Posted on 05/29/2024 9:34:46 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The number of young Evangelicals in the United States who support Israel and view it as crucial to the End Times is declining as they increasingly move toward amillennial and postmillennial eschatology, according to a recent study.
The Jerusalem Post noted earlier this year that support for Israel among young Evangelicals has cratered by more than 50% over three years, as laid out in the 2023 book Christian Zionism in the Twenty-First Century: American Evangelical Opinion on Israel, by Kirill M. Bumin, Ph.D., and Motti Inbari, who serves as professor of Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.
'Thinking less and less about the role of Israel'
Drawing on three original surveys conducted in 2018, 2020 and 2021, the book examined the religious beliefs and foreign policy attitudes of Evangelicals in the U.S. and found that a generational divide appears to be emerging over such issues.
According to data Bumin and Inbari presented at The Center for the Study of the United States (CSUS) at Tel Aviv University in February, 33.6% of young Evangelicals under 30 expressed support for Israel in late 2021, compared to 67.9% in 2018. In 2021, 24.3% of young Evangelicals said they support the Palestinians, compared to only 5% in 2018.
Bumin, who serves as an associate dean of the Metropolitan College at Boston University, told The Christian Post that he and Inbari discovered in their research that premillennial pastors are significantly older than amillennial and postmillennial pastors, and less ethnically and racially diverse.
"Conversations with some of the leaders in the young Evangelical community — such as Robert Nicholson and Luke Moon of the Philos Project, as well as other anecdotal evidence — lead us to believe that the greater racial diversity of amillennial and postmillennial pastors, combined with their relative youthfulness in comparison to the premillennial pastors, helps attract a larger share of the under-30 Evangelicals to those churches and eschatological positions," Bumin told CP.
As amillennialism and postmillennialism grow increasingly attractive to under-30 Evangelicals, Bumin said that demographic is "thinking less and less about the role of Israel and the Jewish people in the End Times as catalysts for the Second Coming and salvation."
"And, without explicit eschatological relevance, support for the Jewish people and support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becomes a matter of a peripheral concern," he continued, adding that postmillennialism especially gathers younger adherents because of its emphasis on social justice and improvement of the human condition through social activism.
Bumin maintained that postmillennialism "resonates with young people and aligns with a pro-Palestinian, rather than a pro-Israel, view in the current political environment in the United States."
'Poisoned by this brainwashing philosophy'
While both forms of premillennialism separate the Second Coming and the Last Judgment, pre-tribulational premillennialists — or "pre-tribs" — believe that the tribulation described in Revelation 7 will take place after the Church is raptured, and that Christ will return with the Church to reign for a 1,000-year period before the Last Judgment. Such a view was popularized by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins in their bestselling Left Behind series.
"Post-trib" premillennialists, by contrast, adhere to the belief that the Second Coming will occur after the tribulation, followed by the millennium and finally, the Last Judgment. Mid-tribulational premillennialists fall in between, believing that the Church will be raptured midway through the tribulation and spared the brunt of it.
Postmillennialism teaches that the Second Coming and Last Judgment will take place at the same time following an extended period of Christian dominance on Earth, while amillennialism teaches that the millennium is symbolic, and that Christians have been in the End Times since the first century.
Amillennialism also teaches that the Second Coming and Last Judgment will take place simultaneously at the end of the age.
Richard Land, executive editor of The Christian Post and president emeritus of Southern Evangelical Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, attributed the decline of young Evangelical support for Israel in part to the influence of cultural Marxism in U.S. colleges and universities.
"First of all, it's true, unfortunately," Land said of the shift. "I see it all the time. I think there are several reasons. One is that the younger Evangelicals have been to university in the last 20 years, and the universities have, to a significant degree, been subverted by Arab oil money."
Land maintained that many schools have also been infiltrated by a form of cultural Marxism that sees Israel as an "oppressor state."
"Some forms of cultural Marxism see Jews, in particular, as a white oppressor class, so it breeds antisemitism," he said. "You look at what's been going on recently, and that can't be that widespread without ideas. Ideas have consequences. And for the last 20 or more years, the younger generation of Americans have been poisoned by this brainwashing philosophy."
