AnglicanThought

Here is an article written by an Eastern Priest,  Father Daniel Swires, on Christian Zionism.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

There is an ancient belief among some people known as “millenarianism” or “chiliasm.” This is the belief that Christ will set up an earthly kingdom and will rule it for a thousand years, usually referred to as the “Millenium.”

This belief actually has its origin in post-exilic Judaism. An anticipation that survived the Babylonian exile was that one day God would restore the kingdom of David under a model anointed king, the Messiah. Even though idealized, this would be an earthly, historical kingdom, and most often its relation to the end-time was not specified.

Another expectation that developed, especially in apocalyptic writings, was that God would directly intervene in the end-time, without any mention of a restoration of the Davidic kingdom.

One way of combining the two expectations was to see two divine interventions: (1) a restoration of an earthly kingdom or period of blissful prosperity to be followed by (2) God’s end-time victory and judgment. Many writers speculated about these two events. They are found in 1^st Enoch, in 4^th Ezra, in 2^nd Baruch, in the Ascension of Isaiah. It is interesting, though, that each of these writers sees a different time frame for these events. It is quite probable, in fact, that most of them never intended to convey exact times. Rather, they were symbolic ways of predicting divine victory over evil forces that are an obstacle to God’s Kingdom or rule.

St. John, then, in writing the Apocalypse, also used the idea of a thousand-year reign of Christ, not to describe a historical, earthly kingdom, but as a way of saying that ultimately, in His own time, God will have the victory. (It is worth reminding ourselves that only one passage in the Apocalypse, consisting of two verses, mentions a thousand-year reign: from this one small passage has come a lot of exaggerated speculation.)

Nevertheless, throughout Christian history some have taken the thousand years quite literally and speculated about it. That belief was held by many in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries, even among some that were considered orthodox (Papias, Justin, Tertullian, Hippolytus, etc.). However, the danger that the expectations of abundance and happiness were becoming too sensual and worldly gradually led to a rejection of millenarianism. Origen allegorized the millennium to represent the spiritual kingdom of God on earth; Augustine understood the first resurrection to refer to conversion to Christianity and the death to sin, and the second resurrection to refer to the resurrection of the body at the end of time. Church writers of the 4^th century tell us that Apollinarius of Laodicea was a chiliast, and the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus (431) condemned his fanciful theories.

But, especially in the Western church, from time to time millennial expectations have been revived in various forms. The Cistercian Joachim of Flora (1130-1202) proclaimed that the millenium or “new era of the Spirit,” represented by monasticism, would come about 1260. Never mind that Christ, Himself, said that no man knows the day nor the hour of our Lord’s return. (Let that be a warning: whenever you hear anyone setting a date, even in general terms, you can immediately write him off as being caught up in error.) Although millenarianism was rejected by the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, some splinter groups, including such famous heretics as (T.) Munzer, and John of Leiden embraced it.

The coming of persecuted Protestants to North America was often accompanied by hopes of establishing a religiously perfect kingdom in the New World. In the United States during the 19^th century, millennialist groups proliferated, usually with one foot in the book of Daniel and the other in the Apocalypse of St. John, and always reinforced by so-called “private” revelations. These are exemplified in the followers of Ellen G. White (Seventh-Day Adventists) and Charles T. Russell (Jehovah’s Witnesses).

In some evangelical groups sharp divisions arose between Premillennialists and Postmillennialists. Premillennialists believe that the golden age will come only after the evil present era is destroyed at the Second Coming. Postmillennialists are optimistic liberals and believe that the present age will be gradually transformed into the millennium by natural progress in society and religious reform: never mind that Christ, Himself, told us that in the end times there would be great apostasy and corruption of society, not progress. (We Orthodox must keep in mind that millenarianism was condemned by the Church long ago and that both of these views are heretical.)

I would like to emphasize, here, that the first thing we must have if we are going to be protected from the erroneous teachings that are all around us is a basic knowledge of the teachings of Orthodox Christianity. That is, knowledge of the Holy Scripture, both the Old and New Testaments (as it has been interpreted by the Church for 2000 years); knowledge of the writings of the Church Fathers; knowledge of Church history; and awareness of the different kind of heresies and errors which have attacked the Church’s true understanding of dogma and especially of the end times. If we do not have a grounding in sources such as these, we will find ourselves confused and unprepared. Our Lord tells us to be ready, to be prepared. So, it is imperative that we study Holy Scripture, the writings of the Church Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, etc., in order to have a basic knowledge and understanding of the teachings of Orthodox Christianity.

In 1970 a book was printed in English which became a tremendous bestseller for a religious book. It sold over ten million copies in America. It’s called The Late Great Planet Earth by Hal Lindsey, an Evangelical Protestant in Texas. Ten years later he published another bestseller called The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon. In these books he talks about the Millenium and about such strange things as the “Rapture,” when Christians are supposedly gathered up into the heavens before the end of the world, and then watch how the people suffer down below. He talks a great deal about the founding of the modern state of Israel and the perceived necessity of expanding its borders to the ancient borders of the Kingdom of David as the key to the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and about the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. (By the way, this is why Evangelical Protestants are diehard supporters of a greater Israel, even at the expense of the Palestinian Christians, who they view as being tools of Satan because they are opposed to the expansion of Israel.)

So, where in the world does all this come from? Well, it actually comes from the predominant fundamentalist Protestant form of Premillenialsim known as Dispensationalism.

