Article #344
Subject: Some recent research on the history of pre-millenenist Christian Zionism preceeding
Author: Andrew W. Harrell
Posted: 4/19/2018 10:11:19 AM

There is on one side an intellectual and spiritual help from the secular and Hasidic Jewish Zionists:

In 1800 the Sephardim constituted 95 percent of the Jews in Palestine, but by 1840 this fell to just less
than 70 percent. The more secular Sephardim were from Turkey, Syria, the Balkans and were joined by
Sephardic Jews from the Barbary States of North Africa shared a common mode of prayer and used a
similar pronunciation of Hebrew”. In their prayer service they tended not to emphasize belief in the
immenent coming of the Messiah as much as the Ashkenazi.
In the 1840s they were replaced more by Askenazi Jews from Russia and Poland. And some from
Romania and also Austria Hungary. They believed their presence would hasten the arrival of the Messiah
and embraced a mystical version of Hasidic Kabbalism based on a personage known as the “Baal Shem
Tov” master of the Good Name, that Name being of course the ancient four-letter Tetragrammaton,
YHWH, YHWH Adonai, YHWH Sabaoth, of Jewish and Pythagorean Christianity.

In the book, the Making of Modern Zionism, the intellectual origins of the State of Israel by Shlomo
Avineri we have cited names like:

1)Nochman Krocmal in his book The Guide to the Perplexed of our Time, attempted to show that
maintaining a Jewish identity did not contradict the universal philosophical imperatives of Kantian and
Hegelian idealism. Human history is not a series of meaningless occurances, there is a telos to history.
Society, the nation, the spirit or ruach of the nation, are the main subjects of history. He sees the Jews
as a nation one of the many nations that contributed to world history, introducing the concept of One
God and his manifestation in human history. At the point where Judaism became a world religion
through its offspring Christianity Hegel had ended his dialectic. But, Krocmal continued it making the
rationale for the existence of the people of Israel in their separateness and apartness from a world of
paganism. Hegel had argued that the victory of Jewish monotheism in the form of Christianity made the
separate existence of Israel superfluous. And, in fact Krocmal could point to the fact that after the
Romans and the Greeks, the Jews did not disappear from the historical scence.

2)Heinrich Graetz To Graetz the Jews are a nation possessing historical continuity and a story unfolding
in time and place, undergoing changes and transformations like other nations. He takes issue with
tradional Christian historiography which loses all interest in Judaism after the destruction of the second
temple. He sees Judaism not only as a national phenomenon but also inextricably bound to the Holy
Land of its birth. He sees Judaism not as a revealed religion, but as “revealed legislation”. It is also
characterized by the special emphasis it puts on the futre as an essential moment of its own self-
consciousness. But, he sees Jesus as not unique, but just one of several Jewish leaders of the time.

3)Moses Hess (1812-1875) The founder of German Social Demoracy, his remains were reinterred in the
cemetery of the first Kibbutz near Lake Tibreerias. But, he ended up arguing that Jews suffer from a
lack of universal consciousness and have a future in modern times only as individuals and not as a
collective entity, and as individuals they should merge into the general universalism. Her in the heart of
Europe the New Jerusalem will be built.

4)Yehuda Alkalai remained within Orthodox Judaism and its quest for redemption rooted in the
traditional Messianic yearnings of Jewish Religion. Everyone should be taught spoken Hebrew in order
to create a unifying mode of communication. He believed in the traditional appearance of the Messiah
Son of David, who will be preceded by a first Messiah, called the Son of Joseph, taking the vision of
both of these people as a person. Since he believed both of these had not come yet, he obviously did
not accept standard Christian theology that Jesus Christ is already both of these people.

5)Perez Smolenskin (1842-1885) One of the founders of arguments for Jewish emigration out of Russa
to the West. To North America, England, South Africa, Argentina and also Palestine. He lived through
the wide-spred pogroms of 1881, mainly in the southern district of Russia where the population was
densest. He create a group of Jewish maskilim or enlightened ones. He turns after an initial rejection to
the land of Palestine as a place to develop national consciousness that will provide a collective solution
to the problem of how to develop Jewish identity.

6)Eliezer Ben Yehuda (1858-1922) Associated with the revival of the Hebrew language as a spoken,
everyday language for the Jews.

7) Aharon David Gordon The first significant Jewish thinker whose ideas emerged from a confrontation
with the reality in Palestine itself. He founded a Labour Zionist party in Russia and Palestine., not guided
by doctrinaire socialism, or mobilizing all our national energies through manual labour. and considered
the Exile as a way of rebirth.







