Out of Zion

Narrator: Welcome to the Israel Answers Series, connecting Israel, the Bible, and you. Join Susan Michael as she explores timely issues and current events from a scriptural perspective to equip the Christian world with a balanced and biblical response. Be sure to subscribe for future episodes, which will ignite your faith and bring the Bible to life in your everyday world. Now, let’s join Susan with your Israel Answers.

Shelle Neese: Welcome to the Out of Zion podcast. I’m Shelle Neese filling in for Dr. Susan Michael. Today I have with me Christopher Keel. He’s the founder of Present Witness and author of *Is God a Zionist?* Thank you for being on the show.

Christopher Keel: Thanks, so excited to be here.

Shelle Neese: So tell me, first of all, what is Present Witness?

Christopher Keel: Present Witness was at first just going to be a throwaway brand. Augustine, the church father, has this doctrine about the Jews called the witness doctrine. It’s this pretty disparaging perspective on why the Jews continue to exist as a people.

I decided to take that and say, no, the Jews are a present witness of the faithfulness of God. It’s an online brand that I do a bunch of stuff under. Then it just became this theological project specifically designed to deal with a lot of the questions that are being asked online.

I have that, and then I do a podcast called The One New Man with a 77-year-old Jewish man who was an early synagogue founder. He is Clevin Schimpff’s father, John Myers. We all do that under Present Witness and One New Man.

Shelle Neese: That’s fantastic. I’m a church history nerd. For the audience, explain that Augustine has this reputation of being very metaphorical with the Bible. He compares the Jewish people to Cain and the mark of Cain. Can you explain that?

Christopher Keel: It is interesting. His whole thing was he couldn't figure out why the Jews continued to exist. Why were they not assimilated after the destruction of the temple and the expulsion from Jerusalem?

The whole thing with the mark of Cain was that Cain, after the murder of Abel, was forced to wander the earth. That was the judgment by God. He had this—some people think he even had a unicorn thing that God put on him—but his whole thing was to wander the earth. That’s what Augustine applied to the Jews.

Basically, your permanent judgment is that you will forever be landless and you will be walking around the earth carrying your Torah scrolls as a representation of what happens when you disobey God. That was basically his innovation, a positive innovation for where church history was at at the time, if you can believe that.

Present witness just means the Jews are a present witness to the faithfulness of God. The one caveat that I will give credit to Augustine is that he also took the psalm "Slay them not" and applied it to the Jewish people. He did some good. It’s kind of amazing that you needed to find some biblical reason to not kill the Jews. He innovated, I guess.

Shelle Neese: There are moments in church history that they know that it was because of that "Slay them not" command that they didn't kill Jews when they had the opportunity. So what is your background? Are you a theologian or a biblical historian?

Christopher Keel: I'm wrapping up my Master’s in Theology. I've probably read thousands and thousands of books on the theology of the church and Israel. I've considered getting my PhD, but I'm not super interested in talking to academics.

I'm very interested in the online layman, just how to translate things for people that they'll listen to it. I'm more interested in that, so I don't know if I'll get a PhD. I'm almost done with my Master’s. I would be done if it wasn't for the book, but I just felt like the environment was changing so rapidly. I had to write this right now, so I stopped a lot of that just to finish this project.

My niche is Israel-Christian relations. It's basically looking at all the major church leaders from Justin Martyr all the way through Karl Barth. What has the church been saying about the Jews, and what is this producing?

It's interesting to see where things are at denominationally, specifically the Catholic Church after *Nostra Aetate*, which was a big magisterial statement in the '70s that really took a major chunk out of the wall of the divide between the Christians and the Jews.

It’s interesting to see what’s happening in America right now. Depending on what denomination you’re in and what age bracket you’re in, you’re going to be interacting with the Israel conversation completely differently. Over the last 50 years, there’s been so much goodwill after the Holocaust, which there should be, obviously.

Jewish-Christian relations have come so far in that. For whatever reason, I would have thought after October 7th that would have continued, but the reverse seemed to happen, where that goodwill seems to be totally spent now. I think what’s happening is a lot of the old theological demons are presenting in new clothes.

A lot of the questions are being asked, and I think that there are some legitimate questions that Gen Z specifically are trying to figure out. They’re in a totally different environment than what we were raised in. It was much easier to get a home, to get married; there were not economic challenges.

They’re also the first generation that’s totally online 100 percent of the time, and I think that world has a way of warping perception. They’re up against these specific things, and so I think it’s very hard for them to process why we should be sending $100 billion to Israel when I can’t afford a home. That’s a reasonable question that’s not inherently antisemitic.

When certain people ask it, it is antisemitic, but there are a lot of really good people that I think are just very confused by the swirl that’s happening right now. I wanted to write something that was interacting with all the arguments from all the different sides of this.

