An Unusual Relationship: Evangelical Christians and Jews

3. Evangelical Theologians, Institutions, and Publications and the Jews

58 > 59 society. It has served as a philosophy of history for conservative Christians , explaining the course of history, offering a picture of the future, and providing hope and reassurance over troubling political and cultural developments. For example, it provided an explanation and a sense of comfort in the face of one of the greatest fears of the cold war (from the late 1940s to the late 1980s), the atomic bomb.1 Likewise, it has meshed well with a pessimistic outlook on current culture and the ability of humanity to reform its institutions and solve its difficult problems on its own. It also agrees with the conservative evangelical sense of righteousness in face of evil and the special role of America in history. In its first decades, dispensationalism did not become a mass dramatic premillennialist movement of the kind William Miller had succeeded in gathering in the early 1840s. The progress of dispensationalism was slower, but it gathered strength and became a conviction accepted by many in America and later by many evangelicals around the globe, and its impact on the evangelical mind has lasted for over a century. Proponents of the new eschatological school struggled, among other things, to convince their audiences in the special role of the Jews in the end times. It was not an easy task. James H. Brookes and the Niagara Conferences One of the early converts to dispensationalism in America was James H. Brookes, an influential Presbyterian minister from St. Louis, Missouri , who was impressed by Darby’s teachings, although he and other Americans did not merely follow in Darby’s footsteps. Only a limited number of evangelicals read Darby, but many more read Brookes and other American proponents of the faith who adapted the British ideas to the American scene. Brookes published a series of books that came to popularize the belief in the imminent second coming of Jesus and make it part of the accepted conservative evangelical creed. The most widely circulated was Maranatha: Or the Lord Cometh (1874). In Maranatha, Brookes spent 545 pages elaborating the dispensationalist belief, its scriptural hermeneutics, its eschatological scheme, and its understanding of 60 > 61 comes the clear, explicit, unconditional and often repeated promise of Israel’s return to their lands.”6 Like other evangelical leaders who adopted the dispensationalist premillennialist faith, Brookes linked the promise of the imminent arrival of Jesus to the return of the Jews to the central stage of history. And like other evangelical preachers, Brookes saw himself as an enemy of anti-Jewish sentiments, advocating greater appreciation for the Jews and their historical role. “Thus if we remember that God’s revelation came to the Jews . . . surely this fact should be sufficient to rebuke the contempt and hatred, which is so commonly manifested toward them by professing gentile Christians who do not follow the divine command ‘Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper all that love thee, PSCXXII: six.’”7 Like other evangelical Christians who adopted the dispensationalist faith, Brookes took special interest in the evangelization of Jews and believed that premillennialist evangelicals were particularly suited to preach the Gospel to the Jews: “No man is fit to preach to the Jews unless he believes in the personal coming of the Messiah. He must go to them with the message, ‘Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous branch.’”8 Brookes also asserted that Jews who accepted Jesus as their Lord and savior should not be asked to assimilate into the general “Gentile” community and turn their backs on the Jewish heritage, and he praised missions to the Jews that he thought were implementing his principles.9 He marveled at Joseph Rabinowitz’s Christian synagogue in Kishinev, Russia, and looked favorably at Arno C. Gaebelein and Ernst Stroeter’s attempt to establish a congregation of Christian Jews in the Lower East Side of New York.10 Brookes criticized the hostile attitude of Christians toward Jews and called for an appreciative and amicable approach toward them, but he himself held some prejudices against that people.11 The following passage , in which he both defends the Jews and expresses negative stereotypes , demonstrates his ambivalence: “It is probable that if our ancestors had been banished and expelled, kicked, robbed and murdered for centuries the world over, we too would feel like raising our hand against every man. The Gentiles in view of the...