And on the other side of the Christian Zionists in the 19th and early 20th century:
A good reference for this is “The Lord Shaftesbury Origins of Evangelical Christian Support for a
Zionism Jewish Homeland.” By Donald M. Lewis, Cambridge U.Press.

The letter of British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour of 1917 certainly changed the political factors in
Europe helping to change history and establish a Jewish state in Palestine:

“I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of his majesty’s government, the following
declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by,
the Cabinet.

His Majesty’s Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the
Jewish people, an will use their best endevours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being
clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any
other country.

I should be grateful if you should bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”

But, what historical factors and changes in the 19th century in the mindset of British Victorian
evangelicalism preceeded and led to this declaration in the 20th century?

According to the famous historian Babara Tuchman in her book” “Bible and Sword: England and
Palestine from the Bronze age to Balfour.” The main reason was the legendary history of travels of
Biblical teachers and prophets from ancient Palestine to Britian.”amongst these travellers according to
Ms Tuchman were the Biblical Gomer, a descendent of Noah, the ancient Phoenicians, Roman Britians,
Joseph of Arimathea in whom tomb Jesus was buried, the first Crusaders, including King Richard, many
Middle age Pilgrims, Henry VII who first published an English translation of the Bible in 1538, merchant
naval adventurers to the levant in the Elizabethan age. English Puritans interested in Calvanistic
prophecy in 1649,

However, I believe more in the affect of the French Englightment and Revolution, Scottish and English
Enlightenment during the late 18th century going into the 1st half of the 19th and the development of
English and German pre-millenialist high Calvinistic theological prophecy.


Both Martin Luther and John Calvin had a consistent position when they were preaching that denied
any ongoing significance to Jews and Judaism. This theological position goes back to Augustine.
However as early as 1590 in the reformed Calvinist theology scholars were rejecting both of these
theological opinions.
“The Puritan Revolution and its subsequent failure had long-term implications for Judaism in England
and in America. Religious non-conformity was immensely strengthened by the Great Ejection of Puritan
clergy from the Church of England in 1662.”
“The decisive turning point in Christian-Jewish relations can be traced to the impact of the French
Revolution on European Protestantism, and especially on British Evangelism… One of the most striking
features of this change was the creation of a small but growing missionary movement that was
determined to take the message of the Gospel to the four corners of the earth. There was also an
impact of German speaking pietism and a growth of philosemitism (Philo-Semitism or Judeophilia is an
interest in, respect for and an appreciation of Jewish people, their history and the influence of Judaism,
particularly on the part of a gentile.)
in the English speaking evangelical world” Op. cit. pages 33,37,49,50

In 1809 the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews (LSJ) was founded.

Charles Simeon (1759-1836) Was an influential Anglican minister in the first half of the nineteeth
century who inspired generations of Cambridge undergraduates in the importance of jewish
evangelism, but not as much the prophecizing of their return to Palestine. “He retained his
postmillennial perspective and never embraced the new Adventist interpretations that were to emerge
in the 1820s.”op cit. page 61 He stands in a tradition of teaching of esteem toward the Jews. “Calvinist
interpretations of scripture which nurtured the new teaching of esteem had a great impact on the
attitudes of English-speaking Protestants toward the Jews. During this period there was an explosion of
interest in the imminent return of Christ, known as the Second Coming. Upon the scheme of
postmillenism the return of Christ would occur after the inauguration of the thousand year reign of
Christ. In its nineteenth century form premillenialism had a key role for Jews in the final events of World
history., something that is also shared with Pietism’s “hopes for a better future”..the leading prophetic
writers who came to light in the 1790s (Scott, Faber, and BichenO) were postmillenialists who insisted
on giving the Jews and their restoration to Palestine a promiment place in their prophetic schemes….It
is a common mistake of historians to ascribe nineteenth century evangelical interest in the Jews to
premillennialism. What the prophetic minded who made so much of the Jews had in common was not
premillennialism or postmillenialis, but a shared Calvinism what resonated with the idea of the divine
“election” of the Jews. This

Figure 1 Russia Jewish Artwork in the Israeli National Historical Musuem Tel Aviv



“High Calvinism” strong rejection of the Catholic tradition of Natural Law, with its emphasis on a
common human nature on the one hand, and with Romanicism’s emphasis on the distinct and peculiar
characteristics of “nations” on the other.” Op. cit. pages 66.67,68


What is the difference between “High Calvinism” and “Low Calvinism”? Here is an excerpt from a
discussion about it on the internet www.puritanboard.com:



Low Calvinist = infralapsarian
High Calvinist = supralapsarian

According to the infralapsarian view the order of events was as follows: God proposed,

1. to create;
2. to permit the fall;
3. to elect to eternal life and blessedness a great multitude out of this mass of fallen men, and to leave
the others, as He left the Devil and the fallen angels, to suffer the just punishment of their sins;
4. to give His Son, Jesus Christ, for the redemption of the elect; and
5. to send the Holy Spirit to apply to the elect the redemption which was purchased by Christ.

