Posted on 09/01/2006 5:32:18 AM PDT by xzins
the change in the fortune of the Jews in Western civilization can be traced, not to humanism, but to the Reformed faith. The rediscovery of Scripture brought a rekindling of the Biblical conviction that God had not, in fact, fully nor finally rejected His people.8
I'm fascinated that Ice is saying that the dutch reformers supported the biblical view of a future for national Israel.
I'd like to track that down.
I suspect a coming flame fest from the antidispensationalreplacementarianists.
You might find this interesting!
Ping of interest!
The title should have been: What do you do with something that cannot be demonstrated conclusively from the Bible without positing raw assertions?
Tommy (Mr. "Replacement theology" == anti-Semitism) Ice's biases and politics are showing.
Read Supersessional Orthodoxy; Zionistic Sadism by Ken Gentry
In Ice's book Ready to Rebuild there is a picture of him, with delight in his eyes, sitting down with Gershon Salomon, the Jewish founder and head of the Temple Mount Faithful. Now as a good Christian, I am sure Tommy warned Salomon of the soon coming holocaustal judgment on Israel. And I am sure as a Christian pastor he presented Salomon the Gospel of Jesus Christ, pointing out that He and He alone is "the way, the truth, and the life." Of course, I just recently purchased some ocean front property in Arizona, too.
Perhaps the flames will be not so intense when you guys start posting articles from Saucy, Blaising and Boch, rather than Tommy Ice. They clearly represent the future of dispensational thinking. The "old school" guys are a dying breed. You could tell they were feeling the heat when they decide to play the "race card", i.e., traditional supersessionism == anti-Semitism.
How long can Ice, LaHaye, and Linday keep up this mantra of "1948 is eschatologically significant" and non-dispensationalists are racists line? It's getting very old, and dispensationalists of all stripes are coming to realize that fact.
I'm not holding my breath, but it would be refreshing.
I thank God for my friends who are still enmeshed in soul-damning cults (mormonism, islam, judaism) even as I pray for their conversion and salvation. In fact, the founding pastor of my church was raised Jewish, then came to the ongoing party as a young man, and has been busily inviting others to join the fun ever since.
It is historically true that as a rule antisemitism did not come out of churches that accepted a future national Israel.
Martin Luther became rabidly antisemitic, but I'm not sure of his eschatology. If he was a typical amillennialist, then replacing "Israel" with "church" was not something that would have BLOCKED this very negative direction of his later years.
Now, there are shoes for both feet. One can play the "replacemetarian/antisemitism" card or one can play the "dispensationalism can only rely on its antisemitic bias" card.
Or we can say that the Christians need to look at each passage and make a decision from grammar, context, and history whether it refers to "national Israel" or "spiritual Israel."
The Bible and its proper interpretation is the issue.
Matthew 24:34 reads "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till ALL these things be fulfilled." Which generation? Hal Lindsey had us believe it was our generation!
Back when Hal Lindsay wrote The Late Great Planet Earth, Israel's foundation (1948) was still recent history. Lindsey wrote that a "biblical generation" at that time was forty years in length. Thus, with the reestablishment of the Nation of Israel, the expectation was that the Tribulation and Christ's Return would occur within a biblical generation, IE within Lindsey's readers' lifetimes (1988 occurring forty years - one generation - after the reestablishment of Israel). Now two more decades have passed, the EU has grown beyond 10 members, the Soviet Bear has fallen, and last time I looked, I don't have a UPC bar-code tattooed on my forehead (or a techno-ID chip implanted in hand) and every car I see on the highway still has a driver. Either someone forgot to set the alarm on that prophetic clock, or Lindsey, LaHaye & co. just kept hitting the snooze button, hoping we'd forget about 1988 coming and going.
Fast forward to 2006. It's been almost sixty years since the foundation of Israel. Assuming the Rapture hits tomorrow, and the dispensational eschatology holds up, you still need to tack on an additional seven years to account for the Tribulation period before a pretrib Second Coming. Thus, either the biblical length of a "generation" is greater than 58 years and growing (assuming pretrib rapture, 65+ years if posttrib), or the old-school dispensationalists have badly misjudged which prophetic time period we're living in, and thus badly misunderstood Matthew 24:34.
In case nobody was looking, Lindsey's already spinning his failures into (future) successes by changing the way he calculates the Second Coming. Rather than begin calculations from the (formerly significant) 1948 (re)founding of Israel, Lindsey now starts with a young earth scenario, with the Earth being formed around 4000 b.c. His new math system now tells us a day is a thousand years, and thus he'd have us believe we're somewhere between 992 years away ("eight years into") and 1004 years away ("four years before") from the Second Coming (yes, his math is that precise). By date-setting the "Second Coming" date to about 1000 years in the future, it's now far ahead enough for Lindsey to avoid dying of embarrassment, should he miscalculate the date again.
