History, Theology, and the Nation of Israel

How the Theological-Historical Interface Impacted the Rise of National Israel

[Editor’s note: this historical survey was published in our magazine, FrontLine, in our November/December 2016 issue. We republish it today because of its relevance to the current crisis in Israel. Readers may find it helpful in putting the current situation in historical context. The author included this explanation of his brief survey at the beginning of his article:

Caveat: To trace the history of any slice of theological development over the last century is a daunting task. To attempt to compress it in the space of 3100 words borders on lunacy. The constraints of brevity compel me to implore the reader’s indulgence. What I am attempting here is the verbal equivalent of shooting a movie trailer for a three-part, big-screen, blockbuster. With my iPhone.]

There is no such thing as secular history — not if the phrase means history that has no theological connections or relevance. All history is theological, because all of life is theological. God has interwoven history and theology so tightly that any attempt to separate the two mars and misconstrues both. So history never happens in a vacuum. Even though the starting point for this centennial survey is 1917, the ideas and events that contributed to the context of that momentous year require brief mention.

Belief in the future restoration of ethnic Israel to the land God promised His people has been known to be argued (vigorously, I might add) by some postmillennial covenant theologians (e.g., John Edwards, a seventeenth-century Church of England theologian). And a gratifying number of amillennial covenant theologians have come to agree that Romans 11 teaches a future conversion of ethnic Israel. But the theological view historically most associated with the ongoing eschatological significance of Israel, ethnically and nationally, is dispensational premillennialism. So this brief historical-theological helicopter tour will particularly concentrate on its role in these events.

Nineteenth-Century Influences

The Church’s view on the ongoing relevance of Israel has been historically divided between restorationism and supersessionism. Restorationists argue that God’s promises to Israel guarantee a future return of Israel to the land God swore to give to Abraham and his seed. Supersessionists believe that Israel was set aside by God and replaced (superseded) by the Church so that the promises originally made to Israel are transferred to and fulfilled by the Church. The view is ultimately a theological one and by no means inherently anti-Semitic; nevertheless, it too often played a role in much of Christendom’s persecution of the Jews. Though the history of the Church is checkered with both views, supersessionism was the predominant view throughout the medieval and early Reformation eras. That began to change in the post-Reformation era, most notably in the nineteenth century.¹

Though various individual threads of the interpretational system that came to be known as dispensational theology can be traced further back, those threads were not woven into a cohesive systematic theological garment until the work of J. N. Darby in the mid-nineteenth century. Darby was no backwoods bumpkin. “His Bible translations in German, French and English reflect serious scholarship,” reports one standard evangelical theological dictionary.² The heart of his system was a consistently literal hermeneutical approach, which informed a consistent prophetic posture (the expectation that promises made to Israel would be fulfilled to Israel qua Israel) and, in turn, a distinctive ecclesiological posture (seeing Israel and the Church as discrete entities).

The impact of dispensational theology was both widespread and diverse. It gave birth to a major Bible conference movement, the most famous of which was the annual Niagara Bible Conference. “Though launched in 1875 by conservative Protestants from a broad spectrum of confessional backgrounds, eventually premillennial dispensationalists (mostly Presbyterians) dominated” the Niagara Bible Conference.³ Such conferences came to be duplicated throughout the country. Household names attached to the Niagara Bible Conference include James Brookes, A. J. Gordon, Charles Erdman, C. I. Scofield, and Hudson Taylor. Thomas De Witt Talmage — Reformed, Presbyterian, and “an ardent restorationist” — asserted, “All the fingers of Providence . . . are pointing to that resumption of Palestine by the Israelites,” adding that “the repatriated Jews would transform the country from a wasteland into a cultural and economic Eden.”⁴ Talmage’s famed contemporary across the sea, C. H. Spurgeon, though not a dispensationalist, was also a staunch believer in the Jews’ future restoration to the land.⁵

The interest in dispensational theology perpetuated by the Bible conference movement created, in turn, a Bible college movement. Moody Bible Institute, founded in 1886, was just one of many Bible colleges springing out of the soil of the predominantly dispensational premillennial Bible conference movement. The educational impetus created by dispensationalism’s popularity continued to flourish into the next century, eventuating in the establishment of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS). Founded in 1924 (as Evangelical Theological College) by Lewis Sperry Chafer, DTS has played a major role in codifying, defending, and perpetuating dispensational theology. Another undeniably influential outgrowth of the movement was the Scofield Reference Bible (1909), which not only further standardized this hermeneutical system but also made it widely accessible. In short, “dispensationalism came to characterize the views and beliefs of a large constituency of American evangelicalism scattered throughout mainstream Protestantism” including especially “Presbyterian, Baptist, and Congregationalist circles.”⁶ Dispensationalism was not merely an American or even Western phenomenon, however. The dispensational teaching of Erich Sauer influenced not only conservative free churches throughout Germany but much of Eastern Europe as well.⁷ On both sides of the Atlantic dispensational theology was creating, across a broad spectrum of the evangelical Church, a heightened awareness of God’s promises and purposes for the Jews. To properly appreciate the significance of that focus, you have to remember that there was no state of Israel, nor had there been for over eighteen centuries.

