James Leo Garrett Jr. and the Southwestern Theological Tradition
Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 65, No. 1 - Fall 2022
Editor: David S. Dockery
By Walker Robins. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2020, 235pp., $49.95
There are few things as exciting to a historian as discovering a surprising historical anecdote. Many good works of history have begun with the discovery of a seeming historical oddity in an archive or finding an intriguing anecdote that opens a vista to the unexpected. Walker Robins begins Between Dixie and Zion: Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel with a story that may prove surprising to modern Southern Baptists. He describes the 1948 Southern Baptist Convention where messengers overwhelmingly voted against motions that called for the SBC to commend Harry S. Truman – himself a Southern Baptist – for his official recognition of the newly proclaimed state of Israel.
Historic Southern Baptist refusal to support the new Jewish state may come as a shock to modern readers. It certainly does not square with modern scholarship that often presents evangelicals as a unified pro-Israeli voting bloc. Recent scholarship has made much of the connection of American evangelicals and the Israeli state (e.g., Samuel Goldman’s God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America and Daniel Hummel’s Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations). Robins challenges simplistic characterizations of evangelical support of Israel with an in-depth examination of diverse Southern Baptist approaches to Palestine in the Mandate Era (1923-1948).
Robins asserts that polarized categories of pro-Zionist and pro-Arab are alien to the diverse realities of Southern Baptist interpretations of (and interventions in) Mandate Palestine. Robins also challenges monocausal representations of Southern Baptist attitudes towards Palestine based on a premillennial dispensationalist eschatology. Rather than cramming historical figures into tidy political or theological camps, Robins examines the diverse “types of encounters” through which Southern Baptists interpreted Mandate Palestine. He demonstrates that Southern Baptists reflected a variety of opinions on political and cultural matters in Palestine.
The driving impulse in Southern Baptist interest in Palestine was not Zionism or Arab nationalism but the spread of the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Reaching Palestine for Christ was the fundamental goal of Southern Baptists, although this could be expressed in pro-Zionist or pro-Arab language by different Southern Baptists. Robins argues that Southern Baptists displayed “Orientalist” interpretations of Mandate Palestine. In so doing, he is drawing on Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism (1978), which critiqued Western perceptions of “the East.” Robins asserts that most Southern Baptist commentators reflected “Orientalist” assumptions pitting the “backwards” Arabs against the modern Zionists. This did not always reflect an embrace of political Zionism, but Robins shows Southern Baptist affinity for the “Western” ways of Zionists.
Between Dixie and Zion explores an ambitious range of Southern Baptist engagement with Mandate Palestine. Robins begins by introducing three lenses through which Southern Baptists interpreted Palestine: missions, biblical prophecy, and pilgrimage/tourism. He follows this with chapters examining the travel writings of Southern Baptists and missionary engagement in Palestine. Chapter three is noteworthy, as it tells the story of the first Baptist missionaries in Palestine: Shukri and Munira Mosa. Shukri Mosa was a Palestinian Arab who was converted under the influence of Southwestern Seminary president L. R. Scarborough whom he met while peddling Holy Land souvenirs in Texas. Mosa founded the first major Baptist work in Palestine and for many years served as the primary voice to Southern Baptists on the behalf of missions in Palestine. Chapters five through nine focus on SBC engagement with the “Palestine question” in the United States. Chapters five and six detail the life and work of Jacob Gartenhaus, the first SBC Home Mission Board missionary commissioned to evangelize Jewish Americans, and the work of the Woman’s Missionary Union that supported Gartenhaus in his efforts and publicized the work of SBC missionaries in Palestine. Chapters seven through nine explore the growth of premillennial dispensationalism in the SBC and the closely connected career of J. Frank Norris as well as the pushback from those who rejected Norris’s marriage of premillennialism and Zionism. Robins shows that dispensational eschatology was influential but not the driving force in Southern Baptist attitudes towards Israel. Robins analyzes Truman is his final chapter, and he argues that Truman’s support of the formation of the state of Israel synthesized the “politically expedient” with Truman’s “faith and instincts” (p. 148).
Robins bookends his work with the rejected motions celebrating Israeli statehood in 1948 and a 2002 SBC resolution supporting “the right of Israel to exist as a sovereign state” (p. 159). The concluding chapter provides a brief dash through theological developments within the SBC from 1948 to the present. This short summary of decades of change includes broad-brush statements and unsup- ported claims. This, however, does not detract from the diligent work reflected in the bulk of this book. It demonstrates the need for further work on theological development in the SBC in the twentieth century. Historians of religion will find much commendable in this short book, especially those with an interest in Baptist history. Robins treats his historical subjects as real human beings. He allows for individual inconsistency, and he does not enforce foreign categories onto historical actors. Furthermore, Robins writes well. He remembers that history is done best when it tells a story. The story of “Southern Baptists and Palestine before Israel” is a story worth recovering.
