Pro-Israel "Supercessionist" speaks.

Submitted by Peter J. Herz (United States), Sep 3, 2006 at 00:10

This interchange, including the comments by Mr. Willruth, are rather interesting. A Christian does not have to be a Dispensational Fundamentalist in order to be pro-Israel.

I disagree with Mr. Willruth that the Evangelicals and Pentecostals are "uneducated and easily led"--even though I do not share the End Times Madness of Dispensationalism and consider too many Pentecostals to be casual blasphemers (see Deuteronomy 18). They've been to college as much as anyone else; and as for being easily led, I beg Mr. Willruth to consider the bewildering sectarian divisions among them, which suggest to me that they can be rather ornery and HARD to lead. Speaking as a hard-core "Calvinist" (we prefer "Reformed", although the title "Zwinglian" could also fit us), I have a lot of sympathy with other Evangelicals' biblicism and willingness to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord; and very little with so-called "moderate Christians" who are ready to embrace every secular "ism" that comes along. Indeed, the willingness of modern secularists to believe almost any palpable nonsense as long as it is prefaced by "science says" strikes me as the greater gullibility and lemming-like behavior.

But I will also disagree with those who call a supercessionist theology blasphemous. It ought to be clear to all Christians that God's covenant focuses not on Jewry but on one Jew--Jesus the Messiah. It is those who are centered on Him that are at the heart of God's plan; whether they looked forward to Him in Old Testament times or remember His work afterwards. Nor is it proper to say that such people see Gentiles per se as the new Chosen People; for Gentile is not synonymous with "Christian". Further, "Christian" is not necessarily exclusive of "Jewish", since all the writers of the New Testament were Jews, and there has always been at least a trickle of Jewish believers entering the Christian Church throughout history. Ancient Israel was indeed the center of God's redemptive plan from the day Jacob wrestled at Jabbok to Passover in 30 AD, since it was God's vessel to bring redemption to the world. But since the coming of the Messiah, the Chosen People of God are those, whether Jewish or Gentile, gathered around Him; not the inhabitants of some particular piece of land.

To those of us who follow Covenantal rather than Dispensationalist theology, the re-emergence of an Israelite polity after 1948 is by no means dumb luck. It was politically necessitated by the exclusion of the Jews by modern nationalism in both Europe and the Middle East. It was, however, part of the Divine plan only in that nations must rise and fall, just as Christ prophesied they would. And, if I wish good for my neighbor, I have no business desiring a few million people to be thrown into the Med; or for the losers of the 1948 to languish in camps three generations later (i.e., if America can naturalize its Falastin Arabs, so can Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Sa'udi Arabia). Further, it is no "justice" to support a people and movement who celebrate suicide bombings.

While I wish the best for Israel (the one between the Jordan and the Med), I worry far more that peoples who once heard the Gospel mightily proclaimed by reformers and 18th century evangelicals now sigh over the failure of Marx's pipe-dream, cheer the decline of the family, and consult horoscopes in the daily paper. God is not mocked. While I don't claim to be a prophet and express only a pious opinion (which I even pray might be wrong), it just might be the case that the modern West is indeed vexed by radical Islamicism (and, in Afghanistan and Iraq, vice versa) because there is a reckoning afoot for those who have too long mocked God's way of salvation.

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