Land also pinpointed that the children of many pre-tribulational premillennialists are increasingly changing their views to post-tribulational premillennialism, a trend he said he could not readily explain.
"I don't know exactly why, but I do know the result," he said. "The result is that they are much less focused on Israel. There's a cause-and-effect relationship: as 'pre-trib' wanes and 'post-trib' waxes, the intensity of the support for Israel wanes."
"And then, as they've been influenced by cultural Marxism and by seeing Israelis as oppressors, some of them have become amillennial. Of course, if you're amillennial, then you don't believe God has anything to do with Israel," he added.
Land also believes that Israel, in general, has been "asleep at the wheel" regarding soliciting support from American Evangelicals, mistakenly assuming that they would always have their support.
'More Christo-centric'
Charles E. Hill, who serves as emeritus professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, told CP that while the influence of antisemitism could be playing a role in declining support for Israel, another major reason that some younger Bible-believing Christians would depart from dispensational premillennial eschatology is because the internet has allowed them wider access to differing theological teachings.
Hill, who said he used to adhere to a dispensationalist theology, now describes himself as amillennial in his eschatology and penned the book, Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity, which argues that many in the early church held to an amillennial position.
“For most of my lifetime, the mere existence of Israel in the Middle East as a nation has been seen as an apologetic for dispensationalism, because it was viewed as a major fulfillment of prophecy: the simple fact that they're there means that God's timetable is moving forward and so forth," Hill said. "And I just think that younger people are further removed from the founding event of the modern state of Israel, and so maybe that argument doesn't make as much sense to them."
Hill said he was ultimately convinced of the amillennial position after his studies led him to "seeing the unity of Scripture and the unity of the people of God throughout Scripture."
"Those are very big for me, seeing that there's always been a spiritual Israel; that the land promises always had a typical function of pointing ahead to Christ and to His ownership of the world."
"For me, it was really coming to the conclusion that the apostles in the New Testament have a different hermeneutic than what I was getting in dispensationalism," he said. "And it was trying to follow the apostles' hermeneutic, their way of interpreting the Old Testament. And I found that I couldn't reconcile that with a literal-only interpretation of prophecy. It was more Christo-centric and not Israel-centric."
"I imagine that once they start looking into it a little bit more, some of them just find the amillennial and postmillennial views more satisfying," Hill added of the younger Evangelicals. "So, I'm sure there are a lot of things that are playing into this."
So to now have cultural Marxism turn on Jews and Israel is a form of “being bit by their own dog”.
You are very naive if you believe that Marxism has "just now" turned on Israel.
Zionism was banned in Russia when the Bolsheviks took over. They regarded it as a "bourgeois nationalist" movement. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks supported Irish nationalism. I guess the Irish are Secretly Behind Communism.
It's true that the Communist bloc voted for partition in 1948 because the Communists at that time considered the British Empire as their number one enemy in a post-Hitler world. The British were occupying Israel and the Reds assumed that the new nation would join them in a crusade against the British Empire. At the same time, even while they were "supporting" Israel in the UN they were already assuring the Arabs not to put too much stock into it.
Despite his neutralism, Ben Gurion offered to send Israeli troops to Korea to fight the Reds. The UN turned him down.
It's true that the initial governments of Israel wanted to remain unaligned, but they were rejected by the entire "non-aligned movement," which instead supported Nasser and Ben Bella. About the only socialist country that would treat Ben Gurion's Israel as a "fraternal socialist state" was Ne Win's Burma!
I used to listen to shortwave radio back before the Internet killed it. Every single Communist station was rabidly anti-Israel, attacking it in terms very similar to the "Liberty Lobby." This is why I was so surprised to discover that "right wingers" traditionally opposed Israel and supported the Communist PLO. What an eye-opener!
It's true that Communist Cuba didn't cut ties with Israel with the rest of the Communist bloc in 1967 but waited until 1973 (after which Cuba might as well have been a member of the Arab League). However, Arafat and his "palestinian" buddies were already visiting Cuba and receiving training there in 1966.
