awareness of and supports persecuted Christians, its leader Dr Patrick Sookhdeo, a Christian expert on Islam, warns against disseminating statistics of large-scale Muslim conversions to Christianity. Sookhdeo believes such figures are often inaccurate, sometimes even exaggerated by some Western Christian organizations “whose financial support depends on the enthusiasm of Christians in their home countries.” He highlights how Islamists, too, engage in deliberate disinformation for their own purposes, citing the following example:

A story that six million African Muslims are becoming Christians every year resulted from claims made by Sheikh Ahmad al Katani of Libya in a televised interview shown on Al-Jazeera. The sheikh’s aim appeared to be to alarm Muslim viewers with high figures of Muslims leaving their faith in order to persuade them to give more generously to Islamic missionary efforts in Africa.

Whether statistics are genuine, miscalculated or exaggerated, Sookhdeo’s point is clear: figures detailing widespread conversions to Christianity inflames Muslim sensibilities and can even cost lives.

It is a sobering warning. Indeed, Christians in many Muslim lands are already in a precarious position. That many Muslims might be converting to a downtrodden religious minority, to the deep alarm of Muslim leaders, makes it doubly so. Thus, in societies built upon a clan system and the need to protect family honour, so-called apostates are ruthlessly rooted out. Even here in the United Kingdom there have been several well-publicized reports of ex-Muslims being targeted for converting to Christianity. An former missionary in Arab North Africa told me of a well-known saying among missionaries to Muslim countries: “Islam follows a Christian convert to the grave”. Imprisonment and killings of even the most elderly Christians testify to this.

All this leaves evangelistically-motivated Western Christians (notably classical Pentecostals, whose pneumatology and eschatology drive their urgent evangelistic activity) with somewhat of a quandary. Repentance is a cause for Christian celebration, a reason to glorify God (Lk 15:10), which is why some Western Christian organizations publish conversion statistics. For them these figures translate into actual, real people who have discovered Jesus Christ as their personal saviour. Indeed, this is why the Pneuma Foundation recently published the statistics in question concerning Christian growth in Muslim lands.

Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Politics of Apocalypse: The History and Influence of Christian Zionism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), xv+221pages, ISBN 9781851684533.

Recent years have witnessed a notable scholarly interest in the instrumental role played by some Christians in helping to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which ultimately led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. From an Evangelical standpoint, Stephen Sizer in particular has expressed criticism of early Christian Zionism, while more recently Paul Wilkinson has challenged Sizer’s approach by focusing on and portraying dispensationalists during this period in a far more positive light. For some pro-Israel Evangelicals, efforts by several senior nineteenth century British politicians to create the conditions necessary to secure a Jewish homeland are perceived as an historical ‘Cyrus moment’ whereby God utilised a secular power to restore his people to their covenantal and ancestral homeland.

Dan Cohen-Sherbok’s book likewise explores how Christian Zionists helped establish a Jewish homeland, drawing strongly upon Sizer’s research (which he acknowledges at the outset). Yet whereas Sizer’s polemical (and unnecessarily pejorative) approach is aimed at an Evangelical audience divided over its response to modern Israel, for the most part Cohn-Sherbok offers his readers a more dispassionate and objective appraisal. As such, the historical narrative which unfolds during the first three-quarters of his book is permitted to speak for itself, without constant recourse to criticism of the main actors, thus making it all the more readable and compelling. This is possibly because he sets out to demonstrate how Zionist thinking was central both to emerging and also mainstream, historic British nineteenth-century Christianity, unlike Sizer who arguably portrays early Christian Zionists as a minority on the fringes of orthodoxy.

Nonetheless, there are structural issues concerning how some of the book’s material is presented. For example, the bulk of Cohn-Sherbok’s narrative gives almost equal time to Jewish religious and secular Zionism, rather than focusing on Christian Zionism alone. Clearly, both Zionist camps overlapped to a degree, drawing upon and mutually exploiting each other’s agenda to further their own. Nonetheless, Cohn-Sherbok’s title and stated aim is somewhat misleading as the book does not focus wholly upon Christian Zionism. Moreover, the compelling narrative which unfolds during the first 150 pages or so of Cohn-Sherbok’s book shifts abruptly in the last quarter of the book, suddenly exploring Christian Zionist influences upon Washington’s foreign policy. Particularly noteworthy is how Cohn-Sherbok quotes lengthily from pre-tribulationist Tim LeHaye’s Left Behind books, a dispensationalist Christian fiction series set in an end-times seven year tribulation period which commences after the Church has been raptured, or caught up to heaven. It is quite one thing to discuss how LeHaye’s books were bestsellers that sold millions of copies in the U.S., but it is quite another to extrapolate from this the thesis that Evangelical dispensationalism therefore lies at the heart of U.S. politics and foreign policy. Indeed, British Christianity indirectly helped create the State of Israel, while its North American counterpart contributed (and continues to do so) towards sustaining it. But contrary to popular European opinion, North American Evangelicalism is far from homogenous, and while it is true that many Christians in the U.S. lend strong support to modern Israel, this is not necessarily borne out of a dispensationalist influence upon U.S. politics. Consider, for example, how post-Holocaust theology has contributed to expressions of support for Israel from across Christendom ever since the State of Israel was founded in 1948.

