November 14, 2006
Premillennialism: Good for the Jews? Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:30 PM EST There’s a fascinating article in today’s New York Times about evangelical Christian support for Israel. As the article notes, “Many conservative Christians say they believe that the president’s support for Israel fulfills a biblical injunction to protect the Jewish state, which some of them think will play a pivotal role in the second coming.” The eschatology to which the Times refers is known as dispensational premillennialism. Based on prophetic writings in the Old and New Testaments, premillennialism holds that God deals with human beings in distinct epochs, or dispensations; that the current (sixth) dispensation—the church era, or the Gentile era—will come to a close upon the arrival of the Antichrist (known also as the Beast), who will visit incalculable terror upon unsaved human beings; that the Antichrist’s reign of seven years, called the Tribulations, will be directly preceded by the in-gathering of world Jewry back to Palestine and by a tremendous event called the Raptures, which will see saved souls, both living and dead, lifted directly from Earth to heaven; that at the end of the Tribulations Jesus Christ will lead an army of saints to do battle with the Beast; that Christ will defeat the Beast at the Battle of Armageddon and introduce a thousand-year rein of peace; and finally that at the conclusion of that millennium, Christ and Satan will engage in a final battle, resulting in Satan’s ultimate defeat The problem for Jews, of course, is that this end-of-days theology foretells a fiery and unpleasant end for the original sons of Abraham—even those who convert to Christ. Which leads to a new twist on a familiar question: Premillennialism, good for the Jews, or bad for the Jews? Should American Jews and Israelis forge a partnership with conservative evangelicals, even if their aims and expectations are so vitally different, even though the same conservative Christians subscribe to a theology that damns Jews no matter what? On this particular question, I’m inclined to throw my lot with those liberal American Jews who’d rather not make common cause, however cynically, with evangelical conservatives. But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the ties between both communities grow a little stronger in the coming years.
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