The book is split into three parts. The first few chapters are a very brief history of the parting of the ways, which is what they call the divide between the church and Judaism in the first and second centuries. That’s the natural starting point. I choose the four or five major things on each side that I think contributed to the schism.

I start with the Jewish response first, since Jesus was considered a Jewish heresy at first. You see some of the initial responses which we read about in the Bible pretty frequently. In the second chapter, it’s the Christian response when the church starts to become predominantly Gentile to its Jewish heritage and root system.

Those are the first two chapters. The next six chapters are a biblical case for Israel. I discuss things like replacement theology and fulfillment theology, which is a rebranding of replacement theology.

I take on a lot of N.T. Wright's work, which is a spiritualized land theology. Some of these big modern theologians have a real problem with the idea of physical land, which to me is a very Gnostic idea. Christianity is not a Gnostic religion. We're an embodied religion.

We serve an incarnate Lord who became flesh. We have to be real about a God that cares about the earth that He’s given us to steward, and this includes land. I argue against a Gnostic approach to land.

Shelle Neese: You’re saying N.T. Wright, one of the greatest living modern scholars, has this thorn that he presents where he doesn't believe that the covenant is continuing.

Christopher Keel: I actually love a lot of N.T. Wright's stuff. He is an amazing apologist. His work on the resurrection is incredible. But he is probably the number one replacement modern scholar of our day, and he's massively popular.

Besides thinking the covenant is done, he also doesn't value even the idea of land among nations. I think the church has really struggled with how they get behind the idea that people belong in a land. I think that's really hard for the modern mind for some reason.

It’s easy for us to say because we all have our own land. We're talking about this like N.T. Wright's perfectly fine in Britain having his own country, saying the Jews don't deserve a homeland or there's nothing significant about this idea.

A lot of that theology comes from a Christianity that over-emphasizes the spiritual and under-emphasizes the physical world. Obviously, the spiritual is of the most importance, but I think we have to find a way that these two worlds are interacting and coming together.

God's spiritual reality takes place on the physical world. To throw out the idea that nations and these things don't matter or are not significant is a total misstep. I take on some of that stuff. I take on a lot of the verses and things people are using.

I have a chapter called "The Tyranny of Ignorance" where I go through stuff that I'm sure ICEJ has been interacting with for a while, like the "Synagogue of Satan" and all these misused things people say. We saw reference to that when the boy in Mississippi burned down the synagogue.

This is not something we should turn our eyes from. It's not archaic. We've been for the last 50 years in this really cool time where we could pretty much openly talk about the Jewish people and Israel and do so without really having to convince people that it's important. There was a willingness like, yeah, God's doing something here.

I don't know if it's because of the conflict that people have a really hard time. Obviously, the media spin on that is not good. But I think it's also just hard for people to see war and violence and figure out how God is involved in all this.

I think that we are now back into an era where we have to be better at apologetics and being willing to hear out an argument that maybe is repulsive to us and give an honest answer in a serious way.

That's really what this book tries to do. It's predominantly meant for people that maybe don't know where they're landing on this issue. Maybe they've followed Tucker Carlson for 10 years and now they're confused with what he's saying about Israel. It's meant to really interact in an honest way with some of the things that are being said right now.

Shelle Neese: How do you interact in an honest way—and I’m sincerely asking this because I’m asking this myself—and also not validate? How do you engage the argument but not validate?

Christopher Keel: I think it's really helpful to do this case by case. When I'm interacting, if I'm mentoring a 22-year-old who is in the Nick Fuentes algorithm and he's seeing stuff and he's like, "Does the Talmud say this about me?" or, "I am struggling financially. Why are we sending so much money?"

This is just a kid who's confused. You can give him honest answers to that and engage with the things. I don't have to cosign everything Israel does. I can feel pro or con about Bibi Netanyahu and still think Israel exists. I try to give them a wide ground to stand on.

You don't have to see it exactly like this. God is still at work even though these things are happening that we might disagree with on these issues. I also recognize that there are really bad faith actors, though. With that, you can't do this.

But I think what we're in danger of is calling everything that we might disagree with or we might find repulsive just simply antisemitic, when it could just be a 22-year-old who's super confused and doesn't know how to think about this and they're still able to be engaged and walked out of this moment.

I just want to see us do that with the people that are asking questions in good faith and are not the Candace Owenses and the Tucker Carlsons who are clearly just agenda-based on what they're doing. You're never going to win them. There's an Indian proverb that says you can't wake a man who's pretending to be asleep.

There's a lot of that, but I think there's a lot of good people that are just seeing all this and they don't know what to make of it. They haven't had our experience in Israel. They might not even know a Jewish person. Honestly, most people don't. They don't understand what these words are. 90 percent of the time these Talmud quotes don't even exist.

