Christian Zionism Came Long Before Dispensationalism
I will never forget the day twenty-five years ago when I replaced my replacement theology. I was leading a church tour of Israel, and we were standing on the ruins of a third-century AD synagogue at Capernaum, just a stone’s throw from the sparkling waters of the Sea of Galilee.
Our guide read from a passage I had read hundreds of times but always skipped over: “Jesus said to the crowds and his disciples, ‘On Moses’ seat have sat the scribes and the Pharisees. Everything therefore they might say, put into practice and protect’” (Matt. 23:2–3a; my emphasis and translation).
I was shocked, not only that I had never noticed, but more importantly, that Jesus was praising all the teachings of the scribes and Pharisees. This was just before Jesus launched into a long tirade against what most Christians are used to hearing about: Pharisaic hypocrisy. But this overlooked prelude made me realize suddenly that my previous thinking about Jesus rejecting first-century Judaism needed scrutiny, especially my assumption that God had transferred his covenant from the Jewish people to (what rapidly became) the Gentile Church.
Recently the Reformed theologian Brian G. Mattson rehearsed traditional arguments for what I had previously believed—that because most Jews rejected Jesus after his resurrection, God replaced his covenant with Abraham’s Jewish progeny with the new covenant for followers of Jesus. No longer were the Jews his Chosen People (unless they accepted Jesus) and no longer was the land of Israel a holy land. God’s focus now was solely on his worldwide Church and all its lands.
Mattson was responding to Tucker Carlson’s now-viral claims that Christian Zionism is a “brain virus” and “Christian heresy” and that Israel does not deserve American political or religious support. Mattson’s counter was far more intelligent than most. While Christian Zionism is bad theology, he writes, many objections to it mask antisemitism. Carlson and his new allies Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens purvey “conspiratorial hatred of Jews.” Israel is typically subjected to “double standards” by its global critics, and there are “many good reasons” to support the state of Israel—though Mattson does not identify them.
Mattson adds that Christian Zionism is “probably not … a decisive departure” from Christian orthodoxy because it does not directly conflict with one of the ecumenical creeds. Christian Zionists will no doubt be cheered by this concession, perhaps like the husband who is told by his counselor that he is “probably” not a bad husband because he beats his wife only occasionally.
This “fulfillment” theologian supports his case with a selective use of quotes from Jesus and the apostle Paul, focusing on Jesus’s proclamation that he came “not to abolish but to fulfill” the Law and Prophets. Like other fulfillment theologians, he interprets “fulfill” to mean “go beyond and leave behind.” As Mattson puts it, the Jewish covenant and land are “out of gear, retired, made obsolete” in redemptive history and significance. They are the types made obsolete by their antitypes (fulfillments). Once the architect’s model is replaced by the building, the model is discarded.
This is how fulfillment theology works. But it is not how Paul thinks. He wrote that human marriage is a type or model of Christ’s marriage to the Church (Eph. 5:21–33; 2 Cor. 11:12). But once Christ came, marriage did not come to an end. And while fulfillment theology says Christ replaced the temple, He declared that God still dwelled in the temple (Matt. 23:21), Paul participated in animal sacrifices at the temple long after his conversion (Acts 21:26), and the apostles kept attending temple worship after temple leaders had delivered Jesus to death (Acts 2:46; 3:1). All this at the same time that Paul believed his own body and the church were temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16; 6;19; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21–22). So the biblical record of the early church shows the Jesus movement’s leaders had no problem holding on to the type and its antiype at the same time. One did not have to replace the other.
Fulfillment theologies are like Procrustes in the Greek myth, the bandit who cut off his victim’s legs if they were too long to fit onto his iron bed. They ignore the inconvenient passages of the Bible that don’t fit their iron bed of fulfillment theology.
