Israel:
Replacement Theology & Christian Palestinianism
Romans 9:1-6
There are probably only about five or six doctrines
that I consider crucial today because they happen to be at the crucial points
where Biblical correctness or Biblical orthodoxy is attacked. Of course, one of
those is in the area of the gospel. That’s the whole battle between the free
grace theology and “lordship” or some kind of works. Within evangelical
circles, that’s the focal point of that battle related to understanding
salvation. In the spiritual life, which we spent a lot of time studying in
Romans 6-8, the focal point of that battle happens to be in the area of the
relationship of God the Holy Spirit. Do we just live our Christian life by
being moral and ethical or is there a conscientious dependence on God the Holy
Spirit. Of course you know the answer to that. It’s the second. There’s a
conscientious dependence on God the Holy Spirit. We walk by means of the
Spirit. It’s not a mystical thing because it’s connected to the objective
revelation of God’s Word.
There are battles related to understanding God’s plan
and purpose for history. That’s the battle between covenant theology and
dispensational theology. At the root of that there’s another battle. The battle
is how do you interpret the Bible? How do you understanding the meaning of the
text? That’s another battle and that battle is germane to both the battle
related to dispensational thinking versus covenant theology as well as the
issue and role of Israel.
Israel is becoming more and more of an issue in recent
years. It has been over the last century with the return of Jews to the land
for the first time in the last 2,000 years. Is this significant for the plan of
God? As Randy Price gave a paper several years ago at Pre-Trib Conference
called, “Is the Return of the Jews to the Land Prophetically significant?” It’s
important to understand how he said that. He didn’t say, “Is this a fulfillment
of prophecy but is it prophetically significant?” The answer, of course, was
yes.
But there are a lot of Christians who don’t believe
that. It’s not a majority of evangelicals. There are a lot of non-evangelicals.
In fact, they think that you’re the enemy. You have been deceived and that Christians
who believe that Israel is significant today, that’s one of the greatest
errors, heresies, and dangers in the modern world. “The reason we have problems
with the U.S. in terms of foreign policy, the reason we were attacked on 9/11
and many other things is because of the horrible, evil influence of you
terrible wicked dispensationalists and Christian Zionists. It’s all because you
support Israel that we have all these terrible things going on in the world. If
we just got rid of Israel we wouldn’t have a problem.”
Now there are a lot of problems with that view. You
need to understand that recent polls indicate that around 64-65% of the
American voting public supports Israel. The reason they do, and we’re only one
generation away from losing that, is because of the heritage of a plain,
literal interpretation of Scripture. Why is it that the United States is so
supportive of Israel and Europe is not? It goes back to the fact that Europe
never was impacted by the consistent, plain, literal interpretation of the
Scripture, except for England. Coming out of England, the English Reformation,
the rise of the Puritans, they were on a literal interpretation and their focus
on the value of the Jewish people, and that God had a plan that included the
future restoration of the Jews to the land.
That was more consistently laid out in England and it
certainly influenced the original colonists who came to the United States. So
ultimately the reason is theological. What’s happened in recent years is that
theological influence is evaporating. A recent survey indicated that probably
60% of the evangelicals who took this survey when asked why they support Israel
gave a reason other than a Biblical, religious, or theological reason. They
said it was because Israel is a democratic nation in the Middle East, they’re
the only ally in the Middle East, because they share a lot of intelligence and
information and technology, and other practical reasons. But a theological,
religious, or Biblical reason was not in the top five answers.
The more a person was involved in leadership in their
local church, taught Sunday school, or were part of a teaching community, the
more that changed. But that affected only older evangelicals who had a Biblical
foundation but the younger Christians, who make up the so-called broad
evangelical spectrum, that group is being taught less and less as the years go
by. So they don’t know. In a few years we’re going to have the last of the
World War II-era generation, that is, those who were born before the baby
boomers and maybe some of the baby boomers as they pass from the scene and what
will be left will be the post-baby boomers, the Gen-Xers and everyone else down
to the Millennialists, those who were born in the 21st century, then
what’s going to happen is that they’re so Biblically ignorant that they’re
going to become easily swayed.
We’re at the high water mark of “philo-Semitism”,
which is the term opposite of anti-Semitism. It means those who love Israel and
love the Jewish people. We’re at the high water mark. The bad guys are gaining
ground. We need to understand this because this is a flashpoint. One of my
favorite quotes from church history is a quote from Martin Luther, who said,
“If we defend the fortress at every point other than the one at which it’s
being attacked, we will lose the battle.” So we have to define what the attack
points are and we have to defend the castle at those points. That’s what I’m
talking about, the gospel, hermeneutics, dispensationalism, Israel, the role of
the Holy Spirit, and sanctification. These are the primary places at which the
battle is taking place in our generation.
We may not like that. I don’t like the fact that I’ve
had to spend a lot of time studying Islam over the last ten years. I really
don’t care anything about Islam. It doesn’t do anything to get me excited. But
that’s the battle today. We’re in a religious war whether this country wants to
admit it or not. We are the objects of a religious war coming from Islam. If we
don’t recognize that, we’re just living in a fantasy world. So we have to
figure out where the attacks are and we have to shape our thinking to defend
the fortress at those points, whether we like those points or not. We can’t
pick and choose the battlefield. The battlefield gets picked and chosen by
many other factors.
