The opposition to Christian Zionism did not begin in the ivory tower and it has never stayed there. It has moved — deliberately and with organizational sophistication — from seminary lecture halls to denominational assembly floors, from academic journals to international conferences, from theological argument to political alliance. What was once a quiet internal debate within Western Christianity has become something considerably more aggressive: a coordinated, ecumenical, globally-funded campaign to delegitimize the biblical case for Israel and to silence the Christians who make it.

This article examines that campaign directly — its architects, its arguments, its methods, and its allies — and responds to it on the terms that matter most: the Word of God. The research of Dr. Thomas S. McCall, Senior Theologian of Zola Levitt Ministries, provides critical eyewitness documentation of the movement's most revealing public moment, a 2004 international conference in Jerusalem that stripped away every pretense of theological neutrality and exposed the anti-Christian Zionism campaign for what it is.

Dr. McCall holds a Th.M. in Old Testament studies and a Th.D. in Semitic languages and Old Testament from Dallas Theological Seminary. He served as co-author, mentor, pastor, and colleague alongside Zola Levitt for nearly thirty years, and his careful, scripturally-grounded responses to Christian Zionism's critics represent some of the most precise theological rebuttals in print. His work informs this article substantially, and Christians Standing With Israel is grateful for it — though the perspective and additions here are those of this author.

The Opposition Is Broader Than Replacement Theology

A common assumption among Christian Zionists is that the primary adversary is Replacement Theology — the supersessionist doctrine that the Church has displaced Israel in God's redemptive program. That assumption is correct as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. The opposition to Christian Zionism is considerably broader, and considerably less theologically motivated, than a straightforward disagreement over covenantal hermeneutics.

Among Christian Zionism's critics you will find not only Replacement Theologians, but mainline Protestant denominations whose institutional postures on Israel are indistinguishable from those of secular anti-Zionist organizations. You will find Roman Catholic liberation theologians whose theology of solidarity with the Palestinian cause has become their operative hermeneutic — the lens through which Scripture is read, rather than the other way around. You will find academic voices from prestigious evangelical institutions who have constructed carefully credentialed arguments against Christian Zionism while their theological conclusions align perfectly with the political interests of those who wish Israel did not exist. And you will find outright political actors — members of foreign legislatures, terrorist-adjacent advocacy organizations, and, in at least one documented case, a sitting chairman of the Palestinian Authority — who have found in anti-Christian Zionism a useful theological fig leaf for goals that have nothing to do with the Kingdom of God.

Satan does not restrict his instruments to the obviously wicked. He is far more effective when he works through those who wear clerical collars, hold theological doctorates, and speak the language of justice, peace, and the love of Christ.

Jerusalem, April 2004 — The Sabeel Conference

In April 2004, an organization called the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center — founded and led by Dr. Naim Ateek, then Canon of St. George's Cathedral in East Jerusalem — convened its 5th International Conference at the Roman Catholic Notre Dame Centre in Jerusalem. The conference theme was "Challenging Christian Zionism: Theology, Politics, and the Palestine-Israel Conflict." Two years in the planning, it drew more than 600 delegates from over 30 countries, with roughly half coming from the United States. It was the largest and most internationally visible gathering of anti-Christian Zionism voices ever assembled.

The speaker list was a deliberate demonstration of ecumenical breadth. Representatives came from the Vatican, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion, mainline Protestant denominations, and at least one prominent evangelical institution — Wheaton College. The message could not have been clearer: this was not a fringe protest. This was an organized, well-resourced, internationally coordinated attempt to mobilize the full weight of institutional Christianity against the biblical case for Israel.

The conference concluded with a field trip to Ramallah and a private audience with Yasser Arafat — then still chairman of the Palestinian Authority and a man whose decades of directing terrorism against Israeli civilians were a matter of public record. Dr. Hanan Ashrawi was also present. Arafat expressed his delight at seeing "the Church," as represented by the Sabeel delegates, standing in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The delegates apparently arranged no similar meeting with any Israeli leader.

If there was any remaining doubt about the political nature of the exercise, that meeting in Ramallah dissolved it.

The Arguments — and the Responses They Deserve

What the Sabeel conference placed on display was not a new set of arguments. It was a familiar set of arguments dressed in new institutional clothing. Each one deserves to be named and answered directly.

