The Seed of Abraham

It is often thought that the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis which cover the primordial history of the world from Creation to the confusing of tongues and scattering of nations at the Tower of Babel depict God in relation to the whole of humanity but in the twelfth chapter a narrower focus on His relationship to a single nation begins.   On one level, this is true.   In the first chapter of Genesis we read the account of God creating the universe.   In the second we read the account of His creating our first parents and placing them in the Garden of Eden.   In the third we have the account of the Temptation in the Garden and the Fall of Man.   The fourth begins with the account of Cain and Abel, then introduces Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, from whom the line of descent that leads to Noah, which genealogy fills the whole of the fifth chapter, begins.  The account of how God sent the Great Deluge to destroy the primordial world for its wickedness, but preserved life, human and animal, through Noah and the ark, then after the Flood made a covenant with Noah and the human race that was to begin anew with him, takes up the sixth through the ninth chapters.   The tenth contains the genealogies of Japheth, Ham, and Shem, Noah’s three sons.   After the account of the scattering of the nations, the eleventh chapter concludes by extending Shem’s genealogy down to Terah and his family, including his son Abram.   The twelfth chapter begins with God’s call to Abram, the first stage in the establishment of His covenant with the man whose name He would change to Abraham.   Here is the account of that call:

 

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Gen. 12:1-3)

 

In these verses we see that the apparent narrowing of the narrative to focus on one nation is not the entire story.   God does indeed promise Abram that He will “make of thee a great nation” and the narrative relating His doing just that fills the rest of the Torah or Pentateuch.   The concluding words of the promise to Abram, however, tell us that even here God was no less concerned with the whole world than He was in His earlier interactions with Adam and Noah and Nimrod’s construction crew.

 

There are some who interpret this passage so as to make everything that is promised to “thee”, Abram, a promise that applies to the “great nation” that God will make of Abram.   They further interpret the passage by saying that ancient national Israel has continued in the diaspora Jewish people to be reborn as a nation in the twentieth century, the present national state of Israel.   They then say that the promise to bless whoever blesses and curse whoever curses are promises to the Jewish people and the present state of Israel.   Translated into contemporary geopolitics this becomes the idea that we are required to support the state of Israel in all her conflicts or run the risk of incurring the curse of God.    Those who interpret the promise this way are obviously intent on persuading Christians to support Israel as the argument would not work with unbelievers.  It is most often heard, therefore, as part of a theological package known as “Christian Zionism”.

 

It is my intent in this essay to demonstrate that Christian Zionism is not compatible with the Christian orthodoxy of the New Testament.   First, however, I wish to show how this interpretation is not compatible with the Old Testament. 

 

One does not have to look outside the Book of Genesis itself to make this point.   Genesis makes it clear that the promises God makes to Abram/Abraham (1) do not descend automatically to all of his physical offspring.   Before Isaac was born to Sarah, she had arranged for Abram, as he was at the time, to sire a son, Ishmael, with her handmaid Hagar.   This takes place in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis.   In the twenty-first, after Isaac’s birth, when Sarah demands that Ishmael be driven out, God promises that of Ishmael He will make “a nation, because he is thy seed”, but that it is Isaac who will inherit the promises.   Later, after Sarah dies, Abraham remarries, and his second wife Keturah bears him six sons, but these do not co-inherit with Isaac any more than Ishmael does.   This is recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter, which also records Abraham’s death and burial, and the birth of Isaac and Rebekah’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau.   While they are still in the womb God tells Rebekah that they will become two nations which will strive with each other.   It is with the younger of the twins, Jacob, later renamed Israel, that God makes His Covenant and to Jacob that He confirms the promises that He made to Abraham.

 

Only one of Abraham’s literal sons inherited the promises.   Only one of Isaac’s literal sons inherited the promises.   Therefore, the promises are not automatically conferred by right of physical descent from Abraham.   Not even in the Old Testament.  

 

The events recorded in the remainder of the Torah/Pentateuch did not change this.  In the Book of Exodus, four centuries after the death of Joseph, the descendants of Israel (Jacob) had grown into an ethnos within Egypt, but their fortune had taken a turn for the worse since the days when Joseph was Pharaoh’s favourite and basically the Prime Minister of Egypt.   They were enslaved and cruel measures were taken by the Egyptians to hinder their growth.   Then God raised up a deliverer in the person of Moses, who had been born into the tribe of Levi but had been raised as an adopted member of the Egyptian royal family.   God sends Moses to speak to Pharaoh demanding the release of His people, and ultimately provokes, through a series of increasingly intense plagues, Pharaoh into driving the Israelites out of Egypt.  En route to the land of Canaan, promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses leads the people to Mt. Sinai, where God enters into a covenant with them as a nation.   This covenant, however, is not like the one God made with the Patriarchs.   Everything that God promised unconditionally to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which unconditional promises we have just seen did not automatically descend to Abraham and Isaac’s progeny by right of physical descent, were in the Mosaic Covenant promised to Jacob’s descendants as a collective people group, a nation, but on a very much conditional basis.   The condition was that they obeyed all of God’s Commandments.   If they did, they would enjoy the benefits of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.   If they disobeyed, they would be punished with the opposite of those promises.  This is why this covenant is called the Law.   The remainder of the Old Testament demonstrates that they were unable to meet the requirements of the Law.   This is not because they were uniquely wicked.  No nation would have been able to meet those requirements.   That was not the point of the Law.   The Law demonstrated the need for a New Covenant that operated on a different basis from the Law.   That New Covenant was promised in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament in connection with the promises that God would send them a Saviour from the Davidic line Who, because He would inherit David’s throne, was called the Messiah, meaning “Anointed One”, i.e. king.   The promises of the Messiah expanded on a promise made to all of fallen mankind in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:15) and so did not concern one nation alone.

 

Although his story is told in the New Testament, John the Baptist was the last prophet of the Old.   Yes, that sounds weird, I know.  It is helpful to remember that “Testament” means “Covenant” and can refer either to the Old and New Covenants qua Covenants or to the collections of sacred books in which these Covenants respectively predominate.   In both Testaments, in the sense of collections of books, the historical narrative begins prior to the establishment of the Covenant.   The Old Covenant was established at Mt. Sinai but this doesn’t occur in the narrative until the second book, Exodus.   The New Covenant was established at the Cross at the end of each of the Gospels.   In the earlier part of the Gospels, and the account of John the Baptist occurs at the beginning of each, the Old Covenant is still in effect.    That John the Baptist is the last prophet of the Old Testament, meaning the last prophet filling that office in the period before the New Covenant takes over, is what Jesus was talking about when He said “Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” and “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John” (Matt. 11:11, 13).   It is also indicated by the fact that Jesus waited until John the Baptist had been imprisoned before He began His public ministry of proclaiming the “Kingdom of Heaven”, i.e., the promised Messianic Kingdom, “is at hand”, i.e., had arrived in the Person of Him, the promised Messiah.   It is significant therefore that John, as the last Old Testament prophet and, according to Jesus, the fulfilment of the prophecy that ends the canonical Old Testament in Malachi 4:5-6 (2), directly addressed the idea that biological descent from Abraham conveyed in itself the promises and blessings to Abraham when he warned the Sadducees and Pharisees:

 

And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. (Matt. 3:9)

 

We come now to the New Testament proper.   In the New Testament we find the substance of which the Old Testament was the shadow.   That which was concealed in the Old Testament is revealed in the New.   The New Testament makes it very clear how Abraham was made a blessing to all the families of the world, to whom the promises made to Abraham descend, and how.

