From Restorationism to Zionism: The Christian roots of support for Israel

In 1896, Theodor Herzl walked into the home of Reverend William Hechler in Vienna, Austria, and was bewildered by what he saw. The room was lined with Bibles from floor to ceiling. Hechler showed him charts and maps, and played Zionist songs on his organ, which he had composed himself. “I take him for a naïve visionary with a collector’s enthusiasm,” Herzl later wrote in his diary. A year and a half later, Hechler would become a guest of honor at the first Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland.

That meeting was more than just a curious encounter between a Jewish journalist and an eccentric Protestant minister. It was a meeting between Christian and Jewish Zionism; two different Zionisms with different histories converging at the perfect moment. In this article, I want to go back in time to show you where it all began. Because modern Christian Zionism didn’t materialize out of thin air. It was an activation of a much older, deep-seated theology called Christian Restorationism.

Restorationism is the belief that one day the Jews will return to the land of Israel, while Zionism is the active attempt to make it happen. In Judaism, a longing for Zion and faith that it will one day happen has always been a part of the religion, while active Zionism is a child of the 19th century.

In Christianity, both Restorationism and Zionism developed slightly differently, often coupled with Philosemitism – a favorable attitude toward Jews. But let’s not be naïve. Christian support for Jewish restoration was not always philosemitic. It often had a snooty, paternalistic attitude or reduced the role of the Jews to mere apocalyptic expectations.

Before the Reformation, mainstream Christianity was dominated by replacement theology: the belief that the Church had replaced Israel in God’s promises. Every time they saw “Israel” negatively in the Bible, they interpreted it to be about the Jews, and every time they saw it positively, they interpreted it as about the church. This was unquestioned.

The Reformation did not immediately change this. Martin Luther and John Calvin both rejected the idea of a future Jewish kingdom. But something important shifted. People started reading the Bible as is. Protestants returned to the Hebrew Bible, studied Hebrew, and read the prophets more literally. Once Christians began reading passages about Israel in their original context, cracks slowly began appearing in the cemented replacement theology. Occasionally, radical voices even suggested openly that the Jews would one day physically return to their land. One such preacher, Francis Kett, was burned at the stake in 1589.

But then the Puritans showed up and began interpreting the Bible literally. Thomas Brightman (1562-1607) was pivotal, but he dared publish his views on the 'end times' only posthumously. Henry Finch (1558-1625) wrote that all nations would one day become subservient to Israel, and was imprisoned by King James.

With the Civil War and the rise of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritans were no longer censored. Now, Restorationism started to gain traction. In 1649, there was even a Baptist petition, asking the State of England to make it happen – to restore the Jews to the land of Israel. The Puritans had injected the idea of a literal return of the Jews to Israel into the bloodstream of English Protestantism.

But proto-Zionism, thoughts on actual activism, like in 1649, were rare. Restorationism was chiefly a theological issue. A specific belief about what the end times would look like. The end-times timeline of the Puritans often included all Jews coming to faith in Jesus first, and then God would bring them to Israel.

But then the American Puritan Increase Mather (1639-1723) scandalously suggested reversing that timeline. He said in 1669 that the Jews might be restored to Israel first and come to faith in Jesus later. This was a revolutionary idea, and it got a lot of pushback. One of his critics, Richard Baxter, actually said, “What about the rights of the current native population of Palestine?” This might have been the earliest foreshadowing of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

This did not occur in a vacuum. The 1660s, and especially the scary-looking year 1666, were filled with expectations about the end times among both Jews and Christians for various geopolitical reasons. Around the same time, the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi gathered Jewish followers from all over the world, and his rabbi, Rabbi Nathan of Gaza, made the city of Gaza the Jewish center of this Sabbatean movement before it disintegrated.

Spoiler alert: the end times did not occur in the 17th century. But as the 1700s rolled along, Restorationism had become a recognizable and increasingly respectable Protestant theological position, and not something that would get you burned or imprisoned. John Gill (1697-1771) wrote specifically that the Jews would be restored to Israel, assisted by “Protestant princes.” Yet, it was still just an end-times idea and hadn’t morphed into active Zionism. That changed in 1799.

In 1799, Napoleon marched from Egypt into the land of Israel. After conquering Gaza and Jaffa, he laid siege to Akko. A rumor spread that he called on Jews to gather under his flag to liberate Jerusalem and turn it into a Jewish homeland. Whether that rumor was true or not – and whether he was sincere or bluffing – is lost to history forever. He abandoned Akko and turned back to Egypt, so we will never know. But it electrified and energized the Christian proto-Zionist fervor. For the first time in world history, a secular world leader talked about resettling Jews in Palestine, and people started thinking that maybe this end-time scenario of Jews returning wouldn’t occur by the heavens parting and angels coming down. Maybe it would happen by regular secular world leaders making geopolitical decisions that, through God’s providence, also advance His plans.

Throughout the early 1800s, Protestant missionary societies, like the “London Jews Society” (LJS), focused increasingly on the Jews, establishing Hebrew-Christian congregations and sending missionaries to Jerusalem itself.

A key figure in this Victorian era is Lord Shaftesbury (1801-1885). He functioned as a bridge between the pulpit and the parliament, and lobbied the British government to make Israel a British protectorate and allow Jews to resettle there. Not because “God wants it,” but because it would benefit the British Empire. The first British consulate in Jerusalem was established in 1838, and the “Palestine Exploration Fund” began to dig around in Israel and authenticate the Bible. Shaftesbury moved the needle from “God will make this happen someday” to “God wants this to happen and the British Empire is the divine instrument chosen to execute it.”

