For the Love of Zion : Christian Witness and the Restoration of Israel

Author: Kelvin Crombie

Paperback: 224 pages

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton Religious (September 4, 1991)

ISBN: 0340558059

About the Author

Kelvin Crombie is director of the Heritage Centre of Christ Church, Jerusalem. The centre is devoted to the active role Gentile Christians have played in the restoration of Israel over the past several hundred years, and the role of Evangelical Christianity in the modernisation of Jerusalem.

Christ Church, the first Anglican and first Protestant church in the Middle East, was built inside Jaffa Gate in the 1840’s and worked among Jerusalem’s large Jewish community, helping to establish the first Jewish farm outside the Old City. The Earl of Shaftesbury was one of its early supporters.

The story of Christian witness and the Restoration of Israel: 1820-1980, especially relating to the ministry of Christ Church in Jerusalem.

During the tremendous revivals that swept England and America in the 18th and 19th centuries, Christian ministers preached that the regathering of the Jews to Israel was an imminent sign of the "last days" and Messiah's soon return. Such British church and political leaders as Lord Palmerston and Lord Shaftesbury proclaimed that England in particular was divinely positioned to assist with Jewish settlement in the Middle East.

The "Restorationists" were to impact the policies and decisions of Great Britain when the government of David Lloyd George issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 in support of "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people". After decades of Christian advocacy for Jewish return to the Holy Land, the prevailing view among those western decision-makers at the Versailles Peace Conference was that they simply were recognizing pre-existing national rights and the biblical connection of the Jews with the land of their fathers in approving the British Mandate in Palestine.

In the Land of Israel itself, devout Christians were instrumental in aiding the Zionist cause. Colonel John Henry Patterson first commanded the Zion Mule Corps and then the Jewish Legion, which fought with the British armies to drive the Turks from Palestine in 1917. Thus he helped fulfill a goal of many Zionists (including a young Ze'ev Jabotinsky who served under Patterson) of a Jewish combat force and the revival of their ancient fighting spirit. Major-General Orde Wingate, a British intelligence officer in Mandate Palestine, risked his military career by secretly training special "night squads" (the Palmach) to carry out missions against Arab raiders and thus deter attacks on the Yishuv. The story of Jewish restoration to the Land of Israel is replete with many more examples of Christians who, sensing the prophetic significance of the return of the Jewish exiles and the rebirth of Israel, have played significant roles in nurturing the Zionist dream, persuading key political figures, influencing momentous historic events, saving Jews from peril, and enhancing the security and well-being of the modern state of Israel.