The Church at the Crossroads Conference is not and should not be treated as a regular Christian peace conference. You will discover below that there are plenty of reasons to make this assertion. It is not merely because it is anti-Zionist. The problem with it is far deeper than Israel criticism. The problem is hermeneutical, as it uses a framework to examine scripture to arrive at the political solutions that it desires. Palestinian suffering becomes an interpretive key that controls Christian readings of biblical categories like Israel, covenant, election, land, and Jewish peoplehood.
Therefore the conference becomes spiritually hazardous because it places Palestinian Christians in the position of victims whose experiences are then exploited to indoctrinate ordinary Christians into thinking Jewish covenantal identity itself is a theological issue.
The danger is not simply that Palestinian Christians are being heard. They should be heard, and Palestinian suffering should be taken seriously. It is also not necessarily a danger to criticize Israeli governments, as governments deserve moral examination. One of the dangers I see is Palestinian suffering becoming the primary lens through which Christians are taught to interpret everything about Israel - the land, the covenant, and the biblical story.
The Church at the Crossroads Conference is deeply connected to Bethlehem Bible College and Bethlehem Institute for Peace and Justice. Munther Isaac and Jack Sara are just two of the most well-known proponents pushing the theology that influences this conference. Upon returning from Bethlehem, conference goers won’t simply have changed minds on certain Israeli policies. They’ll also be exposed to a whole lens through which to view scripture, history, and Christian mission. That isn’t just politics. That is baptism into Arab antisemitism.
It is there that the theological argument needs to be understood. Palestinian dispossession can become the privileged moral lens through which Jewish history itself is interpreted, Jewish claims to sovereignty is understood, and how Christian readings of Israel are evaluated. Election becomes privilege, promise becomes possession, Jewish sovereignty becomes colonialism, and Christian support for Israel becomes complicity. The particular political critique taught at the conference becomes a theological grid through which to view the Jewish people.
The argument is not that opposition to Zionism is antisemitism per se, though I think most forms of anti-zionism are antisemetic. The real problem is when Zionism gets assigned roughly the same theological burden that previous antisemitic worldviews placed on “the Jew.” At that point Zionism stops functioning as merely a political term. When Zionism becomes the explanatory prism through which to understand Palestinian dispossession, Western guilt, evangelical misappropriation, colonialism, militarism, Palestinian suffering, and theological corruption are all made to make sense, it has become something much bigger than a political commitment.
Let me explain why that matters. Antisemitism is what I call a “parasitic theodicy.” This is a term I have coined where a parasitic theodicy externalizes evil onto an opposing force in order to absolve a community’s beliefs of their failure. This allows the group to maintain their perceived innocence of both the belief system and the people who follow it. It has always adapted itself to the moral and political concerns of the age. Sometimes Jews are the enemies of Christ. Sometimes they’re a racial pollutant. Sometimes they represent capitalism, other times revolutionary subversion or communistic oppression. Transportation through our vernacular has allowed it to travel through privilege, colonialism, oppression, liberation, and resistance.
The vocabulary changes but the structure often remains the same. That’s why condemning antisemitism while hosting or attending a gathering that traffics in anti-Jewish theological categories is really not enough. The people who attend may go there to earnestly seek justice. However,they come out of the conference internally reproducing many of the old structures of Christian antisemitism. It is as if medieval European antisemitism has reproduced itself in the Arab world.
This is why Romans 9-11 is nonnegotiable for precisely that reason. Paul will not allow Gentile Christians to read Israel as if they or their theological significance ended with the first coming of Christ. The promises, the patriarchs, the land, the worship, and the election still belong to Israel.
But the trajectory represented at Bethlehem will gently erode that assurance. Because if your theological aim becomes deconstructing Christian attachment to Israel while scrutinizing Jewish claims through the lens of a modern political critique, then you’ll begin viewing Israel less as a sibling with whom the Church shares a common ancestry and more as a domineering parent whose claims must be meticulously interrogated.
This brings me back to Munther Isaac’s public theology. Munther Isaac’s theological project does more than criticize Israeli policies. He deploys Palestinian dispossession as one of several major lenses through which his readers must rethink land, promise, Israel itself, and Christian Zionism.
Again, the question is not simply intention. The bigger question is: what kind of theological habits do these interpretive lenses form in people? Scripture permits no hermeneutic to treat Jewish election and the covenant as merely temporary stopping points along the road to something “better.”
