Unfulfilled Prophecy: The Development Of The Hope - Apostolic Testimony: The Basis Of The Hope

by Iain Murray

‘That God in his appointed time will bring forth the kingdom of the Lord Christ unto more glory and power than in former days, I presume you are persuaded. Whatever will be more, these six things are clearly promised:

1. Fulness of peace unto the gospel and the professors thereof, Isa. 11.6, 7, 54.13, 33.20, 2I Rev. 21.15.

2. Purity and beauty of ordinances and gospel worship, Rev. 11.2, 21.3. The tabernacle was wholly made by appointment, Mal. 3.3, 4; Zech. 14.16; Rev. 21.27; Zech. 14.20; Isa. 35.8.

3. Multitudes of converts, many persons, yea, nations, Isa. 60.7, 8, 66.8, 49.18—22; Rev. 7.9.

4. The full casting out and rejecting of all will-worship, and their attendant abominations, Rev. 11.2.

5. Professed subjection of the nations throughout the whole world unto the Lord Christ, Dan. 2.44, 7.26, 27; Isa. 60.6-9; — the kingdoms become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ (Rev. I I .I 5), amongst whom his appearance shall be so glorious, that David himself shall be said to reign.

6. A most glorious and dreadful breaking of all that rise in opposition unto him, Isa. 60. 12 — never such desolations, Rev. 16.17—19.’

JOHN OWEN ‘The Advantage of the Kingdom of Christ in the Shaking of the Kingdoms of the World’, A sermon to the Commons assembled in Parliament, 1651 (Works, vol 8, 334)

IN the turmoil of ideas which accompanied the Reformation of the sixteenth century it was inevitable that the question of unfulfilled prophecy should be reopened. The restoration of the Bible in pulpits and homes was in itself enough to make this certain. For long years the evangelical meaning of the Second Advent of Christ, and truths concerning the last things in general, had lain out of sight with the removal of the Scriptures from the common people. The future, both with respect to history and to eternity was a dark unknown. Purgatory cast its shadow upon life from the cradle to the grave. Anti-Christ remained unidentified, except in the convictions of some few Lollards or Waldensians. The Jews, despised and downtrodden, heard no word of hope from the professing Church, and the unevangelized world lying beyond the narrow borders of Christendom received no messengers of the gospel of peace.

None of these things could last once the Scriptures were uncovered. Prophecy was again examined and the onset of persecution caused believers to dwell all the more upon the prospects which that subject brought before them. Not without reason did John Knox describe the Christians of England, suffering in the reign of Mary Tudor, as those ‘that love the Coming of our Lord’. And yet it must at once be said that the Reformation period, save for restoring the certain hope of Christ’s Second Coming, did not establish for Protestantism a commonly accepted view of the unfulfilled prophecies which are to precede that coming. No unanimity was arrived at here as it was in many other areas of biblical truth. Luther, for example, regarded himself as living at the very close of history, with the Advent and Judgment immediately at hand. Others, on the outer fringe of orthodox Protestantism, ‘drew out of its grave’ (as a Puritan later complained against them) the belief common among some of the early Fathers, that Christ would appear and reign with his saints a thousand years in Jerusalem before the Judgment. From their emphasis on the word ‘thousand’ (Greek, chilias; Latin, mule), taken from Revelation, chapter 20, they were anciently called ‘chiliasts’ or ‘millenaries’. Calvin deemed this view ‘too puerile to need or to deserve refutation’. He has in turn been accused in more modern times of failing to animate his fellow-Christians by preaching and instruction to await patiently and in faith the establishment of the kingly rule that Jesus had promised in connexion with His Parousia’. This charge is true in so far as Calvin believed that Christ’s kingdom is already established, and, unlike Luther, he expected it to have a yet greater triumph in history prior to the consummation but it is false if it is understood to mean that Calvin did not proclaim the joyful expectation of Christ’s return. The latter he most certainly did, as one characteristic statement of the reformer’s is enough to show. Preaching in the great cathedral of St. Peter’s, Geneva, from the text, ‘The Lord grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in that day’ (2 Tim. 1. 18), he dwells on the words ‘in that day’:

‘Let us learn to stretch out our hope, even to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. . . . For if this hope do not reign in our hearts and sit as mistress there, we shall faint every minute of an hour. Will we therefore walk equally in God’s service? Before all things let us learn to fasten our eyes and stay them upon this last day, and upon this coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, and know we that then there is a crown prepared for us, and let it not grieve us to be in great distress in the mean season, and to have many discommodities, to lead a painful and troublesome life, let us pass over all this, casting our eyes always upon this latter day, whereunto God calleth us, and indeed we see how Saint Paul speaks, In that day, saith he. No Christian man can read this text, but he must needs be touched to the quick. For we see that St. Paul was as it were ravished, when he spake of this coming of Jesus Christ and of the last resurrection. . . . Saint Paul, I say, spake not of these things coldly, nor according to man, but he was lifted up above all the world, that he might cry out, That day, That day!’

This central hope, then, the Reformers clearly asserted. It was in regard to other subjects bearing on unfulfilled prophecy that they left no united testimony. Several of these subjects received little attention from the first generation of Reformers and, with one exception, they were left for their successors to take up. The exception was the unanimous belief that the Papal system is both the ‘man of sin’ and the Babylonian whore of which Scripture forewarns (2 Thess. Rev. 19).” In the conviction of sixteenth-century Protestants Rome was the great Anti-Christ, and so firmly did this belief become established that it was not until the nineteenth century that it was seriously questioned by evangelicals.

