When Jesus told the 12 disciples to shake the dust off their feet in protest of any town that did not receive them, it is easy to forget their mission was among fellow believers in Yahweh. Jews were speaking to Jews, and the message was simple: The kingdom of God is near.

But Jesus foresaw even greater opposition than rejection, according to Matthew 10. His disciples would be dragged before councils, flogged in the synagogues, and betrayed to death by their own brothers, he warned. “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves.”

Christian discourse on the Holy Land conflict is often similarly contentious.

“A conversation is needed,” said Darrell Bock, senior research professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). “People talk at each other, not to each other. But with the emotion and distance between the two positions, is it even possible to try?”

Not from what another Bible scholar witnessed when each camp gathers alone.

“Their conferences only preach to the choir,” said Rob Dalrymple, course instructor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at the Flourish Institute, the seminary for evangelical Presbyterians in the ECO denomination. “Nothing changes; it only reinforces how bad the other side is.”

Each academic belongs to a community traditionally associated with one or the other side of the Israel-Palestine conflict. DTS teaches dispensationalism, which anticipates the restoration of Jews to the Promised Land before the return of Christ. Presbyterians adhere to covenant theology, which interprets the promises given to Israel—including the land—as fulfilled in Christ.

The Jews of Jesus’ day also had factions. But while “shake the dust off” was the instruction given to disciples in the face of opposition to the gospel, to all who believed in him he gave a very different message in the Sermon on the Mount:

Take the log out of your own eye first.

One group of Bible scholars, Christians in Conversation on the Middle East (CCME), has “emphasized self-critique from the very beginning,” said Alicia Jackson, associate professor of Old Testament at Vanguard University, which is affiliated with a Pentecostal movement that is often pro-Israel. “And the heart of the group is to love each other despite our differences.”

But the challenge is immense—and sensitive in their communities. CCME had originally pledged to be private.

“I heartily agree on the need for introspection,” said Bruce Fisk, who is a former professor of New Testament at Westmont College and is married to a Palestinian with origins from Bethlehem. “But why would anyone advertise doubts, lingering questions, and ‘logs’ when they feel under siege? Trust is lacking; fear abounds.”

And thus CCME members strove to get to know one another first.

Discussions began between Dalrymple and Fisk in 2018, with Bock joining a year later. They recruited others with the same desire for healthy conversations and met for the first time at the Society for Biblical Literature (SBL) convention in San Diego, discussing how to expand the initiative. Candidates wrote a statement on how they viewed the conflict, but more importantly they told personal stories about how they came to care. Zoom meetings ensued, and each prospective participant endured the “hot seat” as they introduced themselves.

Eventually they discussed the issues in the Middle East.

COVID-19 caused the emerging group to cancel its planned in-person gathering in 2020. But the evangelical Institute for Biblical Research (IBR) approved their formation of a specialty research group the following year, called Scripture, Hermeneutics, and the Middle East. Seeking to connect biblical interpretation with Holy Land realities, CCME members made a three-year commitment to host a seminar at each annual SBL gathering, starting with Denver in 2022.

Once there, they first had lunch together to move budding online relationships toward face-to-face friendships. The session then proceeded in typical academic fashion, with interested colleagues listening to papers presented on the theme—“Israel Then and Now”—and the formal responses.

And they forged a Christian bond—until October 7 put everything to the test.

Theology: A Contact Sport

Forty days later in San Antonio, CCME’s 2023 SBL session packed out the room.

The theme was “Israel and the Church,” which included hermeneutical topics such as whether the now mostly Gentile body of Christ completes, fulfills, or supersedes the promises for Jews in God’s plan. But the theme was also political, asking if New Testament authors envisioned possession of land for ethnic Israel and whether the modern nation-state either implements or benefits from the Old Testament promises.

It was still an academic gathering—but one preceded by extensive email anguish.

The Hamas terrorist attack and subsequent Israel Defense Forces response had sent CCME communication into overdrive. Ordinary seminar planning gave way to multipage missives that took hours to write and read. Zoom meetings stopped as members became too involved with responses within their own networks, each trying to make sense of what happened, why, and what followed.

Fisk believed the Israeli response, strengthened by American evangelical support, was “wildly disproportionate and indiscriminate.” Bock spoke of urban warfare within an underground tunnel network and Iran’s role in provoking “masses of people who want to wipe Israel from the face of the earth.”

The conversation was heated, but participants’ commitments held. They offered apologies when language went too far and graciously thanked each other for their honesty. No one proposed canceling the seminar.

“This was the test,” Dalrymple said. “In light of what we were trying to do, we had to continue to love and respect each other.”

