Theology in the Raw - Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza: Drs. Bruce Fisk and Ross Wagner

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Join the Theology in the Raw community for as little as $5/month to get access to premium content. Dr. Bruce Fisk (PhD Duke) is Professor of New Testament, Westmont College (retired); Senior Research Fellow, Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East. Dr. Ross Wagner (PhD Duke) Associate Professor of New Testament, Duke Divinity School. Ross and Bruce are co-editors of the recently released, Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza (Cascade, 2025).See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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So there's a lot of lament in the book, but there's also, I think there's a lot of hopefulness. And again, I'm amazed that some of the most hopeful statements come from people in the land. Palestinian Christians who are confident that, in fact, the way of Jesus is the way for humans to flourish. and that the kingdom of God comes not through violence, but through faithful discipleship. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology, not my two guests today. Actually, one and a half, you'll see what I mean in a second, are Dr. Bruce Fisk, who has a PhD from Duke University and is a professor of New Testament at Westmuck College. He's retired, but that's where he used to teach. And he's a senior research fellow for the network of evangelicals for the Middle East and a co-editor of being Christian after the desolation of Gaza,

which he co-wrote with my other guest, Dr. Ross Wagner, who also has a PhD from Duke University. He's associate professor of New Testament at Duke University, Duke Divinity School, sorry, and he is co-editor along with Bruce of the book Being Christian After the Desolation of Gaza, which is the topic of our conversation. I do want to say that both of these guys, I'm not sure, you know, maybe their names aren't familiar to you. Bruce Fisk and Ross Wagner are like top-notch renowned New Testament scholars. I mean, I remember reading their works and articles when I was doing my PhD.

So I was blown away when I was speaking at a conference in Chicago a couple months ago, the Church of the Crossroads conference. And I'm in the green room and upwalk Dr. Ross Wagner and Dr. Bruce Fisk and said, hey, it's really good to meet you press. And I'm like, oh, my word, you're Bruce Fisk. Oh, my goodness. You're Ross Wagner. So anyway, I've known them for years over their New Testament scholarship.

And then I saw that they came out with this book last summer. And I was really excited that they have followed very closely. As you'll see, the conversation about Israel, Palestine, which is what we talk about. So please welcome to the show. Oh, oh, I forgot to mention before I jump in. Yeah, Bruce's internet was... not doing too well. It was struggling. It was struggling really bad. So it's a little

staticy. Hopefully we can edit some of that out. But then halfway through, he dropped off altogether. So I think he's still alive, but he's without internet, apparently. So the rest of our conversation was just with me and Ross. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Dr. Bruce Fisk and Dr. Ross Wagner. All right, Bruce and Ross. Thanks for coming on Theology and Raw. I'm so excited to talk to guys. We're all biblical scholars, New Testament scholars, and we have a, so we have a shared interest there. But also, I was so excited when I saw that you guys co-wrote, co-edited the book being Christian after Gaza, because there's not, as far as I could tell, too many biblical

scholars that have, that have a vested interest in this topic. What, what, I guess, for both of you, how long have you been interested in and following the various wars and conflicts in Israel, Palestine? And then I want to dive more specifically into your current book. Well, Bruce got me into this. So I went to Israel the first time as a teenager as part of the East Ohio Conference of the United Methodist Church. They had a pilgrimage for pastors and youth. And it was a, it was a deeply meaningful trip, but it was very curated. We had an Israeli guide. We were on a big bus. We went to all the holy sites. I'm sure I didn't meet a Palestinian, Palestinian citizen of Israel or a Palestinian from the occupied territories. And I came back very much with a full

heart. I was a pretty new Christian at the time, but not educated at all about the Middle East, other than what I picked up in high school. I, as a faculty, member at Princeton Seminary, co-led a trip in 2000 for pastors. Actually, folks who'd been graduated for about five years, and it was more of a study tour. But again, it was very much focused on the biblical text. Again, kind of curated with an Israeli guide. Our visit to Bethlehem was very brief, and we didn't really encounter the living Christian churches in the land. So it was for me, in 2017, Bruce invited me to come and teach for a month with his Westmont College semester in the Middle East. And it was a fabulous group of students. And it was the first time I

spent significant time in the West Bank meeting Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Muslims. A highlight of the trip was a four or five day hike with an amazing Palestinian guide. And just who interestingly stopped for daily prayer is five times who would always make us tea and then go and do his prayers. And then we'd read. resume our hike. That made me really curious. Why hadn't I learned more earlier? What was I not understanding about the land?