Let’s look first at the doctrine of the “Rapture.” Actually, the doctrine of a “Rapture” does not originate in the book of the Revelation. The word “rapture” is not actually found anywhere in any English translations of the Bible. It comes from rapere which is found in the expression “caught up” in the Latin translation of 1 Thessalonians 4:17. Let’s read verses 15-18:

• “For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will by no means precede those who are asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore comfort one another with these words.”

Now, this is actually a fairly straightforward and very exciting passage of Scripture. The Apostle Paul is talking about the Second Coming of Christ. He says that it will be a glorious event, proclaimed by the voice of an archangel and the blast of a trumpet. You can just picture in your mind what a glorious event this will be! The dead in Christ will be resurrected! Those who are alive will ascend to meet their Lord and shall dwell with Him in eternity! This is our blessed hope being fulfilled! And St. Paul says, “Therefore comfort one another with these words!”

But the idea of an event called the “Rapture” is not actually taught in this passage of Scripture, or anywhere in the Bible, for that matter. Rather, it comes from focusing on those two words “caught up” and interpreting them within the context of Dispensationalism.

Their basic premise is that this passage is not talking about the Second Coming of Christ at all, but rather it is talking about an event that will occur before the Second Coming in which the Church will be “snatched” or “raptured” from the Earth, leaving everyone else behind. Usually this is taught to occur before a period of seven years known as the Great Tribulation, but there are proponents of a mid-Tribulation “rapture” and even a post-Tribulation “rapture.” But, none of this will make sense if we do not know anything about Dispensationalism. So, let’s look briefly at its origins and teachings.

While there have always been groups that worried about such things as a Great Tribulation period and the Anti-Christ, the idea of a “rapture” was pretty rare until the early 1800’s when a man by the name of John Nelson Darby, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, developed the theological system known as Dispensationalism. In fact, much of the thought and attitudes of those who are known as Fundamentalists can be found in the teachings of J. N. Darby.

Mr. Darby was born in London of Irish parents on November 18, 1800. In 1819, at the age of eighteen, Darby graduated from Trinity College Dublin as a lawyer. In 1825 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, and the following year, he was elevated to the priesthood and was assigned a parish in Ireland.

After only twenty-seven months as a parish priest and thoroughly dissatisfied, Darby left the Church of England and began meeting with a Bible study group in Dublin during the winter of 1827-28. It was this group which would later become known as the Plymouth Brethren. While Darby was not the founder of this group, he quickly emerged as its spiritual leader and dominant force.

Many other Brethren groups formed in Britain and subsequently in other parts of the world. As a result of his extensive travels, Darby himself was responsible for the spread of Brethren doctrine to other countries. He made several trips to preach and teach in Germany, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Holland. Between 1859 and 1874, Darby made six trips to the United States and Canada where he taught in all the major cities and in some of the smaller ones as well.

Wherever Darby went, he continually expounded his views on the doctrine of the Church and of future things. He saw the saintly remnant, God’s “heavenly people” as completely incompatible with God’s “earthly people”, Israel. This notion has deep and complex roots in his hermeneutics, ecclesiastical context (19th c. Anglican), and probably even his psychology. He was convinced both that the Church was in a state of ruin and that Christ’s return to “rapture” the saints and establish an earthly millennial kingdom was imminent. Probably the most important disciple of J. N. Darby was Dwight L. Moody, the founder of the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago.

Darby is called by many the father of modern Dispensationalism which was made popular first by the Scofield Reference Bible and more recently by the Ryrie Study Bible. It is a theological system that has gained wide influence through the publications and educational efforts of institutions like Moody Bible Institute and Dallas Theological Seminary. In fact, Darby is credited with much of the theological content of the Fundamentalist movement.

Another very important dispensationalist was William E. Blackstone (1841-1935). He was born in New York and raised in an evangelical Methodist home. After the Civil War Blackstone settled in Oak Park, Illinois, and established himself as a successful businessman and lay evangelist to the Chicago business community. He became a dispensationalist and a close friend of D. L. Moody. In 1878 he published Jesus is Coming, which went through three editions, was translated into 42 languages, and was dispensationalism’s first bestseller in America.

In 1891 Blackstone drew up a petition advocating the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In short order, he collected 413 signatures from leading Americans, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the speaker of the House, the mayors of Chicago, New York, and Boston, and business leaders such as Cyrus McCormick, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Blackstone forwarded the petition to President Benjamin Harrison, who ignored it, and later he sent others to Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Blackstone became good friends with Zionist leaders and regularly sent them the results of his “prophetic” study. In 1918, at a Zionist conference in Philadelphia, organizers hailed Blackstone as a “Father of Zionism;” and in 1956, on the 75^th anniversary of his petition to President Harrison, the citizens of Israel dedicated a forest in his honor.

This connection between dispensationalist evangelical Protestants and Zionists continues to this very day. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Voices United for Israel Conference in Washington, D. C., in April 1998. Most of the 3,000 in attendance were evangelical Protestants, including Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition, Kay Arthur of Precept Ministries, Jane Hanson of Women’s Aglow, and Brandt Gustavson of the National Religious Broadcasters. (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson supported the conference but did not attend.)

On the day before he met with President Bill Clinton, who urged him to trade West Bank land for peace with the Palestinians, Netanyahu told the conference: “We have no greater friends and allies than the people sitting in this room.”

The close tie between evangelical Protestants and Israel is important: it has shaped popular opinion in America and, to some extent, U.S. foreign policy. To understand how it developed, one must know something about the beliefs of these evangelical Protestants.