God was their glue.

“Prayer is so important when emotions are running high,” Jackson said. “We don’t reduce people to positions but sit together and validate each other’s pain.”

But after the conference, the pain continued. As the world debated casualty counts, cease-fires, and settler-colonialism, some CCME scholars confessed to being exhausted and depressed. Despite maintaining mutual esteem, they could not bridge the issues—as children perished in the rubble of Gaza and antisemitism seeped into popular discourse.

“Theology,” one said, “is apparently a contact sport.”

And it wore them out. Since January, apart from basic academic business to plan for the 2024 conference, communication has waned. Some lamented that everyone went back to their rhetorical corners. Others sensed progress and felt the discussion was more important than ever. They did not pretend they could solve the conflict, nor change each other.

But after once hoping to model a difficult conversation, they paused.

Wise by Human Standards

Jesus’ disciples often quarreled. Each time, he countered by emphasizing the importance of service—even to demonstrate by washing their feet.

But bickering is not these scholars’ problem, as they have honored each other consistently. Bock facilitated an article by Fisk in the DTS academic journal. Dalrymple invited Bock onto his Determinetruth website’s livestream, where he encourages the church to live up to its gospel calling. And Jackson commended her male colleagues for the warm welcome they gave her, which some women fail to experience in some evangelical academic contexts.

But prior to taking up the towel, Jesus stated in John 12 that unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it cannot produce much fruit. In reference primarily to his crucifixion, the comment was prompted—appropriately enough—by a Gentile request for an audience with the Jewish Messiah.

The CCME kernel of hope has not died, but conversation has hit an impasse. Shifting metaphors to the parable of the sower, has their seemingly buried seed of initiative found rocky soil, a scorching sun, or a dormant harvest yet to come?

Yet as first-century controversies swirled and believers feared being ostracized by their communities—the original reason for CCME’s privacy—Jesus told them to keep walking in the light, lest the darkness overtake them. And while he assured his listeners that he did not come to judge those who did not keep his word, failure to do so would condemn them on the Last Day (John 12:48).

These words include the Matthew 7 command to find the log in one’s own eye first.

A different spirit animated the church in Corinth, as members touted their favored theologians. Not much is known about the factions that backed Apollos or Peter, but Paul rebuked them by calling attention to their past: “Not many of you were wise by human standards” (1 Cor. 1:26). Similarly, CCME scholars remember that they were once far less informed about the issues than they are today.

Bock did not even know about his own Jewish heritage until age 13.

His parents had left Judaism, but his uncle would take him to synagogue when he visited his cousins in Oklahoma. Bock became a Christian in college and thereafter dedicated himself to studying the Jewish background of the Bible and the Second Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day.

During his doctoral studies in Scotland, he forged a friendship with Gary Burge, a leading US evangelical voice for the Palestinians. For the 40 years since then, they have discussed the conflict, and Bock—despite criticism—has spoken at the Christ at the Checkpoint conference, led by Palestinian evangelicals at Bethlehem Bible College (BBC). Yet his Zionist convictions are clear, and in 2018, Bock wrote Israel, the Church, and the Middle East: A Biblical Response to the Current Conflict.

Jackson, meanwhile, “can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t care about Israel.” Her father taught her about the Holocaust as she imbibed A Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. His message was never political, but growing up in a Jewish community in Portland, Oregon, the family showed solidarity with the local synagogue to commemorate together the genocide against Jews.

Her heart was broken further by a visit to Israel in 2010 led by BBC’s Jack Sara, where she met Palestinian Christians who described their experience of Israeli occupation. Some of the evangelical leaders and their Messianic Jewish counterparts working for reconciliation remain her heroes today. Jackson, nonetheless, is a committed Zionist, believing the Jews’ covenantal connection to the land is eternal, with the prophecies foretelling a permanent restoration. But within this, she clarified that “God’s heart is never for violence.”

Such violence drove her colleagues from their original support of Israel.

Dalrymple grew up Southern Baptist, memorized dispensational end-times charts, and attended graduate school at the conservative Liberty University. Like many, he viewed the 1948 establishment of Israel as fulfillment of prophecy and its victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as a miracle. Academic study moved him away from Christian Zionist theology, but it was not until a 2003 trip to Israel that he even discovered Christians existed in Palestine.

A second trip to Israel in 2008 introduced him to evangelicals at BBC, and their testimony of the realities of occupation brought him to tears. He witnessed firsthand how checkpoints constricted local movement, how the separation wall cut through family farms, and how Jewish settlements steadily confiscated West Bank territory—and he felt terribly guilty.