So the last couple of lessons are background to
understanding the importance of the doctrine we’re going to cover in Romans
9-11. I’ve been addressing these basic, foundational issues. We started with
the issue of interpretation. Today that’s really the issue. What does the Bible
mean? Not so much what does it say, because a lot of people will agree with
what it says, but what does it mean? We see a reflection that battle in the
culture wars in our nation over the interpretation of the Constitution.
Everyone knows what it says. People even know what the Founding Fathers meant.
But as I heard one guy who called in on talk radio say, “Who cares what the
Founding Fathers thought? Who cares what they said? Let’s get our noses out of
the history books and just make law for today.” That person just absolutely
showed their ignorance in terms of their total thinking. A person who is
ignorant of history is bound to repeat history and repeat the worst mistakes of
history.
Numerous people are making comments that way. We have
to know the historical background of things so we not only don’t repeat those
things but so we can really understand what’s going on today and why it’s going
on so we can respond to it. Hermeneutics and interpretation is part of that. So
as I pointed out in the previous lessons, the two basic errors we’re facing
here in terms of the role and relationship of Israel and the church are first
of all replacement theology, which I partially got into last time, and
anti-Semitism. Probably won’t get there until next time.
What’s given rise to both is a non-literal,
allegorizing, spiritualizing method of interpreting the Scripture. In other
words, the view that we hold of Scripture is that you interpret the Scripture
in the light of its immediate context. That’s called the historical method of
interpretation. We do it in light of the normal meaning of the language, the
words, and the grammar. That’s where we get the phrase “the historical,
grammatical interpretation of Scripture.” So we go into the lexical meanings of
the words and their relationship to the sentences and the syntax. All of
this is important and is arranged the way it is by God and is significant.
We interpret these things in terms of their normal usage.
Part of normal usage includes things like figures of speech but figures of
speech have a literal meaning as I’ve pointed out in the past. So we need to
look and understand these things. Some of what I’m covering here may seem a
little academic to some of you but it’s important as a pastor for me to make
sure you understand and can identify where the wolves are and where the weeds
are because you’re, as a sheep going out, you’re exposed to all kinds of stuff
that comes into your mind from television to the news to whatever it might be,
neighbors, people talking, and whatever. You need to be aware of this so you
can develop your grid of discernment.
We have this emphasis in Romans 9:4-5 that the
covenants, the promises still belong to Israel. That means that Jews today,
regardless of whether they’re Messianic Jews, Buddhists Jews, secular Jews,
atheist Jews, Hindu Jews, whatever, still have a responsibility to the
Abrahamic covenant to be circumcised. It doesn’t make them more savable or less
savable. It doesn’t make them more spiritual or less spiritual because that
wasn’t its function; its function was to indicate that they were participants
in the covenant that God made with Abraham. That covenant is still in effect.
It’s an eternal, everlasting covenant. It wasn’t a soteriological
covenant or even a covenant of sanctification.
We’ll get into that a little more as we get into these
issues in a few weeks related to that statement people go to and often
misinterpret, “Jacob I love, Esau have I hated.” This has to do with God’s
historical purposes for the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
not soteriology or sanctification. Everything goes back to that great covenant
as it’s summarized in Genesis 12:1-3. So just to review again David Cooper’s
Golden Rule of Interpretation: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common
sense, make no other sense. Therefore take every word at its ordinary, usual
meaning unless the facts of the immediate context studied in the light of
related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths indicate clearly
otherwise.” That’s the beauty of theology.
Last time we started on replacement theology. I have a
couple of review slides just to get these definitions back in our mind.
Replacement theology is the view that the Church is the new or true Israel and
that it has permanently replaced or superseded national Israel or ethnic Israel
as the people of God and therefore, national or ethnic Israel will not
experience a restoration to the land as God promised or to a position of favor
with God. In other words God had a plan for Israel but when they rejected the
Messiah that purpose ended. They’re no longer relevant. They’re no longer
ethnically any different than the Celts, the Mexicans, than the Spaniards, than
the Asians, than the Japanese, the Siberians. They’re not any different,
nothing significant about them.
Therefore, there’s nothing significant about the
return of these Jews to the land. In fact, you’ll even find some people who
believe in various ethnic theories that these Jews today aren’t even real Jews.
They’re Tsars, going back to a Russian king in the southern part of Russia who
converted the whole Tsar Kingdom over to Judaism so they’re not really ethnic
Jews. There are a lot of different views. You get British Israelism, that the
British are the ten lost tribes, other fantasy views that have nothing to do
with history or the Bible.
So supersessionism comes from the word “super” and
“sederi”, meaning
one person sits on the chair of another in Latin so the Church just completely
replaces Israel. The promises God made to Abraham that he would inherit the
land from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates suddenly becomes a metaphor for
heaven. So for two thousand years from Abraham to Christ that was correctly
interpreted and understood to be a physical piece of real estate. But once the
Messiah was rejected, according to them, now that’s heaven. It’s not a literal
piece of real estate. See this is a hermeneutical shell game. They change the
meaning and it has an implication for the faithfulness of God. It indicates
that God may change the meaning of the terms of your salvation and maybe your
salvation is secure today but maybe in a few centuries maybe you’re not. That’s
terrible theology!