Had the privilege of being back with Bruce a couple times since, including leading a dupe trip where we encountered settlers and we encountered activists, peace activists, Jewish, and Palestinian. So that's a, sorry, long-winded answer, but it's been fairly recent in terms of my own life story and seeing and meeting people's been what has transformed my perspective. It's so often that we hear that that account, isn't it? That it's meeting people that makes such a big difference. Bruce, how about you?

It sounds like your interests go back further than Ross's. A little further. It wasn't, though, until early in my time at Westmont, the early 2000s, during the second he departed, that I was able to cobble together enough. funds to get over and begin to explore. But like many New Testament scholars, I was going mostly to sort of beef up my New Testament lectures, Jesus in the land, you know, the land as the fifth gospel. And I wasn't really going with much of an agenda on the political side.

But like Ross, like all of us, like so many, it was the people that I began meeting in Jerusalem and Bezlehem and beyond that led me on a journey by three years later 2006 I was volunteering in the summers either with you know a group of one time it was rebuilding a house that had been demolished another time it was teaching English I was just kind of looking for excuses and finding ways to get over there to begin exploring the the people the issues of in the present, and not simply seeking ways to, you know, have more sparkling lectures on the first century world of Jesus. Did you know that 30% of Americans grind their teeth at night?

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Betterwild.com slash t-I-T-R. Okay, so you guys have, you've been following the situation in Israel, Palestine for a while, been there, talk to people. Tell me about October 7th. What did you feel, what was going on through your hearts, your minds, when you first read the news or what was going on. Now, for me, it was obviously like everyone, a shock, surprise.

I had kind of come to the place in my thinking that what Israel was doing in terms of managing the conflict was sustainable. I had reached that conclusion a few years earlier that things were going to kind of grind along the way they were,

that Israel sort of knew how to adjust the flow into Gaza and keep things from boiling over to mix metaphors. So I was quite surprised that Hamas and, you know, Islamic jihad and others managed to pull something off and actually chose to engage in the way that it did. I think they succeeded far beyond their expectations.

But, yeah, my initial reaction was shock, and then my second reaction, I think, was fear about what we all knew was going to come, which would be, you know, a kind of retaliation that would be wildly disproportionate as Israel has been known to behave. So, yeah, Ross, I don't know how you reacted. I mean, to add to that, you know, I just remember sitting on a Saturday morning looking at the news coming through and in the subsequent days just, I mean, being horrified at the attack on civilians, I mean, I still have, I tried not to look at too many photographs, honestly, but, you know, seeing bodies scattered around a bus stop in a, or hearing about the music festival or seeing a young woman forced and. to a Jeep or people carried off on on so on motorcycles I so you know initially especially because of the kind of news coverage we we got in the U.S. just the the the sorrow for the suffering of of civilians and also yeah the sense that this is going to be really bad the response is going to be really bad and I remember our president at the time you know drawing a an analogy to the way America

responded after 9-11 and saying, please, Israel don't do that. Yeah. As it turns out, they weren't any more successful than we Americans at being proportionate and measured in our response to a terrorist attack.

I had the same exact kind of two-stage heartbreak. You know, if you're human, you look at what happened on October 7th and your heart breaks. And if you are human and have followed the pattern of decades, you know that it's going to be 10 times, 20 times. The response is going to be overwhelming and it's going to fall mainly on civilians, women and children.

And that's what we've seen over the last two years. I'm curious, I mean, we could spend hours, you know, inching our way through the last two years. but I how have you in your you guys are in different Christian circles I mean you're on different coasts different contexts Bruce you had an evangelical college um Ross you're you're at a you know a Duke divinity school a little broader you know not just even joke there's evangelicals there but a broader context how how has in your different Christian context how how has in your different Christian context. How has the response, the perspective, been over the last two years on the conflict? Are people talking about it much? Or if they are, are they kind of like more pro-Israel

or pro-Palestinian? I hate those black and white categories. Yeah, just to one correction. So I left Westmont well before October 7th, sort of early retirement and have. I'm now based in Peru. Oh, gosh. I'm still in touch with a number of folks at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, but can't say my ears to the ground there any longer. But, you know, like a number of other evangelical schools and like a number of contacts that I have around the country,

it was immediately apparent that the kind of default response for many was going to be what Russell Moore calls moral clarity, you know. And so we stand with Israel for the egregious attack that they suffered. And things like context, which normally would be, you know, mandatory and obvious, are not something high on the priority list. So I saw that quickly. I mean, we saw that in publications right away. and we've seen that in statements coming out of denominations and organizations.