Maybe you should remember these things before you decide to make a fool of yourself again.
Interesting thread
I was raised covenant southern Baptist
Never knew the ardent nature of some dispys till this forum and esp since 10-7
I knew at least to me John Hagee seemed out of order on a level despite my own experience and sympathies with Israel on a political and civilizational level
👊
I don’t think covenant Christians are any less supportive of Israel than Dispys are
That’s a canard tossed around here too freely along with the anti semitism smear
Dispys seem to me from outside looking in appear to me at least to have a special attraction to Jews in general as chosen and an avenue or facilitation to the rapture which they see as more readily imminent
Which is fine
Believe what you like but it doesn’t have to come with its own religious superiority complex
And I for one was never taught what some like Hagee believes that Jews don’t need to be “saved”
While painting all reformed or covenant theologians with the antisemite broad brush would be both unfair and unwise, it is nonetheless true that most Christian antisemitism can be found in either Catholicism or in reformed protestant denominations who believe God has permanently rejected Israel and transferred the covenant promises to the Church. Dispensationalists believe that a remnant of Israelites who accept Jesus as Messiah are still prominent in God’s plans and promises yet to be fulfilled in the future. Dispensationalists are slandered regularly by their Catholic, reformed and covenant theology brethren on FR. I was responding to one such posts. Your gentle admonition is nonetheless appreciated.
😉
Exactly.
But it is too late.
Anyone who supports Israel has now been expelled from the Left. Being part of the “Friend Coalition of the Left” means supporting the Palestinians/Hamas. Even a Two State solution is now seen as insufficient.
Jews were important to the Left when the Left had no institutional power. Jews were a source of money, and could also provide some institutional shelter because of their disproportionate academic presence.
But the Left now controls or heavily intimidates every major institution in the country. Jewish money and academic support is no longer required.
By large supermajorities, Jews wanted a Leftist takeover of the West, they wanted radical Leftist universities, they wanted massive “diversity” and democratically disruptive levels of non-White and non-Christian immigration, they wanted the “browning” of White countries.
And now that it has all happened, instead of increasing their power and wealth, the monsters they created have turned on them, and it is all the worst crime since 1945...
Well, I say they bought the ticket, and they should enjoy the ride !
This is about the changes in attitudes within American institutions, and how evangelicals have been influenced by that.
Lenin and the Tsar and the Korean War and IRA ties to Palestinian terrorists are not relevant.
Thinking Jews need to find Jesus for their salvation is not anti semitic
If anything it’s hopeful
I feel the same way for Muslims and Taoists and Buddhists and even UFO worshippers and Scientologists
Even those Pacific Islanders who thought prince philip a god
What God does with these folks is his prerogative
The Bible isn’t terribly ambiguous but I’m hopeful there is mercy for the righteous and innocent who may have been ignorant no fault of their own
In recent years, increasingly Jews are believing that Jesus is the Messiah. Almost all of these Jewish believers in Jesus are dispensationalists.
https://albertmohler.com/2023/08/23/daniel-hummel/
Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, holds a conversation with Daniel Hummel, author of the 2023 book ‘The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism’.
There’s a video and transcript at the link. Here’s how the conversation begins:
Albert Mohler:
I think most people who know about evangelical Christianity in the United States, and for that matter, the vast majority of evangelicals, are at least familiar with dispensationalism, whether they have a name for it or not. I think they would assume that it had always been part of the evangelical landscape. You really do a masterful job in this book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation, but you really have to tell a story that I think most evangelicals don’t really know.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and it’s a story that is at least 200 years old. It goes all the way back. It doesn’t even start in the United States, but it’s one that I think, as you mentioned, most people, most even Americans that aren’t part of the evangelical world, know something about the teaching of a rapture, at least in the basic form that there’s a teaching that suddenly all the true believers will be disappeared into Heaven, translate into Heaven, and that this will kick off an end time scenario that will lead to all types of wars and the rise of an Antichrist and everything else. That’s a very popularized version of this history, of this dispensationalism, this theology, but it’s so much more than that, and as someone who grew up in the world of dispensationalism, I knew there was a lot more to it. In the book, I start all the way back in the 1830s with a Anglo-Irish cleric named John Nelson Darby, and then we take it from there.