Walt Kaiser said: “Replacement theology declared that
the Church, Abraham’s spiritual seed, had replaced national or ethnic Israel in
that it had transcended and fulfilled the terms given to Israel, which covenant
Israel had lost because of disobedience.” In other words, God had a condition
in the Abrahamic covenant that if you don’t obey Him then this covenant’s over
with. And that wasn’t there.
Ronald Diprose in his book on Israel says that, “Replacement
theology is the view that the Church completely and permanently replaced ethnic
Israel in the outworking of God’s plan and as the recipient of Old Testament
promises to Israel.”
I pointed out there were four different types of
replacement theology or supersessionism. Political, punitive, economic, and
structural supersessionism and I’m not going to go back over the definitions of
those.
So what are the core beliefs of replacement theology?
First of all, national Israel has somehow forfeited its status as the people of
God and will never, ever, ever again possess a unique role apart from the
Church. There’s no distinction between Israel and the Church. This is one of
the things that Charles Ryrie, professor of theology at Dallas Seminary when I was
there, said in his book on dispensationalism. “There are three things that were
unique and these three things together distinguished dispensationalism. One was
a consistent, plain, literal interpretation of Scripture. Second, when you do
that you will hold to a distinction between Israel and the Church.” His third
characteristic was “that the overriding purpose of Scripture in history was the
glory of God”, not just salvation which is what covenant theology does but
that’s another story.
So this is one of the two key distinguishing facets of
dispensationalism. The second core belief of replacement theology is that the
Church is now true Israel, not ethnic Israel; so even the term “Israel” changes
its meaning. Israel means the Church and the Church means Israel. Israel in the
Old Testament is the Church of the New Testament. Israel is just a code word,
according to them, for anyone who is a believer. That violates the principle of
interpretation. Third core belief is that the result of this is that the Church
has become the sole inheritor of God’s covenant blessings, originally promised
to national or ethnic Israel in the Old Testament and thus, this rules out any
future restoration of national Israel.
Therefore, if you believe this, then you don’t believe
there’s any significance to present day Israel. How do you think that’s going
to change how you view U.S. foreign
policy? There is an implication in both views but if you hold to replacement
theology, then it’s going to change your perception of what goes on in the
Middle East. Ronald Diprose in his book says, “For replacement theology to
qualify as a Biblical option, passages which allow such an interpretation are
not enough.” See, one of the things people don’t understand is that there are
certain passages when you take them out of context they could mean this or they
could mean that but when you compare them with other Scripture and when you
work out their implications they can’t mean those other things. They are in one
sense possible but they are excluded as you think through the implications of
those views. So even though there are some passages that may allow that, it’s
not enough to say that’s what it means.
There needs to also be very positive passages which
clearly teach the position and no passages that actually exclude it. So
replacement theology fails on both counts. In terms of replacement theology
they say the Church is the new spiritual Israel and replaces the Jewish people,
which they say is the “old fleshly Israel.” They say Israel nationally just
represents the flesh so they conclude that Israel was therefore an object
lesson in sin and judgment. Can you see how that might lead to anti-Semitism?
You just don’t have too much respect for the Jewish people if that’s your
belief.
The church, they say, is the elect for all the ages,
so it existed in the Old Testament. They believe that Jews who believe today
are no longer Jewish, that the issue of Israel and the Jews are no longer
relevant in the Church Age. Now if you remember, Tuesday night a week ago in
Acts, I taught about this problem of what Paul said about circumcision. And
that he had Timothy circumcised while at the same time, basically, he’s written
in Galatians 5 that if you get circumcised, you’re really under the whole Law
so you really shouldn’t do that. I pointed out that either Paul is completely
contradictory of himself or he’s talking about two different concepts.
In Galatians he’s clearly talking about those who
think that circumcision will get you something in salvation or in the spiritual
life. Whereas with Timothy there’s just an issue with his cultural
acceptability so that he can gain a hearing without having irrelevant issues
become issues while he’s ministering. In the course of the history of these
ideas, people have gotten the idea from the doctrine of the Baptism of the Holy
Spirit, which says that if you’ve been baptized into Christ there is neither
Jew nor Greek, that that means that Jewishness is no longer relevant. That’s
not what the passage is saying. What it’s saying is that ethnic distinctions,
gender distinctions, and economic distinctions, in that passage, no longer
impact the individual believer’s direct access to God. It doesn’t mean that
there aren’t still distinctions between men and women or between Jews and
Gentiles or between slaves and freemen. There are distinctions but they don’t
impact their direct access to God.
So this idea has bled over even into some area of
dispensationalists who teach that Jewishness no longer matters. It does matter.
They’re still under the Abrahamic covenant. It doesn’t matter in terms of their
justification or their sanctification but they’re still of value historically
to their ethnic relationship to Abraham. So the fourth point here is that the
covenant with Jews, according to replacement theology, is completely nullified.
Now I’m going to run through seven observations
related to replacement theology. First, it teaches that the Church replaces or
supersedes the nation, Israel, as the people of God. This view goes back to the
middle of the 2nd Century A.D. You can see hints of it even in the early part of the
2nd century. For example take the epistle of Barnabas. It’s not a canonical
epistle and it probably wasn’t written by Barnabas but it does date to the
early part of the first century, maybe 110 or 120 and in it we read, “But He
[Jesus] was manifested in order that they, the Israelites, might be perfected
in their iniquities. And that we being the constituted heirs
through Him might receive the testament of the Lord Jesus. Therefore He
has circumcised our ears that we might hear His Word and believe for the
circumcision in which they trusted is abolished. For He declared that
circumcision was not of the flesh but they transgressed because an evil angel
deluded them.” Where did that come from?
