Wednesday, April 5, 2023

British and Christian Zionism Links and Notes

In 1878, the heavyweights of the American Dispensationalist Movement met at a

conference in Niagara Falls, including Socfield, James H. Brooks, Charles Erdman,

James Hudson Taylor, William Eugene Blackstone, and many others.

There they presented the "Niagara Creed," their agenda and beliefs as follows:


“We believe that the world will not be converted during the present dispensation,

but is fast ripening for judgment, while there will be a fearful apostasy in the professing

Christian body; and hence that the Lord Jesus will come in person to introduce

the millennial age, when Israel shall be restored to their own land, and the earth

shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord; and that this personal and premillennial

advent is the blessed hope set before us in the Gospel for which we should be constantly looking.”


https://www.google.com/amp/s/westchestermagazine.com/life-style/history/samuel-untermyer/amp/



Our modern world faces many challenges that are complex, threatening and give us

anxiety about the future. However, one conflict surpasses them all in its current expression

and potential escalation, a conflict that seems intractable and unsolvable. Its hostility and

scale of violence have escalated exponentially for six decades. Since May 15, 1948,

the day after David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the modern State of Israel and the day that

modern Israel was recognized by U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the region has been

engulfed in a non-stop war only briefly interrupted by occasional periods of uneasy,

hostile “peace,” punctuated by suicide bombers and tank-led incursions. More than

50 years earlier, in 1891, American Christian Zionist William Blackstone had urged

President Benjamin Harrison to support the establishment of a modern state of Israel,

but Harrison declined.2 Although Truman’s 1948 State Department argued against

supporting modern Israel and Truman initially agreed, he ended up accommodating

the political momentum of his time and went against his Secretary of State,

George C. Marshall.3 Later on, he would declare himself the modern-day Cyrus;

the new restorer of Israel. 


Restorationism The conviction that the Bible predicts and mandates a final and complete restoration

of the Jewish people to Israel. This Christian movement preceded the rise of Jewish

Zionism and facilitates Jews to make aliyah (return to Israel). Early British

Restorationists concentrated their efforts on converting the Jews to Christianity

then encouraging them to re-settle in Palestine. Over time, this changed into first

moving them to Palestine then converting them. Eventually, with Dispensationalism,

the effort to evangelize was played down or even discouraged in favor of the” two

peoples of God” idea. 


Zionism The national movement for the return of the Jewish people to their

ancient homeland and the resumption of Jewish political sovereignty in the land

of Israel centered on Jerusalem as their eternal and undivided capital. Jewish and

Christian Zionists largely share the same Biblical position as a warrant for why the

modern state of Israel has a Divine right to exist. Secular Zionists often point to the

history of having the land and being driven out by the Romans in the 

first Century combined with the centuries of persecution culminating in the Holocaust

as a nonBiblical warrant for the possession of the land. 


Covenant Theology A system of theology that views God's dealings with man in

respect of covenants

rather than dispensations (periods of time). It represents the whole of scripture as

covenantal in structure and theme. Some believe there is one Covenant and others

believe two and still others believe in more. The two main covenants are the Covenant

of Works in the O.T. made between God and Adam, and the Covenant of Grace between

the Father, and the Son where the Father promised to give the Son the elect and the

Son must redeem them. The Covenant of Redemption has been recognized by some

theologians as a Divine Covenant between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit whereas the

Father elects, the son Redeems and the Spirit applies the saving power of the

Redemption to the elect. The covenants have been made since before the world was

made (Heb. 13:20). 


Dispensationalism A form of biblical interpretation derived from the teachings of

John Nelson Darby (1800-82) of Dublin, Ireland, a leader of the Plymouth Brethren,

and popularized by C. I. Scofield (1843- 1921) in his Scofield Reference Bible

(1909 and revised in 1917). It emphasizes the idea that God dispenses redemption

differently in different eras, and maintains a rigid discontinuity between the different

dispensations. Seven periods of time during which humanity has been or will be tested

according to some specific revelation of God. Israel and the church are separate.

The millennium will be the culmination of God’s purposes for Israel


Church For dispensationalists, the church was introduced by God as a kind of parenthesis

as the rejection of Jesus by the Jews postponed his plan. For them, the church are

all true believers from the day of Pentecost until the Rapture. For Reformed theology,

the word is used in two senses: the visible and the invisible church. The visible church

consists of all the people that claim to be Christians and go to church. The invisible

church is the actual body of Christians; those who are truly saved. The true church of God

is not an organization on earth consisting of people and buildings, but is really a

supernatural entity comprised of those who are saved by Jesus. It spans the entire

time of man's existence on earth as well as all people who are called into it. We become

members of the church (body of Christ) by faith (Acts 2:41). We are edified by the Word

(Eph. 4:15-16), disciplined by God (Matt. 18:15-17), unified in Christ (Gal. 3:28), and

sanctified by the Spirit (Eph. 5:26-27). The invisible church comprises all the Old

Testament believers who believed God would send a Redeemer and trusted God in

that promise and though they did not live to see the Savior, they are saved through his

atoning sacrifice. 

Classic Dispensationalism The original dispensational position of Darby, Scofield, and Chafer wherein God

has two peoples, eternally separate; an earthly people, the Jews, and a heavenly

people, the Church which is defined as all believers from the day the Pentecost

until the Rapture. In the Scofield Reference Bible a dispensation is "a period of

time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation

of the will of God" Dispensationalism says that God uses different means of administering

His will and grace to His people. These different means coincide with different periods

of time. Scofield says there are seven dispensations: of innocence, of conscience, of

civil government, of promise, of law, of grace, and of the kingdom. Dispensationalists

interpret the scriptures in light of these (or other perceived) dispensations. Compare to

Covenant Theology and Progressive Dispensationalism.