Albert Mohler:
As an historical theologian, you say all the way back in 200 years.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah.
Albert Mohler:
To a historical theologian, that’s not very far back, and that actually is, I think, the most surprising part of the story is that there’s virtually nothing like dispensational Christianity in the United States in any previous era. You’ve got a lot of eschatological expectation, you’ve got a lot of eschatological speculation, but nothing like this as a system.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and there are definitely, I think, in a less fine-grained version of the story, people would point to groups like the Millerites in the 1840s as a predecessor, and I talk about them as well. Really, what Henry Miller was doing in, or sorry, Willie Miller was doing in that in his prediction of the end times was a version of sort of chiliasm or millenarianism, but it didn’t have the underpinnings of dispensationalism.
If you talk to dispensationalists, they will tell you that there’s a much older history to dispensationalism, and I try to be sympathetic at least in some of the parts of what they’re trying to say there. As far as I see it, and I think I’m not alone among historians, Darby in the 1830s and 1840s is really the figure who brings together a number of teachings to create the embryonic form of a system of theology that we end up calling dispensationalism.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, the theologian in me wants to stipulate upfront that there are systems and there are systems, and most systems are rather fundamental and simple. You could take Covenant Theology as an example. There’s a very simple and direct apprehension of Covenant Theology, Old Covenant, New Covenant, continuity, discontinuity. When you talk about dispensationalism, you’re talking about a system that actually kind of rivals medieval Thomistic thought in its complexity. What’s amazing to me is that there were so many conservative Christians who gave themselves to becoming more or less self-taught and conference-taught experts in this system.
Daniel Hummel:
That’s right, and created a whole sort of Bible institute network of schools to at least in part teach this system as well. That complexity, the intricate nature of the system, that’s one part of the whole story, I think, does trace back to someone like Darby, who was a very intellectual person, someone who wrote millions and millions of words, someone who wrote hundreds of books on all parts of theology. We know him… If you don’t know him for dispensationalism, he is the originator of the Plymouth Brethren movement, and then the exclusive Brethren sect within that. He was just a prodigious person who was very complicated in his thinking, and so as people tried to popularize his teachings and then adopt them in later generations, that intricate complexity traveled along with them.
more at the link
“part 2”
https://albertmohler.com/2023/08/23/daniel-hummel/
Albert Mohler:
There has to be kind of an Earth story here. There’s got to be an origin, and you’ve got the man in John Nelson Darby, but how does it come to this? In other words, this is not a natural reading of Scripture. That was one of the first responses of people say in the Reformed world hearing dispensationalism. No one would read the Bible and just come to that. Instead, it kind of fits that 19th century idea that there’s this overarching structure that’s invisible until you see it. Then, you see it and you can’t not see it. How did that happen?
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and Darby would insist he is doing, I guess, a plain reading of the Scripture or a straight reading of Scripture, and, of course, dispensationalists would as well. He started as an Anglican priest, and there’s nothing really remarkable in his first few years. This is in the 1820s. He develops a very strong critique of the Anglican Church, in particularly the Church of Ireland that in the most basic form that the Church has been totally compromised by the effort to extend British imperial influence across the globe. He sees the Church as just entirely entwined in worldly interests.
He develops a very strong sense that the Church’s purpose in the world is entirely Heavenly or otherworldly, and he brings what some theologians, and I go along with them, call essentially a dualism to the text, to the Bible, and ends up reading all the Bible, and particularly the prophetic portions, as either relating to Heaven or Earth. There are two peoples of God that relate to Heaven and Earth. The Heavenly people are the Church and the Earthly people is the Nation of Israel. Once you start putting that lens over the Bible, you start developing inconsistencies that you have to smooth out and you start developing distinctive teachings about the fulfillment of prophecy, hidden weeks and parentheses and all other types of things to smooth it out.
