More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism

Robert O. Smith's More Desired than Our Owne Salvation traces the theological and political roots of Christian Zionism from early modern English Protestant thought through to contemporary American evangelicalism, written as an academic history of ideas rather than as advocacy for or against the movement it describes. Its authority is that of careful intellectual history, tracing how specific doctrines about Jewish restoration to Palestine developed and spread across centuries and denominations. Its scope is the history of the idea and its theological genealogy, not a comprehensive present-day survey of every Christian Zionist organization or a settled judgment on the movement's political consequences, both of which remain actively debated among historians, theologians and policy analysts working from different starting assumptions than Smith's own historical method.