Such as Jesus declaring that every stroke of the pen in Torah and the Prophets is God-given (Matt. 5:17–18), which includes Moses telling Pharaoh that Israel is God’s “firstborn son” (Ex. 4:22). Not to mention Jeremiah’s prophecy that as long as the sun, moon, and stars are in the sky, the offspring of Israel will never cease being a nation before God (Jer. 31:35–36). And the Old Testament repeating God’s land promise (of the lands of Canaan) to Abraham’s Jewish progeny more than one thousand times, for example, God telling Abraham in Genesis 17:8: “I will give to you and to your offspring after you … all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (my emphasis).
Many think that Jesus implicitly denied the land promise when He preached in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matt. 5:5; my emphasis).
But scholars (such as here and here and here) are starting to recognize that Jesus was quoting Psalm 37:11, and that the Hebrew word for “earth” can also be translated as “land.” Since the phrase “inherit the land” occurs five times in Psalm 37, it is probable that Jesus meant “land” and not “earth.”
And what about Paul? Did he believe his Jewish brothers who had rejected Jesus thereby lost their Chosen People status? Quite the contrary. In his last major statement on the Jewish people more than twenty-five years after his conversion, he said these Jesus-rejecting brothers “are [note the present tense] beloved because of the fathers,” the patriarchs. Their “gifts and calling are irrevocable” (Rom. 11:28–29).
“Calling” was a technical Jewish term for God’s choosing Abraham’s seed to be his Chosen People, and “gifts” for first-century Jews like Philo the Alexandrian philosopher and Josephus the historian always included the land promise. Lest there be doubt that Paul still believed in the land promise, Luke tells us in Acts of the Apostles that when preaching in a synagogue in Antioch of Pisidia (now Turkey), Paul told his audience that “after destroying seven nations in the land of Canaan, God gave this people Israel their land as an inheritance” (Acts 13: 16b–17, 19). This was more than twenty years after his Damascus road encounter, and Paul could not have been more explicit that he continued to hold to the land promise.
But it wasn’t only Jesus and Paul. The author of Hebrews says God led Abraham to a place to receive as an inheritance, and that Isaac and Jacob were heirs with him of the same promise (Heb. 11:9). Before his martyrdom, deacon Stephen said God promised to give Abraham this land as a possession and to his offspring after him (Acts 7:4–5).
Part of Mattson’s problem is that he, like most fulfillment theologians, confuses all forms of Christian Zionism with one recent and admittedly bizarre variety called dispensationalism. This came in the mid-nineteenth century from England, is focused on an unbiblical “rapture” that makes Christ’s final coming a third rather than second coming, treats the Jewish people as “earthly” and on a separate track to the eschaton, and revels in detailed End-Times schedules that go beyond what the Bible tells us.
But as I and others have shown, Christian Zionism starts in the New Testament. It was retained in part among some of the Fathers in the first three centuries, submerged during and after the Constantinian settlement, but came to the surface again among the sixteenth-century (Calvinist) Puritans in England and (Lutheran) Pietists on the continent.
So three centuries before dispensationalism, both Calvinists and Lutherans were concluding that Calvin and Luther were premature to assume that every promise made to the Jewish people was automatically transferred to the Gentile Church. Some of the Old Testament promises were irreducibly Jewish- and Israel-centered and should not be so spiritualized as to remove their original referents to people and places in space and time. We could call this spiritualizing a kind of Gnosticism.
And Mattson and other Reformed fulfillment theologians should know that many Christian Zionists have been Reformed—before and after the rise of dispensationalism.
Increase Mather wrote in his The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation (1669) that “the Israelites shall again possess … the Land promised unto their Father Abraham.” Mather warned against a supersessionist spiritualization of promises made to Israel: “Why should we unnecessarily refuse literal interpretations?”
At the turn of the eighteenth century, the Dutch Reformed theologian Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) published a four-volume systematic theology that asked:
Will the Jewish nation be gathered together again from all the regions of the world and from all the nations of the earth among which they have been dispersed? Will they come to and dwell in Canaan and all the lands promised to Abraham, and will Jerusalem be rebuilt? We believe that these events will transpire.
Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), perhaps the greatest Reformed theologian after Calvin, agreed with Brakel that Calvin’s supersessionism used a hyperspiritualist hermeneutic that rode roughshod over Scripture’s plain sense. He wrote in his Blank Bible that just as the “restoration” of an individual at first involves only his soul but then later his body at the general resurrection, so too “not only shall the spiritual state of the Jews be hereafter restored, but their external state as a nation in their own land … shall be restored by [Christ].”
Karl Barth, the most influential Reformed theologian of the twentieth century, rejected dispensationalism but believed that the rise of the state of Israel was a “secular parable” that bears witness to the Light of the World in Jesus Christ. The modern history of Israel, he wrote, “even now hurries relentlessly” toward the future of God’s redemptive purposes.
Therefore Mattson and all fulfillment theologians utter something of a fantasy when they predicate that rejection of Christian Zionism “is as ‘catholic’ or universal a conviction as one may hope to find.”
Typically they declare, as Mattson does, that Christian Zionists are presumptuous to find any relation between the Bible and the current state of Israel. Mattson is right, strictly speaking, but not as much as he supposes. Consider the apostle Peter’s prophecy in his second speech in Jerusalem, that the apokatastasis is still to come (Acts 3:21).This was the word used by the (Greek language) Septuagint (the Bible for the early church) that one day there would be a return to the land by Jews from the four corners of the earth (Jeremiah 16:15; 24:6; 50:19; Hosea 11:11).
Many scholars said these Old Testament prophecies referred to the return to the land after exile in Babylon. But Peter was speaking after the resurrection of Christ. He was predicting a future worldwide return to the land—which did not occur in significant numbers for more than seventeen centuries.
Historians have documented a massive return of Jews to the land starting in the eighteenth and then flooding in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Only a prejudiced mind (recall Procrustes’s iron bed) would deny the possibility that this unprecedented return to the land was a fulfillment of not only Old Testament but also New Testament (think Peter’s) prophecy.
Is the state of Israel a direct fulfillment of biblical prophecy? No. But no sooner did the Jews return to their ancestral land than they were attacked by their neighbors. Not once, but over and over. Every other people in a land has organized a state for its protection. If there is anything that the last century has taught us, it is that Jews have murderous enemies and they need a state to protect them.
So the return of the Jews from the four corners of the earth in the last three centuries is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy, and the state of Israel is necessary for the protection of that covenanted people. But not only that. The state of Israel, as both sides of the political aisle have testified until recently, is a bulwark of western civilization fighting the same enemies—leftist secularism and jihadist Islam—that want to destroy our American traditions. Our support for what Israel is doing can therefore be argued both religiously and politically.
Most fulfillment theologians don’t realize the logic of their argument and where it has led historically. Their view has been called “supersessionism” because it means that the Gentile Church has superseded (gone beyond and replaced) Jewish Israel in God’s affections. The Jewish people who do not follow Jesus are no longer God’s Chosen, and the land is no different from any other.
Starting in the fourth century but beginning even earlier, Gentile Christians started thinking Jews were stubborn and perverse for refusing what seemed obvious to them: that Jesus was their messiah. Their supersessionist (fulfillment, if you will) theology implied that God had given up on them because of their obstinacy. Pretty soon they were being blamed (in “blood libels”) for epidemics and disasters, and were shortly considered a cancer that for social health must be removed. The logic was straightforward: if God has given up on the Jews, we should too. It is not surprising that the most Christianized country in history and the birthplace of the Reformation—also the country whose churches had become supersessionist—gave birth to the Holocaust.
It would be perverse to charge all fulfillment theology with antisemitism. Many reject Christian Zionism for the plausible (but unfounded) reasons described in Mattson’s piece, and many are clearly philo-Semitic. But it might not be a bad idea for some of them to ask what W. D. Davies and other theologians started asking in the 1970s: “How did Christian Europe come to hate Jews?”
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