Argument One: Christian Zionism Has No Historical Roots — It Began with Darby

The Anglican voice at the conference — the ubiquitous Stephen Sizer, whose own trajectory toward antisemitism and a formal twelve-year ban from Anglican ministry we have documented elsewhere on this site — argued that Christian Zionism is a modern invention traceable to the dispensationalist movement begun by John Nelson Darby in the early 19th century. The implication: it is a theological novelty with no serious historical pedigree, and should be treated accordingly.

This claim is simply false, and the historical record refutes it without ambiguity. Darby himself never claimed to have invented the doctrines associated with Christian Zionism — he claimed only to have recovered and systematized truths already present in Scripture. More importantly, the Christian expectation of Jewish restoration to the land predates Darby by centuries. Francis Kett was burned at the stake in 1589 for teaching that the Jews would return to their land. Thomas Brightman articulated restoration theology in 1607. The English Puritan movement of the 17th century was saturated with the expectation of Jewish restoration — so much so that the universities they founded in the New World, Harvard and Yale, required all students to learn Hebrew. The Puritans named their settlements after Hebrew words. Their theological descendants in 19th-century Britain produced Lord Shaftesbury's parliamentary advocacy for a Jewish homeland and William Blackstone's 1891 petition to President Harrison. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 — the British government's formal support for a Jewish national home in Palestine — was drafted in a cultural and political environment shaped in no small part by centuries of Christian Zionist conviction.

Darby is not the origin of Christian Zionism. He is one chapter in a very long story.

Argument Two: The Disciples "Did Not Get It" in Acts 1:6 — Just Like Christian Zionists Today

Dr. Mitri Raheb, the Lutheran pastor from Bethlehem, argued that when the disciples asked the risen Christ in Acts 1:6 whether He would "at this time restore the kingdom to Israel," they were demonstrating nationalist, narrow-minded blindness — and that contemporary Christian Zionists are their theological heirs, making the same mistake. He meant this as a devastating criticism.

It is, in fact, an extraordinary compliment — and it rests on a fundamental misreading of the text.

The disciples asked their question after forty days of post-resurrection instruction from Yeshua on the subject of the Kingdom of God (Acts 1:3). These were not men confused by political nationalism. They were men who had walked with the risen Messiah, heard Him teach, and were now asking a precise theological question grounded in the prophetic tradition they had spent forty days revisiting. The Greek verb translated "restore" — apokathistēmi — is a key eschatological term appearing in Malachi, Daniel, and across the prophetic literature. It carries the specific meaning of a definitive, future restoration of Israel's Davidic kingdom. The disciples were asking the right question, in the right place — the Mount of Olives, the very location Zechariah identified as the site of the Messiah's return — at arguably the right moment.

What did Jesus say? He did not rebuke the question. He did not correct the premise. He did not tell them the restoration of Israel was a misguided nationalistic fantasy that the New Covenant had rendered obsolete. He told them the timing was in the Father's authority, and that before the restoration could come, the gospel had to go to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. The hope was not dismissed. The commission was given. The restoration remains on the divine agenda — its timing simply not yet revealed.

Dr. Raheb called the disciples "nationalistic, narrow-minded, and blinded." Jesus called them His witnesses. The choice of whose assessment to credit ought not to be difficult.

Argument Three: The Church Is Merely an Afterthought in Dispensationalist Theology

Dr. Gary Burge, then a New Testament professor at Wheaton College, offered what he presented as a fair historical account of Christian Zionism's development — and then concluded that dispensationalists believe the Church is merely an afterthought in redemptive history, a theological placeholder inserted between God's "real" plans for Israel.

This is a caricature, not a description. The overwhelming majority of those who hold to a distinction between Israel and the Church in God's redemptive program do not believe, and have never taught, that the Church is a divine afterthought. The position is precisely the opposite: the Church was always in the eternal plan of God, fully foreknown before the foundation of the world, but progressively revealed — with the full revelation of the Church's nature, calling, and destiny disclosed through the apostolic ministry, and supremely through the Pauline epistles. The Church is not lesser than Israel in God's economy. It is distinct. Both are part of a single, unified plan of redemption. The distinction between them does not demote one or elevate the other. It simply reads the biblical text as it is written, rather than forcing all promises made to national Israel into an allegorical framework that makes them refer to the Church instead.

Argument Four: The Bible Is Dangerous, and the God of the Old Testament Is Immoral

The most staggering presentation at the conference came from Dr. Michael Prior, a Roman Catholic Bible professor at St. Mary's College. Prior declared, to the applause of more than 600 delegates, that "the Bible is a very dangerous book," and that the God described in Exodus and Joshua — the God who directed the conquest of Canaan — is an immoral God, guilty of ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Canaanite peoples.