It’s impossible to detach such theological developments from historical events. The interest in Israel naturally nurtured by dispensational theology’s emphasis on God’s eschatological promises to the Jews coincided with the birth of an international Jewish movement known as Zionism. From its inception, Zionism was never about displacing anyone. In fact, in the mid to late 1800s, Palestine was a dirty, depopulated, barren wasteland, inhabited by a pathetic four percent of its current population.⁸ In fact, “by the close of the nineteenth century, Palestine had not had an indigenous government since the fall of the Jewish commonwealth” in AD 70.⁹

Though Hungarian-born Theodor Herzl is usually dubbed the father of Zionism, the idea of Zionism preceded him, and the term itself was actually coined in 1890 by the Austrian Jew Nathan Birnbaum. “Zionism” is shorthand for Jewish nationalism, and its goal was to reestablish a home for the Jews in their ancient ancestral land. The movement originated in Europe as a solution to the endemic and systemic anti-Semitism in Eastern and Central Europe, as well as the widespread assimilation of the Jews into the general population of Western Europe and America — both of which were, in their own way, a threat to Jews and their Jewishness.¹⁰ Ironically headquartered in Berlin, “Zionism remained an overwhelmingly European movement” until, well, about 1917.¹¹

1917–38

Jewish historian Michael Oren notes that with America’s entry into WWI, “American Jews were not alone in exerting . . . pressure” on President Wilson to strike a pro-Zionist posture; “restorationist Protestants also demanded a presidential endorsement of Zionism. ‘The Zionist movement of recent years has impressed profoundly many students of the scriptures . . . as the beginning of the fulfillment for that great line of prophecies,’ declared Wheaton College president Charles Blanchard.”¹² The Zionist movement was sweeping swiftly westward into Britain and the US, assisted by a considerable segment of the evangelical church which dispensationalism had conditioned to be more attentive to the significance of Israel.

The year 1917 inaugurated a providential convergence of global events that turned out to have paradigm-shifting implications for the future of Israel. In April the US entered the First World War with a declaration of war on Germany. The October Revolution eventually increased anti-Semitism in Russia, driving up Jewish emigration. December sounded the death knell for the hegemony of the Ottoman Empire when Jerusalem fell to the British, shifting control of that epicentral piece of real estate westward. What made that event even more significant, however, was a letter written a month earlier. The dispatch, in what came to be known as the Balfour Declaration, stated as official British policy “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Both Prime Minister Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, along with many others, believed that there were biblical grounds, both historical and prophetic, for such a policy.¹³ Shortly thereafter, President Wilson “officially identified Zionism with the foreign policy of the United States.”¹⁴ Then, “at the San Remo Conference following World War I (April 1920), the Supreme Council of the Principal Allied Powers determined the allocation of the Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottoman Empire and decided to incorporate the 1917 Balfour Declaration supporting a Jewish national home in Palestine into the British Mandate for the territory, a move which confirmed international recognition of the right of Jewish self-determination.”¹⁵ In 1922 the British Mandate was adopted by the League of Nations. Zionism had become government policy in the world’s major power brokers. But the road to realizing that future was still a long and tortuous one, and harsher than anyone but God could have foreseen.

1939–45

So 1917 was, in many ways, an auspicious year for the future of Israel. Not so much 1939. Britain could no longer ignore the rumblings that signaled the imminent eruption of yet another war with Germany.¹⁶ Convinced of the strategic importance of both Palestine and Arab support, Britain “issued what became known as the White Paper of 1939, in essence repudiating the Balfour Declaration in its entirety” and “damning [the Jews] to their fate under Hitler with no homeland for their refuge and virtually no countries accepting Jewish people.”¹⁷

An acrid cloud of anti-Semitic and genocidal frenzy swept over the Axis territories. There were collateral victims as well, of course. (Look up the name Jane Haining sometime.) But no single demographic was more purposefully targeted than the Jews. No single event in the twentieth century has raised the “why” question more poignantly and repeatedly than the Holocaust. At the same time, no other event galvanized more determined rededication to the establishment of a Jewish state in the aftermath of the war.

