God's Country

In the acknowledgements of God’s Country, Samuel Goldman writes, “If I had realized what I was getting into, I might not have written this book. The vastness of the primary sources and the quality of the existing scholarship should have served as warnings to an inexperienced voyager” (p. 241). Yet it is fortunate that Goldman persisted because he has produced a highly readable overview of American Christian thought about Israel from the time of the Puritans to the modern period. The book itself, which Goldman describes as “an essay in the history of ideas, is aimed at readers who want to learn more about Christian Zionism but have little background in theology, history, or political theory—let alone all of these fields” (pp. 11–12). Goldman is clear that the book is not written especially for an academic audience, but rather for “a civic purpose” and therefore errs on the side of “synthesis and generalization” rather than “specialization and novelty” (p. 12).

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