Ever since Hamas terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis more than 100 days ago, Israel has relied on America, its best friend and biggest defender.
If you want to understand how that came to be the case, check out On the Road to Armageddon, a 20-year-old book by Baptist historian (and my former church history professor) Timothy P. Weber.
Widely acclaimed when published by Baker in 2004, Weber’s lucid and inviting study shows how John Nelson Darby’s dispensational theology, Hal Lindsey’s bestselling prophecy books, Left Behind novels, the rise of the Religious Right, and a cooperative Republican Party have brought about an unquestioned loyalty to Israel despite the mounting international outcry (and genocide allegations) over Israel’s deadly and destructive response, which has killed nearly 25,000 Gazans, most of them women and children.
This 270-page theological history shows how the 1948 creation of a new nation of Israel set prophetic clocks ticking for many American evangelicals and how evangelicals’ growing political clout meant goodbye to support for a two-state solution and hello to policies that aligned with dispensationalist interpretations of biblical prophecies, such as moving Israel’s capital from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Weber declined an interview, saying he hadn’t been following the latest prophetic developments, but here’s how he explained things two decades ago.
Darby’s dispensations. Darby, a “disgruntled priest” from the Anglican Church of Ireland, divided all human history into seven periods, or dispensations. He also gave us something new: the belief that the church will be “raptured” before the tribulation, a belief promoted through the popular Scofield Reference Bible, which incorporated his dispensational themes, convincing many these were in fact biblical themes, not interpretations.
“At the center of the dispensational system was the belief that before any of the prophesied end times events could take place, Jews would have to reestablish their own state in the Holy Land,” Weber writes.
“1948 changed everything for the dispensationalist movement.”
A new Israel established. 1948 changed everything for the dispensationalist movement, bringing a new urgency and renewed fascination for reading each movement of the prophetic clock ticking its way to the apocalypse.
Before then, “dispensationalists were more or less content to teach their doctrine, look for signs of the times, and predict in sometimes great detail what was going to happen in the future,” Weber writes.
“All that changed after Israel reclaimed its place in Palestine and expanded its borders. For the first time, dispensationalists believed that it was necessary to leave the bleachers and get onto the playing field to make sure the game ended according to the divine script.”
Love of Israel doesn’t necessarily mean love of Jews. At times, dispensationalists argued for a restored Israel more fervently than most Jews did, but they also argued that before “all Israel is saved,” most Jews will have to be destroyed, or perhaps converted to Christianity.
The chapter “Dispensationalism’s Dark Side” shows how love of Israel has co-existed with antisemitism. Leading evangelical dispensationalists embraced the antisemitic hoax, Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Many evangelicals remained passive amid the Holocaust, believing the destruction of the world’s Jews would hasten Christ’s return. Some taught that Hitler was an “instrument of God.”
Today, many accept Lindsey’s claim that “a numberless multitude” of Jews must die before then.
“The glory of Israel was past and future,” Weber writes. “Present Jews were living under the power of Satan and were contributing to the decline of the present age.”
“Probably the biggest irony concerning dispensationalists’ involvement in the religious life of Israel is their lack of interest in the largest group of believers in Israel and the West Bank, the Palestinian Christians.”
Palestinians? “Probably the biggest irony concerning dispensationalists’ involvement in the religious life of Israel is their lack of interest in the largest group of believers in Israel and the West Bank, the Palestinian Christians,” Weber writes.
The number of Christians in Palestine has decreased significantly since Weber wrote these words, only decreasing the potential for compassion.
Dispensationalists were “ecstatic” over Israeli statehood but showed “so little interest in the claims of the Palestinians, whom they saw as the enemies of God’s purposes.”
Evangelicals have largely supported the expansion of Israeli territory at Palestinians’ expense, as well as the expansion of settlements in Palestinian land, seeing “no reason to dwell on the ethical implications of Israeli actions in the Middle East.”
As a 1947 article in Moody Bible Institute Monthly put it: “The Jews will eventually be given not a partitioned Palestine but the whole of the land.”
Or as Weber puts it, “God owned the Promised Land and had deeded it to the children of Abraham through Isaac, not Ishmael.”
God’s two favorite nations. “America has been blessed because she has blessed Israel,” said Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell, who helped usher in a new season of evangelical political activism and cooperation with the GOP.
What’s next? Readers may disagree with some of Weber’s conclusions, but none can disagree with this sentence from the preface: “The tragedy of the Middle East will be with us for a long time to come.”
Steve Rabey is a freelance religion writer based in Colorado. He holds a master of arts degree in church history from Denver Seminary.
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