This book asks how Christians should understand these competing land claims. Given our theological framework, what is the relationship between land and theology in the New Testament? What did Jesus and the New Testament writers think about the territorial claims of ancient Israel? Did they retain the view of the sanctity of Jerusalem and its Temple? Were they rethinking the relationship between faith and locale? Or were they confident that a sacred place was still to be held for believers?

While it will be a good land, it will not be an easy land. This will be a land that demands faith. Far from being paradise, this is a land that will hone a people. For instance, without a central river system, agriculture must rely on God, who supplies the land with water through rainfall. Culturally the land will not be empty but will be filled with Canaanites (and others) who will tempt Israel to compromise its unique commitment to God. And politically, armies moving from Egypt to Mesopotamia will run through this land as if it were a highway and Israel will be forced to decide whether its security will be found in local treaties and alliances or in God, who promises to sustain its welfare.

Before Israel enters the land under Joshua’s leadership, Deuteronomy records Moses’ final words of encouragement and warning to the people. (Deuteronomy 4:25-27) When you have had children and children’s children, and become complacent in the land, if you act corruptly by making an idol in the form of anything, thus doing what is evil in the sight of the Lord your God, and provoking him to anger, I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are crossing the Jordan to occupy; you will not live long on it, but will be utterly destroyed. The Lord will scatter you among the peoples; only a few of you will be left among the nations where the Lord will lead you. 

The severity of these words is stunning. This land is not simply a gift the giver has forgotten. It is a gift that has expectations for covenant holiness and justice. God is watching this land. He has personal expectations for this land. It is a land that should evoke memories of his own holiness.

More Jews were living outside the holy Land than they were living in it. And this brought major implications to Jewish thinking and perspective.

First, Jesus is surprisingly silent with regard to the territorial aspirations and politics of his day. The national ambitions of Judaism under Rome constantly pressed Jewish leadership to respond. Either Judea was capitulating to the occupation or Judea had to organize to defeat it. However, Jesus is oddly silent about the debate. Moreover Jesus is curiously receptive to contact with the occupiers. In Matthew 8:5–13, he responds to the request of a Roman centurion whose valued servant was ill. Here we find no repulsion of the soldier, no condemnation of Gentiles, but rather we find receptivity and welcome. He says of the Roman: “Not even in Israel have I found such faith” (8:10). What emerges is a general impression that Israel’s national ambitions tied to reclaiming the land live on the margin of Jesus’ thinking.

Such an interpretation is far from certain since it requires an allegorising of the story that is foreign and arbitrary to the story itself. 

At no point do the earliest Christians view the Holy Land as a locus of divine activity to which the people of the Roman empire must be drawn. They do not promote the Holy Land either for the Jew or for the Christian as a vital aspect of faith. No Diaspora Jew or pagan Roman is converted and then reminded of the importance of the Holy Land. The early Christians possessed no territorial theology. Early Christian preaching is utterly uninterested in a Jewish eschatology devoted to the restoration of the land. The kingdom of Christ began in Judea and is historically anchored there but it is not tethered to a political realization of that kingdom in the Holy Land. Echoing the message of the Gospels, the praxis of the Church betrays its theological commitments: Christians will find in Christ what Judaism had sought in the land.

Numerous writers have critiqued this movement extensively and found in its bold claims to territory (linked to eschatology) an angry and dangerous synthesis of theology and politics. Engaging their writings directly is difficult because it is a populist movement fueled by preachers who use its schema evangelistically. No carefully argued theological study has come from within its own ranks. No New Testament scholar has written in its defense. Its advocacy groups, such as Christians United for Israel, and Camera, are generally run by political activists. Its books come from the pens of popular television preachers or lobbyists. I have been invited to debate some of their leaders and find myself with people who have no training in theology. How can such a widespread movement in the Church be successful without a thoughtful theological undergirding?

1. They fail to point out the indisputable biblical motif that land promise is strictly tied to covenant fidelity.
2. They use the prophets to build their worldview, but they fail to hear what else the prophets had to say.
3. They need to call Israel to live by biblical standards of life. The alien and sojourner should be protected because Israel was an alien and sojourner in Egypt.
4. They are naive in applying the historic text of Israel's ancient history to modern Israel.
5. They fail to think Christianly about the subject of theology and the land. A scholar was able to affirm Zionism from the Old Testament, but Burge points out how he neglected to bring the New Testament to bear.

There have been a limited number of treatments of the land motif in the Bible. Many work directly on the problem of land conflict in Israel-Palestine and then provide theological reflection as a feature of the ethical discussion. Others—Jewish and Palestinian writers—inevitably express their own narratives within the struggle. 

• "Jesus and the Land" by Gary M. Burge. Amazon. Logos.