In other words, Lindsey knows he was wrong about the 1988 date, but doesn't want to admit it in print. I wonder if Tommy Ice got the memo?
I'm sure the author is talking about the murder, mayhem, and prejudice directed toward Jews....pogroms, holocausts, anti-Jewish laws, etc.
Those things you mention: justification, evangelization, and spirituality are not "practical" issues within Christianity. They are directly addressed, biblical, doctrinal issues. These are things that MUST be taught.
Persecution of Jews, on the other hand, is not a Christian doctrine.
I never got that.
I always got that it "COULD" be our generation.
Still could be. Jesus said to "Watch for you don't know when the Son of Man comes."
You'd better fault Jesus, too.
Ice is no historian. Look at how he twists the words of Schlissel, who wrote:
Whatever views were maintained as to Israel's political restoration, their spiritual future was simply a given in Reformed circles.Note how Ice's commentary distorts these words which are ambiguous as to a future national entity for Israel:
This extract establishes that the "spiritualized" notion of "Israel" in Rom 11:25, 26, was known to and rejected by the body of Dutch expositors.Huh?? His extract does no such thing. Ice's survey of Dutch thinking amounts to some misplaced quotes from Schlissel.
The Dutch rejected the dispensational, premil notion of a future millennial kingdom after Christ's return with Israel at the center. The Dutch rejected any form of theology where nations were separated along racial lines for salvific purposes.
Ice also comments:
Yet Schlissel is concerned that his Reformed brethren are abandoning this future national hope for Israel as they currently reassert a strong view of replacement theology.His continued reference to "this future national hope for Israel" make it appear that Schlissel, et al support the disnepsatioanlist theories. They do not. Their views on future Israel is radically different from the classic and neo-dispensational ones.
There have always been Reformed theologians (aka supersessionist "anti-Semites") of all strips that have held to a future for the Jews, whether national or otherwise. That is nothing new. In fact, the Westminster Larger Catechism calls out specifically for the conversion of the Jews.
What Ice wants you to believe is that there exists a latent appreciation for dispensational-style Jewish nationalism in Dutch (Reformed) thinking. Such is not the case. Reformed theologians have consistently affirmed a coming of Christ before the millennial, not after. They rejected all forms of "chilaism", the notion of a millennium on earth with Christ physically present and Jews in charge.
For your added entertainment, here is a portion from the Belgic Confession, one of the documents that makes up the "Three Forms of Unity" commonly used as confessions within the Dutch Reformed community:
Finally, we believe, according to the word of God, that when the time predestined by God and unknown to all creatures arrives, and the number of the Elect will be completed, our Lord Jesus Christ is going to return from heaven, bodily and visibly, just as He once ascended there, decorated with consummate Majesty, and He will reveal Himself as a judge of the living and of the dead, having set this old world ablaze with fire and flame in order that He would purify it. Then truly all creatures, so as with men also with women and infants, as many as have thereupon lived, back from the beginning up unto the end of the world, will appear in the presence of this consummate Judge, certainly called forth by the sound of both the Archangel and by the trumpet of God. For all of the previously dead will then rise up from the ground and, by the Spirit, the soul of every one of them, in turn, will be united and joined together with their own body in which they had lived. Again, those who will be living up unto that ultimate day will be transformed in but a moment and a blink of the eye, clearly from corruption into an incorruptible nature. (Belgic Confession, Article 37)Within the context of the phrase "the number of the Elect will be completed" comes the understanding of whatever is included in Romans 11 wrt the Jewish and gentile converts to Christ. While there may be a massive conversion of Jewish people prior to Christ's return (which I happen to believe as a postmillennialist), nothing requires a wholesale return of Jewish people to the Middle East region in order for this to be fulfilled. There certainly is nothing about Jewish nationalism in any of the Dutch confessions.
Please supply us all with a list of these churches, and references from their confessions as to their views on "a future national Israel".
This should be interesting.
I think you're pretty much culture bound in your request. Being from a church that has a confession that might mention such a thing, you forget that many churches are not nearly so formal. Some don't write lengthy confessions at all.
Which form of Judaism -- hasidic, orthodox, traditional, conservative, reform, reconstructionist, humanistic/secular -- represents real Judaism today?
Would you say that reconstructionist or reform Jews observe the same central tenets as orthodox Jews?
That doesn't even begin to address that it was instituted by God Himself.
Which of these forms of Judaism did God institute?
Persecution of Jews, on the other hand, is not a Christian doctrine.
Can we not universalize this to say persecution of anyone is not a Christian doctrine? By singling out Jewish people you make it into a specialized "hate crime" category.
Excellent article. Thanks much.
Let it not come from our side. Sigh.
Holland is fully capable of carrying on a flame fest all on their own. Let them bear the responsibility alone, if they so insist.
AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!
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