1948–Present

Immediately in the wake of WWII, the God who rules in the kingdoms of men and places over them whom He will (Dan. 4:17) placed Harry Truman in the Oval Office and used him to shepherd Israel back into the land. It was a complex political problem, however, and Truman himself often needed goading. Of all the arguments for establishing a Jewish homeland, none was more emotionally overwhelming or unanswerable than the Holocaust. But that was far from the only argument. “Not only Jews but also American Christians were hounding Truman,” notes Michael Oren. “Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute, for example, reminded the faithful that ‘the title deeds’ granting Palestine to the Jews were ‘still extant in millions of Bibles the world around.’. . . Polls taken in 1947 found that Americans, by a ratio of two to one, were in favor of a Jewish state.”¹⁸ The widespread interest, anticipation, and sympathy generated by dispensational theology on behalf of the Jewish people both in America and abroad unquestionably played a role in conditioning the climate for the creation of a Jewish state in the providence of God.

Only time will tell definitively whether 1948 commenced a prophetic fulfillment. One of the major objections to seeing 1948 as a fulfillment of prophecy is the fact that the modern state of Israel is still largely atheistic and has been since its inception. Eduard Schnabel argues, “The Old Testament prophets expected repentance before restoration.”¹⁹ But Michael Rydelnik (along with many other dispensationalists) observes that “the Bible predicts that Israel would return to her land in unbelief” in passages such as Ezekiel 36:24–26.²⁰ Dispensationalists also point to several unfulfilled prophecies describing events that “cannot happen unless Israel is a national entity in the land of Palestine with political, military, and religious control” (Dan. 9:24–27; Zech. 12; Isa. 19:16–25).²¹ Expanding on Aristotle’s “four causes,” Barry Leventhal identifies five causes for the creation of the Israeli State out of the ashes of the Israeli Shoah (Holocaust): (1) Efficient Cause: the Lord God; (2) Material Cause: the Holocaust survivors; (3) Formal Cause: the reborn nation of Israel; (4) Final Cause: the glory of God; and (5) Instrumental Cause: providentially placed political powers (such as Truman and Churchill) along with the extraordinary personal sacrifices of multitudes of ordinary people (such as the Zionists).²² To the list of instrumental causes, however, I would venture to add the cultural conditioning of Christian restorationism and dispensational theology. Interestingly, one of the effects of these historical events involving Israel has been a noteworthy decline in, distancing from, and redefinition of supersessionism on the part of many theologians and churches, to the point that “supersessionism’s grip on the Christian church as a whole has been lessened significantly.”²³

Israel has fought a war for her survival in every decade since 1948. Not content with mere survival, Israel has flourished against all odds. Read the history of her wars. Evidence of the providential protection of God is undeniable. Humanly speaking, there’s no reason that the Jewish state should still exist, let alone be prospering as the percapita technological powerhouse of the world.²⁴ Jewish historian Michael Oren says as much as he concludes his riveting account of the 1967 Six-Day War: “Such analyses perhaps explained how Israel won the war; they could not account for its outcome.” Almost no “stage of the conflict was planned or even contemplated. . . . Even the ‘liberation’ of Jerusalem, as Israelis call it, regarding the event as the most significant of the war and assigning it almost messianic ramifications, came about largely through chance.”²⁵ To which the only biblical response is: it was not by chance. None of this has been.

During his first term as president, Ronald Reagan appointed lifelong Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick as Permanent US Representative to the UN. Kirkpatrick, “shocked by the level of hatred she saw for Israel at the U.N.,” once remarked, “I think the Holocaust is possible again. I didn’t think so before I came to the United Nations, but I think so now.”²⁶ Little has changed in the UN since then. And if the dispensational premillennial understanding of Daniel and Revelation is correct, it’s not only possible, it’s prophesied. But so is the future salvation of the nation when they finally recognize and take refuge in their Messiah. None of this has anything to do with Israel’s deservedness, but it has everything to do with the integrity of God, who always keeps His promises to those to whom He makes them.

