Epilogue
For 1800 years anti-Semitism dominated the Christian Church. Until the time of John Darby, Catholics as well as Protestants with some exceptions despised Jews and persecuted them. Anti-Semitism in Christianity began with the statements of the early Church fathers who began to teach replacement theology starting the second centaury A.D.
Replacement Theology
Replacement Theology teaches that the Church has completely replaced Israel in God’s plan. The Church is now the continuation of Israel and the latter is excluded. After Pentecost, “Israel” in the Bible, refers only to the Church. The Jewish people are no longer God’s chosen people and the promises, covenants and blessings ascribed to Israel in the Bible have been taken away from the Jews and given to the Church. The Jews are subject however to the curses found in the Bible. So the prophecies in scripture concerning the blessing and restoration of Israel to the promised land are “Spiritualized” or” allegorized” in to promises of God’s blessings for the Church.
The antagonism of the early Christians towards the Jews was reflected in the writings of the early Church fathers. Justin Martyr (AD 160) in speaking to a Jew said: “The scriptures are not yours, but ours’. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon (AD 177) declared: “Jews are disinherited from the grace of God. Tertullian (AD 160-230), in his treatise, Against the Jews, announced that God has rejected the Jews, and the curses were for the Jews. The young Church declared itself to be the true Israel, or Israel according to the Spirit.
Also many other Church fathers were involved in anti –Semitic propaganda. Eusebius, Cyril, Chrysostom, Agustine, Origen, Justin and Jerome taught severe anti-Semitic doctrines. John Chrysostom (AD.345-407) was the first to use the term against Jews as “Christ Killers”. “The Jews are the most worthless of all men. They are lecherous, greedy and rapacious. They are perfidious murderers of Christ. They worshipped the devil; their religion is a sickness. The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ, and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jews must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews.”
Do you see any difference between Church fathers and Bin Laden, Taliban, Hitler, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hammas, and Hezabulla (The party of god)?
With Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine, laws began to be passed against the Jews and their buildings. Over the next thousand years, Church Councils confirmed and added to these restrictions. C.H. Wagner, Jr. writes, “So by the Middle Ages, the ideological arsenal of Christian anti-Semitism was completely established. Anti- Jewish teachings continued onwards throughout Church history, manifesting itself in such events and actions as the crusades, the accusation of communion host desecration and blood libel by the Jews, the forced wearing of distinguishing marks to ostracize them, the inquisition, the displacement of whole Jewish communities by exile or separate ghettoes, the destruction of synagogues and Jewish books, physical persecution and execution. Ultimately, the seeds of destruction grew to epic proportions, culminating in the Holocaust, which occurred in “Christian Europe”.
“Had the Church understood the clear message of being grafted into the Olive Tree from the beginning, and then the sad legacy of anti-Semitic hatred from the church may have been avoided. (The Olive tree is the place of privilege that was first occupied by the natural branches (the Jews). The wild branches are Gentiles who, because of the unbelief of Israel, now occupy the place of privilege. The root of the tree is the Abrahamic covenant that promised blessing to both Jew and Gentile through Christ. But the casting off Israel is only temporary. When the Lord returns, the Jewish people will be regathered, judged, restored to favor, and redeemed. This will be for them life from the dead. (Romans 11:17-26)
The error of replacement theology is like a cancer in the church that has not only caused it to violate God’s word concerning the Jewish people and Israel, but it made us into instruments of hate, not love in God’s name.”
The Crusades
The Crusades were military campaigns of the Roman Catholic Church to gain control of Jerusalem from the Muslims and to punish the Jews as the alleged Christ Killers on the road to and from Jerusalem. When the first Crusade under Godfrey reached Jerusalem in 1099, the Crusaders invaded the city through the Jewish quarter. In a desperate attempt to save their lives, Jewish men, women, and children ran to the synagogue for protection, locking the doors behind them. The Crusaders set fire to the synagogue and listened to helpless women and innocent Children scream in horror, begging for mercy, as they were burned alive. The Crusaders marched around the synagogue singing triumphantly “Christ We Adore Thee” as 969 members of the family of our Lord were cremated. Jerusalem was captured by Crusaders on July 15,1099 with most of the Jewish population, which numbered between twenty and thirty thousand, slaughtered that very day. The Dutch humanist Erasmus said, “If it is the part of a good Christian to detest the Jews, then we all are good Christians.”
The Spanish Inquisition (A.D.1478-1808)
When Thomas Torquemada was appointed by the Catholic Church as Inquisitor General of Spain in 1483, he printed Manuals of Inquisition, which told the citizens of Spain how to spot a Jew or a Maranno (pig), a term used to identify those who converted to Judaism. Once caught, these people were to be brought to trial by the Roman Catholic Church.
The trial was actually a torture chamber using fire, garrote, rack, whip, and needle to force those on trial to confess their sin of converting to Judaism. Inquisition tortures continued well in to the eighteenth centaury. During that time, 323,362 people were burned, and 17659 were burned in effigy.
