[The following post is not intended as commentary on the current military operation in Iran. I will comment on that later. This is a theological point I’ve been thinking about for a while.]
One of the things that I believe attracts modern Dispensationalists/evangelicals to the nation-state of Israel is not just their (flawed) exegesis and eschatology, but the fact that Israel functions as a kind of substitute for Christendom.
Dispensationalists do not believe in building Christendom because they have a pessimistic and short term view of the church’s future.* In the dispensational scheme, the church is God’s heavenly/spiritual people, while the Jews are God’s earthly people.
But man inescapably wants to build a civilization on earth because it’s what we were created to do (Genesis 1:26ff). It’s built into the creation mandate that defined and ordered human existence from the beginning. Dispensational theology blocks dispensationalists from investing in a Christian civil order so they invest in an Israeli one instead. They cannot support an American form of Christian nationalism so they turn to an Israeli nationalism instead. They do not believe in Christian civilization, so they support a Jewish civilization in its place. They default to an “Israel first” position, because they see in Israel a fulfillment of their deepest human aspirations, to have a people and a place, a civilization and a culture. Dispensationalists reduce the Great Commission from an evangelism+civilization building mission to mere evangelism. The civilization building piece gets relocated to the Jews. In the dispensational scheme, Jews get to have a fully Jewish civilization, but Christians never get to have a Christian civilization.
To come at it from another angle, in the dispensational scheme, the church “loses down here.” But in the millennium, Israel gets to “win down here.” An eschatology of victory is relocated from the church in this age to Israel in a millennial age. There is no hopeful future for the church’s mission, but Israel’s mission will succeed.
The Reformational answer to this, as indicated above, is Christendom. It is understanding the fullness of the Great Commission – it’s not only about converting individuals but discipling nations. It’s not just about evangelism, it’s about cultural transformation – “twisting the Christian faith” into culture, as Matthew Henry put it. In the Reformational vision, our priority is building a Christian civilization where we are. We not only evangelize the nations, we disciple them, teaching them everything Jesus commanded (= the whole Bible).
*In saying this, I fully recognize that dispensationalists have often been faithful culture warriors. But they have done so in spite of their theology, not because of it.
ADDENDUM: I commend dispensationalists for their missionary work. But their individualistic approach to missions was a departure from the older Reformed model, which took the command to “make the nations my disciples” in more comprehensive way.
A. A. Hodge of Princeton, who was himself a missionary in India in his early years, correctly saw the major change in missionary strategy which the new (in his day) premillennial/dispensational prophetic viewpoint had brought about, compared to what earlier postmillennial missionaries had done:
“[Premillennial/dispensational] missionaries have a style of their own. Their theory affects their work in the way of making them seek exclusively, or chiefly, the conversion of individual souls. The true and efficient missionary method is, to aim directly, indeed, at soul winning, but at the same time to plant Christian institutions in heathen lands, which will, in time, develop according to the genius of the nationalities. English missionaries can never hope to convert the world directly by [individual] units.” (from Iain Murray, The Puritan Hope, p. 204f)
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