One of the first developments in thought on prophecy came as further attention was given to the Scriptures bearing on the future of the Jews. Neither Luther nor Calvin saw a future general conversion of the Jews promised in Scripture; some of their contemporaries, however, notably Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr, who taught at Cambridge and Oxford respectively in the reign of Edward VI, did understand the Bible to teach a future calling of the Jews. In this view they were followed by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva. As early as 1560 four years before Calvin’s death, the English and Scots refugee Protestant leaders who produced the Geneva Bible, express this belief in their marginal notes on Romans chapter 11, verses 15 and 26. On the latter verse they comment, ‘He sheweth that the time shall come that the whole. nation of the Jews, though not every one particularly, shall be joined to the church of Christ.’ .

The first volume in English to expound this conviction at some length was the translation of Peter Martyr’s Commentary upon Romans, published in London in 1568.The probability is strong that Martyr’s careful exposition of the eleventh chapter prepared the way for a general adoption amongst the English Puritans of a belief in the future conversion of the Jews. Closely linked as English Puritanism was to John Calvin it was the view contained in Martyr’s commentary which was received by the rising generation of students at Cambridge.

Among those students was Hugh Broughton (1549-1612) who had the distinction of being the first Englishman to propose going as a missionary to the Jews in the Near East, and also the first to propose the idea of translating the New Testament into Hebrew for the sake of the Jews. Broughton’s ardour for the conversion of the Jews found no sympathy, however, with the English bishops whom he had early offended by his Puritan leanings. Though given no preferment in the English Church he was so well known in the East on account of his learning that the Chief Rabbi of Constantinople wrote to him in 1599 and subsequently invited him to become a public teacher there! This early possibility of a mission to the Jews was thwarted by the Church authorities, but Broughton’s writings — of which the best known was probably his Commentary on Daniel, 1596 —stimulated further study of the whole question.

Broughton was too much an individualist ever to become a leader of the Puritan movement. Two years before he was ejected from his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1579, William Perkins had entered the same college, a man whom we noted earlier as doing so much to influence the thinking of many who were to preach all over England. Perkins speaks plainly of a future conversion of the Jews: ‘The Lord saith, All the nations shall be blessed in Abraham: Hence I gather that the nation of the Jews shall be called, and converted to the participation of this blessing: when, and how, God knows: but that it shall be done before the end of the world we know.’ The same truth was opened by the succession of Puritan leaders at Cambridge who followed Perkins, including Richard Sibbes and Thomas Goodwin. In his famous book, The Bruised Reed, mentioned earlier in connection with Baxter’s conversion, Sibbes writes:

‘The Jews are not yet come in under Christ’s banner; but God, that hath persuaded Japhet to come into the tents of Shem, will persuade Shem to come into the tents of Japhet, Gen. 9.27. The “fulness of the Gentiles is not yet come in”, Rom. 11.25, but Christ, that hath the “utmost parts of the earth given him for his possession”, Psa. 2.8, will gather all the sheep his Father hath given him into one fold, that there may be one sheepfold and one shepherd, John 10. 16.

‘The faithful Jews rejoiced to think of the calling of the Gentiles; and why should not we joy to think of the calling of the Jews?’

This note of joy is significant. It had already been struck by Peter Martyr. If a widespread conversion of the Jews was yet to occur in the earth then the horizons of history were not, as Luther feared, wholly dark. Maintaining the truth that the great day for the Church would be the day of Christ’s appearing at the end of time, Sibbes nevertheless saw warrant for expecting what he calls ‘lesser days before that great day’. He continues:

‘As at the first coming of Christ, so at the overthrow of Anti-Christ, the conversion of the Jews, there will be much joy.... These days make way for that day. Whensoever prophecies shall end in performances, then shall be a day of joying and glorying in the God of our salvation for ever. And therefore in the Revelation where this Scripture is cited, Rev. 21.4, is meant the conversion of the Jews, and the glorious estate they shall enjoy before the end of the world. “We have waited for our God,” and now we enjoy him. Aye, but what saith the church there? “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.” There is yet another, “Come, Lord”, till we be in heaven.’

From the first quarter of the seventeenth century, belief in a future conversion of the Jews became commonplace among the English Puritans. In the late 1630’s, and in the national upheavals of the 1640’s — the period of the Civil Wars — the subject not infrequently was mentioned by Puritan leaders.

As a ground for hopefulness in regard to the prospects of Christ’s kingdom it was introduced in sermons before Parliament or on other public occasions by William Strong, William Bridge, George Gillespie and Robert Baillie, to name but a few. The fact that the two last-named were commissioners from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at the Westminster Assembly, which was convened by the English Parliament in 1643, is indicative of the agreement on this point between English and Scottish divines. Some of the rich doctrinal formularies which that Assembly produced, bear the same witness. The Larger Catechism, after the question, ‘What do we pray for in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer?’ (Thy Kingdom come), answers: ‘We pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fulness of the Gentiles brought in ... that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming.’ The Directory for the Public Worship of God (section on Public Prayer before Sermon) stipulates in similar language that prayer be made ‘for the conversion of the Jews’.

This same belief concerning the future of the Jews is to be found very widely in seventeenth-century Puritan literature. It appears in the works of such well-known Puritans as John Owen, Thomas Manton and John Flavel, though the indices of nineteenth-century reprints of their works do not always indicate this. It is also handled in a rich array of commentaries, both folios and quartos — David Dickson on the Psalms, George Hutcheson on the Minor Prophets, Jeremiah Burroughs on Hosea, William Greenhill on Ezekiel, Elnathan Parr on Romans and James Durham on Revelation: a list which could be greatly extended.

Occasionally the subject became the main theme of a volume. Perhaps the first in order among these was The Calling of the Jews, published in 1621 by William Gouge, the eminent Puritan minister of Blackfriars, London; the author was a barrister, Sir Henry Finch. A slender work, Some Discourses upon the Point of the Conversion of the Jews, by Moses Wall, appeared in 1650, and nineteen years later Increase Mather, the New England divine of Boston, issued his work, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applied. ‘That there shall be a general conversion of the Tribes of Israel is a truth which in some measure hath been known and believed in all ages of the Church of God, since the Apostles’ days….. Only in these late days, these things have obtained credit much more universally than heretofore.’ So Mather wrote in 1669.