Imagine a Christian goes to Church at the Crossroads conference and hears what they believe to be a compelling moral argument for Palestinian freedom using categories we recognize as historically freighted. They go home inspired, but in the wrong way. They may come home more antisemitic in their ideology. This occurs not because they wanted to be antisemitic or bought into stock tropes about Jewish dominance. It occurs because the leaders of the conference were nurtured in a system that taught them to question Jewish particularity.
The conference’s theological framework should be analyzed in conversation with Palestinian Christianity’s broader regional, cultural, and religious context. Palestinians are not the only Christians living in Muslim-majority societies. They are Arabic-speaking Christians sharing important theological and cultural elements with nearby Islamic traditions. What does that mean for how we read Bethlehem’s “Conference for Christian Witness in Palestine?”
It means we cannot analyze Palestinian Christian theological critiques of Zionism as if they exclusively originate in Western liberation theology. We must take seriously the possibility that Arab and Islamic theological and political narratives about Jews, land, conquest, communal hierarchy, and related topics have impacted Palestinian Christian perceptions of Zionism as well. Not to the exclusion of everything else. But as part of an honest investigation.
To borrow from the categories above, Arab Christian opposition to Zionism may be influenced by things like Christian supersessionism, Palestinian nationalism, Western liberation theology, and Islamists ideas about Jews and Jewish political power. With that said, one needs to keep in mind how antisemitism functions. It offers people explanations for why their social/political/theological world isn’t what they thought it should be. Christian scholars and thinkers should locate the reason for that frustration. When everything that “goes wrong” in the Arab world can be traced back to Zionism, Christians should smell a theological rat.
Suddenly Israel moves from being one culpable actor among many to being the singular explanatory principle through which every other bad actor is understood. Once people or movements achieve that kind of symbolic power to explain everything that goes wrong in life, world politics, and Christian theology, you’re well on your way to repeating older antisemitic paradigms with far better clothing.
A Christian conference for peace and reconciliation would subject every community involved in the conflict to theological criticism. Not just by saying all parties do bad things. But by identifying and naming supersessionist patterns wherever they emerge. Challenging Western Christians for their understanding of the modern State of Israel as if it were beyond moral critique, pressing uncomfortable questions into Israeli society when it commits injustice, critiquing Palestinian nationalism when it stokes hatred or violence against Jews, and calling Islamist anti-Jewishness out wherever we see it — no safe spaces. Just hard truths applied equally to every guilty party.
Where Palestinian Christians reproduce anti-Jewish theological trajectories that Christianity long ago (one hopes) outgrew, that conference should call them out. Not just to earn Palestinian Christian social media likes, but because every tribe comes to the party guilty.
At present, Church at the Crossroads is not just imbalanced. It’s dangerous. There’s little sustained concern for Christian anti-Judaism; little concerted effort to expose Arab Christians to sustained critique of anti-Jewish themes in their own political and religious culture; and no effort I’ve seen to place October 7 in the context of Hamas’s theology rather than primarily through the lens of Palestinian victimhood.
Would Church at the Crossroads be more believable if they applied long-term hermeneutical pressure to Palestinian Christian narratives as they do with Christian Zionists?
When was the last time you saw the Church at the Crossroads deploy Paul’s warning against Gentile arrogance toward Israel in a public forum? The temptation for Gentile Christians to read Scripture as if our struggle with sin and divine wrath were the exclusive or paramount narrative struggled against by the biblical text is great.
So great that you’ll struggle to find it applied to Gentile readers of Romans 9-11. Yet if Palestinian Christians are going to teach other Christians how to read Scripture through the grid of dispossession without submitting that same framework to reciprocal scrutiny in turn, we may have unwittingly reversed Romans 9–11 rather than reconceived our reading of it.
The Church at the Crossroads cannot be a Christian peace conference, because Palestinian Christians deserve as much love, as much justice, and as much attention to their suffering as any other community in the conflict.
But that doesn’t mean we should allow them to form Christians who view Jewish particularity with deep theological suspicion; believe the land rightfully belongs to Palestinians because Jewish promises were merely temporary; or think that supporting Israel as a Jewish political entity is uniquely immoral in the realm of nation-states.
Put supersessionism into the language of decolonization, liberation and resistance and you haven’t altered that theology’s architecture. You’ve dressed it in trendy new clothes and sent it back out into the world. So next generation Christians marvel at how they’ve once again learned to stand in judgment over Jewish people while presuming to be more just.