We've seen it in journals. So my response, sort of looking at the U.S. evangelical world from, I guess from afar, but with still a lot of context, has been real dismay that the response has been so consistently one-sided. and I would say myopic and historically naive, frankly. None of that is in any way my attempt to justify what happened on October 7th. We always seem to have to add that caveat. And I'll add it here, right?

It was horrible. It was horrific, and lots of innocent people paid a price, a horrible price for, for that ongoing conflict. But it seems to have given the evangelical church permission or encouragement to really you know, drill down

or tie, you know, maintain a kind of Israel perspective, a Zionist perspective that they've had all along but now has been weapons.

How about you, Ross? Yeah, well, I'm Dick Divinity School is smack in the middle of private university here in the South, and so my experience of this was very much shaped by what was going on in the wider university. Duke had, I think, officially a good response. Our provost started very early an initiative, on the Middle East that tried to gather lots of different voices, lots of different perspectives in a way appropriate to an educational institution. We heard from a variety of speakers in official events. There were also the campus protests. We didn't have an encampment at Duke, but there was one at the University of North Carolina just down the road. There were a lot of protests on the quad. All of this is context for saying that I think the Christian response

at Duke Divinity School was a bit uncertain. We feared, I think, rightly speaking too quickly. Very early on, you know, colleagues invited the Muslim chaplain, a local rabbi to come and just tell us, how are your communities dealing with this? What can we learn? How can we support being in solidarity with you? But our first event inviting a Palestinian Christian speaker didn't occur until the next November. So November, 24.

And I think we've struggled with how to talk as Christians about this, not just to jump on one bandwagon or another. I'm a priest in the Anglican Church in North America, and I think also the denomination has wrestled a bit with how to speak. On the one-year anniversary of October 7th, there was a call to prayer that mentioned all of the sufferings. on the Israeli side and didn't really mention the suffering on the side of Palestinians. And I think it was more omission rather than an intentional, but it kind of shows that our thinking is, as American Christians, mainline evangelical, we're broadly, we understand Israel, we're in sympathy with Israel. It's much harder to put ourselves in solidarity with Palestinians. One of the questions I've wrestled with is why has the bulk of the American Evangelical Church held the perspective they do?

And there's, you know, in the talk I gave at the conference that we met at, you know, I went quickly through a few possibilities. And the one that I didn't get into was misinformation propaganda, the sources from which were getting our information. And as I'm sure you guys both know, I mean, you could read different sources and get wildly different perspectives of what's going on. How have you guys managed to, I guess, find good news outlets or sort through misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, propaganda to actually get to the truth? Because I resonate with my friends that are, you haven't read any books on it. you know, kind of loosely follow the news and kind of like, I just don't know, I don't know what to think of it. And that's why I don't speak out because I'm like, I don't, it just seems so

complex to me and I, I would need to spend hours and hours and hours digging, get into the bottom of it. How have you guys sorted through that? Yeah. All that web of information. For me, you know, I'm on a bit of about, about a 20, 23 year long journey of studying the topic. So, you know, I have read dozens of books that do evaluate the issues, you know, examine the talking points. And so, to be honest, I had reached certain conclusions well before October 7, 2023 about what kinds of sources I thought were most crucial. and many of them, frankly, were Jewish historians. Yeah. But they're, you know, Palestinian voices, American, British scholars that I had come to kind of see as my team.

But I think before October 7th, I had learned over time that, you know, there's always going to be smart people who see things differently. And I always wanted to try to pay attention to the critiques and the arguments that maybe I don't find persuasive, but maybe aren't completely crazy, you know. And so, and so, yeah, I spent a lot of time, probably too much time, just reading and trying to challenge my own assumptions. But I think by the time October 7th happened, and then in the months that followed, I was distressed and, um, to be honest, I fought anger for the last couple of years and not been quite sure what to do with it. And so my collection of voices that I've gone to that whom I found extremely helpful continues to be there,

but I'm not sure what to do with it. I'm not sure, I'm feeling very impotent, I'm feeling very discouraged and angry at the church, at certain key leaders who have positions of influence. But there's plenty of sources to go around, and we could list some of the people, you know, that have been speaking out. And as I mentioned at the outset, some of those key voices are Jewish journalists, Jewish scholars, whether they're teaching in Israel or teaching in the U.S. or elsewhere. Britain, and they're heroic, it seems to me, in terms of the way they are speaking to their own tribe, speaking to their own communities and challenging the kind of talking points that the Israeli military and the Israeli government are putting out, you know, on a daily

