Thesis (M.A.)--Bowling Green State University, 2006. / Document formatted into pages; contains iv, 145 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Th. M.)--Regent College, Vancouver, BC, 1993. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 162-183).

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88).

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88).

Thesis (S.T.M.)--Yale Divinity School, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 83-88).

Thesis (M.A.)--Brandeis University, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 29, 2009). Includes bibliographical references.

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This dissertation focuses on the 'theo-political' core of US Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism. The political militancy characterizing two Millenarian/Messianic movements such as Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism constitutes a still under-researched and under-theorized aspect that, at present, is paramount to address for its immediate and long terms implications in the highly sensitive and volatile Israeli-Palestinian issue, in the US and Israeli domestic domain, and in the wider international community. Although processes of the 'sacralisation of politics' and 'politicisation of religions' have already manifested themselves in countless forms over past centuries, Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism are unprecedented phenomena given their unique hybridized nature, political prominence and outreach, mobilizing appeal amongst believers, organizational-communicational skills and degree of institutionalization.

This thesis is a critical analysis of the theology and ethics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism in America. Chapter One introduces the thesis and its method, which draws constructively from history, sociology, and anthropology while remaining substantively theological. Chapter Two describes dispensationalism's origins in nineteenth-century Britain and its dissemination and development in America. Chapter Three moves from broad, historical description to the contemporary and particular through an introduction to Faith Bible Chapel (FBC), an American Christian Zionist congregation. This description arises from an academic term spent at FBC observing congregational life and conducting extensive interviews, as well as fieldwork undertaken in FBC's "adopted settlement" in the West Bank, including interviews with Israeli settlers about partnerships with American Christians. The remaining chapters move to more explicitly doctrinal analysis. Chapters Four through Six are shaped by William Cavanaugh's concept of 'theopolitics' (Theopolitical Imagination, 2002): a disciplined, community-gathering common imagination of time and space. Through the exploration of a key historical text (The Scofield Reference Bible, 1917) and its continuing legacies in the life and thought of FBC, these chapters examine the theopolitics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism, demonstrating that it is a complex system of convictions and practices in which the disciplines of biblicism and biblical literalism form an eschatology which subordinates ecclesiology and Christology, nurturing an imagination of the roles of Christ and the church in time and space which sever social ethics from necessary Christological and ecclesiological sources. John Howard Yoder's work is used to bring this system into relief, and to establish that eschatology per se is not inimical to Christian social ethics. Chapter Seven concludes the thesis with a summary of its findings, as well as a discussion of the positive functions of apocalyptic in Christian social ethics, pointing toward the possibility of alternative ecclesial enactments of apocalyptic theopolitics.

This dissertation focuses on the ‘theo-political’ core of US Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism. The political militancy characterizing two Millenarian/Messianic movements such as Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism constitutes a still under-researched and under-theorized aspect that, at present, is paramount to address for its immediate and long terms implications in the highly sensitive and volatile Israeli-Palestinian issue, in the US and Israeli domestic domain, and in the wider international community. Although processes of the ‘sacralisation of politics’ and ‘politicisation of religions’ have already manifested themselves in countless forms over past centuries, Christian Zionism and Jewish Religious Zionism are unprecedented phenomena given their unique hybridized nature, political prominence and outreach, mobilizing appeal amongst believers, organizationalcommunicational skills and degree of institutionalization. / Consortium for Peace Studies at Calgary University