Faith Beyond Certainty: Mysticism vs. Christian Zionism
The white-knuckle v. hands-off smackdown
(Last one for a minute, I promise. Thanks to all for letting me clutter your inboxes a bit more this week for school.)
Most of us want our faith to keep us safe. Even if we know life is unpredictable (just this semester we’ve had a major medical diagnosis in my family, hosted a twenty-year-old through a brutal college semester, my dog went blind, and my cat died!), we still hope that our faith can give us something solid to hold. We want answers. Direction. Reassurance that God is still steering the ship, especially when the waves get high. That desire? It's human. It's also where things can get dangerous.
Christian Zionism taps directly into that need for clarity. It takes biblical prophecy and turns it into a timeline. Born from 19th-century end-times movements and sharpened by American evangelicalism, it insists: This land. These people. This order of events. If we just support the right causes, defend the right borders, and rebuild the temple—then Jesus will come back. It’s not really faith. It’s a spiritual contingency plan.
And it’s not abstract. This guides how people run their whole lives sometimes. In the 1800s, Horatio and Anna Spafford—yes, the hymnwriters of It Is Well With My Soul—moved to Jerusalem and founded a celibate settlement to prepare the land for Christ’s return.1 Christian Zionism and the sense that we can call Jesus back is not a new impulse.
The irony, as biblical scholar Michael Coogan points out, “No matter that Jesus himself reportedly warned that even he did not know when the end-time would be (Mark 13:32): believers through the ages, especially those on the fringe, have identified the prophecies as fulfilled in their own times... Fundamentalist Christians today are doing the same.”2 But Christian Zionism doesn’t leave room for a kind of prophetic ambiguity. It leans into certainty with a white-knuckled grip. And it’s not because people are power-hungry. It’s because they’re scared.
Scared of a world that no longer makes sense. Scared of loss and violence and change. Scared that if they let go of the blueprint, the whole thing will fall apart. So they build theological forts. They read the Bible like a contract. They beg Jesus to come back, not because they want to win, but because they’re tired of feeling like they’re losing.
Victoria Clark quotes a Texas woman working on an election campaign as saying, “I believe [the Jews are] God’s Chosen People...but I’m just so scared that if we get the Democrats again, they won’t defend Israel so well, and that’s going to bring suffering on America.”3 In her mind, support for a modern political state becomes not only a theological necessity but also a necessary safeguard. Even voting ‘wrong’ becomes betrayal, not only of God but of national security.
But here’s the thing: faith that relies on certainty isn’t faith. It’s fear in religious clothing. It turns Scripture into a checklist, prayer into a transaction, and God into a cosmic scheduler.
“Then beat on that thick cloud of unknowing with the sharp arrow of longing and never stop loving, no matter what comes your way.” - Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, 54
Mysticism offers another path.
The ancient mystics didn’t need timelines. They weren’t chasing prophecy fulfillment. They’re not interested in control. Instead, they surrender to mystery. They speak of the cloud of unknowing: a place where God is so present, so real, that the only faithful response is awe. Not answers. Not strategy. Just love.
Meister Eckhart said, "You're never closer to God than when you are in utter darkness and unknowing."4 That’s not metaphor. That’s mysticism. It sits with grief. It walks alongside suffering. It doesn't explain away tragedy with divine calculus. It weeps and stays.
Mysticism doesn’t offer safety. It offers presence.
It asks, Where is God right now? and listens, even when there’s silence. It doesn’t weaponize prophecy. It doesn’t need every verse in the Bible to behave like a legal brief. It just trusts. It trusts even when nothing makes sense.
So maybe the invitation isn’t to build a better map. Perhaps it’s to set it down entirely.
Not because the world doesn’t need direction—but because maps drawn in fear always end in someone else’s erasure. Christian Zionism isn’t just a theology of prophecy. It becomes a theology of policy.
When certainty is prioritized over presence, people become collateral damage in the name of divine inevitability. History is rewritten. Ethics are suspended. And suddenly, ancient land becomes a proving ground for modern power—one more war zone sanctified by theological scaffolding.
The mystics offer a counterweight.
They remind us that unknowing is not spiritual failure.
Meister Eckhart called it “utter darkness.” The Cloud of Unknowing called it “love beyond thought.”
They were trying to stay honest.
Faith, at its most grounded, isn’t about being right. It’s about refusing to abandon each other when the world doesn’t make sense. And maybe that’s what we cling to when the waves rise again—not the blueprint.
“Your pain does not mean God has abandoned you, but that your comfort places do.” - Meister Eckhart, Book of Darkness and Light, 54.
Michael David Coogan. God’s Favorites : Judaism, Christianity, and the Myth of Divine Chosenness. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2019) 113.
Michael David Coogan. God’s Favorites, 113.
Victoria Clark, “‘One Book of the Whole Bible,’” in Allies for Armageddon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 263, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vm56q.6.
Jon M. Sweeney and Mark S. Burrows, Meister Eckhart: The Book of Darkness and Light, (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, 2023) 23.