In his epistle to the Churches of Galatia, the region of Asia Minor that had been settled by the Celtic Gauls in the 3^rd Century BC, St. Paul discusses the same issue that was formally addressed by the Holy Catholic Church in the Council of Jerusalem recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Acts.   This issue was whether or not Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, had to become Jews, by being circumcised and agreeing to keep the Mosaic Law with all its ceremonial restrictions, in order to be Christians.   That Gentiles could become Christians was established when St. Peter was sent to Cornelius the Centurion to preach the Gospel, after which he and his household believed, the Holy Ghost came upon them, and they were baptized into the Church at St. Peter’s command.   In the ministry of SS. Paul and Barnabas, who were sent out on their first missionary journey shortly thereafter by the Church in Antioch, the Gentiles proved more receptive to the Gospel than the Jews and joined the Church in droves.   This led to the controversy about whether or not these Gentile converts should be circumcised and made to follow the Mosaic ceremonies.   The Council of Jerusalem after much testimony and deliberation ruled that the answer was no and sent out a letter to that effect.   St. Paul in his epistle went even further than the Council and pronounced an anathema upon those who were troubling the new Christians with their Judaizing claims. (3)

 

It is in the third chapter of his epistle that the Apostle incorporates into his case against the legalistic Judaizers arguments that also decisively demolish ideas that are key to the Christian Zionist position.   Here are the sixth through ninth verses of the chapter:

 

Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.  Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.

 

This passage begins with an allusion to Genesis 15:6, the same verse the Apostle similarly references in the epistle to the Romans, to make the identical point that righteousness before God, which cannot be attained by doing the good works required by the Law for the Law demands flawless obedience of which human sinners are incapable, is, on the basis of Grace, that is, favour freely given, credited to those who trust God for it.   That it is Jesus Christ Who made this possible, by providing His own flawless righteousness to meet the demands of the Law, and by paying for the sins of the world through His propitiatory death, is spelled out shortly after this passage in verse thirteen.   What makes this most relevant to our discussion is that here St. Paul makes a point of saying that it is those who share Abraham’s faith, and so are justified by faith like Abraham, who are the children of Abraham, and that these come from all nations (“the heathen”, here, like “the Gentiles”, means all the other nations of the world).   This is reiterated in verse fourteen.

 

It is at this point that St. Paul’s argument, already devastating to the Christian Zionist position, puts the final nail in its coffin.    In the fifteenth verse he says that covenants, even if they are only between men, once confirmed are neither added to nor annulled.  Then in the sixteenth verse he says this:

 

Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.

 

While it might seem to some that the Apostle is taking great liberty with his text here – there are a number of different verses this might be referencing but Gen. 17:7 is the most likely – St. Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, provides God’s own interpretation of his earlier words.   Jesus is the Seed of Abraham.   St. Paul spells it out for us in black and white.   When, only a few verses earlier, he said that those who are “of faith”, that is to say, who have justifying faith like Abraham, are the children of Abraham, they are the children of Abraham because their faith unites them to Jesus Christ, the Seed of Abraham.   This is how justifying faith – or rather saving faith, because salvation in its entirety, justification, sanctification, glorification, positional and practical, is a gift received by faith – works.   It contributes nothing of its own, it receives what God gives us freely, and that which God gives us freely He gives us in Jesus.   When we receive Him by faith, we are united with Him into a corporate body of which He is Head, and we members.   Therefore, what He is in Himself, the Seed of Abraham, we who believe in Him are by virtue of being united with Him in His body.

 

Now, before I proceed to the rest of the chapter, I wish to make and emphasize the point that everything I just said is not something that is new with the New Testament.   Nobody in the Old Testament was saved by his works, much less by his race.   The Old Testament saints were saved by the Grace of God, received through faith, on account of the work of Jesus Christ as Saviour, just like New Testament saints.   The difference, of course, was that the faith of Old Testament saints looked forward to the Saviour that had been promised but with the dawn of the New Testament saving faith has looked back to the Saviour already given.   In the case of the Old Testament saints, salvation by Grace through faith worked through the anticipation of their union with Christ which union was fulfilled in the establishment of the New Covenant at the Cross and of the corporate Body of Christ on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost) as recorded in the second chapter of the book of Acts.   When the Church was born, the Old Testament saints, whom Jesus had taken to Heaven with Him after releasing them from the Kingdom of Death (Sheol/Hades) when He entered there as conqueror in the Harrowing of Hell, were brought fully into the union, becoming the first members of the Church Triumphant.  

 

Again,  even in the Old Testament, those who were the children of Abraham in the sense acknowledged by God, were so in anticipation of their union with the true Seed of Abraham, Jesus Christ, because they like Abraham looked forward to Him in faith, and not because of physical descent from Abraham.  

 

In the verses that follow after Galatians 3:16, St. Paul, elaborates on the significance of this.   The covenant that God made with Abraham and his Seed, he explains, a covenant based on His own freely given promises, i.e., Grace, precedes the Law.   Since the earlier covenant was confirmed in Christ, the Law which came latter cannot disannul it.  The Law, he explains, was a temporary measure, a schoolmaster or tutor assigned the duty of leading the heirs of the promise to Christ to be justified by faith, after which “we are no longer under a schoolmaster” (v. 25).  

 

What St. Paul says here is the opposite of what the Plymouth Brethren/Scofield Reference Bible/Dallas Theological Seminary school of dispensationalist theology teaches.   This is the theology that gave birth to Christian Zionism.   It teaches that the present Church Age in which Jewish and Gentile believers are one in Jesus Christ is a previously unknown parenthesis in God’s prophetic timeline and that when the Church Age is over the Church will be removed, the Age of Law will resume, and God will return to His real prophetic agenda which is all about national Israel.   St. Paul, however, makes it clear that the Law is the parenthesis in God’s timeline, and that God’s grand plan was always about His promises of blessing freely given in Grace in Jesus Christ to all who believe, regardless of ethnicity.   After telling us that with the coming of the faith of Christ the parenthetical period of Law the tutor is over he concludes his argument with the following:

 

For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (vv. 26-29)

 

Clearly, therefore, St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians precludes the Christian Zionist interpretation of Genesis 12 as requiring us to support the contemporary state of Israel in any and all conflict with her neighbours.   This would be so even if we were to accept what the Christian Zionists take for granted, i.e., that Jewish identity has not changed from the New Testament to our day.   We would be fools to accept any such thing, however, because that is plainly not the case.

 

Even in the Bible Jewish identity is not a constant.  Judah was the fourth son of Jacob, whose name became that of the tribe of his descendants from whom King David came, then later the name of the Southern Kingdom that remained loyal to the House of David after the schism of the Northern Kingdom which called itself after the whole of the nation, Israel.   Originally, the word that corresponds to our “Jew”, derived from “Judah”, referred to the subjects of the House of David in the Kingdom of Judah, but following the Babylonian exile it was expanded to include all ancient Israelites.   This is the meaning that carries over into the New Testament where for the most part it is synonymous with Hebrew or Israelite, although in the Gospel of John as the narrative progresses it takes on the narrower meaning of the religious leaders in Jerusalem.  

 

Shortly after the events recorded in the book of Acts and the writing of most of the books of the New Testament – all except those by St. John – an event took place which had been predicted by Jesus that radically altered the nature of Jewish identity.   To suppress a Jewish revolt, the Roman Empire sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, dispersed the Jews, and abolished their national identity as it was at the beginning of the first century.   With the destruction of their national identity, they were left with a religious identity.   Yet at the same time, and for the same reason, the religion which God had given Israel through Moses was no longer available to them.  Without the Temple, the sacrifices could no longer be offered.   The Levitical priesthood ceased to be the spiritual leaders of the people, even in the nominal sense that had lingered after the Herodian corruption of the priesthood.    The centre of Jewish worship shifted from the destroyed Temple to the synagogue and with it the spiritual leadership of Judaism shifted from the Levitical priesthood to the teachers of the synagogue.   These were the scribes, scholars, and lay teachers, mostly from the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees, who under the title rabbi became the new clergy of this new Judaism.  The rabbis were scholars not just of the Tanakh – what we call the Old Testament – but even more so the oral traditions that they would start to write down as the Mishnah which along with their own commentary on it, the Gemara, forms the Talmud.   The rabbis notoriously disagreed on almost everything, a fact to which the Talmud bears abundant witness.   On one thing, however, they agreed.   They agreed that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ. 

