According to the Bible, as I understand it, national Israel will always be Israel. This is despite the employment of theological terms to suggest otherwise. National Israel will always be Israel, not the church pretending to be a better, more spiritual version. Israel failed in many areas. But what can we honestly say about the global church today?
Around the time of writing this post, an amillennial pastor I highly esteem felt inclined to interrupt his sermon with a preachy tangent about the current Abraham Accord. He pointed out that Abraham’s true offspring was Christ; therefore we are to look for the prophetic to be fulfilled “Christologically.” This pastor admitted that he was once overtly fascinated with popular prophecy.
Similarly, a Reformed amillennial apologist noted he was once premil. He also interrupted a presentation with a brief lecture about types, literalism, symbolism, apocalyptic literature etc. Futuristic Premils are well aware of these hermeneutical terms. I presume these amil folk now regard themselves as being better informed given their former experiences.
This is old territory and too much to cover in a post. But here are some thoughts… Jumping ship to another view isn’t automatic license to now proclaim some special insight. For instance, the Reformed apologist is critical of former Calvinists – often questioning whether they had a full understanding of the system to begin with.
It’s a fair question. I ask the same of former premillennialists noting that amillennialism inevitably leads to a blurring of the difference between Israel and the church.
How well did they understand the best biblical arguments for premillennialism and future for national Israel? What led them to the amillennial view? Dan Phillips has wryly noted that it’s cool to be an amillennialist. It’s a shrewd observation. Most great Reformers and Puritans were amil, though not all.
In the Christological scheme, the promise of the physical land of Israel is superseded by a world-encompassing kingdom shared by Christian Jews and Gentiles. However the land of Israel is still important. The Bible explicitly says so, not because some hand-waving prophecy teacher declared it back in the 1980s (or because of the Scofield Bible for that matter).
There’s not enough space to go into detail here. It has been fleshed out before. But I’d like to point out that the Christological (or Christocentric) Hermeneutic has been addressed by Futuristic Premils. Abner Chou is no intellectual slouch. I recommend reading his article A Hermeneutical Evaluation of the Christocentric Hermeneutic. You can also watch a video HERE.
While Christ may be said to be the true offspring of Abraham, it is His Christological work on the cross which enabled the literal Abrahamic promises (to all those in Him) to be fulfilled. There are promises to the Jews and to the Gentile nations. We share the promise of salvation and identity in Christ. A redeemed Future Israel will inherit the literal land promises. See Genesis 12:3, 27:29; Jeremiah 31:31-37, 33:7-8; Ezekiel 36:22-37; Amos 9:14-15; Roman 11:25-29 etc. Could the flow of Scripture be any clearer?
For I will take you from among the nations, gather you out of all countries, and bring you into your own land. Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean; I will cleanse you from all your filthiness and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit within you; I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. Ezek 36:24-26
The land promises to Abraham’s genetic descendants aren’t abrogated by the One-People-of-God argument. There is diversity within unity in Christ. While there is no Jew or Greek or male and female in Christ, we still acknowledge these distinctions. Moreover Bible believing Reformed churches do not suffer women to be pastors – yet are we not all One? And if there aren’t distinctions between the Jew and Greek, how can the church be true Israel?
For an in-depth discussion of the land of Israel issues, I recommend Barry Horner’s article in which he interacts with Gary Burge’s book “Jesus and the Land“. See Horner’s Territorial Supercessionism: A Response to Gary Burge. Watch the video presentation HERE.
I also highly recommend and appreciate the work Barry Horner has done in his two books: Future Israel and Eternal Israel. A PDF copy of Future Israel can be downloaded from Horner’s website.
Horner notes that Reformed scholars such as J. C. Ryle and Horatius Bonar were premillennial and looked forward to the reformation of Israel as a nation. They based this on plain biblical statements. They stressed that the eschatological passages could not be properly understood without a proper understanding of Israel’s identity.
In contrast, Covenant Theology Amillennialists must either re-interpret (largely ignore) the above cited passages, as well as verses such as Matt 19:29, and morph the 144,000 into the Great Multitude of Revelation chapter 7.
I’ll leave the last thoughts to Barry Horner who writes in Eternal Israel:
The essential problem with the replacement theology of Burge, Robertson, and many other scholars of like opinion, such as Chapman, Sizer, N. T. Wright, Bavinck, Berkhof, and so on, is the conviction that in Christendom, but especially the subsequent messianic kingdom, there cannot be diversity within the united economy of the redeemed people of God, even though this principle stares them in the face at every turn, and particularly concerning Matt 19: 28. For some reason, when this diversity plainly confronts scholars, they must make the Word of God conform to their “unified” and “emulsified” system of theology, the result being crafted obfuscation of Scripture most plain.
Maranatha!
Further reading:
Covenant Theologians sometimes complain that they are wrongly accused of holding to Replacement Theology. See Paul Henebury’s: Is it wrong to use the term Replacement Theology? Also The Parameters of Meaning
Various forms of Replacement Theology
An Analysis of Neo-Replacement Theology
Tony Garland: Systems of Interpretation
Michael Vlach: Christ as “True Israel” (page 43)
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