Zion: Salt Lake City or Jerusalem?

June 16, 4:52 PMSalt Lake City Christian ExaminerDavid Brown

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Salt Lake City Christian Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

For many Zion is the last human city, buried far underground in proximity to the last remnants of warmth radiating from the earth's core.  This Zion, although popular today, is a figment of the Matrix movie trilogy.  Around Salt Lake City there is another definition of Zion.  And within many evangelical circles there is yet another.  What are we to make of Zion today?

Zion has had many different definitions over the centuries: a specific mountain near Jerusalem, the temple mount or old fortress area of Jerusalem's Old City, the land of Israel, the promised land, the new homeland of resettling Jewish peoples, a contentious doctrine of genocide (according to some), and the place of Jesus' second coming.  This last definition being the LDS one, but even within that definition, some people think Zion should be Independence, Missouri, while others think Salt Lake City.  Then there is the Rastafarian definition, which would be a little closer to the Matrix's rendition (without the dirty, metal apartments and refugee from the surface of the earth aspects, of course), accept that Rastafarians believe Zion to be in Ethiopia.  American slaves once thought Zion to be heaven.

As an evangelical Christian I am supposed to be a Christian Zionist, and help in ushering in the second coming of Christ by restoring the Holy Land to the Jews, or at least this is what the loudest and most obnoxious voices within evangelical Christianity are telling the world.  Mormonism also has a long tradition of supporting Zionism.  I outright reject this notion as a rather recent American development to empower our foreign relations and status (and bolster what is seen as one of our only stable allies in the Middle East), which has little to nothing to do with Biblical text or vision.  Jesus and his teachings (along with the rest of Biblical entirety) do not support oppression of people groups as a means to ushering in the "Kingdom."  While there may have been a much more diplomatic means of returning Jews to a place they could call home, in many instances their return has been at the direct cost of Palestinians, who also have claim to the land as home.  If, as followers of Christ, we really wanted to work hard to "help" usher Christ's return, maybe we should go about living the sort of reconciliation and truth that he taught us from "the mount."  This would be a radical Christian Zionism indeed.

So what exactly is Zion?  It seems that it is a lot of different things.  But, among its most common renderings, Zion becomes a home or a gathering place for the faithful that long for deliverance.  Thus it has served as Jerusalem to the Jews and Christians, heaven or homeland to slaves, Ethiopia to black Rastafari, Independence to struggling Mormon pioneers, Salt Lake City to the Saints, and just about anywhere the faithful gather.

What Zion should never be is a rallying cry for violence and prejudice.  How can a Zion be true if it brings deliverance and freedom to one group of people only at the expense of another?  All followers of Christ should educate themselves and stand for the Kingdom of Heaven as Jesus spoke of it - at hand when and wherever he is present.