 

The New Testament is absolutely clear as to what that constitutes:

 

Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. (1 John 2:22)

 

Christian Zionists, although they usually have a very elaborate concept of the Antichrist, shy away from applying this term to rabbinic Judaism even though it meets the New Testament definition of the word.   Many of them have no problem applying the label to a particular Christian bishop who, although guilty of exceeding his jurisdiction and perverting a number of doctrines, has not yet denied Jesus.  

 

Note that while rabbinic Judaism most definitely is antichrist by the scriptural definition of 1 John 2:22 this is not grounds for harbouring hatred towards individual adherents of this religion.   Our attitude towards them should be one of pity towards those bound by the shackles of false religion and of prayer that they would be enlightened by the Holy Ghost to see in Jesus the true Christ Who is their only salvation.   The same attitude, in other words, that we take towards the Mussulmen or adherents of any other false religion.

 

Judaism, both the Old Testament religion of Moses of which Christianity is the true spiritual heir, and the post-Temple rabbinic religion that also lays claim to being the heir of the Old Testament religion but which rejects the Christ Who is the fulfilment of the Old Testament, admits converts.   While post-Temple Judaism has not exactly been characterized by a zealous mission to convert the world, converts have not been unknown either.   Ironically, considering the absurd claim of many Christian Zionists that the Palestinians are the descendants of the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament, one group that was converted to Judaism in the second century BC was the Edomites.   A few of the better known stories in the Talmud feature Gentiles who go to Rabbis Hillel and Shammai, the two most prominent rabbis of the early first century, challenging them with questions and promising to convert if given a satisfactory answer.   In the eighth century AD the king of Khazaria, a Turkish realm in the southern part of what is now the Ukraine, asked Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to send representatives to explain the tenets of their religions, and in the end, converted to Judaism and made his entire kingdom convert with him.   In the twentieth century there were a number of celebrity conversions to Judaism – Marilyn Monroe, Ivanka Trump and Elizabeth Taylor to give just three examples.   This places the Christian Zionist in the absurd position of maintaining that Marilyn Monroe, in order to marry the playwright Arthur Miller whom she divorced five years later, obtained a God-given right to a portion of the Holy Land by converting to a religion that meets the Scriptural definition of antichrist for rejecting God’s Son as Christ.

 

None of this means that the opposite of Christian Zionism, the idea of those who insist that we are under some sort of obligation to support the Palestinians are right.   In my next essay, Lord willing, I shall discuss the masses cheering on Hamas, look at their infantile mentality, and show that it comes from a far more perverse source than the banal “anti-Semitism” the neo-conservatives have been mindlessly yammering about.

 

(1)   Genesis 12:1-3 contain just the first set of these promises, to which more are added later in the chapter in verse 7, then in verses 14-17 of the thirteenth chapter after Abram and Lot part ways, then in the fifteenth chapter in which God formally enters into covenant with Abram, then in the seventeenth chapter in which God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and promises that he will be “a father of many nations” (not just one), and that his wife Sarai, whose name is also changed to Sarah, will give birth to an heir despite their old age, and adds circumcision as the sacramental sign to the covenant between Him and Abraham, then again in the twenty-second chapter after God tests Abraham’s faith in the matter of the command to sacrifice Isaac

(2)   John’s own denial that he was Elijah (Jn. 1:21) does not contradict Jesus as it may seem.   John was addressing a party sent from Jerusalem that thought of Elijah in terms of the historical personage sent back to earth.   John was right to say that this is not who he was.   Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:14, affirming that John was the fulfilment of this prophecy, mean that this prophecy was not to be taken as literally as that.

(3)   The epistle was clearly written in the midst of the controversy.   Whether it was written before or after the Council, which took place towards the end of the fifth decade of the first century, cannot be determined with certainty, although the absence of reference to the Council might be taken as indicating that the epistle was written first.

The Seventh Article – The Second Coming

The second Article of the Christian Creed is, in the version of the Creed we call the Apostles’, “and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord”.   The next five Articles after this one, comprise a lengthy clarifying statement of Who this Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, in Whom we confess our faith, is.   Together these make up six of the twelve Articles, or half the Creed.   The seventh Article, which is our subject today, is the last of these.

 

The seventh Article pertains to a matter which has proven very controversial and divisive among Christians especially in the last century and a half.   The controversy and division is not usually over the content of the Article, which is a fairly simple assertion, but about the very complex systems of interpretation that theologians have built up around it.

 

The Article in the Apostles’ Creed is inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.   Our Book of Common Prayer renders this in English as “From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”   The inde or “From thence” points back to the previous Article in which Jesus is confessed to have ascended to Heaven where He sits at the right hand of God.   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan version of this Article is καὶ πάλιν ἐρχόμενον μετὰ δόξης κρῖναι ζῶντας καὶ νεκρούς· οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος.   In the Book of Common Prayer this is translated as “and he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.”   As you can see, the Article is quite simple in both Creeds.   In most cases the extra words in the conciliar Creed simply make explicit what would already be understood in confessing the material common to both Creeds, i.e., that the predicting coming is πάλιν –again – and μετὰ δόξης  - with glory.   The longest piece of additional material in the conciliar Creed - οὗ τῆς βασιλείας οὐκ ἔσται τέλος – whose kingdom shall have no end – is an assertion implicit in calling the Son of God by the title “Christ” for this is precisely what “Messiah” or “Christ” means, the predicted “Anointed One” who would arise from David’s seed to rule as king over Israel and all the earth forever.

 

This is about as basic as a confession of faith in the Second Coming gets.   The First Coming of Christ was in humility, to submit to arrest, false accusations, unjust condemnation, torture, and death on the Cross, to accomplish our salvation.   The Second Coming will be in judgement on both those living at the time – it just doesn’t sound right to refer to these in English in any other way than the expression used in the Book of Common Prayer here and in the Authorized Bible “the quick” – and the dead.   This is precisely what the New Testament says about the Second Coming and so we find in this Article about the Second Coming the entire Quattuor Novissima (Four Last Things) – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell – encapsulated.

 

It is when eschatology goes beyond a simple assertion of belief in the Second Coming, the Final Judgement and by implication the Four Last Things, and the eternal Kingdom of Christ that matters get controversial.

 

The writers of the New Testament speak of the Second Coming as an event they expect to live to see.   This is not because they had been misled about the timing of the event, as liberals who reject the infallibility of the Scriptures claim, much less because they were right about the timing and it took place two millennia ago as preterism, a deadly heresy of our own day claims.   It is because they paid heed to what Jesus Himself had said about this event – that the timing was a total mystery, unknown to anyone but the Father,  and that rather than unprofitably looking into this, they should maintain an attitude of watchfulness, expecting His Coming at any moment, because it will come like a thief in the night.   These instructions, clearly, were not just for the Apostles, or even for all of Jesus’ first generation disciples, but the entire faith society that Christ would establish through the Apostles, the Church.   The instructions were intended to show us how to avoid the opposite errors we were most likely in our fallen human nature to fall into the further away we got from the Ascension without the Second Coming having occurred, the error of abandoning our watchfulness on the assumption that it having been so long it will be still longer until He comes if He does at all, and the error of thinking that the closer we get to the Second Coming the less the warnings against date-setting apply.