So there’s this incipient anti-Semitism that was
starting to creep into the church. The Jews were starting to be blamed as
Christ-killers. Many early Church theologians promoted replacement theology.
Church history is so important to understand. I learned more about theology
from studying Church history from ever studying systematic theology because you
see it in the real time events of the debates that went on between people in
trying to understand the Scriptures. You see it brought out in a little more
relief.
In the last part of the Patristic era, which is the
first three hundred years after Christ’s death, there was a growing acceptance
of the replacement view. Factors such as the reception of the two destructions
of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and again in
135 and the growing Gentile composition of the Church, in combination with the
trend toward allegorical interpretation, led to a full-blown replacement
theology by roughly 300 A.D. You had the statesmen—like
Justin Martyr around 150 who was the first person to explicitly identify the
Church as Israel, then Irenaeus, a Church father, who
said, “In as much as the Jews have rejected the Son of God and cast Him out of
the vineyard when they slew Him, God has justly rejected them and given to the
Gentiles outside the vineyard the fruits of the cultivation.” So we see this
kind of thing going on.
Melito of Sardis, A.D. 180, says, “Israel was precious before the Church
arose. The Law was marvelous before the gospel was elucidated. But when the
Church arose and the gospel took precedence, this model was made void,
conceding its power to the reality. Israel was made void when the Church
arose.”
Next is Clement of Alexandria. Now last time I pointed
out in hermeneutics the difference between Alexandria in Egypt, right on the
Mediterranean, that they had become the heirs to Greek philosophy and
Platonism. They became a center of allegorical interpretation.
In contrast was Antioch. It’s the same Antioch we’ve
been studying as the home base for Paul’s missionary journeys. Antioch was
dominated by thinking in terms of a literal interpretation of Scripture. So
which group do you think was a millennial? The Alexandrians. Which group was
premillennial? The ones in Antioch. They believed in a literal millennial. So
theology makes a difference in how you perceive these things. Now Origen came
out of Alexandria and he formalizes allegorical interpretation and that wins
out in the early Church. You see these ideas are already present there.
Tertullian said that Israel had been divorced from God.
Cyprian is also another early Church father by 250 who stated, “I have
endeavored to show that the Jews according to what had been foretold had
departed from God, had lost God’s favor, which had been given to them in past
times and had been promised them for the future while the Christians had
seceded to their place.” See it’s much more refined now, this idea of
replacement theology.
By the time Constantine made Christianity legal in the
Roman Empire, you get the introduction with his idea of Roman political rule
which is wedded to Christianity and this non-literal view of the kingdom now
which begins to enter into the thinking of the western Church. So they saw the new
covenant in Christ as a replacement for the old Mosaic covenant, which
represented Judaism and the Jewish people as a whole. Now historically, this
led to statement where the Church was seen to be the fulfillment and
replacement of Jewish ecclesiastical structures.
Recently, within the last ten years Pope John Paul II
said that the Roman Catholic Church rejected replacement theology. What’s
happening is you have to read between the lines and understand the nuances
here. After the Holocaust, replacement theology has been so identified with the
Holocaust that nobody in their right mind really wants to say they believe in
replacement theology. So the Roman Catholic Church comes out with a formal
statement a few years ago that said they reject their replacement theology but
the Jews can’t call themselves the chosen people anymore. Do you hear the
contradiction there? If the Jews aren’t the chosen people you’ve just validated
replacement theology. They’re trying to say that replacement theology is a
narrow definition of those who are wickedly anti-Semitic but they still believe
the Church superseded the Jews. They just don’t want to go too far in light of
the Holocaust. So they see the Church as the new people of God.
Now the second observation of this is that replacement
theology has been the dominant view of the organized Church since the 3rd
century until the middle of the 19th century. So if your dominant
view is replacement theology, how many people are going to talk about the
Rapture? They’re not going to even think about the Rapture. That’s why
dispensationalism basically disappeared into the corners and crevices of Church
history because the dominant view was amillennialism, allegorical
interpretation, and replacement theology. You can’t get to dispensationalism
unless you believe in a literal hermeneutic and a distinction between Israel
and the Church. It won’t happen. So that’s why it’s such a late development.
There are elements of it very early in the Church and
more and more scholars are finding more and more evidence of a pre-trib Rapture
and other uniquely dispensationalist ideas much, much earlier in Church
history. It wasn’t really a main idea so it was sort of buried off to the side.
In the Patristic era they mixed a lot of these areas together so that leads to
the idea of a replacement theology and pretty much ends the hope of any
national Israel in the future. By the end of the Patristic era you had this
incredible individual by the name of Augustine who was brilliant. He formalizes
allegorical interpretation and an amillennial theology and many, many other
things and also the idea that salvation is only in the church, meaning the
Romans Catholic Church.
People ask when the Catholic Church started. It
depends on what your criterion is. It’s probably somewhere between 600 and 800.
These other ideas began to coalesce a little bit earlier. Augustine introduces
ideas that are hostile to Israel. According to Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini,
Augustine introduced a negative element into judgment on the Jews. He did this
by advancing this theory of substitution whereby the new Israel of the Church
became a substitute for ancient Israel. The Roman Catholic Church in the Middle
Ages was supersessionist.