According to the supralapsarian view the order of events was:

1. to elect some creatable men (that is, men who were to be created) to life and to condemn others to
destruction;
2. to create;
3. to permit the fall;
4. to send Christ to redeem the elect; and
5. to send the Holy Spirit to apply this redemption to the elect

The question then is as to whether election precedes or follows the fall.



William Wilberforce was a chief architect of the remarkable growth of evangelical influence within the
Church of England.

Henry Drummond (1786-1860) English banker, politician, member of the Royal Society and writer
helped found a Catholic Apostolic Church along with Edward Irving and Robert Haldane in 1826, was a
member of Parliament associated with the Conservative Party. A High Calvinist (as opposed to his more
famous namesake Henry Drummond, 1851-1897 another evangelist, but more of a liberal Methodist
who taught the importance of Natural Law and not predestination, wrote the famous Christian classic
“The City Without a Church” and friend of my great grandfather, Adoniram Judson Gordon also a pre-
millenenist like the earlier Henry Drummond).

In 1929 he published six theological points on which his school of pre-millenenist theology could agree
on:

1)This dispensation or age will not end insensibly but cataclysmically in judgment and destruction of the
church in the same manner in which the Jewish dispensation ended.
2) The Jews will be restored to Palestine during the time of judgement.
3) The judgement to come will fall princiapply upon Christendom.
(in fact looking back on it it as occurring during the American Civil War, World War I and II, it fell on both
Christendom and Israel).
4)when the judgement is passed, the millennium will begin (looking back on it I believe that we are now
in the new millennium)
5)The second advent of Christ will occur before the millennium (this has in fact occurred for a lot of us I
believe).
6) The 1260 years of Daniel 7 and Revelation 13 ought to be measured from the reign of Justinian to the
French Revolution. The vials of wrath (Revelation 16) are now being poured out, and the second advent
is imminent.

Eg. Ezra Stiles at Yale and Asa McFarland in 1808 voiced the opinion. That the fall of the Ottoman
Empire was imminent and would bring about Jewish Restoration,. In 1825 Morecai Noah founded a
national home for the Jews on Grand island in New York as a way station on the way to the Holy Land. In
1844 George Bush a professor of Hebrew at New York University and cousin of an ancestors of the
President’s Bush, published a book “The Dry Bones of Israel Revived”. Restoraionist theology , Chjarles
Simeon as Postmillennial, and James Frere, James Stewart and Edward Irving who were Pre-
milliennialists, during this period was inpsirations for the first American missionary activity in the Middle
East. In 1878 as the Niagara Bible Conference there was a 14-point Dispensationalism, Pre-millennisalist
declaration..In 1890, the tycoon William Blackstone published a book about the need for Jews to
convert to Chrisitianity either before or after the second coming.

In Britian, in 1831 McCaul was appointed president of an Anglican society for Jewish missionary service.
Lord Shaftesbury, the British Foreign Secretary , perhaps as Bible conscious as Cromwell, established a
consultate in Jerusalem in 1838 to reflect his zeal for this ancient people. In 1841 a joint Anglican and
German Pietiest bishopric was established in Jerusalem.
In 1849 the Anglican Christ Church was built in Jerusalem by the London Society for Promoting
Judaism (LSJ) and it still functions today inside the entrance to the Joppa Gate of the Old City and just
next to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Via Dialorasa, which itself it at the end of a pathway from
the present Western Wall below the city going to the Church of the Holy Seplucher following the Holy
path of Jesus’ cruxification after his entrance on Palm Sunday, going up to the Most Holy of Holies in
Herod’s Temple. Sahftesbury was perhaps the main instrument of implementation of a Chritian pre-
millenianist Zionism during this period. It was has vision that there be an Anglican Israel.



In 1839 The Church of Scotland sent missionaries to report of the condition of Jews in Palestine..In
1840 the Times reported the the British Government was considering jewish restoration. One prominent
figure who supported the restoration was William Hecler, an English clergyman who was also the
chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna, later to become a close friend of Theordore Hertzl.