By this latter date, however, divergencies of view had also become established within Puritan thought on prophecy, and to these we must now turn. They centre around those scriptural prophecies which appear to speak of a general conversion of the nations. The first expositors of a future conversion of Israel, Peter Martyr and William Perkins for instance, had placed that event very close to the end of time. Martyr interpreted the word ‘fulness’ in Paul’s statement, ‘blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in’ (Rom. 11.25) to mean that Christ’s kingdom among the Gentiles will have reached its fullest development, indeed its consummation, by the time that Israel is called. By the conversion of the Jews, he says, the churches will ‘be stirred and confirmed’, but the thought that thereafter many more Gentiles will be converted is not possible, Martyr argues, for ‘it is said, that the Jews shall then be saved and enter in, when the fulness of the Gentiles hath entered in. And if the calling of the Gentiles shall be complete, what other Gentiles shall there be remaining to be by the conversion of the Jews brought unto Christ?’

Thomas Brightman (1562—1607) seems to have been one of the first divines of the Puritan school to reject the argument that the Jews’ conversion must be placed at the very end of history. Brightman was a contemporary of Perkins at Cambridge and a fellow of Queens’ College before his appointment to the living of Hawnes, Bedfordshire, in 1592. With his Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, A Revelation of the Apocalypse (first published in Latin in the year of his death and later in English) he stands at the head of the long line of subsequent English commentators on that book. For Brightman the Revelation gives a chronological outline of church history: events up to the 14th chapter he considered were already fulfilled; the 15th commences to deal with things yet to come; while the 20th gives a summary in which ‘the whole history is repeated’. In the course of this exposition the Elizabethan Puritan gives considerable attention to the future prospects of the Jews: ‘I have set down these things with more store of words, because I would give our Divines an occasion of thinking more seriously of these things.’

Brightman’s work confirmed the view that the Jews would be called, but in addition it brought forward considerations concerning the time of their conversion which tended to show that the matter was not so conclusively settled as Martyr had considered. Though there would be a certain fulness of the Gentiles made up before the salvation of Israel, this does not necessitate the belief that no more Gentiles can be added; Paul himself Brightman argues, implies the contrary in verse 15 of Romans 11.15 The Jews’ calling, he believed, would be part of a new and brighter era of history, and not the end.

In the earliest and most popular Puritan exposition of Romans, the Plain Exposition of Elnathan Parr, published in 1620, it is interesting to note a development in the same direction. Parr was educated at Eton, graduated B.A. at Cambridge in 1597 and exercised a powerful ministry at Palgrave, Suffolk, dying about the year 1632. In handling chapter eleven he is in major agreement with Martyr and refers to his work. But over the prospects for the world at the time of Israel’s future calling he does not accept the Continental divine’s interpretation that the ‘fulness of the Gentiles’, preceding the Jews’ call, means that God’s saving work among the Gentiles will then be complete:

‘The casting off of the Jews, was our Calling; but the Calling of the Jews shall not be our casting off, but our greater enriching grace, and that two ways: First, in regard of the company of believers, when the thousands of Israel shall come in, which shall doubtless cause many Gentiles which now lie in ignorance, error and doubt, to receive the Gospel and join with them. The world shall then be a golden world, rich in golden men, saith Ambrose. Secondly, in respect of the graces, which shall then in more abundance be rained down upon the Church.” In 1627, seven years after Parr’s commentary appeared, further impetus was given to the expectation of world-wide blessing connected with the calling of the Jews, by the appearance of a Latin work by John Henry Alsted, The Beloved City. Alsted poses his main question in these words, ‘Whether there shall be any happiness of the Church here upon earth before the last day; and of what kind it shall be?’ From a consideration of some sixty-six places in the Scriptures he resolves this question in the affirmative and gives the following outline of the Church’s history during the course of the Christian era:

1.From Christ’s birth to the Council of Jerusalem, A.D. 50.

2.The second period is of the Church spread over the whole world and contains the calling and conversion of most nations.

3.From the beginning of the thousand years to the end thereof and it shall contain, as well as the martyrs that shall then rise, the nations not yet converted, and the Jews; and it shall be free from persecutions.

4.From the end of the thousand years to the last judgment. In which the estate of the Church shall be very miserable…..

It will be seen immediately that Alsted identifies the period of the Church’s highest development on earth, when the Jews will be called, with the millennium of Revelation 20. The most prevalent view hitherto was that the thousand years’ reign of Christ was his spiritual rule over the Church in this world —a symbolic picture of the whole period between Christ’s first and second advents. According to this traditional view, Christians of every generation share in Christ’s spiritual reign; they have ‘part in the first resurrection’ (Rev. 20.5), that is to say, they are people who have been quickened in regeneration. This spiritualization of the word ‘resurrection’ is not without support from other Scriptures. For instance, Christ, speaking of the present gospel era, says, ‘The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live’ (John 5.25).

This interpretation, popularized by Augustine, was now being challenged. In Alsted’s view the thousand years was literal not simply a symbolic figure — and the resurrection to mark its commencement was likewise to be literal. This new position on Revelation 20 soon gained influence in England, particularly through the writings of Joseph Mede (1586—1638), a learned Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Mede, like Alsted who influenced him, argued that the millennium is a future period of time, and he went further with the suggestion that it would be ushered in by a personal appearing of Christ —a ‘pre-millennial’ coming.’