They don't understand all this stuff that's swirling around them. For me, I've just found it's really helpful to walk them through this stuff as if they were my child and they had just fallen into something that they were unsure about.

But I can't do that if I'm like, "Hey, you're an idiot and you're dumb for thinking this and this is an unserious question and you're an antisemite." My concern is just that I don't want to see us lose this generation because we're afraid to interact in a real way and a good faith way with those people that are just being confused by the moment that we're in.

Shelle Neese: It does. I’m going to give you one of the questions. I just went with a group with ICEJ USA. We brought a group of young people to Israel. These are people who were predisposed; they love Jesus, they love the Bible, but they are products of this generation and what they’re hearing.

Some questions you don't want to validate, like was October 7th an inside job or did Israel kill Charlie Kirk. The main question that kept coming up, and I think it needs to have a response, is how is modern Israel the same as biblical Israel?

In their eyes, only biblical Israel should be relevant to them, but they see a big disconnect between biblical and modern Israel. How would you answer that?

Christopher Keel: I think one of the most amazing things about Israel is there was another theologian, probably the first well-known Christian apologist theologian, was a guy named Pascal. He was a 16th-century Catholic theologian, and he had a whole defense of belief in God because of the Jewish people.

He would go and he said, "Look at the fact that the Jewish people still exist. They're still this people. That is one of the reasons why you should believe in God." You can take what he's saying there and you can elevate that because the reality is that the Jewish people are the only people in the entire world that have ever been removed from their land, had the language die out, and then been restored to their land and they're still worshipping the same God that they did when all of this happened.

Anthropologists and sociologists judge this by: do they worship the same God, do they speak the same language, and do they live in the same land? By these three things, there's not a single people in the world that do it besides the Jewish people. So you're telling me that I'm supposed to believe that that's not the Lord that's doing this? That's an insane proposition for me. You can reason it out.

A lot of people who ask the question that you're asking me cannot understand how the modern Israel that doesn't serve Jesus could be the Israel of the Bible. But first of all, the Israel of the Bible was often being in and out of judgment with the Lord, and that's just the reality.

At no point did He or did they ever stop being His people. In fact, why God was so offended by this was because they were His people always. He was offended that they would take His name. We also have to have a correct perception about the restoration of Israel.

I get a lot of my theology of this in Ezekiel 36, 37, 38. But the restoration of Israel that Ezekiel talks about was first the physical restoration of the people. It’s the bones coming back to life. It’s this thing that basically looks like it’s been dead and on the physical on the outside it’s being restored.

A lot of this is the metaphor of just modern Israel being restored as an economy, as a national identity, as a people. But the last thing that happened to this army is that the Spirit of the Lord comes in. That’s my hope, at least.

I think we all kind of look through this with a glass dimly to some degree, but I try to encourage people in that direction. You can look at the reality of it and an honest person cannot deny that God is clearly at work.

Even the church fathers and many of the medieval theologians, their main argument against the Jews was "Look, they've been kicked out of their land, God has judged them." You can use their logic and say look, the Jews are back in the land.

I think it is unfair theologically to use the church fathers that direction but not use them the direction that we can now clearly see the grace of God and the hand of God has moved them back into the land.

Shelle Neese: That’s a great answer. I need to put you in my pocket and take you on tour. I do have a copy of your book. The good news for you is that I spilled coffee on my computer, so I have nothing to read on the plane ride home. I’m going to be reading this book. It’s a great-looking book, by the way. I do judge books by their cover. It looks wonderful.

Christopher Keel: I do too. I was like, man, so much of our messaging right now is off-putting. If you're 20 and you're looking at this, you're going to be like "What?" I wanted to make it unoffensive, like you're not really sure what to think of it. It's more of an idea than just one giant line of Judah.

The book comes out March 17th on Amazon. What you have is a pre-release. It’s going to be on Audible, Kindle, obviously the physical. March 17th you can get everywhere Amazon ships to. We could say it’s available in all bookstores, but we all know you’re going to go to Amazon.

Shelle Neese: Thank you for so much for being on the show and thank you for listening to Out of Zion.

Susan Michael: Hey, just give me one more minute. I want to offer you one of our free resources. We have wonderful resources in our show notes and if you go to our website at icejusa.org/shownotes, you’ll find links for a number of our free offers.

We have downloadables to help root you in scripture, help you to understand the issues surrounding Israel and the importance of Christian support for Israel. And don’t forget, please follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn and stay connected. Thank you and God bless.

Narrator: We hope you have enjoyed this episode of Out of Zion with Susan Michael. Be sure to subscribe to Out of Zion now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pray.com, Salem One Place, Salem Live Audio. Out of Zion with Susan Michael is a production of ICEJ USA. All rights reserved.