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 and I think we should be wary of any kind kind of American exceptionalism that would put the nation in the place of the church), 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. Dispensationalism is no more Calvinistic than altar calls and decision cards.
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. Similarly, many Christian Nationalists point to Sabbath laws as proof of America’s Christian founding and want to revive such laws, which rejecting the Puritanism that established those laws in the first place and provided the theological framework within which the American founding took place. You cannot despise Puritanism, including the “Puritan hope,” while touting America as an historic Protestant/Christian nation or working to recover American’s Christian (really, Puritan) heritage. Christian Nationalists who gerrymander the Reformed tradition to exclude Puritanism are departing from tradition just as much as the “Radical Two Kingdom” theologians.
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ADDENDUM: “Didn’t Christian Zionism arise from 17th century Puritanism?”
Dispensationalists wish their view had that kind of pedigree. But it doesn’t.
Even the small handful of Puritans who thought the Jews would eventually return to Palestine (displacing the Ottomans) did not envision them doing so apart from repentance, conversion to faith in Christ, and incorporation into the church. No Puritan would have seen the nation established in 1948 as having anything to do with Romans 11 since it was a secular nation being inhabiting by an unbelieving people.
ADDENDUM: “Dispensationalism (and Zionism with it) is the fruit of Puritanism. The former could not have come about in Christendom without the latter.”
That’s a ridiculous claim.
Puritanism was mainly a New England phenomenon, Dispensationalism gained popularity mainly in the American South. Puritans were Calvinists, mainly Congregationalists and Presbyterians, while Dispensationalists were and are mainly Baptists (a few early Dispensationalists were non-confessional Presbyterians but that proved to be an oddity). Puritans held to Calvinistic soteriology including the perseverance of the saints, while Dispensationalists often taught no-lordship salvation, “once saved always saved,” and the “carnal Christian” theory. Puritans were postmillennial, long term optimists about the kingdom, while Dispensationalists were short term pessimists and had their own brand of premillennialism. Puritans were covenantal, believing the church is the new Israel, while Dispensationalism takes essentially the opposite view, that the church and Israel are so completely distinct that God has two peoples. Puritans believed Jews would be converted in this age, through the preaching of the gospel, after the fullness of the Gentile nations has come in, while Dispensationalists believe Jews will be converted by extraordinary means after the church gets raptured out of the world. The Puritans would have found Dispensational ideas like a rebuilt “third temple” with re-instituted animal sacrifices as blasphemous. And so on.
So, yeah, they’re obviously closely related. Depending on which historians you trust, Puritanism as a coherent movement died out in Britain by 1700 and in America by 1740 or 1790. By the time Dispensationalism arrived in America in the 1860s, Puritanism had been dead for a long time. Dispensationalism was not really popular or dominant until the early 20th century, long after Puritanism was over. Dispensationalism has no connection to Puritanism. Early Dispensationalists did not quote from Puritans or self-consciously draw from Puritan sources.
The only possible link you can draw is that a handful of Puritans believed that a Christianized Jewish people would displace the Ottoman Muslims and dwell in Canaan again. That was never the Puritan consensus and was often presented more as a matter of speculation. But in any case, the Puritans were not Zionists in any modern sense of the term. They would not have said unbelieving Jews have an inalienable right to the land or deserve unconditional political support. Those things were unheard of the Puritan era. The Puritans would not have seen unbelieving Jews reinhabiting the land in 1948 to forms a secular nation as a prophetic event since the key thing prophesied about the Jews in Romans 11 is a reversal of their hardening and thus their conversion to faith in Christ. But even then, it’s a very different view from Dispensationalism because Puritans would say when Jews trust Christ, they join the same church as Gentile believers, whereas the whole Dispensational system depends on denying that Jew/Gentile oneness. A Jewish right to the promised land plays virtually no role in Puritanism. You can read hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of pages of Puritan literature and never come across any such thing.
Another possible link might be handful of Puritans who were premillennial, but they were historic premillennialists, which is very different from Dispensational premillennialism.
The claim that Puritans were proto-Dispensationalists or that Dispensationalism is the fruit of Puritanism is crazy and completely unhistorical. Some Dispensationalists have tried to draw this connection to lend credit to their system so it won’t appear quite so novel, but they are wrong to do so, and no one with any sense of history would let them get away with it. Dispensationalism was more influenced by secular forms of Zionism than by historic Puritanism.
ADDENDUM: “Didn’t Calvin hold that the salvation of “all Israel” is fulfilled in the church?”
Yes, it’s slightly different view than what you find in other Reformers, the Puritans, and WCF. Calvin saw “all Israel” in Romans 11 as the sum total of saved Jews and Gentiles across history. I don’t think that’s the best reading of the text, mainly because it does not deal with the issue that prompted Paul to write Romans 9-11.
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