But it wasn’t just people like him who worked the government from the top. Preachers, like Charles Haddon Spurgeon, excited the masses from the bottom. He was immensely popular, and his sermons were printed and circulated widely. In 1864, he said that the promises to Israel were true and should “not be spirited or spiritualized away.”

This Victorian-era proto-Zionism created the environment in which Hechler emerged that fateful day, singing Zionist songs to a bewildered Herzl. It was in this environment that the Balfour Declaration was written in 1917. If this environment had penetrated the British government more thoroughly, the era of the British Mandate for Palestine, 1917 - 1948, would likely have looked very different.

The problem with Christian Zionism at this time was, of course, that it was all about convincing someone else – the Jews – to move to Israel. And most Jews just shook their heads at the “crazy Christians.” Sure, there was a longing for Zion in the Jewish religion, but only the most religious Jews actually took the huge sacrifice of moving to that malaria-infested corner of the world. There were early rabbinic proto-Zionists, such as Zvi Hirsch Kalisher (1795–1874), who urged Jews to begin returning to the land before the Messiah. But even for him, cooperation with the Christians was still unthinkable. However, with the emergence of secular Jewish Zionism in the late 19th century, this changed. Suddenly, the longing for Zion was a secular nationalist movement, similar to many other nationalist movements of the 19th century. They quickly realized that Christians like Rev. Hechler had something Jews like Herzl lacked: geopolitical access to world leaders.

Meanwhile, in the US, Christian Zionism started gaining traction as well. William Blackstone (1841-1935) led a petition in 1891, signed by hundreds of mayors, governors, and businessmen, urging then-President William Henry Harrison to support the idea of a Jewish state. Like Shaftesbury before him, he framed the issue in political rather than purely theological language. He pointed to the pogroms in Russia and stated that just as the Bulgarians and Greeks had gotten independence from the Ottomans, the Jews should get that too, in their ancient homeland of Palestine. Later in his life, Blackstone convinced President Woodrow Wilson to support the Balfour Declaration.

What made Christian Zionism reach the grassroots of regular Americans wasn’t political petitions, but theology. John Nelson Darby developed dispensationalism, which states that God is not done with the Jewish people. This theology was popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible, published in 1909. Darby himself was against political activism. He believed the restoration of the Jews to Israel would occur only after the rapture, but his work unintentionally made many Americans receptive to political Zionism. Fifty years later, in 1948, they saw biblical prophecies fulfilled in newsreels, and Christian Zionism grew significantly and exploded after the victories of 1967. It’s still a huge part of American evangelicalism, even if it’s losing momentum lately.

In the UK, however, the development went in the opposite direction. Christian Restorationism gradually collided with imperial pragmatism after Britain conquered Palestine in 1917. Once Britain actually had to govern the land, oil politics, Arab alliances, and strategic concerns increasingly outweighed theological enthusiasm for Zionism. The clearest expression of this shift was the repeated British restrictions on Jewish immigration during the Mandate era, especially in the years leading up to the Holocaust.

Now to the elephant in the room: Christian Zionism contains a contradiction. The core Christian calling to spread the Gospel often had the unintended effect of assimilating Jews into gentile Christianity, thereby undermining Zionism itself. This led to some Christians abandoning missionary endeavors altogether, at least when working with the Zionists, while others abandoned Zionism altogether, going back to universal missionary activity and replacement theology. And then there were some who walked the fine line of not compromising on either of those principles - strongly supporting Zionism while also desiring that the Jews come to faith in Christ. How is that possible? Only if Jews who believe in Jesus hold on to their Jewish identity. And this really became possible only through Zionism itself.

The “non-missionary Zionists” are Christians who put the missionary aspect of their faith aside in order to cooperate with Jewish Zionists and gain their trust. They believed that establishing the Jews in the land of Israel needed to be the focus, and they trusted God to reveal the truth of the Gospel at some point in the future. Hechler was one of those. There were many others. The “non-Zionist missionaries” are the ones who took the opposite approach and conducted missionary activity among the Jews, and didn’t care if it erased their Jewish identity. The Zionist missionaries are those who insisted on both. It was rare, and before 1948, almost impossible, often actively opposed by powerful Christian churches.

The one thing needed for both to exist simultaneously is a way for Jews to come to faith in Jesus while still maintaining their Jewish identity. Since 1948, that tension has become easier to navigate. In a Hebrew-speaking Jewish society, it is now possible for Jewish believers in Jesus to maintain a visible Jewish identity. In fact, many of us increasingly see our faith in Jesus as a form of Zionism. In 1960, a Messianic leader wrote, “Just as we didn’t occupy Israel, but returned to our homeland, we Messianic Jews didn’t convert to a foreign religion, but returned to our original spiritual heritage.” Here, we see a real convergence of Zionism and missionary work together. Just as we took back the land, we are taking back the faith in our Messiah.

There are now about 30,000 Messianic Jews like me, who speak Hebrew, serve in the IDF, take part in Israeli society, and believe in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah. So is it possible to be both a Christian Zionist and also a missionary? For foreign Christians, that tension still remains difficult to navigate. For Israeli Jewish believers, however, the two identities coexist naturally.

We’ve covered centuries of Christian Zionism in this article, and we have seen that an idea that started as an “extremist” way of reading the Bible “as is, actually came true exactly as the Bible said it would. At the exact right time in history, secular nationalism, Christian Zionism, and religious Jewish longing for Zion met “by chance” to fulfill the exact promises God had made thousands of years before. Just 200 years ago, a restored Jewish state sounded crazy to most people. Today it exists. That raises the question: which biblical promises sound impossible today?