Before Scofield, Before Herzl, Christianity Has Always Been Zionist [1/2]

The term “Christian Zionism” is often thrown around as if it denotes a fringe modern aberration – a 20th-century invention tacked onto Christian theology. Nothing could be further from the truth. From its very birth, Christianity carried the expectation that God’s ancient people, the Jews, would return to their homeland and their Messiah.

As a non-Christian deeply engaged with Christian intellectual history, I argue passionately that labeling this age-old hope “Christian Zionism” is a misnomer, even a historical distortion.

Christianity, in its essence, has always been Zionist in the sense of anticipating Israel’s restoration. In its theological and eschatological foundations, Christianity has long carried an expectation of Israel’s restoration, embedded in scripture, patristic writings, and early doctrinal imagination, well before the term itself ever existed.

This conviction, though suppressed at times by theological trends and political power, courses through the centuries from the early Church to the Reformation to today. It is not a novel heresy but a deep continuity of Christian belief. Through history, supportive faith in the Jewish return to Zion has been intrinsic to Christianity’s story, and dismissing it as “modern” or “marginal” betrays a profound ignorance of Christian tradition.

Zion in the early Church: Ancient faith in Israel’s restoration

From the earliest post-apostolic age, Christians looked toward a future for Israel. The second-century Church Fathers held a vivid expectation that God was not finished with the Jewish people. Justin Martyr (100-165 AD), for example, despite believing the Church inherited Israel’s promises spiritually, nonetheless taught that the messianic Kingdom would be centered in a rebuilt Jerusalem.

In his famous Dialogue with Trypho – a debate with a Jewish scholar – Justin openly affirmed that he and “many other” orthodox Christians expected Jerusalem to be restored and the faithful of Israel gathered there with Christ in the end times. He insisted this was no personal whim but a mainstream hope, even citing the Hebrew prophets to underline that “there will be a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged” as foretold.

Other early fathers echoed this Zionward outlook. Irenaeus of Lyon (c.130-202) believed that “Jerusalem would one day be rebuilt,” welcoming a restored people of God from “all the nations” into an earthly millennial kingdom. Significantly, Tertullian (160-225) went further – he maintained it would specifically be the Jews who are restored to the Promised Land in the end, a literal fulfillment of prophecy.

Even if these Fathers differed on details, they agreed that biblical promises about Zion – Jerusalem and the Land of Israel – would literally come to pass in Christ’s Kingdom. The great translator Jerome (347-420), too, taught on the prophet Joel that in the “latter days” the Lord “will gather the called remnant from Judah…He will return the captives of Judah to Jerusalem.” In other words, a Jewish return to Jerusalem was foreseen as a part of God’s redemptive plan.

Far from being a strange modern obsession, the hope of Israel’s restoration was interwoven into the eschatology of early Christianity. It was simply understood as part of God’s promise, grounded in Scripture. The earliest Christians were, in this sense, proto-Zionists anticipating God’s future for Israel even as they labored for the Gospel among the nations.

Imperial Christianity and the suppression of Israel’s hope

If Zionism was intrinsic to the early Church’s hope, how did it come to be seen as an oddity? The turning point came with the fusion of Church and imperial power in the 4th century. As Christianity became the Roman Empire’s state religion, theological fashions shifted and a tragic estrangement from Judaism set in.

Influenced by Greek philosophy, the Alexandrian theologian Origen (185-254) pioneered an allegorical reading of Scripture that spiritualized Israel’s prophecies. To Origen, material and physical fulfillments (like an earthly kingdom or a Jewish return to land) seemed crude. He taught that with Christ’s first coming, all Old Testament promises should be understood metaphorically, not literally.

This approach gutted the earlier hope for a restored Jerusalem – prophecies of Israel’s future were reinterpreted as symbols for the Church, and any expectation of Jewish restoration was effectively erased.

In the 5th century, Augustine cemented this allegorical theology into Church doctrine. Augustine’s influential amillennial stance treated the prophesied “Millennium” as a present spiritual reign, not a future earthly kingdom, thereby denying a literal future for Israel.

In his paradigm, the Church was the New Israel in full, and the Jewish people’s role had expired. Augustine’s system (often called “replacement theology”) left “no place for the Jews in God’s plan.” According to the prevailing medieval view derived from him, Jews were destined to wander as a cursed people – living proof of God’s judgment for rejecting Christ – until the end of time.

Under imperial Christianity, this theology of contempt had brutal real-world consequences. The once-persecuted Church now became persecutor. From Emperor Constantine onward, laws steadily curtailed Jewish rights, forbidding Jewish evangelism, banning new synagogues, and excluding Jews from public office.

