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/
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/hoax/unt.htm
https://www.gospeltruth.net/scofield.htm
Lotus club history
Suggested Woodrow Wilson for President
Funded by Andrew Carnegie
https://www.hope-of-israel.org/createdbible.html
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