“This is because of people like me, who say God will bless those who bless Israel,” Dalrymple said of his thoughts at the time. “We are contributing to the oppression of the Palestinian people.”

There was no exact aha moment for Fisk, who also grew up dispensationalist. But his repeated travels to Israel since the early 2000s introduced him to the diversity of the people, though he went there simply to strengthen his lectures in New Testament geography. And as he developed concern for Jews and Gentiles alike, he aligned primarily with Palestinians in describing the conflict as “asymmetric and unjust.”

With Dalrymple and other founding members, in 2018 Fisk launched the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East to help Americans discover the “best voices on both sides.” Under its auspices, he is near completion of an eight-volume curriculum for an irenic introduction to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Dividing Wall

Background matters. “Wounds from a friend can be trusted,” states Proverbs 27:6, so only those with a known history of advocacy might dare to find the logs in the eyes of their own communities. And the scholars were cautious: No one wanted to speak on behalf of those in the land.

“Self-criticism is difficult because it is seen as a defection, and with stakes as high as they are, this is dangerous,” said Bock. “But as Christians, we are almost compelled to do it.”

The almost is purposeful. Since issues are complex, the word compelled may risk mobilization without the requisite humility. But with these caveats in place, “iron sharpens iron” as the Proverbs chapter continues.

Hearing other voices is critical, said Dalrymple, as feedback helped him discover a flawed attitude in his book These Brothers of Mine: A Biblical Theology of Land and Family and a Response to Christian Zionism, published in 2015. His critique at the time was that those of a dispensationalist perspective who view the land separately from other promises fulfilled in Christ betray a not-high-enough view of Jesus.

“I didn’t mean it quite like that, but I wrote it,” Dalrymple said. “It was not fair.”

Jackson said that the Book of Ephesians anchors her in these difficult self-reflective conversations. Paul, unlike in his other letters, is not addressing a particular conflict but is calling believers into a deeper Christian life. Applied to the discourse on Israel and Palestine, Jackson cited the apostle’s emphasis on unity, the dividing wall of hostility, and the reality of a spiritual battle.

“My prayer is for the Holy Spirit to convict me of any attitude not in line with the love of Christ,” she said. “We have to be aware of the enemy at work while anchoring ourselves in Jesus’ victory on the cross.”

Both sides are reluctant to identify fault in their allies, said Fisk. But in Christ, both sides are still part of his spiritual family. His grand vision is to help everyone become less absolute in their assessment of the conflict, even as he struggles when his original side remains in staunch support of Israel. Rather than identifying logs in eyes, however, he said an easier task might simply be to forge common ground upon what each has learned from the other.

Conversation has helped Fisk recognize how much the specter of antisemitism haunts both Messianic Jews and Christian Zionists. Descriptions of the multiethnic nature of the body of Christ can risk downplaying the ethnically distinct role of the Jews. And while he maintains his position that Old Testament promises of land are fulfilled in Jesus, he has come to see a “handful of texts” in the New Testament that hint at territorial restoration.

But another problem with “logs” is the necessity of specifics.

“Many insist that they are willing to criticize Israel,” said Fisk, continuing with deliberate emphasis, “But. Never. Do.”

Legitimate Questions

For his own part, Fisk said that he is not studied enough in Islamic theology to comment specifically on the compatibility of Jewish and Muslim perspectives on the land. And he defended Christian Palestinians who, despite their long-standing commitment to nonviolence and denunciations of terrorism, grow frustrated when asked afresh to condemn—with specifics—each new atrocity.

But detailed critiques without firsthand experience—even from those who are highly invested—are difficult amid contested media narratives, Jackson said. She recognizes the desire for precision is legitimate and is not trying to evade it. But with settler violence, for example, the facts of what truly happened in any given reported event are sometimes hard to determine.

Yet the settlement issue helps identify logs in eyes, she said. Some Christian Zionists can label any criticism of Israeli government policies as lack of support for the Jews. Settlement expansion may not be a good idea, an attitude not uncommon among Israelis. And many who are pro-Israel tend to ignore or minimize Palestinian suffering. Though Jackson was previously aware of the disputed politics, dialogue with CCME colleagues increased her already deep compassion for both Jews and Palestinians and her burden to encourage Christians to love them equally.

Jackson’s biblical interpretation leads her to a unique position on the founding of Israel. In her view, God’s promised restoration of Jews to the land was not envisioned by the prophets as a conquest like the one in the time of Joshua, where inhabitants were removed from the land. But the horrors of war led to Palestinian displacement, and perhaps relations today would be much improved if Israel—or the surrounding Arab states—had facilitated their resettlement with citizenship rights.