Conclusion

The political events of the first half of the twentieth century profoundly shaped the theological developments of the second half of the twentieth century. Some would argue that they also validated the theological developments of the second half of the nineteenth century as well. Critics have often accused dispensationalism of “newspaper exegesis.” While the charge is a helpful reminder that current events do not interpret Scripture, it is just as mistaken to insist that Scripture provides no lens for interpreting current events. Every fulfillment of prophecy is nothing less than the convergence of revelation and reality. At some point, the prophesied future becomes the actual present. To risk putting it somewhat crassly, every prophecy eventually becomes a newspaper headline, because every prediction eventually converges with a point in time.

Mark Twain, though no great friend of Christianity, cultivated an affinity for the Jews. He toured Palestine when it was still a deserted wilderness and wrote about it. He had a Jewish son-in-law and, while in Paris, was himself the subject of anti-Semitism when the French press (remarking on his first name, Samuel, and the size of his nose) suggested he was Jewish.²⁷ It was Twain who wrote, “All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?” The only feasible explanation is the one the Bible offers: the secret lies in the promises of God to Abraham and to his seed. Those promises, and the prophecies that grow out of them, are ultimately rooted in the integrity of God — His ability to say exactly what He means and to do exactly what He says. And that, more than anything else, is what dispensational theology is all about.

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Dr. Layton Talbert is professor of Theology on the Seminary faculty at Bob Jones University.

(Originally published in FrontLine • November/December 2016. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)

1. Michael Vlach, “Israel in Church History,” in The People, the Land, and the Future of Israel, ed. Darrell Bock and Mitch Glaser (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2014), 198–99. [↩]
2. H. H. Rowden, “Darby, John Nelson,” in New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J. I. Packer (Downers Grove: IVP, 1988), 187. [↩]
3. Michael J. Svigel, “The History of Dispensationalism in Seven Eras,” in Dispensationalism and the History of Redemption, D. Jeffrey Bingham and Glenn R. Kreider, eds. (Chicago: Moody, 2015), 77. [↩]
4. Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2007), 277. [↩]
5. Vlach, “Israel in Church History,” 207–8. [↩]
6. Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock, Progressive Dispensationalism (Wheaton: Baker, 1993), 11. [↩]
7. Svigel, 84. [↩]
8. Michael Rydelnik, Understanding the Arab- Israeli Conflict (Chicago: Moody, 2007), 72–73. [↩]
9. Ibid., 74. [↩]
10. Ibid., 78. [↩]
11. Oren, 353, 359. [↩]
12. Ibid., 359. [↩]
13. Rydelnik, 84. This was not the first time that political considerations converged with religious motivations on behalf of Israel. Cyrus’s policy of repatriating those displaced by the Babylonian captivity, including the Jews, was politically astute, but Ezra 1 informs us that the policy was also religiously motivated and prophetically predicted. [↩]
14. Oren, 365. [↩]
15. Joshua Teitelbaum, “Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People: From the San Remo Conference (1920) to the Netanyahu-Abbas Talks,” Jerusalem Viewpoints Series No. 579 (September- October 2010), Synopsis. [↩]
16. It has often been argued that the Allies effectively created the conditions for Hitler by inflicting crippling and humiliating conditions on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles. Perhaps, but a little historical context is helpful. Only a year before Versailles, the Germans had inflicted even harsher terms on Russia via the Brest-Litovsk Treaty. In any case, whatever its human contributions may have been, the bigger consideration in the rise of Hitler is the theological context of divine providence. [↩]
17. Rydelnik, 90. [↩]
18. Oren, 488. [↩]
19. Eduard Schnabel, 40 Questions about the End Times (Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2011), 141. [↩]
20. Rydelnik, 132. Remarkably, nowhere in his book on eschatological prophecy does Schnabel even cite Ezekiel 36. [↩]
21. John S. Feinberg, “Israel in the Land as an Eschatological Necessity?” in The People, the Land, and the Future of Israel, ed. Darrell Bock and Mitch Glaser (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2014), 184–93. [↩]
22. Barry Levanthal, “Israel in Light of the Holocaust,” in The People, the Land, and the Future of Israel, ed. Darrell Bock and Mitch Glaser (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2014), 234–35. [↩]
23. Michael Vlach, Has the Church Replaced Israel? (Nashville: B&H, 2010), 69–72. [↩]
24. George Gilder, “Silicon Israel,” City (Summer 2003, Vol. 19, No. 3). [↩]
25. Michael Oren, Six Days of War (New York: Random House, 2003), 311–12. [↩]
26. Peter Collier, Political Woman: The Big Little Life of Jeane Kirkpatrick (New York: Encounter Books, 2012), 130. Though appointed as a Democrat, Kirkpatrick became a Republican for the last thirty years of her life. [↩]
27. Oren, 283–84. [↩]