Most of those who gathered in Washington to show their support for Israel believe that the Holy Land will be ground zero for events surrounding the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Such people read the Bible as though it were a huge jigsaw puzzle of prophecies, with Israel in the center. They believe that human history is following a predetermined divine script, and they and Israel are simply playing their assigned roles. These beliefs come out of the complex system of biblical interpretation know as dispensationalism.

The Scofield Reference Bible was edited by Dr. C. I. Scofield, a lawyer who converted to Protestantism under the teaching of D. L. Moody. He studied many of the Plymouth Brethren writings and put together a huge set of reference notes that were issued as the Scofield Reference Bible. He became the great teacher of dispensationalism to a whole generation of people.

It was Dr. Scofield who provided the Fundamentalist definition of a dispensation. In the first chapter of Genesis he has a note which says, “A dispensation is a period of time during which man is tested in respect to his obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.” He saw through the course of history seven periods of time in which God was doing different things with men. He called them: (1) The “dispensation of innocence,” which covered the time before the fall when Adam and Eve were in the Garden, in fellowship with God. (2) The “dispensation of conscience,” which followed the fall and extended to the time of Noah, when men lived according to their consciences. (3) The “dispensation of human government,” which came in after the flood and went from Noah’s time until that of Abraham. (4) The “dispensation of promise,” which began when Abraham was given various great promises of God by which men were to live, as Dr. Scofield saw it, until the time when Moses brought the law. The (5th) “dispensation of law” ran on through many centuries until the coming of Jesus Christ, who introduced (6) the “dispensation of grace” in which we all live, and which is yet to be followed by (7) the “dispensation of the kingdom,” or “the millennium,” a thousand years of Christ’s rule on earth in the future. Those are the seven dispensations taught by Fundamentalist Protestants.

It is interesting to note that the “dispensation of grace” is also referred to as the “Times of the Gentiles.” Dispensationalists believe that the “Times of the Gentiles” will end with the end of Daniel’s “Seventieth Week,” which is considered the last “week” of time before the restoration of the earthly kingdom. There have been many attempts to mathematically determine the beginning and ending of the “Seventieth Week,” all of which have failed. But there is a general belief that the turn of the millennium is related to this time.

I remember so well some of the slogans of dispensational teaching. One was, “Rightly dividing the word of truth,” borrowed from 2 Timothy 2:15 where St. Paul exhorts young Bishop Timothy,

• “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a workman who has no need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”

To the Dispensationalist mind, that means dividing up history according to these dispensational distinctions, “rightly dividing” it so that you have a clear understanding of the divisions of time.

I have since come to understand that this verse doesn’t refer to that at all. It is really talking about hermeneutical or interpretational principles. One is to handle the Word of truth according to the clear teaching of the Church through the Apostles and their successors, the Bishops, and not go off on a tangent, on doctrinal side tracks, but to “plow a straight course” through the Word of truth. That is literally what the phrase means.

Another of their phrases is “The Great Parenthesis,” which has to do with prophecy. It means that seemingly God has interrupted His program with the nation of Israel, that at the Cross this nation was scattered abroad across the face of the earth, and God introduced the Church. The church age will run its course until the Great Tribulation, and then God will “rapture” it and again deal with the people of Israel and wind up this age with a resurgence of the prominence of the nation of Israel and the restoration of the kingdom of David. The period in between, then, is called “The Great Parenthesis,” the time when God is working with the Church, as opposed to Israel.

The doctrine of the rapture, which is woven into this dispensationalist system, actually has its origin in Darby’s warped ecclesiology. The “heavenly people” must be hermetically sealed off from any divine activity with the “earthly people.” Thus, if Israel’s “clock of prophecy” (another code-word) is to begin keeping time again during the Great Tribulation, then, by definition, God’s heavenly people must be “caught up” and removed from the scene beforehand. So, we have the “rapture.”

Another of their slogans is, “All Scripture is for us but it is not about us.” This means that certain parts of the Scriptures seemingly do not apply to the Church but were addressed only to the Jews.

All of this found its final _expression in the teaching of Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, who was the successor to Dr. Scofield at the Scofield Memorial Church, in Dallas, Texas, and who founded the Dallas Theological Seminary.

One big problem with Dr. Scofield’s definition of a dispensation is his connecting it with “a period of time.” This word, “dispensation,” is a biblical word. It is found in the King James Version in several places. It comes from a Greek word, oikonomia, from which we get, in English; economy. In the Revised Standard Version it is usually translated “stewardship” or, in some places, “plan.” It appears in Ephesians 1:10 where the apostle Paul speaks of “a plan for the fullness of time.” In Ephesians 3:9, St. Paul speaks of a “dispensation” or “stewardship” which was committed to him, which he calls, in the RSV, “the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things.” This is the word we are dealing with. Literally, it would mean “the law of the house”. It has to do with the order and regulation of things.

Essentially, though, a dispensation has little to do with a period of time, as such. Let me illustrate. In John 1:17 you have a verse that Dispensationalists often use. John says,

• “The Law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ.”

This has been construed to mean that a “dispensation of law” was introduced by Moses which covered the Old Testament period after the Exodus. And the people of the Old Testament lived primarily under the Law and tried to fulfill the Law. But, in the New Testament, Jesus changed all that, set aside the Law, and introduced grace and truth. And now it is by grace and truth that we live.