 

Attempts to develop a more detailed eschatology than what we find in the Creed inevitably involve attempts to decipher and interpret the Book of Revelation, the last book in the published order of the New Testament, taken by nearly everybody to be the last book of the Bible to have been written – it is usually dated to the 90’s of the first century – and the last book of the New Testament to be accepted as canonical by the Church.   It is also the hardest book of the New Testament to interpret or rather the easiest book to misinterpret.   It is written in vivid allegorical imagery, the meaning of some of which is explained in the text, for example, that the dragon refers to Satan, while much of it is left without such explanation, and all or nearly all of it, makes allusion in one way or another to something in the Old Testament.   There has never been a true consensus as to its meaning.   The terms premillennialism, a-millennialism, and postmillennialism, denoting the three major competing systems of eschatology, pertain to the interpretation of the thousand years of the twentieth chapter of the Book of Revelation.   None of these can truly claim to be the small-o orthodox, or small-c catholic view, if we use the Vincentian canon as the standard of what is small-o orthodox and small-c catholic.   The tests of the Vincentian canon are antiquity, universality, and consent.   Premillenialism passes the test of antiquity.  It was the view held by the Apostolic Fathers or at least the Apostolic Fathers whose views on the matter can be determined from their extent writings – St. Justin Martyr, St. Polycarp of Smyrna, St. Papias of Hierapolis, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas – and by many of the most important second century Fathers, including St. Irenaeus, St. Hippolytus of Rome and the apologist Tertullian.   It fails the test of universality, however, having virtually disappeared for most of Church history.   If any of these views passes the test of universality it is a-millennialism, but it arguably fails the test of antiquity, for while very old, there is no evidence of it prior to the second century, and the earliest evidence for it is among heretics like Marcion of Synope.   The version of a-millennialism that grew to become near universal arguably owes its influence in the orthodox ancient Churches to St Clement of Alexandria and especially his protégé Origen.   Origen’s reputation as a doctor of the ancient Church – he was her first real systematic theologian – helped a-millennialism to overcome the bad reputation of its early heretical associations around the time that the premillennialism of the Apostolic Fathers and the succeeding generation fell into disrepute through association with the Montanist sect.   Postmillennialism passes none of the tests, none of the three interpretations pass all three.   In this, perhaps, we see the wisdom of the Lutheran tradition in taking the same position with regards to the antilegomena – the books of the New Testament whose canonicity was disputed in the early centuries – that all orthodox Protestants take with regards to the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books of the Old Testament, i.e., leave them in the Bible instead of removing them like hyper-Protestants, but do not apply to them to establish a doctrine. (1)  Nothing in the Creed requires support from the antilegomena for its establishment.   Neither premillennialism nor a-millennialism nor postmillennialism can be established without interpreting the most difficult of the New Testament antilegomena.

 

Contrary to a claim that is often heard, chiefly among Eastern Orthodox theologians, the phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end” was not added to the conciliar Creed to condemn chiliasm, as premillennialism was called in the early Church.   The phrase was added to the Creed by the Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and one of the heretics condemned at that Council was Appollinaris of Laodicea, but Appollinaris was condemned for denying the full humanity of Jesus Christ, not for his eschatology.   It was the third Article of the Creed, not the seventh, that was expanded to counter Appollinaris.   The phrase “whose kingdom shall have no end”, taken from the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary in the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke was added to counter a different heretic, Marcellus, who taught that the Trinity was a temporary arrangement, that Christ’s Kingdom would end when the Son handed the Kingdom back to His Father, and dissolved His Personhood into that of the Father.   (2) By the time the Second Ecumenical Council rolled around, chiliasm had become a minority viewpoint, but it was certainly not condemned by the Council.   It was still taught by the leading Western theologian of the day, St. Augustine of Hippo, who did not renounce it for a-millennialism until early in the next century amidst the events that led him to write The City of God.  

 

Indeed, the beauty of the simplicity of the seventh Article of the Creed is precisely that it does not speak to matters such as these one way or another but simply affirms what is essential to the Christian Faith with regards to the Second Coming.

 

One of the reasons for the shift away from chiliasm and towards a-millennialism in the centuries leading up to the first Ecumenical Councils was the growing idea that the premillennialists were repeating the mistake of the first century Jews.   The first century Jews were looking for the Messiah to come as a Conqueror Who would deliver them from the rule of Gentile empires like the Roman, restore David’s Kingdom, and establish that Kingdom over all the earth so that the tables were turned and the Gentile nations would come pay homage to the Son of David in Jerusalem.   Those who rejected Jesus as the Christ, did so because His Coming was very different from that, He came and submitted to the injustice of being tortured and crucified, to offer Himself up as the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.   Those who held to chiliasm believed that the mistake of these Jews was to fail to recognize that Christ would come twice and to miss Him because they were looking for Him as He would appear at His Second Coming.   The a-millennialists came to believe that the mistake of the Jews was deeper than this, that they were wrong to look for a political deliverer rather than a spiritual Saviour, and that the chiliasts were wrong to borrow Jewish apocalyptic millenarianism and apply it to the Second Coming of Christ.

 

In our day that reasoning has been pressed to an extreme that goes much further than the a-millennialists would allow for into a denial not just of premillennialism but of the Second Coming as we confess it in the seventh Article of the Creed.   The origins of this heresy go back to the Counter Reformation in which Jesuit theologians in response to certain Protestants who misapplied various negative characters in the Book of Revelation to the Roman Communion and its leadership argued that the passages these Protestants were misapplying referred to first century individuals and institutions and so were long-fulfilled.  Later, this sort of argument would catch on in response to the revival of premillennialism in the nineteenth century.   The revival of premillennialism was itself a response to the spread of the apostasy of liberalism throughout Protestantism.  Many conservative Protestants looked to premillennialism to help understand this apostasy and in the hopes that it would provide them with a means of combatting it.   While some turned to premillennialism in basically the same form that it had in the early centuries of the Church, newer forms of premillennialism were also developed.   The one that gained the most influence among evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants is the dispensationalist premillennialism taught by John Nelson Darby, the Church of Ireland curate who became one of the founders of the hyper-separatist sect the Plymouth Brethren and popularized among other Protestants by the Scofield Reference Bible.   This form of premillennialism is characterized by a hermeneutic that makes hair-splitting distinctions and consequently multiplies events – it divides the Second Coming in two, His Coming for the Church then at a later date His Coming in Judgement, it divides the Final Judgement into at least two Judgements, usually more,  and so on.   The most important flaw in its theology, however, is that it interprets the present period – the Church Age or the Age of Grace, between Pentecost and The Rapture – as a parenthesis in the Age of Law, which will be resumed and wrapped up after the Rapture.  One of the implications of this, that has become more explicit in dispensationalist theology over time, is that it treats the God of the Bible as being basically a tribal deity, Who only really cares about national Israel, and Who has allowed other nations to worship Him in the present for the purpose of making national Israel jealous.   This contrasts heavily with the strong Old Testament emphasis that the God Who made a Covenant with Israel was the God of the whole world Who made His Covenant with Abraham and his descendants in order to bless all the nations of the world.   Similarly, the idea of the Age of Grace as a parenthesis in the Age of Law is a direct contradiction of St. Paul’s third chapter in his epistle to the Galatians in which the Law is the parenthesis in God’s program of salvation based on Promise and Grace.   One error breeds its opposite, and in response to this departure from historic, traditional, and Scriptural orthodoxy, several theologians adopted the old Jesuit preterism and flushed it out into the claim that all Biblical prophecy has been fulfilled, that the Second Coming and the Final Judgement and the Resurrection all took place in the first century, in the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD 70.  Dispensationalism thought up multiple versions of the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, the Final Judgement, and every other simple eschatological concept, needlessly complicating it all, in order to fit everything into its idea of a Divine Program of History that is ultimately all about national Israel.   The preterists, by contrast, collapsed every prophesied event – the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and the Final Judgement – into a single event, the divine Judgement on national Israel in the destruction of the Temple, also making everything about the national Israel.  It is quite obvious from the standpoint of historical, traditional, orthodoxy that dispensationalism and preterism share the same unhealthy obsessed fixation on national Israel, albeit approaching it from opposite perspectives.   Preterism, however, takes it to the point of denying an Article of the Creed.   For all the flaws of the dispensationalist version of premillennialism, it does not do this.   Saying that there will be a temporary earthly version of the Kingdom of Christ on this earth before it is translated to the New Earth is not a denial that the Kingdom of Christ will have no end.