If you want to know how Germany, which was considered
the most civilized nation in Europe in the 19th century, degenerated
into the Nazi Party and the Holocaust in the mid-20th century, it
goes back to this. It’s bred into the thinking of much of Europe. It goes back
to the idea that the Jews are evil and the Church has replaced them. Martin
Luther and John Calvin also held to this view and it wasn’t until you get to
the Puritans that things began to change. Three of the great individuals who
were influential were Plato, with the introduction of Greek philosophy which
played a major role in Augustine’s view that the Church was the spiritual form
of the kingdom and that the Jews were people to witness to and he held to a
millennialism. Calvin held to the same kind of views. All are supersessionists.
Calvin got much of his theology from Augustine and it’s also covenantal.
How does covenant theology view Israel’s national
promises? They’re spiritualized into the Church. How does covenant theology
view Israel and the Church? They’re one people of God, which is a buzzword.
When I went through seminary a lot of these things were a little fuzzy,
especially when you get this new idea called progressive dispensationalism.
People were wondering what it was. Proponents of progressive dispensationalism
tried to argue it was just a refinement and others, like Bruce Waltke, who was
a former professor at Dallas, when he read their position said they were just
covenant theologians and they don’t want to admit it. They’ve become
amillennialist and they don’t want to admit it.
There are dangers in these ideas and we have to know
what they are. Jerusalem, Eretz Israel (the land of Israel), for them is fulfilled. The Old
Testament is annulled. Jerusalem is no longer significant. The Temple doesn’t
need to be rebuilt. They’re post-Millennial, amillennial or preterists, which
means they think it was all fulfilled back in A.D. 70. Armageddon is just figurative.
How many people think of Armageddon as something other
than a literal battle that takes place in relationship to the Valley of
Megiddo, located in the Galilee in Israel? Most people think if an asteroid is
coming its Armageddon. We’ve discovered atomic bombs. It’s Armageddon.
Armageddon has become a metaphorical term but it’s not used that way in the
Bible. This view comes out of replacement theology.
There’s just one visible event at the end of history
for them, the return of Jesus. The Millennium is not a thousand year period;
it’s just a figurative event. This comes out of Stephen Sizer’s book, Christian
Zionism. He is a major proponent of replacement theology and he hates Christian
Zionists.
On the cover of his book on replacement theology
Michael J. Vlach uses these two figures, two statues, which are in the
Strasbourg Cathedral that were designed in 1230 A.D. This is before the Protestant Reformation. This is at
the very height of a millennial allegorical interpretation. These two figures
represent the Church, ecclesia,
and the one on the right represents sunagoge.
They represent the Church and Israel. This represents the view of the Church
and Israel in the Middle Ages. It shows a supersession symbolism. ecclesia is standing tall and erect,
wearing a crown and is in a dominant position whereas sunagoge, Israel, is blinded as a symbol of their blindness
and spiritual status. ecclesia has a scepter,
representing rule. sunagoge has a
dead stick indicating her despised and cast-off, wandering status. Since the
Law has been abrogated Israel has been rejected. Notice the Law is a closed
book held down by her side to show it’s no longer relevant or significant. That
statue is a depiction of replacement theology.
It was in the Middle Ages that you started to see the
rise of Christian anti-Semitism. You saw caricatures of the Jews and places
where they had to wear badges or certain signs. This is when they’re first put
into ghettos, restricted to certain areas of a city, and they couldn’t do
business or go out of that area. It’s also at that time that you have the first
rise in the 12th century in Norwich, England of the “blood libel”.
The blood libel was the view that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to
make matzo for Passover. That comes up time and again. One of the most famous
instances occurred in 1839 in Damascus. Five Jews were arrested and put on
trial and I believe Charles Churchill, an uncle of Winston Churchill, went to
their defense and won the case so they were set free. This blood libel has
cropped up again and again and again throughout Church history. Jews were
described as devils and made to wear yellow rings and badges to show they were
nothing of value to Christians. So this idea of Hitler having the Jews wear the
yellow Star of David’s didn’t start with the Nazis. This goes back to the
Christians in the early Middle Ages.
Third observation: Since the mid-19th
century replacement theology has received serious criticism and widespread
rejection. Over the last 150 years there’s been a backlash to it but it’s
overly caricatured and it’s often identified as something related to that which
brought up the Holocaust. There’s a shift away from this more overt
supersessionism. David Holwerda in his book, Jews & Israel: One Covenant or Two,
states, “The traditional view that the Church has superseded Israel which no
longer has a role in God’s plan of redemption is no longer dominant. Even
though no consensus has developed on how to evaluate the present position on
the future role of Israel. The negative tones prominent in the Church’s
traditional view has been mostly muted.” But they’re still there. They just
want to call it something else.
Now what’s grown out of replacement theology, which is
really spooky and scary because of its influence today is something called
“Christian Palestinianism.” Paul Wilkinson, a member of the Pre-Trib Rapture
Study Group, coined the term. He usually gives a paper every year. He wrote his
PhD dissertation on the role of John Nelson Darby and the rise of Christian
Zionism. It’s the antithesis of those who believe in Christian Zionism. Let’s
define Christian Zionism. There are a lot of weird Christians out there. We’ve
got to love them because God loves them and they’re our brothers and sisters in
Christ but they’re a little bit off-balance. They want to show up wearing
Jewish prayer shawls and blowing a shofar and doing all this because they’ve
almost assigned a mystical, magical quality to people who are Jewish. We’ve got
to love them because they love Jews. They love Israel and they love the Bible
but you don’t want some people to go out in public too much. The reason I bring
that up is because I’ve had conversations with some people who’ve only run into
the wacko extreme so they think that’s what Christian Zionism is. That’s not
Christian Zionism at all.