Despite the general cautiousness of these two scholars, they both encouraged the practice of date-fixing and in the general excitement of the 1640’s — the Civil War period — the question whether Christ’s coming to establish a ‘millennial kingdom’ was near at hand was agitated by men of considerably less competence than Mede and Alsted. The end product was ‘the Fifth Monarchy’ party, so called because they believed that Christ’s monarchy, succeeding the four spoken of by Daniel, was shortly to be set up, with the Jews converted and the millennium brought in. Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, published in 1662 when this party was thoroughly discredited, comments pithily: ‘I dare boldly say that the furious factors for the Fifth Monarchy hath driven that nail which Master Mede did first enter, farther than he ever intended it; and doing it with such violence that they split the truths round about it. Thus, when ignorance begins to build on that foundation which learning hath laid, no wonder if there be no uniformity in such a mongrel fabric.”

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We have traced in these last few pages a sequence and development of ideas which may be enumerated as follows: (1) the Jews to be converted; (2) their calling to be associated with a further expansion of the Church and therefore not to be at the end; (3) a fuller development and future prosperity of the Church to be identified with the thousand years’ peace of Revelation 20 and (4) Christ himself to inaugurate this future reign and raise his saints.

It is important now to notice that these beliefs are not so necessarily related as to stand or fall together. The majority of Puritan divines believed that the scriptural evidence was broad enough to warrant an acceptance of points one and two above. Some considered that point three was correct, but that the ‘resurrection’ to usher in the millennium was not to be taken literally; it refers, they thought, to the spiritual resurrection of the Church’s influence in the world which will then be witnessed. This identification of the Church’s time of highest development with a spiritual millennium was to command very wide support in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Protestantism. Whether right or wrong, no major difference exists between those who accepted this refinement of point three and those who only went as far as point two. Sometimes those who accepted point three, in the sense just given, have been termed ‘millenaries’ or ‘chiliasts’, but Millenarianism proper is the view represented by point four and it is here that a radical difference is involved. According to this teaching the Church’s brightest era is to differ from the present not simply in terms of degree but in kind. That is to say, it will be more than a larger measure of the spiritual blessings already given to the church; by Christ’s personal appearing and the resurrection of saints an altogether new order of things is to be established. Christ will then reign in a manner not now seen or known. To this conclusion Mede’s teaching pointed and from it Puritanism, generally, diverged.

The reason for this divergence was the unwillingness of the majority to be committed to a prophetic scheme which virtually made Revelation 20, a notoriously difficult chapter; the axis of interpretation. Thus Elnathan Parr, while speaking of the future blessing promised in Romans 11 declines to employ Revelation 20 on account of its obscurity, though he notes that some have done so. Likewise John Owen with characteristic caution writes:

‘The coming of Christ to reign here on earth a thousand years is, if not a groundless opinion, yet so dubious and uncertain as not to be admitted a place in the analogy of faith to regulate our interpretation of Scripture in places that may fairly admit of another application.’

We must therefore note that it was not upon a Millenarian basis that the Puritan movement in general believed in the conversion of the Jews and a period of world-wide blessing. The belief was already common long before the challenge of Millenarianism became noticeable in the 1640’s, and, while the two sides held common ground in that both believed there are various passages in the Old and New Testaments warranting the expectation of future blessing for the world, men of the main Puritan school were quick to assert in answer to that challenge that those scriptures needed no pre-millennial interpretation of Revelation 20 to make their sense clear. Thus Robert Baillie answers a pre-millennial writer who had appealed to Romans 11.12 (where Paul writes of the Jews, ‘If the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?) in this way:

‘There is nothing here for the point in hand: we grant willingly that the nation of the Jews shall be converted to the faith of Christ; and that the fulness of the Gentiles is to come in with them to the Christian Church; also that the quickening of that dead and rotten member, shall be a matter of exceeding joy to the whole Church. But that the converted Jews shall return to Canaan to build Jerusalem, that Christ shall come from heaven to reign among them for a thousand years, there is no such thing intimated in the Scriptures in hand.’

Thomas Hall in his pungent little book, A Confutation of the Millenarian Opinion, 1657, makes this same point in dealing with a certain Dr. Homes whose argument he summarizes and answers in the following terms:

‘Those things which are prophesied in the Word of God and are not yet come to pass, must be fulfilled, (very true.) But the great sensible and visible happiness of the Church on earth before the Ultimate Day of Judgement is prophesied in the Word of God, which is the Old and New Testament (very true,) ergo, it shall come to pass; who ever denied it? But what is this to the point in hand? Or what Logick is this? Because in the last dayes the Jews shall be called, and because the Glorious Spiritual Priviledges of the Church shall then be advanced, Ergo, Christ and the saints alone shall reign on earth a thousand years. This is the Drs Logick you see from first to last.’

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We are now in a position to see how this somewhat prolonged discussion of Puritan thought on prophecy relates to the subject of revival. If the calling of the Jews and a wider conversion work in the world is to occur without such cataclysmic acts as personal descent of Christ and the resurrection of saints, by what means will these blessings be brought to pass? The answer of the main Puritan school became a most important part of the heritage which they left to posterity. It was that the kingdom of Christ would spread and triumph through the powerful operations of the Holy Spirit poured out upon the Church in revivals. Such periods would come at the command of Christ, for new Pentecosts would show him still to be ‘both Lord and Christ’. Their whole Calvinistic theology of the gospel, with its emphasis on the power given to Christ as Mediator for the sure ingathering of the vast number of his elect, and on the person of the Holy Spirit as the One by whom the dead are quickened, dovetails in here. They rejected altogether a naturalistic view of inevitable progress in history —so common in the nineteenth century — but asserted that the sovereign purpose of God in the gospel, as indicated by the promises of Scripture yet unfulfilled, points to the sure hope of great outpourings of the Spirit in the future. It was upon such central beliefs as these that the Puritans based their expectations. John Howe, for instance, exemplifies their common attitude when he dealt with unfulfilled prophecy in a series of fifteen sermons on Ezekiel 39.29: ‘Neither will I hide my face any more from them: for I have poured out my Spirit upon the house of Israel, saith the Lord God.’ The series was posthumously published under the title, The Prosperous State of the Christian Interest before the End of Time by a Plentiful Effusion of the Holy Spirit. As Howe’s emphasis on the work of the Spirit is so characteristic of Puritan thought I have included a lengthy extract from these sermons at the end of this book, though it may help the reader to appreciate what follows if it is read after this present chapter.