There is nothing subtle about what Prior did. He did not merely argue against a particular interpretation of Scripture. He attacked the moral character of the God of Scripture. He placed himself — and by extension, the assembled delegates who applauded him — in the position of judging the Almighty, finding Him wanting, and declaring His revealed Word dangerous to human flourishing.

The God of Exodus and Joshua is the God who raises up kingdoms and puts them down according to His own sovereign purposes. The displacement of the Canaanites was not random cruelty. It was divine judgment on a civilization whose wickedness had reached a threshold God had set and announced centuries before, when He told Abraham that the iniquity of the Amorites was "not yet complete" (Genesis 15:16). He waited four hundred years before the judgment fell. To call this "immoral" is not sophisticated theology. It is a refusal to submit to the sovereignty of God — the same God who will judge every nation, including the nations represented by the delegates who applauded Prior that afternoon.

That such a statement received applause from an assembled body of Christian clergy and scholars is not merely troubling. It is a diagnostic. It tells you precisely what the anti-Christian Zionism movement is willing to sacrifice in order to reach its conclusions: the authority of Scripture, the character of God, and the integrity of the theological tradition it claims to represent.

Argument Five: The Bush-Sharon Agreement Was Racist — and Terrorism Does Not Exist

Azmi Bishara, then an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset, addressed the conference and made claims that would be remarkable in any context. He condemned the Bush-Sharon letters — in which the United States affirmed that Arab refugees from the 1948 war and their descendants would not have a right of return to present-day Israel — as a second Balfour Declaration. He declared that "Islamophobia" was the most potent form of racism in the contemporary world. And he denied the existence of terrorism.

The last claim deserves particular attention. The conference was held three years after September 11, 2001. The suicide bombing campaigns that had claimed hundreds of Israeli civilian lives in the preceding years — on buses, in restaurants, in markets — were not distant abstractions. They were fresh. For a speaker at an international Christian conference to stand before 600 delegates and deny that terrorism exists — and for those delegates to receive this without recorded objection — reveals the degree to which political solidarity had displaced theological and moral coherence.

What the Conference Revealed

The Sabeel conference was not primarily a theological event. It was a political event dressed in theological language, convened under the banner of Christian ecumenism, and designed to produce one outcome: the mobilization of the broadest possible coalition of Christian institutional voices against the State of Israel and the Christians who support it biblically.

That it drew representatives from the Vatican, the Greek Orthodox Church, the Anglican Communion, mainline Protestantism, and evangelical academia simultaneously is a measure of how effectively Sabeel built its coalition. That it concluded with a pilgrimage to Arafat in Ramallah — and not to any Israeli counterpart — is a measure of where that coalition's sympathies actually reside.

Christian Zionism survived the conference, as it has survived every organized attempt to extinguish it, because it is not built on institutional consensus. It is built on the Word of God — which does not require the approval of the Notre Dame Centre, the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, the Bishop's Disciplinary Tribunal, or any other human institution to remain true.

The Final Word — and the Only One That Matters

Dr. McCall closed his account of the 2004 Sabeel conference with a question and a reminder. The question: Are we ready for the battle? The reminder: the prophet Zechariah's word to Zerubbabel, spoken in a moment when the task ahead seemed impossibly large and the opposition impossibly well-organized.

Zerubbabel was tasked with rebuilding the Temple in Jerusalem against the organized opposition of those who did not want it rebuilt. The task was completed. The opposition did not prevail. The principle Zechariah articulated is not a pious sentiment. It is a statement of how God works in history — not through the largest coalition, the most prestigious academic credentials, the strongest institutional backing, or the most sophisticated theological arguments. Through His Spirit.

The attacks on Christian Zionism will continue. They have continued for centuries and they will not stop. But the God whose covenant with Abraham is everlasting — whose faithfulness to Israel is tied by His own decree to the permanence of sun, moon, and stars — is not threatened by conferences in Jerusalem, private audiences with terrorists, or professors who find the God of Exodus morally objectionable. He is not threatened by any of it. And those who stand with His covenant people, in fidelity to His Word and dependence on His Spirit, need not be either.

This article draws substantially on the eyewitness account and theological responses of Dr. Thomas S. McCall, Th.D., Senior Theologian of Zola Levitt Ministries, whose documented scholarship on the 2004 Sabeel conference and its speakers provides the factual foundation for the analysis presented here. The editorial perspective, expansions, and conclusions are those of this author.