But that is very confusing, because it ignores the fact that there was grace and truth running throughout the whole Old Testament. Right in the middle of the struggles of the people of Israel to obey the Law, was God’s provision – given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, -of grace and truth. The entire system of sacrifices was God’s gracious provision for the forgiveness of sins. And it is a picture of the work of Jesus Christ. Therefore, grace and truth were as much available, and as much a part of the life of God’s people, in the Old Testament as they are in the New. Grace and truth didn’t just begin with the Incarnation.

Because of this confusion about time, many Dispensationalists have rejected, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount, the great passage in Matthew 5 through 7 in which our Lord taught such things as the Beatitudes. Many Dispensationalists say, “No, this doesn’t belong to us. This belongs only to Israel. It is to be fulfilled in the future kingdom.” Because that passage incorporates the Lord’s Prayer, many Dispensationalists refuse to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Yet this is the prayer that Christ taught his disciples to pray, and it has great value and meaning for Christians today. Some go even further and apply much of the Gospels to the future kingdom age. Some reject water baptism as being inapplicable today. Or even the Lord’s Supper, they say, doesn’t belong to us but is only to be celebrated in the millennium that is yet to come. And some Dispensationalists set aside all the apostles except Paul. They say that Paul is the apostle to the Church, and that he is the only one we should read, that the rest were Jewish Apostles—James, and Peter, and John—and their words do not have any significance to us, but only to Hebrew Christians.

These distinctions have all been made because of their insistence in linking the idea of a dispensation with distinct divisions in time. But this is misleading.

In Galatians St. Paul says, “The law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.” But this doesn’t mean that people had to wait for twelve hundred years – the whole time from Moses to Christ before they could come to Christ.

No, the law was leading them to belief in their need for a Savior all during this time. That is what St. Paul means. And the same thing is actually true, today. A single person can, in fact, pass through a number of these so-called “dispensations.”

Take for instance a person living in the jungle, who is an animist and knows nothing of God. He is living, as Dr. Scofield would say, in the “dispensation of conscience,” in which he is responsible only to his conscience for guidance. But then, let us say, some Jews come along, and they get acquainted with him and begin to teach him the Old Testament revelation of God through Judaism, the Law of Moses and the sacrifices, and he becomes a Jew. Well, now he has moved into what Dr. Scofield would call the “dispensation of law.” He understands something of that further revelation. His understanding of God has been greatly increased, but it is still far short of what the New Testament sets forth – all this according to a Dispensationalist’s point of view. Finally some Christians come along, and this person is taught the New Testament and accepts Christ. Now he has moved into the “dispensation of grace”. But he is the same person – just at various stages of knowledge and understanding in his life – moving from one “dispensation” to another.

The last major problem with dispensationalism is its tendency to view people in the past as locked into a pattern of truth that they cannot rise above. That is, dispensationalists often teach that the Old Testament saints did not understand and did not experience God in the same way that we do today, that they lived at a lower level of understanding and experience than we, and they couldn’t come up to ours because ours is based on a fuller and fresher revelation of truth.

But we would have to disagree strongly with that. Take men like David and Abraham and Isaiah and others. When David writes in the Psalms about how he felt in relationship to God, we can only echo what he says. He cries,

• “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Ps. 27:1).

You can’t beat that. That is what the Lord can be to anyone! When you read Isaiah, you see beautiful descriptions of his understanding of the being, the wisdom, the knowledge, and the character of God, of His grace and His abiding presence. He writes to the people of Israel and says,

• “Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall, but those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength; They shall mount up with wings like eagles, They shall run and not be weary, They shall walk and not faint.” (Is. 40:30-31).

You can’t beat that. These people may have lived before Christ, but they certainly had a profound knowledge of God. Abraham is said to be the father of the faithful. That is, everyone who walks by faith walks in the steps of Abraham. He follows him. And Abraham was called the friend of God. He is set forth as the example of those who follow, so that we become children of Abraham, walking as Abraham walked – children of Abraham, by faith in Jesus Christ. Abraham was taught by God and came into communion with God. And the promise that was given to Abraham is promised to us.

So, you see, faith has a way of eclipsing time. Faith is a way of surmounting time, of stepping out of it, if you like. When you live by faith in Christ, you are able, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, to “taste the powers of the age to come.” The age to come hasn’t yet come in time, but you can experience the Kingdom of God now, in your life in the Church. You can know the presence of God, live in the city of God, walk in the midst of the garden, with the river of life flowing through it.

In summary, the whole “dispensationalist” system is flawed to its very core. The idea that God deals with mankind in all these different “dispensations” of time and is soon going to “snatch” or “rapture” the Church off this Earth and leave it populated with unbelievers who will initiate a Great Tribulation upon those who then come to believe in Christ, including a restored nation of Israel, is an innovation that is not taught in Scripture and is certainly incompatible with the teachings of Christ, the Apostles, and the Orthodox Church.

Glory to Jesus Christ!