 

Preterism in its denial of the seventh Article of the Creed is heresy.   While all heresy is serious this is a particularly deadly one.  Every heresy contains a germ of truth for that is the nature of heresy, to take a truth and twist it and distort it until it becomes a denial of other truth.   In this case, the truth is that Jesus spoke prophetically about the destruction of the Temple and the events of AD 70 in general.   Several of His parables refer to these events and a plainer prediction of the destruction of the Temple was what promoted His disciples to ask Him about when this would occur and when His Coming would be.   He answered both questions in the Olivet Discourse.   Preterism takes this truth, and twists it to claim that the judgement upon Israel for rejecting Christ in the destruction of the Temple was the Final Judgement and fulfilled all prophecy of the Second Coming including the prophecy of the Final Resurrection which nothing that took place on AD 70 even remotely resembles.  (3)   This repeats the error of Hymeneaus and Philetus that St. Paul warned St. Timothy against: “whom concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some”. (II Tim. 2:18).   It tells Christians not to take the attitude of watchfulness that Jesus Christ enjoined upon His followers.   By telling Christians that there is no future Second Coming to look for they tell them to disregard what St. Paul wrote to St. Titus that the “grace of God that bringeth salvation” and which hath “appeared to all men” i.e., in the First Coming of Christ, teaches us “that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world; Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ; Who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify unto himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works”. (Tit. 2:12-14).   By denying to Christians what St. Paul calls our “blessed hope” preterism leaves Christians with no hope.  Hope is essential to Christianity, being linked forever by St. Paul with the faith by which we trust in the grace of God and the charity, or Christian love, from which all good works must flow, in the final verse of his much beloved chapter on that love (1 Cor. 13).  Preterism, however, essentially takes the words Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate (Abandon all hope, ye that enter here) that Dante inscribed on the entrance to hell in his Inferno, and writes them over the door of the Church.

 

Against the preterist heresy small o-orthodox Christians profess our faith that the same Jesus Christ Who visibly ascended to Heaven forty days after His bodily Resurrection will just as visibly return from Heaven in the same Resurrected body.   The first time He came, He came to be the Saviour of the world.   In His Second Coming He comes as Judge of the world.  The Final Judgement is a Judgement of the whole world – not just of the generation of Israel that rejected Him- but of everybody, “the quick” – those living at the time - and “the dead” – everybody who had ever lived and died (2 Tim. 2:1).   The dead will be raised for this Judgement, as prophesied, both in the Old Testament (Dan. 12:2) and the New (Jn. 5:28-29).   The Judgement will be of everyone’s works, everything they had done including their thoughts and words (Matt. 12:36), because that is the nature of judgement.   Since the Judge of the whole world is Perfect in His Justice, we know that this Judgement will not be as depicted in some pagan mythologies, where one’s good deeds are weighed against one’s bad deeds, with the outcome determined by which side is heavier.   Imagine if earthly temporal human courts dispensed judgement in this manner, and murderers were let off the hook because all the people they didn’t kill outweighed the few that they did.  It would not resemble justice at all.   While the idea of a Final Judgement where we are held to account for our every thought, word, and deed, and where whatever good we have done does not offset whatever evil we have done, is a sobering one, especially since “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) it is not something the believer need look forward to with dread and trepidation because the One Who will be the Judge on that Day is the One “that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us” (Rom. 8:34) and from His love we can never be separated (Rom. 8:38-39). (4)  Trusting that He Who is the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world” has saved us by His grace, we look forward to His Coming and the Judgement, knowing that after this comes the ultimate manifestation of His Kingdom, the life of which we have begun to live even now in this life in the Church, and that His Kingdom shall have no end.    As John Newton put it:

 

When we've been here ten thousand years
Bright, shining as the sun
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we first begun

 

 

 

 

 (1)   See the sixth of the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion for this position with regards to the ecclesiastical books.   “Ecclesiastical books” is the designation the Church Fathers gave to the books and portions of books found in the Greek Septuagint, the Christian Old Testament, that were not found or at least were not extent at the time in the Hebrew Tanakh of the Jews.   The Roman Church calls these “deuterocanonical”, the Eastern Orthodox Church does not give them a separate designation.   They are called “the Apocrypha” in the sixth of the Anglican Articles of Religion and in orthodox Protestant Bibles like the original Authorized Version and Luther’s Bible in which they are placed in their own section between the Testaments.   This is an unfortunate designation because this term was used by the Church Fathers to designate a completely different set of writings.   Dr. Luther, Martin Chemnitz, and other Lutheran Reformers, thought that the seven New Testament books designated as antilegomena should similarly not be applied to in order to establish doctrine – and Dr. Luther similarly segregated them from the homolegoumena, the undisputed books of the New Testament, in his German Bible – but this position was never articulated in the Lutheran Confessions of the Book of Concord.

(2)   See Francis X. Gumerlock, “Millennialism and the Early Church Councils: Was Chiliasm Condemned at Constantinople?” Fides et Historia, 36:2 (Summer/Fall 2004), 83-95.

(3)   What I just call “preterism” in the text of this essay is sometimes called “full preterism” or “hyper-preterism” to distinguish it from what is sometimes called “partial preterism” which interprets much of the Olivet Discourse and the Book of Revelation as having been fulfilled in AD 70 but affirms a future literal Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Final Judgement.   Since “partial preterism” does not deny an Article of the Faith it is not a heresy and in my opinion it is best not to call it by the same name as the heresy that denies a literal future Second Coming, Final Resurrection, and Final Judgement.

(4)   In the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, Jesus talks about the Final Judgement when the world will be divided into “sheep” and “goats”, each judged by their works, the “sheep” being rewarded for the works of mercy they did to others which the Judge takes as having been done to Himself, the “goats” being punished for their neglect of such works.   Real people, of course, are not divided into people who consistently do good at every opportunity and people who never do good.   In the goats part of Jesus’ parable we find people who are punished for the evil they have done with the good not being brought in to offset the evil, demonstrating God’s Justice, that He is not like some insane judge who lets a murderer off because of all the people he did not kill.   In the sheep part of the parable we find people who are rewarded for the good they have done, with none of the evil they have done being held against them.   Both are judged for what they had done, because nobody can be judged for anything other than what they have done.  The radical difference in the way in which the works of the one are judged from the manner in which  the works of the other are judged is due to the one being “sheep” and the other being “goats”.   While it is not spelled out what the basis of the distinction is there is a hint of it in the parable.  The Judge accepts the good works the sheep did to others as unto Himself, and takes the goats’ neglect of good works to others as a neglect of Himself.   He Who comes at the end of time as Judge, had already come before as Saviour.   Those who accept Him as He came in His First Coming are the sheep who will be accepted by Him at His Second Coming.  Those who reject Him as He came in His First Coming  are the goats who will be rejected by Him at His Second Coming as Judge.