Throughout Puritan literature, embracing authors who followed ‘the independent way’ in church government and those who were of Presbyterian convictions, and as common in Scotland as in England, there is this emphasis upon the kingdom of Christ advancing through revivals. We shall later seek to show how the transmission of this belief to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries became one of the most powerful influences in the spiritual history of Britain and America.

In conclusion, it may be helpful to attempt a summary of the different views on unfulfilled prophecy which were current among the main-line Puritans:

1. A small number continued the view current among the early Reformers that the Scriptures predict no future conversion of the Jews and that the idea of a ‘golden age’ in history is without biblical foundation. The most able spokesmen for this position were Alexander Petrie and Richard Baxter.

2. A larger number appear to have held the belief of Martyr and Perkins that the conversion of the Jews would be close to the end of the world. This was probably the dominant view at least until the 1640’s.

3. The attention drawn by such writers as Mede and Alsted to the millennium of Revelation 20, and to the Old Testament prophecies which appear to speak of a general conversion of the nations, led to a revived expectation of a pre-millerinial appearing of Christ, when Israel would be converted and Christ’s kingdom established in the earth for at least a thousand years before the day of judgment. Stated in its more moderate form this belief commanded the support of some of the Westminster divines (notably, William Twisse, Thomas Goodwin, William Bridge and Jeremiah Burroughs) ; in its wilder form it became identified with the Fifth Monarchy party. In all its forms, however, its influence seems to have been short-lived in the seventeenth century, and pre-millennial belief gained no general recognition in Protestantism until its revival two years later.

The fourth group, like the second, believed in a future conversion of Israel and opposed the idea of a millennium to be introduced by Christ’s appearing and a resurrection of saints. But, like the third group, they regarded Romans 11 and portions of Old Testament prophecy as indicating a period of widespread blessing both attending and following the calling of the Jews. The Confession of the Independents, The Savoy Declaration of 1658, summarizes this in its chapter ‘Of the Church’:

‘We expect that in the later days, Antichrist being destroyed, the Jews called, and the adversaries of the Kingdom of his dear Son broken, the Churches of Christ being inlarged, and edified through a free and plentiful communication of light and grace, shall enjoy in this world a more quiet, peaceable and glorious condition than they have enjoyed.’

This statement has been attributed to the millenarianism current among Independents in the late 1640’s, but it should be noted that the Savoy divines, among whom was John Owen, declined to identify this period of the Church’s highest development with the millennium. Moreover, this same belief was maintained by staunch Presbyterians as, for instance, Thomas Manton (author of the ‘Epistle to the Reader’ in the Westminster Confession), David Dickson and Samuel Rutherford. Before Rutherford met any of the English Independents he wrote from St. Andrews in 1640: ‘I shall be glad to be a witness, to behold the kingdoms of the world become Christ’s. I could stay out of heaven many years to see that victorious triumphing Lord act that prophesied part of his soul-conquering love, in taking into his kingdom the greater sister, that kirk of the Jews, who sometime courted our Well-beloved for her little sister (Cant. 8.8); to behold him set up as an ensign and banner of love, to the ends of the world.’ This was no millennialism as Rutherford was careful elsewhere to say, ‘I mean not any such visible reign of Christ on earth, as the Millenaries fancy.’

Forty years later this same belief was the common testimony of the Covenanting field-preachers who upheld the confession of the Church of Scotland in its purity during ‘the killing times’. Richard Cameron preached on July 18, 1680 just three days before his violent death on the moors at Ayrsmoss, from the text, ‘Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen: I will be exalted in the earth.’ (Psa. 46.10). To his hearers, gathered with him under the shadow of eternity, Cameron declared:

‘You that are in hazard for the truth, be not troubled: our Lord will be exalted among the heathen. But many will say, “We know He will be exalted at the last and great day when He shall have all the wicked on His left hand.” Yes but says He, “I will be exalted in the earth.” He has been exalted on the earth; but the most wonderfully exalting of His works we have not yet seen. The people of God have been right high already. Oh, but the Church of the Jews was sometimes very high, and sometimes the Christian Church! In the time of Constantine she was high. Yea, the Church of Scotland has been very high, “Fair as the moon, clear as the sun; and terrible as an army with banners.” The day has been when Zion was stately in Scotland. The terror of the Church of Scotland once took hold of all the kings and great men that passed by. Yea; the terror of it took hold on Popish princes; nay, on the Pope himself. But all this exalting that we have yet seen is nothing to what is to come. The Church was high, but it shall be yet much higher. “There is none like the God of Jeshurun.” The Church of Christ is to be so exalted that its members shall be made to ride upon the high places of the earth. Let us not be judged to be of the opinion of some men in England called the Fifth-Monarchy men, who say that, before the great day, Christ shall come in person from heaven with all the saints and martyrs and reign a thousand years on earth. But we are of the opinion that the Church shall yet be more high and glorious, as appears from the book of Revelation, and the Church shall have more power than ever she had before.’

The above four classifications cannot be taken as exact; they are an approximation. The Puritans, apart from the Fifth Monarchists — if they can be classed as Puritan at all — had no party divisions determined by prophetic beliefs. Yet the seventeenth century was the formative period of the differing schools of thought on prophecy which at a later date are more sharply identifiable. The fact that a present-day classification of evangelical prophetical belief would prove very similar seems to show that few new considerations have entered into the debate in the last three hundred years.