As the title indicates, this book is concerned with who owns the Holy Land. At the outset, Gary Burge explains how he struggles with rival biblical versus historical claims to the land by both Jews and Arabs, asking if it can really be justifiable to evict Arabs who have lived on the land for centuries on the basis of an ancient promise made in the book of Joshua. He also questions the eschatological zeal driving Christian Zionism which he believes ignores major ethical problems in Israel today. Hence, Burge is keen to provide an alternative view of the situation in the Middle East to Christians he believes are not being told the entire story. Yet despite championing Palestinian self-determination without Israeli interference, nonetheless he also believes Israel’s security and right to exist must be secured if there is to be lasting peace in the region. Moreover, while the Old Testament covenant has been abrogated, this “should not diminish the church’s respect for Judaism nor the rights of the Jewish people to live in the land of Israel” (xviii).

The book begins with a description and historical survey of the land, before moving on to theme of land ownership in the Old Testament. Burge demonstrates how the land is intimately connected to God’s covenant with Abraham and Israel. Yet control of the land was conditional upon Israel’s faithfulness: “Possession of the land is linked to covenant fidelity” (74). Israel does not actually own the land, rather she is a tenant entrusted with it only as long as she is in a covenant relationship with God. Thus, the promise of the land is indeed eternal, but only provided Israel remains faithful to God.

Burge then moves on to explore the theme of the land in the New Testament, noting how, by and large, it is absent there. Focusing on the abrogation of the Old Testament law, he argues that the promises made to Abraham are now spiritualised in and through Jesus, who is a new Moses:

Jesus himself becomes the locus of the holy space … Just as Moses was leading the people of Israel to their promised land, so too, Jesus leads God’s people. But now we learn that Jesus himself is in reality that which the land had offered only in form. To grasp after land is like grasping after bread—when all along we should discover that Jesus is ‘the bread of life’ (175).

Gary M. Burge is professor of New Testament at Wheaton College and Graduate School.

Thus, the book argues, the true descendants of Abraham (that is, Christians rather than simply Jews) will inherit the whole world, rather than simply the tiny strip of land which is modern day Israel. Yet Burge cannot quite bring himself to reject fully the notion that the Jews and Judaism retain some special significance in the divine plan, stating that unbelieving Judaism is still beloved of God and retains an ‘enduring role’. “For the sake of their history, for the sake of the promises made to their ancestors, God will retain a place for Jews in history” (187). But whether Burge is simply suggesting Jewish believers are grafted onto the Church (cf Rom 11:17ff), or else something more substantial, is unclear. The book concludes with a brief survey of Palestinian Christianity, a critique of Christian Zionism (“Many of us within the evangelical church are offended by Christian Zionism”, 246), and highlights Evangelical organisations that reject Christian Zionism.

Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 298 pages, ISBN 9780830853687.

An explosion of Evangelicalism (predominantly Pentecostalism) across Latin America during the 1980s quickly captured the attention of sociologists. Since then, this ripe field of research has been extended to include the social and political impact of explosive Pentecostal growth in Africa and elsewhere, while the entire phenomenon has arguably spawned a relatively new, interdisciplinary academic field, Pentecostal Studies, which is now well-established in respected universities and centres throughout Europe and North America.

If several decades of scholarly Pentecostal studies have taught us anything, it is the movement’s heterogeneity. Pentecostalism’s diverse histories, beliefs, and practices underpin various expressions of global Pentecostalism, which in turn demands a nuanced approach to the movement. Some scholars viewing Pentecostalism as essentially homogeneous have discovered this to their cost, producing research that has ultimately proved flawed and been ridiculed within the academic community.

Yet despite these apparently disparate expressions of Pentecostalism, nevertheless there are features common to most. These include styles of worship, pneumatology, and especially charismata (spiritual gifts), especially glossolalia (speaking in tongues). Another, arguably, is Zionism. Several years ago, when I delivered a lecture to a Pentecostal Studies group at the University of Birmingham, the subject of Israel was raised. Given Pentecostalism’s diverse nature, together with the various expressions represented there, I sought students’ views on the modern state of Israel. Of more than a dozen postgraduates, I do not recall any student expressing other than a positive view of Israel. I suppose this should not be that surprising. After all, Pentecostalism’s eschatology is historically strongly influenced by dispensationalism, which has helped to ensure that classical Pentecostalism is strongly Zionist by nature. Even though one can find Pentecostals today who are not Zionist or support the modern state of Israel, nonetheless Zionism has become a defining feature of classical Pentecostalism which has since been embraced by other expressions of Pentecostalism throughout the world.

It is because of this pro-Israel stance that Pentecostals (or, for that matter, any other Christians who believe the Jews remain God’s people and who support the modern state of Israel) should be aware of Stephen Sizer’s book, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? which is highly critical of Christian Zionism. In his book, Sizer traces the roots and history of Christian Zionist dispensationalism, its theological emphases, and what he considers to be its damaging political implications. The book concludes with what Sizer refers to as a `a covenantal alternative’.

Sizer argues that British dispensationalism was instrumental in creating the necessary political will within the British political establishment to create a Jewish homeland within the land that fell at that time under the British Mandate. He also states that British dispensationalism, which predated the American variant, went on to influence U.S. Christian perceptions of Israel. Thus, the book argues that whereas British dispensationalism helped to create the modern state of Israel, U.S. dispensationalists (and those influenced by it) provide Israel with ongoing legitimacy and active support. Among those at the forefront of garnering political support for Israel are several leading Pentecostal televangelists, which brings us right back to where this essay began, namely, Pentecostal attitudes towards Israel.