basis. Yeah. Yeah, the history is, I found this out, I guess, much more recently than you. just your 23 year reading dozens of books. That was for me the last two years in an obsession with educating myself and just really wanting to understand the history, the context, and then finding credible news sources that are reporting daily on the events. I would, I mean, there's just actually a lot out there. Almost all of them are independent news outlets. Drop site news is probably the, my, go to on the current conflict, Ryan Graham and Jeremy Schaill. Jeremy Schaill, they, I mean, they've, I mean, these guys literally have like talked and interviewed like Hamas leaders. Like they are so involved with the situation. They've got people on the ground. They are what I, and I try to fact check everybody, especially

myself, you know. And whatever I do, I try to find something. It's like, oh, I'm going to find some. and they just do incredibly thorough work. And we'll talk about stuff that nobody else, no mainstream outlet would ever, you know, mentioned. But yeah, anyway, yeah, we can, I could probably list some sources in the, in the show notes. But, yeah, context is, I mean, it's just,

and that's, I feel like that might be the biggest blind spot among American evangelicals. They think October 7th was just kind of out of nowhere, just a manifestation of pure. anti-Semitism rather than a violent response to occupation. I mean, wherever you're going to have an illegal, oppressive military occupation, you're going to have a violent retaliation. And I know two years we still have to say, we're Christians, we don't endorse a violent response. Yeah. It's so sick of. But anyway, yeah, I've had to say that over and over.

You're justifying it? I'm like, well, on what planet do you think I'm justified a violent response but it's just it's just an observation like that's just it's going to keep as long as the illegal military occupation continues to happen as long as they have widespread settler violence and and a depression of Palestinian people you're going to have you're going to have nonviolent responses and and I I'm still blown away at how pervasive nonviolent responses are among the Palestinians. They are some of the best most profound thinkers when it comes to non-violet. It blows my mind, Muslims and Christians. But you're also going to have people who say, forget the non-violent stuff. We've tried that. It doesn't work. We still keep getting killed. So we're

going to pick up arms and respond. And I, you know, Peter Beiner, this recent book of his, I guess it came out a year ago now almost being Jewish after the destruction of Gaza. He talks about the great march of return in Gaza, people mostly peacefully, just walking toward the separation fence. And many of them shot with rubber bullets, live ammunition, many of them became disabled, amputees. But he has a line there. He says, we demand Palestinian Gondis, and then we shoot him in the kneecaps. Yeah. And just lamenting the kind of no-win situation that nonviolent protest, boycott divest sanction is seen as a violent assault.

And then violence breaks out. These Palestinians can't win for trying to be nonviolent creatively or for using violence. I would just say to amplify what you mentioned a minute ago, I've just been deeply. impressed and challenged by Palestinian Christians who in this context are committed to creative nonviolent resistance. And I think in the book, we have a fantastic essay by Daniel Banura on Hamas, just trying to understand the organization, what makes it tick, how is it evolved. But he ends with a very strong statement rejecting the framing of this conflict as a religious

war and reminding us that Palestinian Christians are committed to and have a long track record of creative nonviolent resistance. Similarly, essays in the book by Yusuf al-Kurie and Tony Dyke emphasized this costly commitment to resisting with, they quote from the Kairos-Palestine document from 2009, but the logic of love that is possible because Jesus Christ has come and brought God's peace that we long to see in full. And they're living out of this. And boy, as a Western Christian, as an American Christian,

I want to learn from them. I want to be like that. And I know that, but for the grace of God and for examples, I won't be able to live that way. Yeah. It blows my mind how pervasive a theology of nonviolence is among Palestinian Christians. it's it's it's fascinating i mean i you know i wrote a book on nonviolence 12 years ago

from boise idao you know like it's like the safest like when we go to the store we leave our car running you know it's like there's no it's just the safest place and you know i'm looking at the theology of it i'm not saying you know not saying like hey i'm living this i'm just saying here's how i'm reading the bible but to see it's palestine christians who have their entire existence has been one of conflict and oppression and violence and to be so committed to non-violence,

it's just mind-blowing. Yeah. I should give a shout-out. Preston to another book that's just come out this fall called The Cross and the Olive Tree. It's edited by John Muneyer and Samuel Monier with Orbis.

But it has a half dozen or a few more essays by younger Palestinian theologians. And another one by Yusuf al-Curray, who's the dean now at Bethlehem Bible College, New Testament scholar. He talks about his grandmother's theology that Palestinians learn. His grandmother and his family are all in Gaza still. And just having learned through, she survived the displacement, the Nakba of 1947-48. And so this kind of nonviolent following of Jesus is passed down, generating.

to generation. And according to him, some of the most profound Palestinian theologians are the grandmothers. I had Yusuf on my podcast and he told me a story growing up in Gaza and seeing a bunch of IDF soldiers come busted into their apartment or house and, you know, ravaging the place. And his grandma, I think, offered them bread or something. Like, you might be, you must be hungry. Or it was something along those lines. And he says as a kid, he was learning that theology and nonviolence in practice from his grandmother. Yeah, exactly.