Yet she reads the “dry bones” passage of Ezekiel 36–39 with consideration of how God often works in stages. The physical restoration of God’s people to the promised land precedes their spiritual restoration in the Messiah—land first, reform second. To Jackson, what is happening may be the beginning of a revival, for while Israel in 1948 included only a handful of Messianic Jews, today an estimated 30,000 live there. God regathered Jews and is now drawing more to faith in Yeshua.

“God’s heart is for Israel to dwell with the nations, for the blessing of the nations,” Jackson said. “What we see now is not the full expression of that vision, though it may be an initial phase.”

Bock also recognized how God’s shalom will eventually fulfill the Isaiah 19 prophecy of peace with a highway connecting Israel with Egypt and Assyria (modern-day Iraq) as joint peoples of God. In the interim, Israel’s existential fear is real and legitimate; while in a region that lives by “eye for an eye,” it is hard to ask for restraint. And the Bible does give clear examples of how God worked to remove entirely a source of antisemitic evil—see the commanded extermination of Amalek.

Nonetheless, Bock said Israel has not done enough to care for noncombatants, limiting food and humanitarian aid. The extent of destruction has been excessive, with not enough protection for civilian life. He said the overall policy of disproportionate deterrence, while understandable, contributes to a cycle of perpetual violence and deepens mutual animosity.

Such logs in eyes will not help Israel in the long run.

“The Christian contribution must be to pursue peace while balancing different biblical themes,” Bock said. “Our group tries to do so, for without understanding where people are in their perspectives, all moral appeals will fall on deaf ears.”

Dalrymple has seen such failures and sought to adjust. Like Fisk, he has come to appreciate how Jews experience antisemitism and Christian Zionists fear its spread. Advocating forcefully against systemic injustice can unwittingly trigger such feelings. He acknowledges some antisemitism in the pro-Palestinian camp.

And the argument that Israel has no right to exist remains, as a minority voice, believes Dalrymple. Though not a scholar on the subject, he said that settler-colonialist discourse painting Israel as the political or theological project of Europe is incorrect. It is “problematic” to deny Judaism’s historic sense of the land, as it is to overlook that Jews lived in Palestine before the Israeli state—others came subsequently as refugees, not resource-seekers.

“Too often we debate issues by setting up straw men,” Dalrymple said. “But with real people you learn to nuance and discover where something is heard as offensive. It sparks a response of ‘Ah, I see.’”

Does this mean that settler-colonialism language is a log in the Palestinian eye? Like the accusation of genocide, Fisk said, this is a question for lawyers—not biblical scholars. But after years of Palestinian believers exerting “heroic energy” to invite theologically like-minded evangelicals to hear their perspective—and largely failing—they have grown closer to politically like-minded allies among liberation theologians and in the anticolonial Global South.

“Time will tell if they come to regret these alliances,” said Fisk. “But they ask, ‘How can they see what the followers of Jesus cannot?’”

Soils of Response

It is a question both sides can ask—and repeatedly do. During Passion Week, in the John 12 passage Jesus quoted Isaiah 6 to say that God had blinded the eyes of his people. But while discussing the soils of response to his early ministry, in Matthew 13 Jesus referred to the Septuagint rendering of the same prophetic passage to say that from a calloused heart, the people had closed their own eyes.

Willful or otherwise, the popular gap on Israel and Palestine remains.

But most damning is Jesus’ warning to the Pharisees in John 9:41—“If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains.” One would think a log would be obvious; human nature reveals it is not.

Isaiah’s commission, in fact, was to preach in such a manner that this guilt was laid bare—“otherwise, they might see with their eyes” (6:10). Understandably frustrated, the prophet asked, “How long, Lord?” (v. 11).

God’s response evokes images from Gaza and the border communities of Galilee and Lebanon, now including parts of Beirut:

“Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lord has sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken” (vv. 11–12).

And the scholars of CCME—from different perspectives—continue their lament.

They have resumed planning for the 2024 SBL conference in San Diego, with participants including a Palestinian Christian and a Messianic Jewish rabbi. Jackson’s heart is for reconciliation. Fisk is confident his colleagues will defend him if he is mischaracterized, and he would do the same for them. Bock says that discussion is a success in itself. And Dalrymple finds hope that despite their distress, CCME extended its fellowship for an additional three years.

“The war in Gaza may end,” he said. “But the issues will not go away.”

The post Gaza War Strains Bible Scholars’ Model of Christian Conversation appeared first on Christianity Today.