Since then, through 2005, the United States has given a cumulative total of $154 billion

in direct economic and military aid to Israel.4 The amount raised by American Christian

Zionists in indirect aid is difficult to estimate, but could be imagined by considering just one

Christian Zionist organization, the Chicago-based International Fellowship of Christians

and Jews, which has raised over $250 million from 1995 to 2005 with a 500,000-member

donor base.5 But what if the Christian Zionists are wrong about their beliefs concerning

what the Bible says about the land of Israel, the Jews in history and the events during the

end of modern history? Should we not seriously question the underlying Biblical arguments

before we lobby secular governments for support of modern Israel? When John Hagee

states that pastors are “America’s spiritual generals” and calls for the President of the

United States to bomb Iran because his reading of the Old Testament tells him that the

Bible predicts a conflagration of immense proportions, 6 should we not investigate the

Biblical interpretations underlying his message? 

The Reformation ushered in a new period in which the Bible was now taught not from

a moralistic or allegorical perspective, but from a literal and historical perspective.

The Reformation principle of “Scripture interpreting Scripture” meant that their

expositional preaching taught the whole counsel of God, including the history of the

Jewish people and the covenantal aspects of blessings and curses for loyalty and

obedience. This renewed interest in ancient Israel eventually led to a change in how

of Romans 11 was understood.


Whereas for centuries the Roman Catholic Church had interpreted Israel in Romans

11:25-26 to mean the Church, including Jewish and Gentile believers, the Reformers

that followed Luther and Calvin tended to see this passage as referring to unconverted

Jews. We see evidence of this view in later editions of the Geneva Study Bible, wherein

a note on Romans 11 defines Israel as “the nation of the Jews” and later it was

strengthened to mean the future conversion of the Jewish nation to Christ.

13 This significantly changed the interpretation of Romans 9-11 and laid the

groundwork for a view of Israel quite unlike that taught in the Western church

in preceding centuries. It wasn’t long after this that some of the Puritans, led by

Thomas Brightman, started to advocate the rebirth of a Christian Israelite Nation.14

By the early 1600s this sentiment gained favor within the political class of England.

In 1621 an influential member of Parliament and Cambridge contemporary of

Brightman, Sir Henry Finch, wrote a book entitled The World’s Great Restoration

or the Calling of the Jews, and of All the Nations and Kingdoms of the Earth, to the

Faith of Christ. Finch called for the restoration of the Jews to the Promised Land and

urged them to re-establish their claim to the Land and to convert to Christianity.

At the time, Finch and others did not contemplate any re-construction of the Temple,

the re-establishment of the sacrificial system or a theocratic kingdom.

They wanted them to come to Christ, and then return to the Land.15


Puritans in America picked up on this but not all- 

While Increase Mather wrote and taught that the Jews needed to return

to their ancient homeland, his historian son Cotton later departed

from the views of his father. In a small work entitled Triparadisus

he presented a cogent argument for Romans 11 that comes to the

conclusion that the end of the Jewish age was fulfilled in A.D. 70

with the fall of Jerusalem.18 Cotton’s difficulty with his father’s view of the re-establishment of ancient

Israel was its favoritism of a nation and race that contradicted the New Testament

expansion of the gospel to“all nations, tribes and tongues”. To Cotton, elevating

any nation over another was “very derogatory to the Glory of our God,

very contradictory to the language of the Gospel.”19




No fewer than fifty books on the subject of the Jews’ return to Palestine were

published between 1796 and the end of the century. The flood of words had become

a raging torrent with the Pope’s exile from Rome by Napoleon in 1797 which, for those

with eyes to see it, was a prophetic Rosetta stone and a sure sign of the approaching

End Times. In 1800, when Napoleon’s foray into the middle east remained unchecked,

a Scottish magazine reported on prophetically raised expectations: “It is rumored that

he proposes to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem and re-establish the Jewish hierarchy

and government in all their ancient splendor in the Holy Land, to which he will invite that

people [Jews] from all the nations of the world among whom they are scattered.2


But in the early part of the 19th century, one idealistic and wealthy young man decided to

devote his life to converting the Jews to Christianity and moving them back to Palestine. 


Lewis Way was a young lawyer and graduate of Oxford who happened to inherit £300,000,

not a small amount of money in 1811.26 He studied ancient Hebrew and also the unfortunate

history of the Jews since their expulsion from England in 1290 (although Cromwell allowed

them to return). Way began to seek out Jews in London, encouraging them to read the

Christian Bible in Hebrew and even instructing them in how to ride a donkey and other

preparatory skills for repatriation to the Holy Land. Way was convinced that it was a

Christian duty to help fulfill prophecy about the Jews coming to faith in Christ and

returning to Palestine. Since he was a man of means he funded these efforts largely

by himself. 27

Way compromised his ideal of the Jews’ being converted to Christ and then resettled

in Palestine, to being resettled as soon as possible with the hope of converting them

afterwards. The position that developed at this time was more to relieve the Jews of

their social and political oppression rather than the need for them to come to Christ


https://cdn.rts.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Newkirk-American-Christian-Zionism.pdf





https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Untermyer


https://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/21/the-origins-of-the-israel-lobby-in-the-us/


https://balfourproject.org/the-road-to-balfour-the-history-of-christian-zionism-by-stephen-sizer-2/

https://www.anixneuseis.gr/the-untold-story-of-christian-zionisms-rise-to-power-in-the-united-states/


http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/hoax/unt.htm

https://www.gospeltruth.net/scofield.htm


Lotus club history 

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