Have you, okay, for the last two years, so that whole like evangelical response in the wake of October 7th, you know, and there's like Israel has a right to defend themselves, human shields, you had all the kind of, you know, talking points and, and so I was kind of like, all right, I can, I don't agree with. I didn't agree with much of the evangelical response, but it's like, okay, I can see if we're a few months in, you know, we're still in the wake of October 7th, but two years later, it's like, I don't know, I don't, it's just kind of hard to, with all of the stuff that has come out, all this has been revealed, all the whistleblowers, all the American medical doctors that have said, they've said, this is what we have seen, sniper bullets to children's heads, children's, children.

genitals. I mean, people just being slaughtered. There was that statement that came out by, I think, 152 American volunteer doctors with a cumulative, like, I don't know how many hundreds or thousands of hours they served in Gaza. They all said, we haven't seen one Hamas militant in hospitals. Like, apparently hospitals are bases of Hamas operation. We haven't seen a single one. You know, all we do is every day, we just get. you know, floods of people, you know, with their flesh hanging off, limbs hanging off, with moms carrying their kids and garbage bags, you know, body part. I mean, it's like, it's just, it's, it's, it's just absolutely horrific. So, you know, I mean, after two years, I'm kind of like,

are people still, like, say, you know, go Israel? Have you guys seen that shift that are in your circles or just as you pay attention to the broader evangelical world? Yeah. I, I mean, I think there are certainly groups that are just as supportive of Israel despite what we've seen. But I think there's a fairly large group, at least that I encounter at Duke Divinity School, where people are now, they've just heard more stories. They've heard testimonies, as you say, as doctors. They've read more news. I've been impressed to the extent that maybe my expectations were low,

at how much, say, major outlets like New York Times or the Washington Post, even the Wall Street Journal, have done some in-depth reporting about not only the destruction in Gaza, but the spike in settler violence in the West Bank. I think the information as it's getting out is causing people to recognize this has gone too far. I think especially the images of starving kids this summer that we're coming out. But so much of the problem is that we we can live in our media bubbles. I like to read things that reaffirm my view of the world. It's hard to read other or encounter other voices. And I think a lot of the American response has been where I'm interested. I'm just going to continue to hear the stuff that reinforces how I already thought.

And so I think there's a shift, but it tends to come with people who've just seen more, read more, encountered more ideas. They're recognizing that if there is complexity, there's also some things that are pretty clear. 20,000 children being killed is an evil, is a tragedy. It ought to stop starving a population. That's too far. How do you respond to the argument? I think this is probably the most common argument is, yes, that's horrible, 20,000 children, women, yes, it's absolutely tragic. That's why we need to get rid of Hamas. This is Hamas's fault. They're using civilians as human shields.

They started this. If they would just give up the hostages, everything would be fine. And basically, the blame is all on Hamas. So they're not denying the horrific tragedy. They're just saying it's all Hamas's fault. How do you respond to that? Yeah. Well, I'm not an apologist for Hamas. I think we've seen even in the ceasefire, they're reasserting control by executing people in public

and terrorizing their population. I think there were, ironically, there was polling that came out of Princeton University was done just before October 7th. So in that summer of 2023 that showed there was a lot of dissatisfaction with Hamas. There have been no elections in Gaza since 2007. So, yes, Hamas has, I think they started this conflict knowing very well that they would be able to retreat into their tunnels and the population was going to suffer.

And in fact, that was going to do work for them. People would see how terrible Israel is and maybe the world would rally to their cause. I think it's terrible. On the other hand, I mean, I think modern states that claim to be motivated by what they might call Judean Christian values have an obligation to protect innocent life. And I think international law holds up the necessity of protecting non-combatants. And that's what nation states like Israel and the U.S. have signed on to, or at least they think other people ought to sign on to these treaties. Ironically, we haven't always signed on to them ourselves.