Joseph Rabinowitz, a close friend of Adoniram Judson Gordon, is sometimes said to be the Theodore
Herzl of Messianic
Judiasm. He was born and lived in Kishinev Russia (the area is now a part of
Moldava and the Jews there suffered much from Chrisitans). In 1881 he and has
brothers set up a Jewish agricultural society there. Believing the only
future for Judaism depended on it restablishming itself in the Holy Land, in
1882 he travelled to Palestine to set up a community of believers there. He
converted to Chrisitianity (chose to believe in Jesus Christ as God’s Son,
believed in Him as a savior and a brother, and was baptized a Christian in
Germany in 1885). He believed “our brother Jesus” to be the key to opening
the way for Jews to return to the Holy Land. A Christian council in London
was set up for his support in 1887 and he travelled to the U.S. to spend 35
days and attend the Moody Bible conference in Chicago in 1893. There he
shared a room next to A.J. Gordon at the conference. He was declared by him
(Gordon) to be a new Isaiah.

He chose to use the name YHWH in his group’s prayer service as opposed to the
name Adonai to reflect their belief that the Messiah for Judaism had already
come in the person of Jesus Christ.

Joseph Rabinowitz’s Seven articles of faith:

1. I believe with perfect faith, that our heavenly Father is the living
and true, and eternal God who created heaven and earth and everything visible
and invisible and invisible through His Word and His Holy Spirit. All things
are from Him. All things are in Him. All things to Him.
2. I believe with perfect faith that our heavenly Father has, according
to His promise made to our forefathers, to our prophets, and to our King
David, the son of Jesse, raised unto Israel a Redeemer, Jesus, who was born
of the virgin Mary, in Bethlehem the city of David, who suffered, was
crucified dead and buried for our salvation, rose again from the dead, and
liveth, and sitteth at the right hand of our heavenly Father, from thence he
shall come to judge the world, the living, the and the dead. He is the
appointed King over the house of Jacob forever, and of His dominion there
shall be no end.
3. I believe with perfect faith, that by the counsel of God and His
foreknowledge, our fathers have been smitten with hardness of heart for sin
and for rebellion against our Messiah, the Lord Jesus, in order to provoke
the other nations of the earth unto jealously, and to reconcile all through
faith in Christ, by the word of His Evangelists, in order that the knowledge
of Jehovah should cover the earth, and Jehovah be King over the whole world.
4. I believe, with a perfect faith, that through faith in Jesus, the
Messiah alone, without the works of the law, a man may be justified; that
there is but one God, who justifies the circumcised Jews by faith, and the
uncircumcised through faith and that there is no difference between a Jew and
Greek, between bond and free, between male and female. There are all one in
Christ.
5. I believe with a perfect faith, in a Holy Catholic and Apostolic
church.
6. I confess one baptism for the remission of sins.
7. I wait for the resurrection and renewed life of the dead, and for the
life of the world to come. Amen.

For Thy salvation, I wait, O Lord; I wait, O Lord, for Thy salvation, O lord
for Thy salvation I wait.

In a debate between Rabinowitz and other Jewish rabbis in Kishinev Russia in
1884 these articles were compared with those of the Church of England and the
differences were argued between Ziegler a brother in-law of Faltin
representing the orthodox Jews and Rabinowitz and other Hebrew Christians
present.

It was noted that the first four articles are in almost perfect agreement
with the first four Christian ones. However, Rabinowitz omits mentioning that
there are three persons of one substance in the godhead. Yet he affirms that
God creates and upholds everything by His Word and His Holy Spirit.

See “Joseph Rabinowitz and the Messianic Movement” by Kai Kjaer Hansen, page
98.

There is also a statement of his twenty-four and twelve articles of faith in
chapter 8 of the book “Joseph Rabinowitz and the Messianic Movement” by Kai
Kjaer Hansen







In the Holy Land itself in 1936 Charles Orde Wingate earned the rank of Captain in the British Army,
learned Hebrew, and served three years in Israel as a British intelligence officer.
He organized and trained “Special Night Squads”, comprised primarily of haganah fighters who were
successfully employed throughout the Yishuv (a term referring to the body of Jewish residents in the
land of Israel). He was called “ha-yedid”, the friend.

More recently at the Third International Christian Zionist Congress held in Jerusalem February 1996
issued a proclamation that the modern ingathering of the Jewish People and the rebirth of the nation of
Israrel are in fulfillment of Biblical prophecies, as written in Both the Old and new Testament.
However, in 2006, the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem (Catholic), the Syriac Orthoxdoc Archdiocese of
Jerusalem, the Episcopal Church in Jerusalem land the Middle East and the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in Jordan and the Holy Land published a declaration rejecting Christian Zionism as substituting,
in its view, a polical military program in place of the teachings of Jesus Christ.