This is a copy of a recent Facebook post from a pastor friend of mine. He is a "liberal" Bible scholar in my (former) conservative denomination, The Missionary Church. Sometimes I wonder how long he will last there since he doesn't conform to the mainstream of end times (and other) doctrines in his church. He very often speaks for me as my orthodoxy has become more "generous" over the last 20 years.
Rev. Bill Barnwell says:
"Israel, the Church, and so-called "Replacement Theology"
First of all, what exactly is "replacement theology" anyway? The New Testament does not teach that the church "replaced" the Israelites. What it does teach, over and over again, is that the New Covenant is the fulfillment of the Old. Jesus taught that he was the fulfillment of the Law. He declared Himself the new "Temple." Christ clearly fulfills the sacrificial system and temple worship. Jesus predicted the fall of the Temple and the end of the Mosaic system (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21). Hebrews says there is no need for a tabernacle (which was the forerunner of the Temple) and that Christ Himself is our high priest. Paul repeatedly says a true child of Abraham is a person of faith in Christ, whether Jew or Gentile, and that just because one has ethnically Jewish blood running through their veins does not make them a child of Abraham. Jesus took direct aim at Pharisees who thought their ancestry made them Abraham's children.
Paul spends all of Romans chapters 9-11 describing the election of the Gentiles and that they have been grafted into the covenant of God, warning them not to get arrogant in their newfound acceptance into grace because they could be "cut off" just as the "natural branches", were cut off due to unbelief. And yet, Paul says a remnant of Jews continued to believe and that one day that fullness of believers would result in "all Israel being saved." In other words, who is the "people of God?" It's Jew and Gentile united in Christ. "In Christ" being the key operative words there.
So if that's "replacement theology" then the Bible itself is in error.
As far as the promise to Abraham, it was to Abraham and his descendants, and the same promise was fulfilled most directly not in the re-establishment of secular, national Israel in 1948, but in the New Covenant of Christ in 33AD and throughout history.
This notion that if anyone criticizes the modern nation state of Israel is in danger of being "cursed" by God is utterly absurd on both Biblical and political grounds. In support of this notion, believers hold to a view being suggested by the image accompanying this post. That God's promise to Abraham (in the singular) in Genesis 12:3 means that today, if any believer disagrees with any of the goals and aims of the far-right of the modern and secular Israeli government of 2015, that God will curse them. Here we see how theological beliefs can have major real-world implications for how believers see the world, and how they form their political beliefs.
And as far as the entire theological system of dispensationalism where all this modern prophetic speculation comes from, not a single person ever taught it in church history until the 19th century, around 1830 when John Nelson Darby began systematizing a theology so many American Evangelicals accept without questioning.*
Other than pointing to a single questionable source from hundreds of years ago (that may not even be authentic, see Pseudo-Ephraem), dispensationalists cannot find any credible sources that document their theology at any point in church history prior to the 19th century. That it would take so many centuries for believers to discover this "clear Biblical truth" should make one pause on its own.
That people would denounce historically sound theology as some sort of dangerous heresy and pump up their own relatively modern and consistently discredited system as "Biblical" is very sad irony.
Thus if anyone is being "liberal" and playing fast and loose with the text, it's the dispensationalists.
But people wrapped up in this have way too much invested into it to ever question their theological presuppositions. And naturally, such individuals wed their erroneous theology it to their political philosophy and it then begins defining their foreign policy. So now, it's not only a sin to criticize a secular nation state, but America has a responsibility to never go against, even in the slightest of ways, what far-right wing Israeli hardliners demand.
There's perfectly good reasons to support Israel from an American perspective in that they are our allies and we naturally see our interests closer align to theirs. But arguing that they can never be questioned or challenged without risking God's wrath is pure nonsense. And ignoring the plight of Christian Palestinians in particular, who have no allies in the region, neither from Israel or their Islamic neighbors, is a sin of American Evangelicalism. Many (but not all) of them are far more obsessed with Israel because they think it has something to do with the end-times and receiving God's blessing than they are Christians in the region.