And I think this this revulsion against a disproportionate response is human and it's right that, no, Hamas is evil, doesn't justify any means necessary. If one isn't the pacifist, you know, there's a long Christian tradition of the justice. war, it has parallels in Islam and Judaism, but the Christian tradition insists that for a war to be just, it has to have a reachable goal. You have to be able to articulate what is the goal and saying we're going to absolutely destroy Hamas is not an attainable goal. You can't violently destroy an idea. It's not a just war if the proportional damage to civilians is too high. If the evil created by the war is greater than the evil suffered, it's not a just

way. There are lots of ways that traditions have of thinking about what is a proper proportionate response. And I think if this was unclear in November 23, it's become increasingly clear across the world to lots of observers that Israel is now treading in territory of crimes against humanity, war crimes, that this has been a disproportionate response that ceasefire is a good thing. We haven't

begun to start untangling the problems that led to this or creating conditions for a just peace. But even the fact that we've ceased firing now is an admission that there are other ways to respond besides bombing. Right.

Yeah. I recently read a couple academic books on the history of Hamas and going all the way back to like, you know, the early 1930s and the Palestinian resistance and just the, yeah, the whole history leading up to it, leading up to the election in 2005, 06, 07 maybe. And the one thing that those of us live in America or a democratic-ish country,

country is we read kind of the election of Hamas through our own context. And it's like the you have to understand the, yeah, the whole history and context in which Hamas came to power, the conditions that nurtured that, Netanyahu's support of Hamas is a big one. But also the other options, the Palestinian Authority, you know, is not, they had a terrible reputee do have a terrible reputation among many Palestinians. And so it's just, there is a historical complexity, not justification, but a complexity that has given rise to a, yes, very violent regime is Hamas. But yeah, after doing a bit of research on Hamas, and I hear people, I hear Americans talk about Hamas. I'm like, oh, it's just so, there's just a lot of ignorance there, which is fine. I don't expect

people would go, but it's like at least say, Hamas, I don't, I don't know much about them. I think there's any kind of violent terrorist act I would condemn, but I don't, I wish there would be more admission of ignorance when it comes to the layers and layers of history and complexity and what has given rise to this movement and that movement. But you were going to say something. No, I was just going to say, I mean, I've heard people say, well, they voted for Hamas. And ironically, I mean, half the population of Gaza wasn't alive when Hamas took up her. There's a kind of lack of realism, too, I think, in how political change happens. There are brave, they've been during the last two years, there have been some very brave Ghazans speaking out against Hamas.

Some of them ended up dead. Some of them are facing retaliation now as alleged collaborators with Israel. And I think the, yeah, it's a much longer story, but the way in which Netanyan who played the Hamas over against the Palestinian Authority, allowing Hamas to keep. And, you know, it's well documented. He's allowing huge influx of cash from Qatar to come because he didn't want a unified Palestinian government that could. There's the complaint, we don't have a partner for peace on the Palestinian side.

And then there's this effort to make sure we won't. Yeah. Yeah. That's, I know, it's all, it's all, but well, I remember when I first mentioned that a couple years ago, people thought, oh, it's a conspiracy theory. That's not true or whatever. And now I don't, it's been so publicized now that you have quotes from that Nahoo saying he was doing this. So I think the same probably has to, has to be said on the Israeli side. I mean, public opinion, understandably in Israel is very supportive of the war. We feel threatened existentially. Public opinion polls tend to reflect that. I think Israelis, I've talked to a friend who lives in Tel Aviv. They don't see on their news the kinds of things that we see very often.

There's widespread public support, and yet there's a very brave peace movement still. There are voices calling for restraint. There's before October 7th, millions in the streets, opposing some of the changes to Israeli governance by Netanyahu's coalition, it's not as if Israelis are completely able to change their government at a whim either. And some of the people most influential right now in the governing coalition, their vision for annexing the West Bank, for changing the status quo on the Temple Mount, those are not majority positions, but these are people who have power.

Yeah. And unfortunately, as an American right now, I can sympathize with what, how do I protest government policies that I find abhorrent, but I don't know how to pull the levers of a political power. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the whole blaming the civilians on electing Hamas, that's a, I mean, that's literally almost a quote from Osama bin Laden in his letter to a. America, where the reason why he bombed the Twin Towers and killed civilians was because of, I mean,

he was, the motivation was responding to America's support of Israel and the persecution of Palestinians. It was a response to American military power, but the response was towards civilians. Why? Because, well, you guys voted your government in that's doing this to our people, you know? it's like I so yeah it's just I don't think Christians or anybody should use the logic of it's okay to kill the civilians because they voted the violent you know regime in the in the office what led you guys to write this oh good go ahead go ahead no go ahead no we'll skip yeah so so you guys co-wrote being Christian after Gaza with a bunch of awesome essays in it from both Palestinians and allies. Did you start thinking of this book

shortly after October 7th? Yeah, Bruce isn't here so he can't challenge my story. I'll blame him again. I don't know how to think differently without friends. Some of my friends are authors of books. Some of them are people I talk to and have hard conversations with. And I'm grateful for Bruce being that kind of a person. But there was a circle of us that were meeting by Zoom after October 7th, just wondering what in the world could we do that would make any difference. A lot of them are contributors to the book, people with long experience in Palestine more than I have.