 

The Coming(s) of Christ and Some Misconceptions Thereof

We are rapidly approaching Christmas which, as has often been observed, is now two distinct holidays occupying the same space on the civil calendar. One the one hand there is the secular Christmas – or X-mas, as it is known to people who are either politically correct, lazy spellers, or both. This holiday, sacred to the pervasive cult of Mammon, has long been a celebration of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, Avarice and Gluttony, and in more recent years has increasingly added Lust as well. It is preceded by an anticipatory period the length of which is decided by the engines of commerce and which begins when the first decorations and advertisements appear in the stores. While many have opined that it seems to get longer and longer each year, in reality All Saints’ Day is the earliest it can begin. Any earlier and the advertising campaign would clash with that of the secular version of All Hallows’ Eve.

On the other hand there is the Christian Christmas – the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It too is introduced by a preparatory period, which in Western Christendom we call Advent, but this is much shorter than the season leading up to the secular holiday. It always begins on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew’s Day (November 30th), which is always the fourth Sunday prior to Christmas, and so is never longer than a lunar month. Like Lent, the season leading up to Easter, the liturgical season of Advent is supposed to be a period of sober reflection and repentance. This too is a sharp contrast with the hurly-burly of running around and shopping interspersed with party after party that characterizes the season’s secular counterpart.

While the contempt that such fictional curmudgeons as Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch displayed towards the commercial holiday before their changes of heart is, perhaps, understandable, it is much harder to comprehend the problem that many soi disant Bible-believing Christians seem to have with the religious holiday. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan dictator of the 1650s, was the spiritual ancestor of these types, as he was of political liberalism and all the various hues and shades of Mrs. Grundyism. You have probably encountered their arguments. The most familiar of them are that December 25th was originally a pagan holiday, that Jesus was not born on December 25th, and that we ought to be keeping the holy days God established in the Bible rather than man made ones. I have dealt with this matter in depth previously and so will provide only a short answer to each of these here.

First of all, yes the date on which the Church chose to celebrate Christmas coincides with a pagan festival. It also coincides with a Jewish festival and while that Jewish festival is also “man made” in that it is not instituted by God anywhere in the Bible, even in the Books of Maccabees that relate the events it commemorates, it was kept by Jesus in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. The fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Genesis gives, as God’s stated reason for creating the sun, moon, and stars in addition to dividing day from night and lighting the earth that they might be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” so it should come as no surprise that different religions would have important festivals at approximately the same time, in this case around the winter solstice.

Secondly, since the Scriptures do not tell us the day on which Jesus was born, they neither tell us that He was born on December 25th nor that He was not born on December 25th. The absence of a positive assertion does not constitute a denial. The same principle applies to the argument that because the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Paul did not write it, an argument that a Judaizing acquaintance recently made in a bizarre attempt to bolster his argument that we ought to keep the Old Testament feasts rather than man-made ones like Christmas. (1) At any rate, the question of the actual date on which Jesus was born is moot. Christmas is not necessarily Christ’s “birthday” but a liturgical feast day commemorating His birth. It occurs at the beginning of the liturgical year because that year is organized to take us through the most important events of Christ’s life chronologically. (2)

Finally, the position that Christians ought to be keeping the Old Testament holy days rather than Christmas, Easter, and other feasts appointed by the Church can only be maintained by disregarding the authority of Christ’s Apostles and the New Testament Scriptures. For the New Testament is absolutely clear on this matter. Christians are neither required to keep the feasts, rituals, and ceremonies of the Old Covenant nor forbidden from doing so. The first Christians were Jews who believed in Jesus. When God sent St. Peter to preach the Gospel to a Gentile, Cornelius the centurion, He gave Him a vision in which the dietary laws of the Old Covenant were abrogated. When Gentiles came to be converted in large numbers, a controversy arose as to whether or not they should be circumcised and made to follow all the rituals of the Old Covenant. The Apostles convened a church council in Jerusalem to settle the controversy which ruled against placing these obligations on the Gentile converts. The Book of Acts records that while the original Jewish Christians continued to participate in worship at the Temple and in the synagogues until they were driven out, the Church was already developing its own worship, meeting, for example, on the first day of the week. St. Paul in his epistles encourages these trends and reserves his harshest words for those who would impose the Old Testament rituals on the Church. (3)

This attitude of looking down one’s nose at ordinary Christians for keeping Christmas rather than the Old Testament feasts bears a resemblance in some ways to both of two opposite errors regarding the Second Coming of Christ that have plagued the Church from time to time and which have undergone significant revivals in the last century. For traditional Christian believers the Second Coming is as much in view at this time of year as His first coming. Indeed, while the emphasis of Christmas itself is on the events of His First Coming at Bethlehem a little over two thousand years ago, the emphasis in Advent is on the Second Coming. Whereas the focus of penitent reflection in Lent begins with contemplation of our own mortality on Ash Wednesday and ends with the vicarious suffering and death of Christ on Good Friday, in Advent the focus could be summed up in the words of St. Peter “But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer” (I Pet. 4:7) and of his Master and ours “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” (Matt. 24:42) For this reason, lectionaries traditionally assign readings that pertain to the Second Coming to this period and the two comings are joined in the Collect for Advent Sunday (4) which is repeated with the other Collects for the duration of Advent.

In their disregard towards the ruling of the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, the clear teachings of St. Paul, and Apostolic authority in general, the legalistic Judaizers who would deny to Christians the freedom to celebrate, as they have traditionally done, the Person and events of the New Covenant of eternal redemption and bind them back in chains to Mt. Sinai, resemble the date-setters, who have a very similar approach to such statements of Christ as “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” and “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” and “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.” (Matt. 24: 36, 42, 44). Despite these clear warnings, every time a society collapses, a significant period of time such as a millennium passes, or some other such momentous event occurs, out trot the date-setters with their arguments for why Jesus will return on such-and-such a date. Those among them who are wise guys, despite lacking wisdom, rely on an ultra-literal interpretation of the above verses (only the “day” and “hour” are not mentioned, not the “year” or “decade”) to justify their obvious evasion of the spirit of the text. Needless to say our own era in which Western civilization as a whole has been giving every sign of being on the verge of imminent collapse for a century (5) and the second millennium AD came to an end has had more than its fair share of date-setters.

In their arrogant attitude of superiority towards other Christians, however, the Judaizers more closely resemble the preterists, the hubris of whom make the ancient Gnostics look humble in comparison. Preterism derives its name from the Latin proposition praeter. Praeter means “besides, except for”, “contrary to” and “beyond” but it can also mean “before” in both its spatial and temporal senses. It is in the temporal sense of the meaning “before”, i.e., “in the past”, that the preterists use this word to identify their views. For their doctrine is that all Biblical prophecies – including the prophecies of the Second Coming and the last three of the Quattuor Novissima (6) have all been fulfilled in the past. It is an ancient heresy, having been first taught by Hymenaeus and Philetus in Ephesus towards the end of the sixth decade of the first century AD, and rebuked by St. Paul in his Second Epistle to Timothy:

But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. (II Tim 2:16-18)

Contemporary preterists attempt to elude the obvious application of these verses to their own doctrine by arguing that at the time St. Paul wrote those words – early in the seventh decade – the resurrection was not yet past but that it happened shortly thereafter, at the very end of that decade, a couple of years after St. Paul’s martyrdom. For contemporary preterists teach that the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and the Last Judgment all took place in the year AD 70.