Having thus looked in general at Puritan thought on prophecy we shall now turn to a chapter of Scripture which lay at the heart of the matter.

Chapter IV. Apostolic Testimony: The Basis Of The Hope

There awaits the Gentiles, in their distinctive identity as such, gospel blessing far surpassing anything experienced during the period of Israel’s apostasy, and this unprecedented enrichment will be occasioned by the conversion of Israel on a scale commensurate with that of their earlier disobedience.’

JOHN MURRAY The Epistle the Romans, chapter 11. 11-12

THERE are several reasons why the future of the Jews was a subject of importance in the minds of so many Christians in the seventeenth century. For one thing they considered that a concern for the welfare of that scattered nation is a necessary part of Christian piety. Of the Jews, concerning the flesh, Christ came; to them first was the gospel preached, and from them was it received by the Gentiles: ‘Which should teach us’, writes Edward Elton, ‘not to hate the Jews (as many do) only because they are Jews, which name is among many so odious that they think they cannot call a man worse than to call him a Jew; but, beloved, this ought not to be so, for we are bound to love and honour the Jews, as being the ancient people of God, to wish them well, and to be earnest in prayer to God for their conversion’.

We shall later note how this awareness of duty towards the Jews did enter into the day-to-day living of many Christians in the seventeenth century. And yet their interest in Israel was always set in a wider context than the particular future of that nation; it was Israel’s future within the kingdom of Christ and the relation between their incoming and the advancement of Christ’s glory that was uppermost in their thinking. The future of the Jews had decisive significance for them because they believed that, though little is clearly revealed of the future purposes of God in history, enough has been given us in Scripture to warrant the expectation that with the calling of the Jews there will come far-reaching blessing for the world. Puritan England and Covenanting Scotland knew much of spiritual blessing and it was the prayerful longing for wider blessing, not a mere interest in unfulfilled prophecy, which led them to give such place to Israel.

We shall be concerned, firstly, in this chapter, with what was claimed as New Testament evidence for a future general conversion of the Jews. The two gospel texts Matthew 23.38, 39 and Luke 21.24 were sometimes cited. In these Christ appears to place a limit to the period during which a general judgment will rest upon the Jews and, by implication, to suggest that a brighter day for them would subsequently follow: ‘Jerusalem shall be trodden down of the Gentiles, until the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled’; ‘For I say unto you: ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord’. The words ‘Blessed is he that cometh’ remind us of the greeting and welcome given to Jesus upon his entry into Jerusalem, (Matt. 21.9) and the reference to their future use by the Jews suggests that their long continued hardiness as a nation is one day to end ‘the cordial welcome is contrasted with the factual position at the time’ when Jesus spoke. The fact that Jesus did not entirely dismiss the question put to him by the disciples before his ascension, ‘Wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel’, may also be suggestive. Another passage more often quoted by the Puritans was 2 Corinthians 3.15, 16: ‘But even unto this day, when Moses is read the veil is upon their heart. Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the veil shall be taken away.’ ‘Alas,’ writes Increase Mather, ‘there is a veil of miserable blindness upon their hearts that they cannot, they will not, see the Truth: But, saith the Apostle, “This shall be taken away”. And (saith he) “it shall turn”. What is this? I answer: “It”, there may note the body of the Jewish nation, or the words may be read, “They shall turn” (i.e. the blinded minds of the Jews shall turn) “unto the Lord”.’

Another New Testament text sometimes cited by seventeenth century divines was Revelation 16.12, which speaks of the drying up of the river Euphrates ‘that the way of the kings of the east might be prepared’. It was suggested that ‘kings of the east’ is a reference to the Jews scattered in the East beyond the Euphrates.

Much might be said on these texts but it must be confessed that in the case of each a considerable amount of obscurity remains, and even taken together they scarcely amount to definite evidence of a future conversion of the Jews as a people. It was not, however, upon these texts that Puritan expositors placed the weight of the case. With reference to those who expected ‘a large and visible addition of Jews to Christ’s church’, Johannes Wollebius (1586—1629) the Reformed theologian of Basel, noted that ‘nothing that would uphold this idea may be found in the Apocalypse’. But he adds, ‘Those who teach it look to Romans 11.25-26 for their chief authority’. There can be no doubt that Wollebius’ last assertion is correct and that the Puritan view of Israel’s future, as far as the New Testament is concerned, rests principally upon their exposition of that chapter. ‘I know not any Scripture containing a more pregnant and illustrious testimony and demonstration of the Israelites’ future vocation,’ says Mather, ‘it being a main scope of the Apostle in this chapter to make known this Mystery unto the Gentiles.’ Similarly the eminent Scottish divine, James Durham, writes: ‘Whatever may be doubted of their restoring to their land, yet they shall be brought to a visible Church-state. Not only in particular persons here and there in congregations; but that multitudes, yea, the whole body of them shall be brought, in a common way with the Gentiles, to profess Christ, which cannot be denied, as Romans 11 is clear and that will be enough to satisfy us.’ In the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards was a spokesman for the same conviction when he wrote, Nothing is more certainly foretold than this national conversion of the Jews in Romans 11. To this chapter, therefore, and its interpretation, we must now turn.

The verses referred to by Wollebius read:

v.25. ‘For I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, lest ye should be wise in your own conceits; that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in.

v.26. ‘And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob.’

A number of questions are involved in the interpretation of these two verses:

The blindness spoken of in verse 25 clearly belongs to Israel as a race, with the exception of a believing remnant —hence the qualification of the Apostle, ‘blindness in part has’ happened to Israel’. Does the salvation of verse 26 likewise designate a blessing which will belong to the Jewish people as a whole and as a race? Who are the ‘all Israel’ who shall be saved?