Zionism is the belief that the Jewish people have a
right to return and establish a national homeland in their historic homeland,
the land God gave to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. That’s it. Nothing more. Nothing
less. It doesn’t mean you validate everything the state of Israel does, every
political decision. They have a right of return just as the Italians had a
right to unite and have a nation and the Germans had the right to unite and
have a nation, and the same with the Czechs and the Hungarians, the French. The
Jews have the right to have a Jewish nation with defensible borders which is on
the basis of self-defense and the right to have secure borders and to live in
their national homeland without fear of people shooting rockets at them every
day or blowing themselves up on their buses. They can do whatever is legal and
normal for any other nation to protect themselves and to provide security.
That’s what Zionism is.
Christian Zionism comes from Christians who believe
that’s true but they add a new wrinkle. They believe there’s a Biblical basis
for the Jews returning to their homeland and Christians should support that
because they see it as a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy. Actually, when you
and I talk to a lot of people who aren’t Christians they don’t care what the
Bible says. They’re more concerned about other facets.
There are three lines of argument to support the
return of the Jews to the land. There’s the Biblical argument which we’re all
familiar with. There’s the historical argument that there have been Jews living
in the land. They didn’t disappear. I went through a long study several years
ago where I traced this all the way through from 135 AD all the way up to the present. There’s always been a
Jewish population, a Jewish presence in the land. There’s been a Jewish
presence in Jerusalem. Not many because at times the Moslems ran them out, the
Byzantines ran them out for a while, Hadrian ran them out for a while but
there’s always been a presence there.
Then there’s a legal argument based on the San Remo
Resolutions coming out of the end of World War I. But these Christian
Palestinians reject all three of those lines of reasoning and you find this in
a lot of Christian denominations. It is the official position of the United
Church of Christ, the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., the Church of England, and the United Methodist
Church. I don’t think the Evangelical Methodist Church believes this. There’s a
pastor of an Evangelical Methodist Church down in Sugar Land and I’ve run into
him on my way back from Israel the last two years. He’s very pro-Israel. Others
who hold to this view are the National Council of Churches, the Church of
Scotland, the Reformed Church of America, the Methodist Church of England, the
Roman Catholic Church, Bethlehem Bible College, which has sponsored this Christ
at the Checkpoint anti-Zionist, anti-Israel rally for several years, World
Vision, World Council of Churches.
What’s the view of these? This comes out of the
Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism and says, “We categorically reject
Christian Zionist doctrines as false teaching that corrupts the Biblical
message of love, justice, and reconciliation.” You didn’t know that what you
believe corrupts the Biblical message of love, justice, and reconciliation, did
you? “With urgency we warn against Christian Zionism and its justification of
colonization of apartheid and empire building.” I’ll talk about that next time
under anti-Semitism.
The Church of Scotland says, “Christian Zionism seeks
openly to use the Jewish Zionist cause in order to achieve its own theological
and political reality. Christian Zionist worldview has cataclysmic consequences
for religiously integrated lasting peace in Palestine.” See, it’s all your fault;
you are a Christian Zionist! The problem is what you believe. That’s why there’s
a problem in the Middle East. It’s your fault. You’re Christian Zionists. You
believe that God has a future plan for Israel. They go on to say, “Christian
Zionism portrays an unjust God with an unjust people and seeks to exclude and
arguably eliminate whatever is perceived to be alien to its cause.”
Another group that started up that has really promoted
this is known as Sabeel. At the Fifth International Sabeel Conference in
Jerusalem 2004, they said, “We warn that the theology of Christian Zionism is
leading to the moral justification of empire colonization of apartheid and
oppression.” It sounds like Democrats talking about George Bush, doesn’t it?
John Stott, a very well known British scholar, author of numerous books says,
”I, myself, believe that Zionism, both political and religious, is incompatible
with Christian faith.” Then we get Hank Hanegraef, Bible Answer Man, who used
to be on radio here, says, “Christian Zionist beliefs and behaviors are the
antithesis of Biblical Christianity.”
Now here’s a good one from Gilbert Bilezikian, one of
the founders of Willow Creek Community Church. The pastor is Bill Hybels and
back in the 90s this was the largest church in the U.S. It’s been superseded
now by Lakewood here in Houston. Willow Creek funded a movie that is very
anti-Zionist. It’s called “With God on Our Side.” Bill Hybel’s wife and
daughter are main promoters of this movie. Also, Rick Warren with the
“purpose-driven heresy” coming out of southern California has done so much to
destroy orthodoxy but he does it very subtly has also gotten on board with
this.
So we need to know who the players are. A lot of you
like to watch Fox News and for some reason, people at Fox News like to have
Rick Warren on so you always have to know who the wolves in sheep's clothing
are. Tony Compolo who is another popular Christian speaker, professor emeritus
of sociology at Eastern University and a former faculty member at University of
Pennsylvania says, “The most serious threats to the well-being of Palestinians
in general and to the Christian Palestinians in particular come not from the
Jews but from Christian Zionists in the United States.”