Reformation
Martin Luther or John Calvin were also continued to teach anti-Semitic doctrines. Adolph Hitler accepted the anti-Semitic view of Martin Luther. His doctrine provided many suitable texts for Hitler’s program of extermination. The most vicious, Jew-hating statements Luther ever made can be found in his tract entitled “Concerning the Jews and Their Lives.” In it he stated: “First, their synagogues or Churches should be set on fire. And whatever doesn’t burn up should be covered or spread over with dirt so that no one may ever be able to see a cinder or stone of it. And this ought to be done for the honor of God and of Christianity in order that God may see that we are Christians….Secondly, their homes should be broken-down and destroyed. Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer books and the Talmud in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blaspheme are taught. Fourthly, their rabbis must be forbidden under the threat of death to teach anymore.
Fifthly, passport and traveling privileges should be absolutely forbidden to Jews. Let them stay at homes. Sixthly, they ought to be stopped for usury. For this reason, as said before, everything they possess they stole and robbed us through their usury, for they have no other means of support. Seventhly, let the young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the axe, the hoe, the spade, the distaff, and spindle, and let them earn their bread by the sweat of their noses as is enjoined upon Adam’s children. We ought to drive the lazy bones out of our system. If we however, we are afraid that we they might harm us personally, or our wives, children, servants, Cattle, etc… and let us apply the same cleverness (expulsion) as the other nations, such as France, Spain, Bohemia, etc, etc… and settle with them for that which they have extorted from us, and after having it divided up fairly, let us drive them out of the country for all time.
To sum up, dear princes and notables who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine doesn’t suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free from this inseparable Jewish burden…. The Jews.”
Two days after writing this tract, Martin Luther died!
When Hitler became a global monster, the Catholic Church didn’t criticize him. But John Paul 11 was a visionary and reconciled the Roman Church with Jews from its anti-Semitic past. As pope John Paul 11 began to prepare the Roman Catholic Church for the Jubilee 2000 celebrations, he proclaimed the first Sunday in Lent, March 12, to be the “Day of Pardon.” On that day the whole Church was called to a collective act of repentance for the historical sins of the Church’s sons and daughters… Seven representative of the Church… step forward to offer prayers for sins committed in the service of the truth, such as during the Crusades and the Inquisition…After each Cardinal and bishop offers a prayerful petition, John Paul replies with his own. Here John Paul showed a true Christian attitude.
Dispensationalism, a Correct Interpretation.
Finally dispensational teaching cleared the fog that was afflicting the Church for 1800 Years. Dispensationalism is one of the most influential theological systems within the Universal Church today. Largely unrecognized and subliminal, it has increasingly shaped the presuppositions of fundamentalist, evangelical, Pentecostal and charismatic thinking concerning Israel and Palestine over the past one hundred and seventy years.
John Nelson Darby is regarded as the father of Dispensationalism and its prodigy, Christian Zionism. It was Cyrus .I. Scofield, Clarance Larkin and D.L. Moody, however, who brought Darby’s sectarian theology in to mainstream evangelical circles. R.C. Sproul concedes that Dispensationalism is now “a theological system that in all probability is the majority report among current American evangelicals. Major early dispensationalist writers include Donald Grey Barnhouse, Vernon McGhee, Charles E. Fuller, M.R. DeHaan, Arno C.Gaebelein, Lewis Sperry Shaefer, and William R Newell. Today, virtually all the “televangelists” such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, Charles Stanley, James Dobson, John Hagee and Tony Evans are dispensationalists.
Other leading dispensationalist writers include Roy A. Huebner, Charles Ryrie, Dwight Pentecost, John Walvoord, Tomas Ice, Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsey, and Grant Jeffrey.
Ronald Reagan is the first Christian Zionist who became the president of America. In 1980 he became the American president and paramount leader of the conservative movement in America with the help of fundamental Christians. Since that time, fundamentalists have shaped the policies and agenda of the Republican Party. George W. Bush also is a proponent of Israel. The most significant Christian organizations to espouse dispensationalism have been the Moody Bible Institute, Dallas Theological Seminary (until recently)
Dispensationalism Defined
J.N. Darby, the father of dispensationalism, developed his theology in the 1820s and 1830s by saying that God’s plan for history included two peoples, Israel and the Church. Darby took the Old Testament literally and at face value so that he recognized Israel’s future destiny. At the same time, he took the New Testament and the Church literally and at face value. Darby did not have to spiritualize either Israel or the Church, recognizing from the Bible two peoples of God. Darby has testified that it was his coming to understand that “there was an economy to come, of His ordering; a state of things in no way established as yet” which compelled him to formulate his distinction between Israel and the Church. Because of the rise of the dispensational viewpoint, “Premillennialists were able to stress the evangelization of the Jews while at the same time they supported Jewish nationalistic aspirations. Christian Zionist movement wields a huge clout in American political landscape, especially in the Republican Party.