Later theologians come along and try to bring some order to that, but really Darby’s original interest, which might surprise people who think of just the end time scenario as the totality of dispensationalism, was really you could say an ecclesiological concern about the Church and the sort of fallen nature, the apostate nature of the Church. Anyway, that drives his reading of the Bible, but once you apply that dualism across the entire Bible, you have a lot of things you have to account for that develop into this system.
Albert Mohler:
Yeah, the Plymouth Brethren angle of this is certainly the manifestation of that kind of, again, primitivist impulse in ecclesiology. You see that on both sides of the Atlantic, the Campbellite Restorationist movement, the Churches of Christ. Again, simplicity and the restoration of a lost simplicity. Again, what makes it different is that there’s no way that dispensationalism can be defined as simple, and so that’s the irony here, the anomaly in my mind. I can understand the purity effort and appreciate it and the Restorationists’ concern, but how you get from that to the complexity of dispensationlism, it’s still a leap in my mind.
Daniel Hummel:
Yeah, and that’s part of what I tried to fill in the gaps is there’s a more surface level reading of this history that really draws a straight line from John Nelson Darby to people like Cyrus Scofield and then Dallas Seminary for something like that. That’s just not how it developed. Darby was a pretty marginal figure, particularly in American Christianity, but even in British Christianity. He does travel around the United States for a number of years.
He spent seven years in the United States in the 1860s and ’70s, but really what is the key to his growing influence or his ideas’ growing influence in the U.S. is a set of other Brethren who are much better at popularizing his teachings. There’s a number of them. His main editor was a guy named William Kelly who is very popular among American Christians, and there’s another sort of more devotional writer named C.H. Mackintosh who was a very prominent Brethren who people like Dwight Moody cited as very influential in their thinking. Darby’s ideas sort of trickle in in the 1860s and 1870s in the United States, and no one in the U.S. takes it full… swallows the whole thing full.
This is to Darby’s great torture that no Americans want to adopt his whole system, particularly these Americans who are adopting his system are all pastors more or less. The Brethren don’t believe in a clergy class, and so if Darby had his way, people would leave their denominations and join the Brethren and reject the idea of a clergy. That doesn’t happen, but there are key leaders in the United States who do adopt both the ecclesiology part for particular reasons having to do with the 1860s and ’70s, and the eschatology part because it seems to be making sense of a lot of what’s happening in the world as well. Darby doesn’t get his way. I think it’s actually a sort of disservice to both Darby and the people that follow him to draw that straight line.
more at the link
The bible says absolutely nothing about this. In fact, it says the OPPOSITE. Salvation is on an individual basis. The kingdom of God was taken from the Jews once and for all, and given to the Gentiles. Believe in Christ Jesus as your savior or no heaven. That is very clear.
Question 2: when Jesus said, “Salvation is of the Jews”, what did he mean?
——>So you deny Romans 11? Zechariah 12, Isaiah 63, Joel 3, Hosea 5?
I deny YOUR INTERPRETATION of those texts. Anything that comes from Dispensationalism/Futurism comes from the Antichrist power, that being the Papacy.
More to come later.
Who said they believed it?
Preterism and Futurism were fabricated by the Papacy as part of the COUNTER REFORMATION, deflecting claims by literally every Protestant Reformer, that the Papacy was the biblical Antichrist power. This important fact seems to escape Evangelicals of today. The lie of dispensationalism comes from FUTURISM. Don’t believe me? All one has to do is look it up.
Francisco Ribera (Jesuit)
Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (Jesuit)
Michael Walpole (Jesuit)
Manuel De Lacunza (Jesuit)
Edward Irving
Margaret McDonald (ecstatic utterances)
Samuel Roffey Maitland
James H. Todd
John Henry Newman
John Nelson Darby
Arno C. Gaebelein
Cyrus Ingerson Scofield
Samuel Untermeyer
Lewis Sperry Chafer
Etc...
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