And so the idea came because most of us are academics. Well, let's publish a book. And we had a very helpful editor, Michael Thompson, at let's stop Cascade. And it's okay, let's do a slim volume of essays. Let's try to get a wide group of

contributors and see what we come up with. The book took longer to bring together and I think it's better than I could have imagined at the beginning. We struggled mightily as editors to let our contributors speak in their own voice. So as with any edited collection,

there are going to be some perspectives that don't particularly gel. But I think the advantage of what we've done is we've empowered some really knowledgeable, faithful Christians to speak. Out of their experience, out of their location, younger scholars from Palestine, a Jewish follower of Jesus who's been involved in the peace movement for decades, North American, Latin American authors. And so the essays, I think all of them, they sort of form a whole. and there are three movements to the book, one kind of looking at the context, historically, culturally, one looking at biblical theological themes, and one that really is building on personal experiences of friendships and collaborative action together.

But overall, it's a kind of raw book, as you would expect, people wrestling with, how can I be a follower of Jesus in this time, in my play? given what I know, given what I'm committed to, given what I aspire to as a follower of Christ. And is the challenge? Because I mean, there is kind of an underlying challenge built in the title, being a Christian after Gaza. Is it dealing with this mixed support among Christians of what the very thing that you're calling evil? It's like, I actually have people within the kingdom of God that are saying this evil is actually good. Is that part of the, how do I be a Christian in this space?

Right, right. This is not a two-sides book or a four-views book. The authors are lamenting the lack of a full-throated Christian response that calls for just peace that cares as much about Palestinian lives as about Israelis. It doesn't simply pick aside and then Christianize it. So there's a lot of lament in the book, but there's also, I think there's a lot of hopefulness. And again, I'm amazed that some of the most hopeful statements come from people in the land, from Lisa Loden, who's a Jewish follower of Jesus, who in some ways is very lonely as a Christian Jewish voice for peace, but refuses to give up hope. She is a deep spiritual life and a well of experience years walking with the Lord that sustain her.

Or Tony Dyke or Yosef al-Kurri Lama Mansour, Palestinian Christians who are confident that, in fact, the way of Jesus is the way for humans to flourish and that the kingdom of God comes not through violence but through faithful discipleship, even embracing the cross in the hope of the resurrection. So the hopefulness in the book comes by, I think, sort of trying to double down on what is it to live a story as crazy as the Christian story. The New Testament tells us that Jesus is our peace, that in Christ, God has reconciled the world. And our call then is to invite people into that reconciliation. But the true thing about the world is that it's God's world, that Jesus has identified with our humanity so thoroughly as to make renewal of human being possible.

And I think that as an American Christian is the ongoing challenge. How do I act and react to what's going on, not simply as an American who happens to be a Christian, but as a Christian who dares to try to live as if the gospel is true? That's, for me, the being Christian after Gaza is, this is a watershed, I think, for many of us in a way comparable to the way the Holocaust was a watershed for Christians coming up against a long tradition of anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism, seeing where it led and saying we need to repent. I think there's a similar challenge to the church in the West now to see. the ways we've allowed nationalism, militarism, distorted accounts of the Christian story to

lead us into complicity with injustice in the Middle East. And there's an opportunity here to repent. In fact, a bold and loving invitation from Palestinian Christians to repent. Maybe you can put in the show notes, Preston,

but you spoke very powerfully at the Church at the Crossroads conference earlier this fall. And a statement that came out of that, a response, a call to repentance that is open for others to join on, to read, to pray about, to potentially sign as one concrete measure of solidarity that might well lead those who decide to become signatories into other kinds of action. Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, thanks. just in the last couple minutes we're in a cease

sort of a ceasefire there's still been lots of firing are you like where do you do you think do you think this is the whatever kind of ceasefire we have is going to hold do you think it's going to slowly

just go back to the way it was or do you have any are you hopeful are you pessimistic I know that I'm supposed to be hopeful as a Christian, but my hope is supposed to be in the Lord and not in human beings. I think it's an interesting time where President Trump has, he's so far out of the box in so many ways, but he has been willing to say no to Netanyahu. He's on record as saying Israel will not annex the West Bank. I know. Lady Vance is on record saying, well, that was a dumb vote you guys took. That's a stunt.