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Many modern Christians (the vast majority of Baptists and non-denominationalists), such as John MacArthur, teach that there are essentially two peoples of God. In a recent conference, John MacArthur rebuked many of his colleagues by claiming that every one of them should believe in the modern pre-millenial doctrine of the “end times.” Now, I wonder how many of his colleagues remember that in the early 80′s, MacArthur false prophesied the return of Christ to be in 1984. I wonder also if many of his colleagues know that the premillennial doctrine he teaches originated only about 100 years ago. There was a doctrine called chiliasm that weaved its way into the early church through the likes of Jewish pseudepigrapha (non-canonical writings) as well as the heretics known as the Montanists. This was the belief that we are in a pre-state of the Church and that not until Christ comes back will we have a temporary reign with him of a thousand years. The problem with this view as it is expressed through modern Dispensationalsm is that it opens wide the opportunity for heretics to preach their dooms-day doctrines. Since, according to this view, we are headed in to some sort of prophetic tribulation and there is no victory in Christ and his Church until this supposed new thousand year era has arrived, we can expect horrible things to take place within the Church; and what Christ says in Matthew 13 and what Paul says in Ephesians 5 – that the Church and the Kingdom are growing into maturity – can never happen. It simply does not allow for Christ to have complete victory in this New Covenant. One may look at the current state of the Church and ask how such a thing could happen, since their is so much turmoil, but all this means is that we are a long ways off of seeing the return of Christ, or a short way with a hard thrust. We have work to do! And the problem is that many do not want to partake of this work because, well, as the Dispensationalists say, why polish brass on a sinking ship?

Chiliasm, which has now been transformed into Dispensational pre-millennialism, teaches that we are not yet reigning with Christ in His kingdom but taht will only happen in the future, for a thousand years, and then comes the end of time when heaven and earth are consummated to its final stage to accommodate God’s people. In other words, we are now in a sort of pre-state of Christ and will one day begin to experience our reign with Christ…and then, after a thousand years have gone by, inherit life where the devil is finally thrown into the lake of fire.  

One of the other confusions that this doctrine causes is based on what it teaches about the modern Jewish religion; that the people that live in the land of Israel are another people of God. Now, I do not think that many of them will say that these so-called people of God are going to paradise with Christ after they die, but I do know that they teach that  God is restoring to them their land as well as their temple in order to begin blood sacrifices again. It is really as if these premillennial Christians are teaching two different gospels: one that saves people that believe in the New Testament and another that saves people that believe only in the Old Testament, or the Torah, and that God still accepts (or will again accept) blood sacrifices for the atonement of sin. These teachers will not explicitly say that Jews spend eternity with Christ but their teaching begs the question of just what happens to them since they are supposedly being blessed by God with a new Temple and blood sacrifices.

This belief that there are two different people of God has led many to create a type of newspaper theology, where news events are desperately linked to bible verses, creating entire movements within the Church. These beliefs have gotten so popular that movies such as Left Behind have been produced. Another more frightening movement that has been birthed from the doctrine of premillennialism involves a  political idea that neo-Israel – this supposed new group that God is going to one day give eternal blessings to without following Christ – is to inherit the land that God took away from the Jewish people in the first century (first with the destruction of their Temple in A.D. 70 and then the complete termination of their religion within Israel in A.D. 135.)

Much of modern Christianity, with the help of leading advocates such as John MacArthur, are now claiming that this new Israel fulfilled this supposed prophesy that the land would one day be returned to this people of God in the year 1948. In 1948 the United States helped create space within Israel for a people to move in and begin claiming parts of the land (not the entire land, there are still many Christians and Muslims there). Why would the United States do this? Well, there is oil in Israel as well as its neighboring countries. The United States could think of no better plan than to conquer a portion of this land and send in conservatives in to partner with and eventually conquer large portions of the Middle East (remember, the United States government could give a rip about Judaism or Christianity).

You see, this is all a political game. God will not restore the Jewish Temple and He did not restore the Jewish land (as Jewish). He never will. The Temple of God is the Church of Jesus Christ. This is what St. Paul says throughout the New Testament. According to Christ and His Apostles the ceremonial law is forbidden to be practiced by ANYONE. It is heretical to obey the Old Testament and not the New. It well never be orthodox to practice the Old Covenant Law again. This would put all that Christ did on the cross to utter shame!

I would like to conclude this post by pointing to an article by Bishop N.T. Wright on the land of Israel and the confusion of it being prophetic to neo-judaism.

Epilogue: The Holy Land Today

(Originally published in The Way of the Lord: Christian Pilgrimage in the Holy Land and Beyond. 1999, London: SPCK; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 119-130.  Reproduced by permission of the author.) 

By Tom Wright 

ALL THAT I have said in this book would be just as relevant if the Holy Land, and Jerusalem in particular, were uninhabited save for the guardians of the shrines and the obligatory little boys selling postcards.  Or, for that matter, if the entire land were at peace, inhabited by one people living in peace and justice amongst themselves and with their neighbours.  But, notoriously, that is not the case, and it doesn’t look like being the case for some while to come.  What effect does this have on our pilgrimages, geographical and metaphorical?

We must avoid the natural reaction of Westerners who, perhaps forgetting Northern Ireland, are tempted to regard squabbles in the Balkans or the Levant as the result of silly backward peoples, or perhaps hot-tempered Mediterranean peoples, who can’t learn to get along with one another, and whose running skirmishes (and worse) get in the way of our natural desire to experience the ‘sabbath rest by Galilee, the calm of hills above’.  How inconsiderate of them, we think, to throw bombs at each other when we simply want to come and pray!  This, of course, is a typically modern and typically Western reaction.  In the hopes of a more thought-out possibility, I want to reflect by way of conclusion on the reality of things on the ground in Israel and the West Bank today, and then to reflect on how this reality might affect pilgrimage to that land.  And to everything that I shall now say I want to add: ‘but it’s actually far more complicated than that’.