Some Reformation commentators, notatbly Calvin, took the view that the ‘all Israel’ of verse 26 refers to the sum total of the complete Church, including both Gentile Christians and the remnant of believing Jews. It does not, they thought, designate national Israel at some future point in history. This spiritualization of the term ‘Israel’ is not as strained as some have alleged. Two chapters earlier Paul is careful to show that race as such does not make a true Israelite (Rom. 9.6), and elsewhere Gentile believers are acknowledged as being of Abraham’s seed (Gal. 3.29); in the New Testament perspective, national privileges in regard to salvation have ended and on at least one occasion the term ‘Israel of God’ is taken to describe the whole Church of Christ (Gal. 6.16). But there are strong reasons for not accepting this interpretation of the word ‘Israel’ in Romans 11.26.

(i) It would involve a violent transition from the literal meaning of the term in verse 25 to a spiritual one in verse 26, and the passage gives no indication that such a sudden difference of meaning is being introduced. On the contrary, it may be argued that Paul’s usage of the term ‘Israel’ in this whole section is consistent and uniform. As Doekes observes: ‘In these three chapters (Rom. 9—11) the term “Israel” occurs no less than eleven times. And in the preceding ten cases it refers indisputably to the Jews, in contrast with the Gentiles. What compelling reason can there be, therefore, to accept another meaning here? Not, to be sure, the context, for the differentiation between Jews and Gentiles does not cease in verse 25 but is continued in the verses which follow.’

(ii) If the ‘all Israel’ of verse 26 refers to the final salvation of all believers, Jew and Gentile why does Paul call it a mystery? Elnathan Parr’s objection is relevant: ‘Paul saith that he would not have the Gentiles ignorant; of what? That all the elect. should be saved? Whoever doubted it? But of the calling of the Jews there was a doubt. He calls it a secret or mystery; but that all the elect shall be saved is no secret.’

Accepting that Israel in verse 26 means Jewish people and not the Church as such, we must now proceed to a further question.

2. Is the salvation of ‘all Israel’ something that is progressively realized through the ages? Does it refer to the complete number of individual Jews who through the centuries have been added to the Church by faith in Christ, as for example Paul in the first century, Emmanuel Tremellius at the Reformation, Adolph Saphir in the nineteenth century, and so on? Some commentators have answered this in the affirmative and argued that Paul, in verses 25 and 26, is not speaking about a still-future conversion of the Jews as a nation. The apostle does not, they say, teach a temporal sequence in the order of events not ‘after the incoming of the fulness of the Gentiles then all Israel shall be saved’. ‘Paul,’ says a recent writer holding this view, ‘is not thinking about the time but about the way or manner in which “all Israel” is saved.” According to this interpretation, the hardening judicially inflicted upon Israel as a body will continue until the last of the elect Gentiles are saved, that is, until the very end; nevertheless through all the centuries a portion of elect Jews will escape that hardening, and this body — the entire Jewish remnant is the ‘all Israel’ who are to be united for ever with Gentile believers in the fold of God.

If this view is correct, then Romans 11 gives us no grounds for expecting any saving work of conversion among the Jews surpassing what has yet been seen in history: there is no prediction of a great revival among the Jews still to come. This exposition of Romans 11 was apparently common in the early seventeenth century, but it was almost uniformly rejected by English and Scottish exegetes of the Puritan school. Charles Ferme, for example, mentioned earlier as one of Robert Rollock’s students in Edinburgh in the 1580's who later became eminent in his witness and suffering for the gospel, gives this comment on verses 25 and 26:

‘As some, reserved of God through the election of grace, owned Christ as Lord in the days of Paul, so when the fulness of the Gentiles shall have been brought in, the great majority of the Israelitish people are to be called, through the gospel, to the God of their salvation, and shall profess and own Jesus Christ, whom, formerly, that is, during the time of hardening, they denied.... This interpretation of the passage is most pertinent to the scope of the present discussion; but because that recall of the Israelites is not yet witnessed in respect to the majority, most interpreters explain the passage differently, and understand what the apostle here says — “all Israel shall be saved”, of Israel in spirit, and also of all Israelites according to the flesh, who at any time have believed, whether in times of apostasy, as were those of Ahab and Paul, or of open profession, as that of David, or of reformation, as those of Hezekiah and Josiah. In this way the meaning will be — “that the Gentiles having been added, through the gospel, to the people of God, that is, to the Israelites, who are Israelites in spirit, as well as according to the flesh, ‘all Israel’, viz. Israel in the spirit, consisting of the elect from among Jews and Gentiles, ‘shall be saved’ at the second coming of Christ”.”

Ferme’ s valuable work on Romans lay unpublished until 1651 but long before that date the interpretation he held to be ‘most pertinent’ had obtained general acceptance.

As we noted in the previous chapter, it had been advanced in the notes of the Geneva Bible as early as I560 and expounded in Peter Martyr’s commentary on Romans published in English eight years later.

The argument against ‘all Israel’ being interpreted as ‘the entire remnant of Israel’ involves a wider consideration of the whole chapter. In summary form it may be stated as follows:

Paul, in putting the question ‘Hath God cast away his people?’ (v. I), opens the subject of the cast-off condition of Israel and the problem how that condition is consistent with the promises and purposes of God. It is true, he says, that as a body they have fallen, but there is a remnant who believe in accordance with God’s sovereign determination (v v. 2-10). The grace of God has prevented the apostasy of Israel being total and universal. The question, however, remains: Has God finished with the Jews collectively considered as a people? ‘I say then, have they stumbled that they should fall?’ Did their fall fulfill God’s ultimate purposes towards them? ‘God forbid!’ (v.11). We do not, Paul affirms, see the conclusion of God’s design in Israel’s fall because that fall is overruled for the salvation of Gentiles; which salvation is, in turn, intended to prompt Israelites to repentance and faith (‘provoke them to jealousy’). Grace, not judgment, is thus God’s ultimate purpose. Israel’s stumbling is made the occasion for salvation coming to the Gentiles and that is not the end, for, as the apostle goes on to show, God has further planned the salvation of Israel on a scale which will enrich the Gentiles to a degree hitherto unprecedented:

v.I 2. ‘Now if the fall of them be the riches of the world, and the diminishing of them the riches of the Gentiles; how much more their fulness?
v.13. ‘For I speak to you Gentiles, in as much as I am the apostle of the Gentiles, I magnify mine office:
v14 ‘If by any means I may provoke to emulation them which are my flesh, and might save some of them.’

