The “Puritan Hope,” as Iain Murray called it was not some kind of nascent dispensationalism, as some have suggested. It was just historic postmillennialism, including the view that the Jews (along with every other people group) would be converted at some point in history. The Puritans did not believe Jews were in covenant with God outside of Christ. They did not believe the Jews were saved apart from Christ. They did not believe in “two peoples” theology, with separate tracks for Jews and Gentiles, Israel and the church. They did not hold to a “secret rapture” of the church or a future 7 year “great tribulation” and obviously rejected the whole premillennial scheme.
Yes, the Puritans did believe the conversion of the Jews would be the capstone of the Great Commission, based on Romans 11:25-26. But their point was not that ethnic Jews were special; their point was Jews would not be left out of the promised global Christianization that was coming. They believed the Jews would be converted and incorporated into the olive tree of the covenant – but they also believed this would happen to the Chinese, the Russians, the Brazilians, and so on.
The Westminster Larger Catechism includes in its exposition of the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer (“thy kingdom come”) a prayer for the Jews to be called, along with a prayer that the “fullness of the Gentiles” would come into the kingdom. But all Puritans believed that when the Jews got converted en masse at some point in the future, they would be incorporated into the church because God has one people. There is no mention of a return to the “promised land” (as in the case of Zionism) in the Westminster Standards.
Some Puritans (like John Owen and Thomas Goodwin) and their successors (David Brown in the 19th century) did speculate that after the Jews converted, they might return to the land, but this was not a central plank in Puritan eschatology. Owen wrote,
“There shall be a time during the continuance of the kingdom of the Messiah in this world, wherein the generality of the nation of the Jews, all the world over, shall be called and effectually brought unto the knowledge of the Messiah, our Lord Jesus Christ; with which mercy they shall also receive deliverance from their captivity, restoration unto their own land, with a blessed, flourishing, and happy condition therein.”
But belief in a Jewish return to the land was not a Puritan norm or even emphasis.
The Puritans very clearly believed that the church is the new Israel. That’s the way they read the Bible. Interestingly, some Puritans who came to colonial America actually Israelized themselves to an extreme degree — America herself came to be seen as a new Israel. Some Puritan colonists referred to America as the “land of promise” or the “new Zion” and likened their migration to the new world as kind of “Red Sea crossing” out of the Egypt of Europe to a new Canaan, a land flowing with milk and honey. They had a keen interest in the ancient Hebraic Republic, largely as a model for their own civil project, e.g., John Cotton’s Abstract of the Laws of New England incorporated many laws from Torah in the colonial law code. Laws about the Lord’s Day were called “Sabbath laws.” Many punishments for crimes were drawn straight from the Torah. Many American towns were given names drawn from the Old Testament and many Puritans gave Old Testament names to their children.
Of course, all of this was mostly by analogy. Puritans knew America did not replace Israel or even fulfill the typology of old covenant Israel. They believed the church to be the fulfillment of Israel. But the analogies colonial Puritans drew between Israel and America show that they were not thinking like modern Zionists. If anything, they were American Christian nationalists and, in a certain sense, American exceptionalists. We can debate the accuracy and the wisdom of the analogies they drew between themselves and Israel (I do not think appropriating “city on a hill” language for a civic nation rather than the church is proper), but they were certainly not dispensationalists or even proto-dispensationalists.
Puritans never attempted to organize an invasion of Palestine (at that time part of the Islamic Ottoman Empire) so that Jews could be resettled there. They never encouraged Jews to try to retake the land as a divine right. Even Puritan theologians who most strongly emphasized future Jewish conversion were not Zionists in the modern sense of the term. And, again, they were certainly not proto-dispensationalists. Dispensationalism did not arise from within Reformed theology; the founder of the system, John Nelson Darby, was a member of the Plymouth Brethren and dispensationalism took root in America mainly among Baptists, only after the Second Great Awakening had de-Calvinized the American church. Dispensationalism did not arise from Calvinism; it filled a void after Calvinism had been rejected.
Many Christian Nationalists critique Reformed people for wanting historic Reformed soteriology but not historic Reformed political theology. That’s a fair criticism, but it cuts both ways. Many Christian Nationalists want historic Reformed political theology while rejecting historic Reformed eschatology.
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