Once upon a time there was a lady who rejoiced in a large family.  Her husband was rich and well respected.  His family used to live in a fine stately home in the country; impecunious ancestors had given it up several centuries ago, but the family still thought of it as theirs. One day, burglars broke into their current home.  They shot the husband, raped and murdered the daughters, cut the throats of all the sons, and stole everything they possessed.  The lady and one child miraculously escaped.  Desperately seeking to make a new life, they discovered that the old family home seemed to be available.  With help from a few friends, who felt guilty that no-one had heard the family’s cries for help in their hour of need, they moved in, assuming that the few people living on the estate were servants.  The lady married again, and in a short time had a new and flourishing family.  However, to her dismay and alarm, some of the tenants on the estate seemed to resent her arrival, and were plotting to get rid of her.  Why, she wondered, does the whole world seem to have it in for me?  What have I done to deserve this?  Why can’t I just be left to live in peace after all I’ve suffered?

Now let’s tell the story the other way round.  Once upon a time there was a family who had lived in a great old house for so long that they’d almost forgotten they hadn’t built it themselves.  They loved the house and its grounds dearly; they knew every room, every nook and cranny, every stick and stone on the property.  They had suffered much because of violent and abusive neighbours, and were reduced in circumstances to the point where some of the fine rooms in the house were shut up, and some fields left uncultivated.  One day, to their alarm, a woman swept up the drive in a car, announced that she was in charge now, and proceeded to throw some of the family off the estate altogether, herding many of the rest into little encampments, while she took over the best parts of the house and grounds.  When they protested, she called up her powerful friends, who gave her money to see her through.  Now, a generation later, the family have grown used to her, but many, particularly the younger generation, are asking why they have to put up with this intolerable situation a moment longer.

No parable can begin to do justice to the complex reality.  Centuries of European anti-Semitism came to their awful climax in the Holocaust (or, in Hebrew, the Shoah), when six million European Jews died.  Some in the West knew and did nothing. Many knew little and cared less.  Some cared but knew little.  When the facts came to light, a huge head of steam built up, not least from horror, deep sympathy, and residual guilt either for conniving with anti-Semitism or at least for standing by and doing nothing.  The Jews, millions felt, must have a homeland.  Uganda was proposed.  So was part of Argentina.  But most Jews knew that only their ancient homeland, promised by God to Abraham, possessed by Joshua, would do.  Many thousands had already emigrated there, often in defiance first of Turkish rule and then of the British mandate.  In May 1948 the United Nations set up the new state of Israel.

Many of the early Jewish settlers genuinely believed the land was empty.  ‘A land without people for a people without a land’ was their slogan.  This, however, was far from the truth.  The Palestinians were neither numerous nor strong, but they existed, real people living in real houses on real farms, running real businesses.  They were ordered out, often with threats, sometimes with actual violence.  In typical instances, they were given half an hour to get ready, and then bussed away, either over the border into Jordan (thereby creating huge new problems for that neighbour) or into specified towns such as Nazareth.  They were not allowed back.  To this day there are Jews living in those Palestinians’ houses, tilling their fields, sleeping in their beds, eating off their china, and quite likely quoting Deuteronomy to back it all up: houses you did not build, fields you did not plant, vineyards you did not grow.  Two poignant pictures from dozens stand out: a little boy persuading the bus-driver to stop at his front gate so he could get his radio from the house; an old man, told to pack up his belongings, going instead out to his small garden to say a fond and sad farewell to his two olive trees, which he and his forebears had lovingly cultivated for countless generations.

The tale is too long to tell here, and far too complex, intricate and many-sided.  The Jews came in on the high moral ground of their sufferings in the Holocaust: the Yad Vashem memorial, in modern West Jerusalem, stands both as a horrific reminder of the appalling sufferings of European Jewry a generation ago and as a strong appeal for the moral legitimacy of the present state of Israel.  Every criticism of Israel can at once be construed as a resurgence of anti-Semitism.  The Palestinians, with every passing year, claim higher and higher moral ground, as many of them liveindirty and squalid refugee camps, kept behind barbed wire while sometimes, within their sight, new settlements, with all modern conveniences, are built for Jewish immigrants to live in (and to guard fiercely), and holiday resorts for them to play in.  The Jews lose moral ground every time another settlement goes up in the West Bank, which the Orthodox refer to as ‘Judaea and Samaria’, in defiance of United Nations resolutions and of the spirit of the Oslo accord.  The Palestinians lose moral ground every time they demonstrate in support of Saddam Hussein, every time another Hamas suicide bomber blows himself up, taking another dozen Israeli civilians with him.  And we British have little if any moral ground to stand on in the eyes of either Israel or Palestine.  During the thirty-one years of the British mandate we managed to get ourselves in the bad books of both sides.

Among the Jews, of course, are a large minority, perhaps even a majority, who long for peace with their every breath who would only too gladly giveup some land for the sake of it and who bitterly resent the importation from America of plane-loads of Orthodox cousins, fired up with passionate synagogue sermons from their ageing rabbis in Brooklyn, ready to arm themselves and take over the Promised Land.  Jewish Israel is today a deeply divided nation.  Among the Palestinians, of course, are a large minority, perhaps even a majority, who do not now want to see the Jews driven back into the sea; who would be happy to liveand let live, to create a new situation in which all could live as neighbours.  Policies shift, and people move with or against them: Yasser Arafat, once regarded as the classic Palestinian terrorist, is now the moderate, trying desperately to hold the centre in the fragmented little Palestinian homeland, while many to is left (or is it right?) see violence as the only solution.  We in Britain are all too familiar with the spirals of violence and mistrust in Northern Ireland; multiply the recipe by about a hundred, add in a strong dose of Old Testament fanaticism on the one hand and Islamic fundamentalism on the other, stir vigorously in the cross-currents of global politics, and cook in a small overheated oven a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide.  That is the beautiful and tragic country to which pilgrims still travel in search of the one true God. 