This was the year in which Titus, the son of the newly elevated Roman emperor Vespasian, after a seven month siege of Jerusalem, lay waste to the rebellious city, destroying the Second Temple and apart from the handful of leftover zealots who would be wiped out at Masada three years later, essentially crushed the revolt. The truth in preterism – for heresy is not pure error but begins with a truth being twisted out of shape – is that these events were frequently predicted in the New Testament, sometimes in passages that also discuss the Second Coming. The Olivet Discourse contained in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of the Gospel According to St. Matthew is the obvious example. The discourse begins when Jesus tells His disciples that the Temple will be destroyed and they ask Him “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” Orthodox Christianity has always taken the position that the disciples had mistakenly associated the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem with the Second Coming of Christ and the end of time and thus asked Jesus two questions, thinking they were asking one. Jesus answered both questions without directly correcting their mistake, knowing that just as the disciples would not be able to grasp that there would be a Second Coming separate and distinct from the First until after His Resurrection and Ascension so the unfolding of events would eventually make obvious the distinction between the destruction of the Temple and His Second Coming. Accordingly the three ancient Creeds which express the consensus of the early, undivided, Apostolic Church as to fundamentals of the orthodox, Scriptural, kerygma all include an affirmation that Christ will “come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” (7)

Orthodox Christians have disagreed on other aspects of eschatology, both in the early centuries and down through the years. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all taught a form of what is now called pre-millennialism, while the Alexandrian Fathers and St. Augustine taught the a-millennialism that became the dominant view down until modern times. Regardless of where they stood on these matters, however, orthodox Christians joined in the Creedal affirmation of the Second Coming as a literal, future, event that will involve the judgement of the entire world, including both the living and the dead. The preterist teaching that the sack of Jerusalem fulfilled completely the prophecies of the Second Coming and the Final Resurrection and Judgement obviously requires an interpretation of these prophecies that exceeds in its non-literalism what was allowed for by even the most allegorical of the orthodox Fathers. It also requires that the events prophesied be reduced from a global scale and made to pertain only to national Israel. Ironically, since the recent spread of preterism can be partially attributed to a reaction against dispensationalism, preterism shares dispensationalism’s obsession with national Israel, giving it, of course, the opposite negative spin. (8) To both alike, all Bible prophecy is about God wrapping up His dealings with national Israel. To the dispensationalists, this is a future wrapping up that will involve the total restoration of the nation. To the preterists, it is a past wrapping up that involved the total rejection of the nation in judgement for its unbelief. The dispensationalists, at least, affirm the passages in which Christ comes back for His faithful believers, albeit by making it a prelude to the main event. (9) Consistent preterists must insist that passages which speak of the believer’s hope in the coming of the Lord were all fulfilled by the judgement of national Israel. This fact alone ought, in itself, to be sufficient to refute this obviously false doctrine.

The late Lutheran theologian John M. Drickamer once remarked that responding to preterism is like taking out the trash – it is an unpleasant, smelly, task but one that needs to be done from time to time. What better time to do it than Advent, the time in which we traditionally look forward in penitent reflection to Christ’s Second Coming, was we prepare to celebrate His First Coming?

Merry Christmas, every one, and Maranatha (the Lord is coming)!



(1) Actually this case may not be an exact parallel. While the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Peter may very well have identified St. Paul as its author in II Peter 3:15. In this verse he reminds his original readers, who are the same as those of his first epistle (3:1), that St Paul had written to them something to the effect of “the longsuffering of the Lord is salvation.” All of the “signed” Pauline epistles are addressed to particular churches which were predominantly Gentile. St. Peter’s epistles, on the other hand, are “catholic” or “general” epistles (I Peter 1:1), and his original readers seems to have largely consisted of believers of Jewish ancestry (2:12). Since St. Peter goes on to identify St. Paul’s words as Scripture, Hebrews is the only epistle that seems to qualify as the one to which he is referring. It is part of the New Testament canon, written to the same addressees, with content that matches the allusion by St. Peter (see the ninth and tenth chapters of Hebrews).

(2) See, however, William J. Tighe’s arguments in Touchstone Magazine, that the early Church calculated December 25th and January 6th (Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, celebrated in Western Christendom as the Feast of the Magi, in the East as the eve of Christmas itself) as the dates of Christ’s birth by adding nine months to March 25th and April 6th respectively. According to Tighe there was a widespread belief at the time that Israel’s prophets died on the same date as their conception, and so March 25th and April 6th were identified as the dates of conception through attempts to calculate the calendar date of Christ’s death. Tighe also maintains that the Church had done these calculations and started celebrating Christmas on December 25th prior to AD 274 when Emperor Marcus Aureleus declared the same date to be the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun.”

(3) He develops a theological argument for this doctrine of Christian liberty throughout his corpus, but especially in the epistles of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Hebrews. The Old Testament Law in its ceremonial aspect pointed to and foreshadowed Christ, now that Christ has appeared and instituted the New Covenant with His blood we, having the substance, ought not to cling to the shadow. Under the Old Covenant, Israel was to be a holy nation. She was supposed to remain untainted with the paganism and idolatry of the tribes and nations surrounding her, and the ceremonial aspects of the Law, including the dietary and clothing restrictions, contributed to her distinct and separate identity. Under the New Covenant, however, believers of all nations are united spiritually in the Church, and this unity is symbolized by the Church’s standing under grace rather than Law.

(4) “ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.” Collect for First Sunday in Advent, Book of Common Prayer.

(5) It is one hundred years since the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline – more accurately “Downfall” of the West – was published.

(6) Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell.

(7) This is the wording of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as translated in the BCP. The Apostles’ Creed and the Quicumque Vult both introduce the Second Coming by saying that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father after which the Apostles’ Creed adds “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” and the Athanasian Creed adds “from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies: and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.”

(8) Interestingly there are other parallels. Both doctrines in their contemporary forms can be traced back to sixteenth century Jesuits (Luis de Alcasar in the case of preterism, Francisco Ribera in the case of dispensationalism) through nineteenth century Protestant popularizers (James Stuart Russell’s The Parousia: a Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord's Second Coming in the case of preterism, John Nelson Darby and C. I. Scofield in the case of dispensationalism).

(9) The main problem with dispensationalism, from the standpoint of orthodox theology, is not their elaborate eschatological scheme but the significance attached to certain of the events. The rapture (from the Latin equivalent of the Greek ἁρπάζω used by St. Paul to mean “caught up” in I Thess. 4:17) is said by dispensationalists to the be the end of the Church Age which began at Pentecost, and the entire Church Age is described by dispensationalists as a parenthesis in the Age of the Law. This is the opposite of inspired Apostolic doctrine in which the Law is the parenthesis in the unfolding of God’s promises of grace (Gal. 3:6-29, NB especially vv. 17, 19, 23-25).

Dr. Bob Jones or: How I Learned to Stop Zionizing and Love the Palestinians

In the late summer of 1990 Saddam Hussein ordered his Iraqi forces to invade and conquer the small country of Kuwait. This initiated a crisis that led to a coalition of nations coming together under American leadership to drive Hussein back into Iraq. The campaign, “Operation Desert Storm”, began in the middle of January 1991 and was over by the end of February.

One nation that very much wanted to participate in the coalition but was actively and intensely persuaded not to do so by US President George H. W. Bush was Israel. Bush’s reasons for not wanting Israel to actively participate were simple and sound – her presence would break the coalition, as all of America’s other allies in the region would desert her and possibly align themselves with Hussein. Saddam Hussein, knowing this, launched Scud missiles in the direction of Israel, hoping to provoke an attack from the Israeli government, then headed by the belligerent Yitzhak Shamir.

Shamir resented Bush’s insistence that the coalition’s operation against Hussein ought to take precedence over Israel’s immediate right of retaliation and I remember sympathizing with him. I was a fourteen year old teenager at the time and, although not yet a Christian believer – I would place my faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour later that summer – I was a firm Zionist, on what I thought were Scriptural grounds. My Zionism would intensify after I accepted Christ and remained strong through high school and my first three years at Providence College in Otterburne. Indeed, I remember a heated debate at Saturday morning brunch one morning, early in my first semester at Providence, in which a friend who was in his last semester and I, both argued for Israel and the Jews, against another friend, a student in the seminary with whom we were sitting.