So what are their basic beliefs? Most of this we’ve
hit on already but they strongly reject literal interpretation in favor of
spiritual hermeneutic, strongly reject dispensationalist, which they love to
hate. They affirm Liberation Theology. Hello, where have we heard of liberation
theology before? This is socialism and Marxism applied and dressed up in
Christian terminology. Does the name Jeremiah Wright mean anything to anybody?
This was Obama’s pastor up in Chicago. Jeremiah Wright holds to black
Liberation Theology.
There’s black, Palestinian, and all these different
things but they’re all basically the same thing: anti-Christian, anti-freedom,
anti-truth. They believe that “modern Israel has no connection with or
justification for owning the Promised Land, that modern Israel is an apartheid
state.” Now Melanie Philips is one of the good people. I love to read her books,
one of which is called “Londonistan” talking about the danger of the Islamic
community in Britain and how that’s changing things states, “So when Arab
Christians reinterpreted Scripture in order to delegitimize the Jews claim to
Israel, this kick-started replacement theology [She’s a little off on her
history there but she’s basically right.], which roared back into the
imagination and sermons of the Anglican Church.” See the Anglican Church in the
19th century was very pro-Israel. That’s what produced the great
leaders who led up to the Balfour Declaration. Melanie Philips goes on the say,
“This revision isn’t held that Palestinian Arabs were the original possessors
of the Land of Israel”.
There was no such thing as a Palestinian up until
Arafat decided to co-opt the term Palestine that up until the mid-60s was used
to apply to Jews. The Palestinian Brigade in the British Army was Jewish. They
wore a Palestinian Brigade patch, but they were Jews; they weren’t Arabs.
That’s all been distorted. Two hundred years ago there were just very, very few
Arabs who lived in the land. Most of them were Bedouins or poor tenant farmers
and nothing was going on.
In fact, one of the things I learned this last trip is
one of the reason Israel was devastated so much of the 19th century
was that the Ottoman Empire imposed a tax on trees. What do you think the
unintended consequence of that tax was? Cut down all the trees. How does that
change the environment? How does it change the topography? What’s that going to
do to the topsoil? It absolutely devastated the land so it was swampy, it was
arid, and the land wasn’t worth anything, the topsoil was blown away in the
hill country. It was terrible. So very few people wanted to even be there.
Key players in this whole movement:
Elias Chacour is considered the godfather of Christian
Palestinianism and he says, “We’ve been taught for centuries that the Jews are
the chosen people of God. We do not believe any more that they are the chosen
people of God since now we have a new understanding of the chosenness.” This is
what happens when you don’t interpret the Bible right.
Naim Ateck says, “Strangers will stand and attend your
flock and you shall eat the wealth of the nations. This exclusiveness text is
unacceptable today. It must be de-Zionanized.” Just get out our razor blades
and reinterpret Bible. He also says that Samson was the first suicide bomber. I
thought you’d like that. “Christian Zionists thrive on war and conflict…” It’s
all our fault! “Christian Zionists harbor an obsession with the Battle of
Armageddon.”
Some of those who went on that first trip to Israel
remember when Wayne House allowed a film crew to come along and film us. It was
a big mistake. They turned it into a horrible movie. I’m not even going to tell
you the name of it but one of the contentions is that we just loved and
anticipated the Battle of Armageddon. They twisted everything we said. They say
the only reason we want to get the Jews back to the land is so Jesus will come
kill them all at the Battle of Armageddon, you anti-Semite you. I’d never heard
that before. I had made a mistake. My mistake was that sometimes I don’t like
to go away on conferences because I can’t see the immediate relevance. Right
after I moved back here Tommy and Randy went to one of these groups’ major
conferences in Chicago. They called me up to go with them but I had Bible
class. Well, if I had learned what I had learned there we wouldn’t have gotten
sucked into that awful thing. That’s why I go to conferences, to be informed.
There’s so much garbage out there today.
Okay. Naim Ateck who is one of the leaders, the
foremost thinkers in Christian Palestinianism says, “When confronted with a
difficult passage in the Bible one needs to ask such simple questions as “is
the way I’m hearing this the way I’ve come to know God in Christ?” See it’s
totally subjective. He says, “Does this fit the picture I have of Jesus that
God has revealed to me?” See, you don’t just go see what the text says. You
just have this subjective image of Jesus and then you fit your beliefs into
that. That’s what’s called idolatry.
Colin Chapman is another thinker. He says, “The New
Testament writers ceased to look forward to a literal fulfillment of Old
Testament prophecies of a return to the land and a restored Jewish state.” You
may say that hearing this is boring and you don’t like it but this is really
gaining traction. I hate studying stuff like this because it doesn’t seem real
edifying, but it’s protective. Okay, this is what’s going on and it’s
increasing in its exposure. Stephen Sizer is a guy you just hate to have on the
other side. Why? Because he grew up as a Christian Zionist. He says, “As a
young Christian at Sussex University in the mid-70s I was strongly influenced
by Christian Zionist leaders such as Tim LeHaye, David Posit, and Hal Lindsey,
devouring his bestselling book, “The Late, Great Planet Earth” and hearing in
person his lectures on eschatology and the book of Revelation, it seemed that
the Bible was literally coming true in this generation. My conversion came in
two parts [to Christian Palestinianism]…” I’ll just skip a couple of these
quotes but you get the idea.