I cannot here attempt to address the political situation further, though the partial parallels with Northern Ireland, and even with the former situation in South Africa are too close for comfort.  What I sense a responsibility to do at the end of this book is to outline what all this means for the Christian pilgrim going to the Holy Land today.

There are thousands, perhaps millions of Christians in the world – I regularly meet them, read their writings, and get accosted by them after addressing meetings or services – who passionately believe that the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland, climaxing in 1948 and building on from there, is the God-given fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.  Many such people cherish particular schemes of what are referred to as the ‘end times’.  In such scenarios, texts from Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation are brought together in schematic form and applied to twentieth-century political realities.  They are regularly used to indicate that the long exile of the Jewish people, dating back to the destructions of Jerusalem first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans, will finally be undone, and that the new Jewish existence in Palestine, coming into public acceptance in 1948 and growing thereafter, will herald the dawn of the final day when Jesus Christ will return, will fight the great battle at Armageddon, and will set up his kingdom once and for all.  The details vary with different interpretations, but the overall scheme is well known.

This scheme is, of course, well liked by Zionists.  It engenders, from newspaper columns to plane-loads of tourists, unthinking support for the state of Israel and all that it is and does, so that any and every criticism of that state, even of its more obtuse and blatant right-wing actions, is met with the charge of anti-Semitism, of failing to understand the Bible properly, of failing to see God’s hand in history.  I was once at a conference at which, in the hearing of many Palestinian Arab Christians, an American Jewish Christian declared that the land belonged inalienably to her and her people.  She graciously allowed that, according to Deuteronomy, the Arabs could be permitted to stay – as long as they were made hewers of wood and drawers of water.  Those who take such a position find themselves committed to great ambiguities.  I once knew a young Jewish Christian in Montreal who believed passionately that the return of Jews to the Land was the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, heralding the return of Jesus.  He applied to emigrate to Israel himself. In granting him permission, the authorities stipulated that he go through a ritual bath to renounce his Christianity.  He and I talked about it and prayed about it together.  He went ahead.  Within a short time he was back, a sadder but not wiser man.  The Promised Land was not like he had imagined it.  Israeli Jews were not supposed to be Christians; if they were, they risked losing their citizenship.  How could this be the fulfilment of prophecy?

Behind this muddled thinking lies, of course, a deep divide over how Christians should read the Old Testament.  In what way, by what means, does this extraordinary book become our book?  How can we claim that we, Jew and Gentile alike in the body of Christ, are the children of Abraham, the one people of promise?  Is not this a denial of the specialness of Israel?  Does it not constitute in itself the beginning of anti-Semitism?  Such charges are regularly laid against Christians who claim such things, basing their claim on Paul, 1 Peter and other New Testament writings.  But this is a case of being condemned if you do and condemned if you don’t.  Exactly the same charge is leveled against Christians who forget their Jewish roots, who construct a neo-Marcionite system in which Abraham and the covenant are left behind (Marcion was a second-century heretic who denied that the God revealed in Jesus was the same as the God of the Old Testament), who speak of Paul’s doctrine of justification as Paul’s attack on ‘Judaism’, who see ‘the Jews’ in themselves as the problem, and Christianity as the answer.  The New Testament itself, of course, from start to finish sees the gospel of Jesus as the fulfilment of all that God had promised to his people in the Old.  On the road to Emmaus, Jesus expounded to the two puzzled disciples all the things in the scriptures which concerned himself.  That remains the foundation of Christian existence.

One of the specific things on which the New Testament insists, again and again, is that in the life, death and supremely the resurrection of Jesus the promised new age has dawned. The return from exile has happened.  ‘All the promises of God’, says Paul in 2 Corinthians 1.20, ‘find their “yes” in him.’  This is in fact the great Return, even though it doesn’t look like people had thought it would.  Instead of Israel as a political entity emerging from political exile, we are invited in the gospel to see Israel-in-person, the true king, emerging from the exile of death itself into God’s new day.  That is the underlying rationale for the mission to the Gentiles: God has finally done for Israel what he was going to do for Israel, so now it’s time for the Gentiles to come in.  That, too, is the underlying rationale for the abolition of the food laws and the holy status of the land of Israel: a new day has dawned in God’s purposes, and the symbols of the previous day are put aside, not because they were a bad thing, now happily rejected, but because they were the appropriate preparatory stages in God’s plan, and have now done their work.  When I became a man, I put away childish things.  Lift up your eyes, says Paul in Romans 8, and see how the promises to Abraham are to be fulfilled: not simply by a single race coming eventually to possess a single holy strip of turf, but by the liberation of the whole cosmos, with the beneficiaries, the inheritors of the promise, being a great number from every race and tribe and tongue, baptized and believing in Jesus Christ and indwelt by his Spirit.

To suggest, therefore, that as Christians we should support the state of Israel because it is the fulfilment of prophecy is, in a quite radical way, to cut off the branch on which we are sitting.  It is directly analogous to the mistake of the Galatians, who thought that if they were members of Abraham’s family they should go the whole way and get circumcised.  It is similar to the mistake of which the Reformers accused the mediaevalCatholics, of supposing that in every Mass they were actually re-crucifying Jesus, when Jesus’ death had been once and for all, never to be repeated, on Calvary.  It is a way of saying that in the cross and resurrection God did not actually fulfil his whole saving purpose; that Jesus did not in fact achieve the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy; that his resurrection was not the start of God’s new age; that Acts is wrong, Romans is wrong, Galatians is wrong, the letter to the Hebrews is wrong, Revelation is wrong.  Say that if you like, but don’t claim to be Christian in doing so.

