What do evangelicals mean when they talk about “supporting Israel” — and how did Jewish–Christian dialogue evolve from centuries of suspicion into the conversations happening today?

In the third installment of our series built around the Last Questions of Faith community lecture, host Jean Geran welcomes historian and author Dan Hummel for a wide-ranging conversation on Christian Zionism, evangelical theology, and the hard, patient work of talking across big religious differences. Dan traces the roots of Christian support for Israel — from post-Holocaust theology and the Second Vatican Council’s Nostra Aetate to Billy Graham’s 1969 meeting with the American Jewish Committee — and explains how dispensationalism shapes the way many evangelicals read Israel into biblical prophecy.

Along the way: why Christian Zionists are an organized minority rather than the evangelical majority, how the U.S.–Israel relationship has been deliberately cultivated over decades, and what a more generous, substantive interfaith dialogue — one that includes the more conservative voices in each tradition — might actually look like.

GUEST BIO

Dan Hummel is a historian of U.S. religion and the author of The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023) and Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations. He is the Director of the Lumen Center at the SL Brown Foundation, and is a co-host of American Evangelicals: A History Podcast. His research and writing focus on Christian Zionism, evangelical theology, and the history of U.S.–Israel relations.

RESOURCES & LINKS

· Book — The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism (Eerdmans, 2023), foreword by Mark Noll

· Book — Covenant Brothers: Evangelicals, Jews, and U.S.-Israeli Relations

· Mentioned: Amy-Jill Levine (A.J. Levine), New Testament & Jewish studies scholar; earlier in this series

· Mentioned: Nostra Aetate (Second Vatican Council, 1965); E.P. Sanders; N.T. Wright; Marvin Wilson, Our Father Abraham