We're not going to do that. Trump has said, you're not going to be allowed to start the war again. He said to Hamas, you know, he seems to realize there is a time at which Hamas is going to be part of a new order, but, you know, you can't be killing people out in the streets. So to the extent that he remains interested and is willing to use the leverage that the United States has, I'm hopeful. On the other hand, this is such a complicated situation, this 20-point plan that where all the details are pretty much being left to be worked out later, there doesn't seem to be much of a reckoning with war crimes on Israel's part or on Hamas's part, but in particular, there doesn't seem to be a connection between. the violence ongoing in the West Bank and a long-term peace.

So that's where I've become less hopeful, is that so many of the core issues are not addressed. But boy, and the killing hasn't stopped. It's continuing. Both sides have broken the ceasefire multiple times. But so far it's contained, and that's a good thing. So if that's possible, maybe more is possible. Yeah.

it's hard with I feel very much the same I mean again this is where if you go back in history you can kind of get a little more pessimistic you know and the hard thing with the American I do think you know

Trump his unpredictability is almost like the only hope because with past presidents it's like they can't they talk loud but they don't do anything

Biden, talk loud, past president. They all, there's just, there's too much, maybe Jimmy Carter might be the only one. I don't know. But like, all that to do is cut off funding if they're like, hey, don't do this. Otherwise, we're going to cut off funding. And when they do that, cut off funding. But they often are like, oh, that Yahoo, you shouldn't have done that. Oh, don't do that.

Or one more time. And we're going to, you know, but they never do anything. There's just, there's too many, there's too much money invested in presidents. being supportive of Israel. And so, I mean, I don't, I mean, Trump literally said out loud like that Madeline Adelson, that Jewish billionaire donor, you know, even, she even said, I don't if you saw this. He's like, yeah, you know, Adelson, they can kind of just like, coming to the White House, whatever they want, whatever. And people are like, dude, you're not supposed to say that out loud that you have billionaires giving millions of dollars in your campaign that are hardcore,

is unconditional Zionists and you're just like, yeah, they have access to me. It's like, so I don't, I don't, I don't, it is the glimmer of hope in as much as I want to put hope in American or human leaders. The glimmer of hope is, well, he's just crazy enough that he might, you know, actually do something about it. And he has put his foot down verbally, you know, but it's like at the end of the day, it would take America saying, we're cutting off funding if you, you know, start bombing again or something. And I just don't see them doing that. But, you know, and also, as I said earlier, like, as long as there's still an oppressive military occupation, illegal settlements, and all these things, it's like,

even if there was a five-year ceasefire, it's just, it's going to, something else is going, there's going to be more violent resistance as long as there's oppression, unfortunately so. so and I don't see that ending anytime soon yeah but yeah I don't want to end on that no okay here here here is my hope and I don't want to get cliche Christian whatever but my hope is in the astounding astounding radical commitment to the gospel and and nonviolence among Palestinian Christians, that in the midst of a situation, it seems utterly hopeless. I mean, we can go back to shoot. Let's go back to 701B.C. and Sinacribs campaign. Let's go back to 56. Let's go back to seasons in the biblical story where, humanly speaking, it was utterly

hopeless. But you had the faithful remnant that clung to Yahweh, trusted in his promises. And I see that embodied among the Palestinians over there in impossible circumstances. So that my hope is in Jesus as he has been embraced and followed among Palestinian Christians. Yeah. And I would say increasingly I'm recognizing how much I need the global church to help me be a faithful Christian in America. We have our own challenges. We have our own complicity with what's going on the Middle East, but lots of other issues

that I think the church is called to offer an alternative. to the power politics of our day. And I don't want to put Palestinian Christians on an impossible pedestal. But I look at them, I look at Christians in South Africa, especially during the struggle against apartheid, and think, well, here are living examples. Look back to the civil rights movement and Dr. King. I'm encouraged that, yeah, that God is not left without witnesses,

that there are people seeking to embody creative, non-violent resistance against injustice, doing so as followers of Christ. And I want to learn from them. I want to be led by them. I want to encourage them in whatever way possible. And yeah. Yeah. And I keep praying, Lord Jesus, come back.

Come back and bring the just and peaceable kingdom that is the true. reality of our world. I want to see it. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Ross, thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you for the book. Being Christian after God. Sorry, we lost your friend there. Bruce. I hope he's okay. He had some internet issues, but yeah, please do pass on my greetings to him. I'll send him an email. Thank him. Okay. So, yeah, thank you so much, Ross. Thanks for your time, Preston. Take care. Thank you.