In Galatians 6:16 he said, “This is perhaps the Apostle
Paul’s most stark example of universalizing the new identity of the people of
God.” That’s the phrase where Paul says, “greet the Israel of God.” What’s he’s
talking about is greet the Jews who are believers. Israel always means the
Jewish people everywhere it’s used in Scripture. But among the allegorizers
they want to take that phrase and say that applies to the Church, the New
Israel. So that’s a battlefield passage. Sizer says, “The Apostle is redrawing
the definition for self-identity and with this new definition comes a
realignment of the privileges that come with all identities.” He is a major
influence in Britain.
Then we have N.T, Wright. Now why is N.T. Wright
important? Because he has influenced at least one pastor whom we ordained at
Berachah twenty years ago and he has influenced others and it’s causing
problems in some churches that have members who are family members of folks in
this congregation. N.T. Wright says, “Israel’s story has been embodied in one
man, Jesus. The whole story of Israel reached its intended climax with His
death and His resurrection. His death is the exile of Israel and the
resurrection is restoration of Israel.” See how allegory works there. He says,
“The church seems to have taken the place occupied by Jewish ethnic identity.
The Lord Jesus was reconstituting Israel around Himself, reinterpreting
Israel’s eschatological hope, no longer literal, and reusing Israel’s prophetic
heritage retelling it story and redefining what the kingdom meant. The promises
to Jerusalem to Zion are now transferred to Jesus and His people.” Pure
replacement theology! He goes on to say, “The American obsession with the
Second Coming of Jesus, especially with distorted interpretations of it,
continues unabated. Seen from my side of the Atlantic the phenomenal success of
the Left
Behind books appears puzzling, even bizarre.”
Then we have this quote form Alan Hart who is a
British journalist. I ran across a picture of him at a conference he’s
attending entitled, “Zionism, the Real Enemy of the Jews.” He said, “It’s time
to give Israel’s hardcore Zionists their real name. They are the new Nazis. If
Europeans and Americans don’t stop the new Nazis, it’s likely their endgame
will be the extermination of millions of Palestinians.” So we’re the new Nazis!
Okay, I’m going to run through this very
quickly. “Those who hold the replacement supersession view often use
replacement terminology but reject the idea they’re replacement theologians.
Here’s one from dear old Bruce Waltke who says, “The New Testament teaches the
hard fact that national Israel and its law have been permanently replaced by
the Church and the New Covenant. The Jewish nation no longer has a place as the
special people of God. That place has been taken by the Christian community which
fulfills God’s purpose for Israel.”
Observation five: Those who argue for fulfillment,
enlargement language or transference language do not use different arguments
than those who use replacement language. What this point is saying is that the
term that people want to use today is fulfillment, enlargement, or transfer but
it’s all a word game.
Sixth observation: Replacement theology is a
legitimate title for the view that the Church supersedes or replaces Israel.
That’s what it is and that’s what it means.
Last observation: Nations and promises to nations are
not unspiritual nor are they things that need to be transcended. Replacement
theology talks about Israel being redefined and physical land promises being
transcended by greater spiritual reality but where does the Bible ever indicate
that nations are unspiritual or lesser types that must give way to greater
spiritual realities? Their whole methodology is flawed so they end up with a
complete false view.
One last quote from Gary Burge who
is a major influence and teacher at Wheaton. Wheaton has often been thought by a lot of people to
be conservative. Trust me, folks, Wheaton hasn’t been Biblically conservative
in their theology since World War II. Lots of people sent their kids off to
Wheaton to get a good Christian education and they were spiritually eviscerated
by the lousy theology at Wheaton. Wheaton hasn’t had somebody believe in
literal Genesis creation since about 1950. Gary Burge says, “Reformed
theologians are not at all convinced that the promises to Abraham, much less
Moses, are still theologically significant today. The work of Christ is
definite. There’s one covenant and it’s with Christ.”
That’s the issue with replacement theology. Next time
I want to look at the issue related to anti-Semitism and this is growing.
According to the Anti-defamation League anti-Semitism is on a huge growth spurt
worldwide. For the last sixty years since the end of World War II it wasn’t,
because the anti-Semites were put in the shadows by the horrors of the
Holocaust. But people and cultures have short memories. History disappears and
vanishes into the midst of time and we’re on the cusp of a rising
anti-Semitism. It’s increasing by leaps and bounds all over Europe and that’s
just Christian anti-Semitism. Then you have Islamic anti-Semitism and that is
also fueling the Middle East.
It’s not about the Palestinians. If you had a scale on
cultural value, the Arabs think that the scum on the bottom of the ocean are the
Palestinians. That’s why they don’t want to let them there in their country.
They just leave them there to rot in these displaced person’s camps as just
something to fester so they can keep tweaking Israel. They don’t care at all
about the so-called Palestinian Arabs and have done nothing for them and that’s
just been demonstrated in history. They just view them as a tool to fight those
evil Zionists in Israel.
Next time when we come back I want to look at
anti-Semitism, its Biblical roots, its historical and present manifestations.
Then we’ve covered a good foundation for going into Romans 9-11. Romans 9-11
affirms very strongly that God has not deserted His people Israel. Why is that
important? Because if God goes back on His promises to Israel then how do you
know that God’s not going to go back on His promises to save you? This is all
about eternal security. Trust me.