By Augustine’s era, Church leaders taught that Jews should be kept in perpetual subjugation: allowed to survive, but only as “eternal witnesses” to Christian truth, humiliated and without restoration. Any notion that the Jewish people might be destined to rise again in their own nation was scorned or forgotten.

Medieval Christendom, tragically, often expressed its theology in violence – Crusaders en route to the Holy Land massacred Jewish communities as “Christ-killers,” seeing Jews as forsaken by God and fit only for punishment.

Thus, from roughly the 4th to 15th centuries, the original Christian Zionist hope was largely buried under the weight of replacement dogma and anti-Jewish policy. The idea of Israel’s future restoration survived only as a flicker in obscure corners of theology, at odds with the dominant narrative that the Church had permanently supplanted Israel. Yet that flicker was never fully extinguished.

The Reformation: Renewed reading of Scripture revives the promise

The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century cracked open that medieval consensus. By insisting on sola Scriptura (Scripture alone) and translating the Bible for common people, the Reformers unwittingly rearmed Christians with the plain words of the prophets. As believers studied Hebrew and Greek texts afresh, ancient promises to Abraham and Israel resurfaced with new clarity.

Although magisterial Reformers like Luther and Calvin remained largely captive to Augustine’s amillennialism, a new generation of Bible readers – especially in Britain – began to ask: Does God still mean what He said to Israel? In the pages of Scripture, they found reason to say yes. Notably, the Geneva Bible of 1560 (an early English translation) included marginal notes on Romans 11 hinting at a future spiritual rebirth of the Jewish people.

Building on this, English theologian John Bale argued that the Jews would experience a national conversion to Christ at the end of days and again have a place in God’s kingdom. In 1563, John Foxe – better known for cataloguing Christian martyrs – wrote that God’s promises to the Jews were “remaining still in their force,” awaiting fulfillment.

As scholar Gerald McDermott observes, “British readers were told there is a future for the Jewish people that is distinct from that of Gentiles and that they would play a role in God’s drama at the end.” This was a radical departure from medieval theology: the Bible’s literal text was reasserting itself over allegory. What had been a faint flicker now grew into a steady flame of hope that Israel would be restored, just as the prophets said.

The Puritan revolution: Rediscovering Zion as divine promise

It was in the 17th century, however, that the trickle of Christian Zionist expectation swelled into a torrent. The Puritans – those fiercely Bible-centric English Protestants – drove a theological revolution in how Christians viewed the Jews. Immersed in the Old Testament, Puritans took biblical covenants and prophecies at face value. They asked, If God promised to regather Israel, why should we doubt it?

Leading Puritan voices answered emphatically that we should not. Scholar Thomas Brightman (1562-1607) wrote commentaries on Daniel and Revelation and posed the provocative question: “Shall they [the Jews] return to Jerusalem again?” His own reply thundered: “There is nothing more certain; the prophets do everywhere confirm it and beat upon it.”

Such confidence, drawn directly from Scripture, earned Brightman the title “the father of British Restorationism.” Other Puritans agreed. In 1621, Sir Henry Finch, a Member of Parliament and devout Puritan, published The World’s Great Restauration of the Jews. He boldly proclaimed that when the Bible speaks of “Israel,” it means the literal people of Israel – the physical descendants of Jacob – not allegorically the Church.

For insisting that God’s land promises to Jacob’s seed still stand, Finch was actually imprisoned and stripped of his status by King James I. Yet his work had already lit a fire in Puritan circles.

Across England and New England, Puritans increasingly taught that the Jews would one day turn to Christ and return to their land as part of God’s grand design. Influential pastors like John Cotton (in Boston) and Increase Mather (president of Harvard) eagerly anticipated a mass Jewish conversion followed by restoration to Palestine.

This expectation even permeated culture: the poet Andrew Marvell famously quipped that he would love his lady “till the conversion of the Jews,” meaning forever – since Jewish conversion was understood to occur at history’s climax.

Such references show how normal the idea had become in Puritan thought. Far from being marginal, the hope of Israel’s renaissance was central to Puritan eschatology. It was the era’s “theological common sense” that God’s truthfulness required the eventually literal fulfillment of biblical promises to the Jewish people.

This Puritan groundwork in the 1600s planted the seeds of an explicit Christian Zionism well before the modern age. It ensured that when Jews began to seek a return to Zion in later centuries, they would find learned Christian allies ready to champion their cause as a matter of biblical conviction.