My main theological influences in the early years of my Christian walk had come from fundamentalism, a form of conservative Protestantism that had admirably fought for Scriptural authority and the historic teachings of Christianity on matters such as the Trinity, deity, virgin birth, miracles and literal bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ, against the unbelief that had swept the churches in the form of liberalism or modernism. Fundamentalism itself, however, had been largely influenced by a system of Scriptural interpretation called dispensationalism that had started with the Plymouth Brethren in England in the nineteenth century, and through the influence of the Scofield Reference Bible had spread throughout other Protestant denominations. Purporting to be more literal than other systems that relied upon historical exegetical traditions, dispensationalism divided Scriptural history into a series of ages, in which man was tested by God under a particular arrangement, each time failing and being judged. We are living in the Age of Grace, dispensationalists taught, that is a parenthesis in the Age of Law. The Age of Grace will end with the church being removed from earth in the rapture, after which God will finish His dealings with national Israel, pour out His wrath upon the world in the judgement of the Great Tribulation, which will end with Christ returning to establish His kingdom of earth, which He will rule from Jerusalem for a thousand years.

While still a “fundamentalist” in the sense of having a high view of Scriptural authority and no use for the apostasy and unbelief that is liberalism or modernism my theology has grown much more “high church” as I have developed a greater appreciation for the importance of church tradition in interpretation of Scripture. I am no longer a dispensationalist. Yet oddly enough, it was from a man who was an uncompromising adherent of the form of theology I described in the previous paragraph, that I first learned to question the Christian ultra-Zionism that so frequently appeals to this form of interpreting the Scriptures for support.

Dr. Bob Jones Jr. was the son of the famous Methodist evangelist who founded a fundamentalist Christian college that later grew into the institution that well deserves its reputation as the “World’s Most Unusual University”. When it evolved into a university upon moving to its current campus in Greenville, South Carolina, the second Dr. Bob Jones took over the presidency from his father, and under his administration it gained an emphasis on fine arts and high culture that is itself unusual for the type of fundamentalism it espouses. He was himself a Shakespearean scholar and actor, talents which he put to use in developing the university’s fine arts department, which also includes a professional opera association, and after the Second World War he started the collection of Baroque and other religious art now housed in the university’s renowned art gallery.

When I was in my third year of studies at Providence College, I read his memoirs entitled Cornbread and Caviar, which had been published in 1985 by the publishing arm of Bob Jones University. I love reading autobiographies, a genre which fundamentalists excel in, and of fundamentalist autobiographies, Cornbread and Caviar was the crème de la crème. From cover to cover it is filled with fascinating and amusing anecdotes as well as uncompromising, straightforward, commentary on the political and religious issues of the day, backed with the wisdom of the ages and old-fashioned common sense.

The thirteenth chapter is entitled “The Middle East”, in which Dr. Jones tells stories about his many visits to the region, and the interesting people, Jewish, Muslim and Christian, that he had encountered there. In the course of doing so he comments on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Theologically, he was an uncompromising dispensationalist, and he relates a conversation with former Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek, in which he compared Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War to Gideon’s victory in the book of Judges, and “pointed out to him that some day when they recognize the Messiah, they will have all the land from ‘the river of Egypt’ to the Euphrates”. (p.139) Nevertheless, he displayed an even-handed fairness towards both sides in the conflict, that I had never before seen encountered in the writings of someone from his theological perspective.

After praising the Jordanians (under which term he seems to include the Palestinians) as “the most gentle of people and most faithful of friends” he wrote:

I know God’s promise to Abraham still holds good, and there is blessing for those who bless his descendants and curses for those who curse them. I know too, however, that they are back in the land today, many of them in unbelief and agnosticism, some in atheism, and almost all in rebellion against God’s law. I do not know a more ungodly nation than Israel…I admire the wonderful development, the rich farms, the towering forests, and the sturdy cities which have sprung up since the beginning of the Jewish state of Israel. At the same time, I lament the fact that they are so hostile to Christian missions and so intolerant of Israeli Jews who are converted to Christ. I lament the unkind treatment and arrogance which they have so often shown to the Arabs. I can well understand the resentment of the Jordanians and certainly cannot blame them for it. If you talk to any well-educated Arab and to any honest Jew, you will hear tales of atrocity and cruelty perpetrated upon the Arabs in the land of Israel. It is hard to realize how a people who have been so persecuted and cruelly treated themselves through the years can show so little kindness and gentleness towards those whose lands they have overrun. (pp. 138-139)


He spoke well of Teddy Kollek, King Hussein of Jordan, David Ben Gurion, and Moshe Dayan, his encounters with each of whom he recollected, before going on to blast “a group of self-styled Fundamentalists” (Jerry Falwell was the leader of this group, although his name is not mentioned) for telling Menachem Begin “that the Fundamentalists of America stood behind him in all of his policies and unqualifiedly supported him”. (p. 140) He wrote:

At the same time these men slobbered over Begin and his government, that government was persecuting Christian Arabs and Jews who had been won to Christ. A godly Arab on the West Bank, married to an American missionary and the only man on the city council of Ramallah who was not a Socialist or a Communist, was picked up in the middle of the night and tortured by Begin’s government. That man is now facing a hip operation necessitated very largely by his treatment by the Israeli government. People who are interested in the gospel and welfare of their Christian brethren in Israel might well rejoice in the fact that Menachem Begin is no longer in power, though his successor is as vile a man as Begin. (p. 141)

He then revealed just what sort of a man Begin was – as was Yitzhak Shamir, clearly whom he had in mind when he wrote “some of the men still in power”:

What the press does not tell you very often is that Begin and some of the men still in power were terrorists; that they murdered British soldiers during the time of the British occupation of Palestine; that Begin blew up the King David Hotel, killing the British soldiers whose headquarters was there; and that he and his companions in Irgun (a terrorist organization) slaughtered in one night a whole Arab village of some 200 to 300 people, including infants, pregnant women, and crippled old people.

I had not heard of any of this before, but I later confirmed that everything he said here was in fact the case.

He then told where the bottom line was for him “I have a great love for both Jews and Arabs, but I hate tyranny, terrorism, and violence just as much on the part of Jewish government as I do on the part of an Arab government”.

In the concluding paragraphs of the section from the chapter that I have been quoting, he ridicules as folly the idea that we should not rebuke the Israeli government for its wickedness when the prophets were sent to the kings of Israel and Judah to do just that, the silliness of American ambassadors who think they can bring peace to the region, and the arrogance of Israeli rabbis “and their rabble followers” who hate Christianity and Christian missions, but:

demand from this country [The United States] financial and military support. They want us to supply them arms, munitions, and aircraft while they would deny us the right to send missionaries to Israel to win Jews for Christ. (p. 142)

This was very different from the moral Manichaeism that I had previously encountered in dispensationalist writings about Israel. I recognized immediately that it was a more balanced, common-sensical, and Scriptural approach and once I confirmed that everything he had said about Israel’s persecution of Christians and Begin and Shamir’s terrorist origins was factual – and it was – I became far less willing to automatically excuse everything Israel did, and far more sympathetic to the sufferings of the Arabs. Since then, my theology has moved away from dispensationalism and towards church tradition (although hopefully not away from Scriptures in the process) but I continue to be grateful to Dr. Jones for opening my eyes on this issue, particularly in the present crisis when it has become clear to me that some of Israel’s “Christian” supporters would continue to support and justify Israel in anything she does up to and including the point of genocide against the Palestinian Arabs.