In particular, as pilgrims we must take with the utmost seriousness the fact that almost all Christians living in the Holy Land today are Palestinians.  Yes, there are some Jewish Christians, some brave souls living their faith openly, and, I have it on good authority, many others who practise their allegiance to Jesus as Messiah behind locked doors, as certain of their forebears did between the first Easter and the first Pentecost. But most of those who worship God in Christ day by day and week by week in the Holy Land today are Palestinian Arabs: people like Elias Chacour, Naim Ateek and Audeh Rantisi, all Anglican priests (which is why I happen to know them), who have had the courage to speak up and speak out for justice and freedom, for justice for Jews and Arabs alike, to speak out against torture, against the building of new settlements, against the systematic brutalization of a whole people which then provokes more of the violence it condemns.

What does it do to Christians like that when they see massive American funding pouring in to the state of Israel, sustaining the regime that is oppressing them?  What does it do to them when they hear again and again that many Christians are backing the state that is doing its best to eliminate them?  Many Palestinian Christians are now in exile, in America or elsewhere, and do not expect to return.  They have given up the struggle.  Many are tempted to make common cause with their Muslim neighbours, the Cross and the Crescent united against the Star of David.  Yet many know that even if the Arab world got together and succeeded where they failed in the wars of 1949, 1967 and 1974 – in other words, if they managed to eliminate or marginalize the state of Israel altogether – then the battle would be on to establish in its place an Islamic republic of Palestine similar to that in Iran and elsewhere, in which, as in many Muslim countries, Christianity would be at far greater risk than it is from the present Israeli government.  They feel themselves to be between the devil and the deep blue sea.  They are our brothers and sisters: the ‘living stones’, as they call themselves, ignored by many tourists, especially those who go on one of the Israeli-government-sponsored tourist packages, but very much alive, very much present, maintaining their dignity, their worship, and their hope, though with increasing difficulty.  ‘Is it nothing to you,’ they say, ‘all you who pass by?’  If we go to worship in the Holy Land, we dare not ignore our brothers and sisters in pain all around us.

When we go on pilgrimage today, then, we do not go in order to comment on or criticize other people for their inability to solve political problems.  God knows we can’t solve our own, which are much smaller and less rooted in history.  Of course, we will grieve over injustice, oppression and violence wherever it occurs and whoever instigates it; but in highly complex situations it behoves us to go with our eyes and ears open, ready to learn rather than to condemn.  But as pilgrims we go, above all, to pray.  In the same passage where Paul speaks of God’s intention to make the whole world his Holy Land, to renew and liberate the whole of creation, he also speaks of the whole creation at present groaning in travail; and then he declares that we who have the first fruits of the Spirit groan inwardly as we, too, wait for our final redemption (Romans 8.18-27).  It is in that context that he says that all things work together for good to those who love God (8.28).  What can he mean?

He means, I think, that our vocation as Christians includes the vocation to be in prayer at the place where the world is in pain.  We are not to expect to pray only at places of great beauty, stillness and peace.  We are not to look only for selfish refreshment, to top up our own spiritual batteries while forgetting everyone else.  We are to stand or kneel at the place where the world, and particularly our brother and sister Christians, are in pain and need, and, understanding and feeling their sufferings, to pray with and for them, not knowing (as Paul again says) what precisely to ask for, but allowing the Spirit to pray within us with groanings that cannot come into articulate speech.  We are called, in other words, to become in ourselves places where the living, loving and grieving God can be present at the places of pain in his world and among his children.  We are called to discover the other side of pilgrimage: not only to go somewhere else to find God in a new way, but to go somewhere else in order to bring God in a new way to that place, not by tub-thumping evangelism or patronizing, well-meaning but shallow advice, but by our presence, our grief, our sympathy, our encouragement, our prayer.

As we do this, in going to the Holy Land today, we find the three things I said about pilgrimage in the introduction to this book reinforced and given particular direction.   Pilgrimage is a teaching aid: at this level, it teaches us not only about the roots of our faith, but about the ways in which injustice still rampages through communities, some of them within our own family.  It opens our eyes to see God’s world the way it is, rather than the way we would like to imagine it.  Second, pilgrimage is a way of prayer: both a way of drinking in the presence and love of God in Christ, as we visit places particularly associated with him, and also now a way of standing at the place of pain, at the foot of the cross literally and metaphorically, holding on to that pain in the presence of God in Christ, not knowing what the solution will be but only that God is there, grieving with and in us, in a perpetual Holy Week at the heart of the Holy Land.  Third, pilgrimage is a way of discipleship: both to be reinforced in our own daily life and work as Christians, and now also to be reinforced in thinking, working, speaking, writing and praying for justice and peace to be restored to the Middle East, to Northern Ireland, to the Sudan, to God’s entire creation.

We do not go on pilgrimage, then, because we have the answers and want to impose them.  That would make us crusaders, not pilgrims; the world has had enough of that, and I dare say God has had enough of that.  We go on the pilgrim way, we follow the way of the Lord, because he himself is the way – and, as he said himself, the truth and the life as well. We go to meet him afresh, to share his agony, and to pray and work for the victory he won on the cross to be implemented, and for his way to be followed, in Israel and Palestine, in our own countries, and in the whole world.

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