Critics of "replacement theology", who ironically refer to it as a "heresy" frequently believe in what is essentially a form of "dual-covenant theology", and believe that both the Old and New Covenants are both still actively in force. If anything is heretical, it's this, though I consider such individuals well-meaning, yet misguided and not "lost."
The Scriptures are objective, not subjective. Just because a doctrine sells a lot of books or gels with someone's political philosophy doesn't make it true. Dispensationalism simply is not supported by the Biblical text and those proudly patting themselves on the back for adhering to it would do well to put their faith before their politics and make sure their theology does in fact line up with Scripture.
Proponents of dispensationalism claim to take the Bible more "literally" than non-dispensationalists. But while all Scripture is making "literal" points, it sometimes uses figurative language to accomplish this. For example, dispensationalists like to point out that God made promises to the ancient Israelites (including land boundaries in the Middle East) that would last "forever." Since someone like me doesn't "literally" believe this, I don't take the Bible as seriously as them, they would argue.
But numerous times in the Old Testament the word "forever" is used in a non-literal sense. See for example Jonah 2:6, I Chronicles 28:4, 2 Kings 5:27, as just a few examples. Context needs to control for the overall verse and in the broader context of the entire Bible. Again, regarding God's promises to Abraham and Israel collectively, God's fulfilled His promises and they have eternal and everlasting application.
And the promises He made in the OT are given far grander effect now. There's no reason to cheer on some "Third Temple" when Christ Himself is our Temple. We don't need "revived animal sacrifices" in this hypothetical third temple since that insults the once and for all sacrifice of Christ. There's not a single verse in the New Testament about "rebuilding the Temple." The verses about it in the Old Testament are about the rebuilding of the Second Temple, the same one renovated by Herod that Jesus correctly prophecized would be destroyed. Any other references to tabernacle/Temple worship is in the sense of it being sized up for destruction or its obseleteness. When the New Testament talks about "the abomination of desolation" taking hold in the Temple, that was in context of the Roman siege on Jerusalem in 70AD, not some indefinite time into the future when a "new Temple" exists in the 21st century.
Not only that, far more than a piece of Real Estate in the war-torn Middle East, God promises in the New Testament a New Heaven and New Earth. There is no need to make pilgrimages to a Temple when the Holy Spirit has been poured out upon all believers and can be accessed anywhere, at all times, anywhere in the world. And there's no need for a "High Priest" to make sacrifices on our behalf since Jesus is our High Priest. And there's no need for animal sacrifices since Jesus not only our High Priest, but also the "once and for all" sacrifice.
I could go on and on, but the point is that, yes, God DID fulfill his promises to Abraham and Israel, and He did so in a much grander way than they were ever expecting.
There is nothing at all radical or new about what I'm saying. What I'm saying above is completely in line with historical theology and I think far better tied to the Biblical text. Dispensationalism is actually the new kid on the block. Even though it's what a lot of people have always heard during their lifetimes, it simply wasn't found or believed anywhere prior to the 19th century. And even today, only a minority of Protestants hold to the view. Numbers and might don't make right, but I'm just trying to point out that there's nothing subversive about my eschatology or "unbiblical" about it.
I grant that good people can differ on these things. I think when it comes to future happenings nearly all of us probably have some things wrong. Which is why it's good for believers to have a degree of humility about such stuff, rather than trying to excommunicate other believers out of the Christian movement. After all, nearly all people had gotten details of the First Coming wrong. Perhaps it should cause those looking towards the Second Coming and related events to be a bit less dogmatic and a bit more charitable towards believers whose theology doesn't exactly mirror theirs.
(This is adapted from some comments I've made on another thread that I figured I'd put out for everyone else who is interested in the topic)"
No comments:
Post a Comment