Well-known American dispensationalist, Arno C. Gaebelein, a German immigrant, castigated Gentile Christendom in his lectures and writings for its attacks on the Jew. In 1895,Gaebelein, upon returning to the US from a trip to Germany, sadly stated, “it is only too true that protestant Germany is Jew-hating, and we fear, from what we have seen and heard, that sooner or later there will come another disgraceful outbreak.” (Later it came true through Hitler.) Later he added, “The fact that the matter is that there were not too many premillennialists in Hitler’s Germany since most of Christianity in Germany at that time were of a liberal variety. In my entire life thus far I have never met or heard of a liberal who was premillennial.” Much of the Christian resistance to Hitler came from those who also hid Jews and they were often premillennial. Joop Westerville, a leader in the underground, was a Plymouth Brethren and has a prominent place in the Israeli memorial to the “Righteous of the Nations.” Corrie Tenboom’s family were premillennial and are synonymous in the minds of American evangelicals with activism on behalf of the Jews in world war 11. Rausch has noted, “Contrary to popular opinion, this prophetic viewpoint (premillennialism) combated anti-semititism and sought to reinstate the Biblical promises that God had made to the Jewish people through Abraham-Biblical promises that post millennial Christendom had determined were null and void. Most dispensationalists still believe the following Bible verse “I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curse you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed”. (Genesis 12:3.)
Although Darby’s name is unknown, his influence in the church and political arena is enormous. He personally established churches in many European countries and United States, which in turn sent missionaries to Africa, the West Indies, Australia, India and New Zealand. By the time of his death more than 1600 separatist Brethren Assemblies had been founded worldwide. Don Wagner makes this point that: “During his lifetime, Darby wrote more hymns than Wesley’s, traveled further than the Apostle Paul, and was a Greek and Hebrew scholar. His writings filled forty volumes. If Brightman was the father of Christian Zionism, then Darby was its greatest apostle and missionary”. In 1908, Harry Ironside, the prince of Bible expositors and former pastor of Moody Memorial Church in Chicago claimed, Darby had rediscovered the apostolic teaching lost to the Church.
“ Until brought to the fore through the writings and preaching and teaching of a distinguished ex-clergyman, Mr. Darby, in the early part of the last centaury (19th), the apostolic teachings scarcely to be found in a single book or sermon through a period of sixteen hundred years”.
Darby defended his dispensational interpretation on two grounds. First, he claimed others had not studied the scripture correctly. “The covenant is a word common in the language of a large class of Christian professors… but in its development and detail, as to its unfolded principles, much obscurity appears to me to have arisen from a want of simple attention to Scripture.”
Second, Darby believed the Lord had revealed it to him personally. “For my part, if I were bound to receive all that has been said by the Millenarians, I would reject the whole system, but their views and statements weigh with me not one feather. But this doesn’t hinder me from enquiring by the teaching of the same spirit. What God has with infinite graciousness revealed to me concerning his dealing with the Church”
Darby was convinced that the visible church of his day was in ruins. This assumption appears to have shaped his emerging belief that the church era was therefore merely a “parenthesis” of the Last days. Darby regarded the Church as simply one more dispensation that had failed and was under God’s judgment. Just as Israel had been cut off, so the Church would be. Just as only a small remnant of Israel had been saved, so would only a small remnant of the Church.
Darby believed that the covenantal relationship between God and Abraham was binding forever and that the promises pertaining to the nation of Israel, as yet unfulfilled, would find their consummation in the reign of Jesus Christ on earth during the Millennium. Speaking of the imminent return of the Jews to Palestine, Darby predicted, “The first thing. Then, which the Lord will do will be to purify his land (the land which belongs to the Jews) of the Tyrians, the Philistines, the Sidonians; of Edom and Moab, and Ammon- of all the wicked, in short from the Nile to the Euphrates. It will be done by the power of Christ in favor of His people re-established by His goodness. The people are put in to security in the land, and then will those of them who remain till that time among the nations be gathered together.”
Darby not only taught that God would ‘purify’ the Arabs from between the Nile and the Euphrates and give it all to the Jews, but also believed the majority of Jews would eventually identify with antichrist. “The government of the fourth monarchy will be in existence, but under the influence and direction of the Antichrist; and the Jews will unite themselves to him, in a state of rebellion, to make war with the lamb. Satan will then be displayed, who will unite the Jews with this apostate prince against heaven. A remnant of the Jews is delivered and Antichrist destroyed.”
Bibliography
www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4531.htm
Christian Zionism: Dispensationalism And The Roots of Sectarian
www.reachouttrust.orgarticles/doctrine/rtheo_pf.htm
Replacement Theology
www.gotqustions.org/replacement-theology.html
Jerusalem Countdown By John Hagee