The effect upon Paul personally of the truth declared in verse I2, he wishes his Gentile hearers to know, is to quicken him in his Gentile ministry so that the success of that ministry may serve to awaken Jews. But along with his concern for his fellow countrymen there is a greater end in view because the interests of the Gentiles themselves are bound up with God’s design towards Israel.

v.15. ‘For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’

Concluding the parenthesis of verses 13 and 14 on his present ministry with its hope of saving ‘some of them’, Paul reverts to the prospect already envisaged in verse 12. According to the view we are here opposing, the prediction of verses 12 and 15 has to do with the aggregate of individual Jews saved through the ages and not a future national conversion. But the verses cannot bear that meaning for it ignores a vital part of Paul’s argument, namely that the parallel drawn between the ‘casting away’ and ‘the receiving of them’ requires the subject to be the same in both instances. The people who were rejected are to be readmitted.

The remnant of believers never fell nor were cut off, and it cannot therefore be of them that Paul says they will be ‘received’ and grafted in again (v.23). Thus Elnathan Parr, answering those who denied that ‘any other calling of the Jews to be expected than in these days, now and then one’, asserts: ‘the very reading of the words of the 11, 12 and this verse, make the contrary manifest: If the casting away of them of whom? Of the nation, say learned men: What shall the receiving of them? Of whom? Of them which are cast away; that is the nation: or else we make the Apostle say he knows not what: not that the same individuals of the nation which are cast away shall be received, but the body of the people to be understood.”

The sense of verses 12 and 15, according to the common Puritan interpretation, points to a vast addition to the Church by Israel’s conversion with resulting wider blessing for the world. There is a great revival predicted here!

John Brown, minister of Wamphray, Scotland, gives the following exposition in his Exposition of Romans, 1666, and it may be taken as typical of the whole school to which he belonged.

In verse 12, Brown says, the apostle meets a difficulty which might arise in the minds of Gentiles following the disclosure of verse 11 that the hardening of the Jews was not the final dispensation of God towards them. If room has been made in God’s kingdom by the casting out of the Jews, the thought might occur that the restoration of the Jews would lead to the Gentiles being cast out. ‘To this the apostle answereth, that, on the contrary, the Gentiles shall have braver days then, than ever they had; for if their fall, or stumbling, was the occasion by which the Gentiles dispersed up and down the world, enjoyed the riches of the gospel and of the knowledge of God in Christ, and their diminishing (to the same purpose, and explicating what is meant by their fall) that is, their rejecting of the Messias for the most part, so as there were but few behind, and that nation was worn to a thin company and a small number of such as embraced the gospel, be the riches of the Gentiles, the same with the riches of the world; how much more shall their abundance be? that is, How much more shall their inbringing and fulness, or the conversion of the body and bulk of that nation (for it is opposed to their diminishing) tend to the enriching of the Gentile world in the knowledge of Christ; and so the Gentiles need not fear that the conversion of the Jews shall any way prejudice them; but they may expect to reap advantage thereby.’

On verse 15, the minister of Wamphray continues: ‘In this verse the apostle doth further explain and illustrate that argument set down, verse 12, and useth other expressions to the same purpose; If the casting away of them, that is, if the slinging away of the Jews, and casting them out of the church, be the reconciling of the world, that is, be the occasion whereby the gospel should be preached to the Gentile world, that thereby they might be reconciled unto God, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead? Will there not be joyful days thro’ the world, and among the Gentiles, when they shall be received into favour again? Will it not be like the resurrection from the dead, when Jew and Gentile shall both enjoy the same felicity and happiness? Seeing out of the dead state of the Jews, when cast without doors, God brought life to the Gentiles, will he not much more do so out of their enlivened estate? will it not be to the Gentiles as the resurrection from the dead?’

In the verses which follow there are three further reasons why the Jews’ conversion is to be expected: because of the holiness of the first-fruits and the root, v16; because of the power of God, ‘God is able to graft them in again’, v23; and because of the grace of God manifested to the Gentiles, v24, who would in turn be the means of salvation to the Jews, ‘that through your mercy they also may obtain mercy’ v31. Matthew Henry illustrates the last reason thus, ‘If the putting out of their candle was the lighting of yours, by that power of God who brings good out of evil, much more shall the continued light of your candle, when God’s time is come, be a means of lighting theirs again’.

All these considerations lead to the conclusion that in verses 25 and 26 Paul is speaking of the realization in future history of what the predictions of the earlier verses point towards, namely the termination of the long period of Israel’s blindness, and the resulting salvation of a large mass of that people. The ‘all Israel’ is not the believing remnant of all centuries but the body of the Jews received again at a particular period in history. The mystery of which Paul would not have them ignorant is, in Parr’s words, ‘that when the fulness of the Gentiles is come in, there shall be a famous, notorious, universal calling of the Jews’. This is not to say that every individual Israelite will then be converted; despite the thousands of believing Jews in the apostolic period the casting away of the Jews was so general that it permitted the assertion that Israel was cast off, so, despite those who will remain unbelieving, the number to be ingathered will be of an extent which justifies the expression ‘all Israel shall be saved’.

3. We have already in part anticipated and answered a third and last question, but it now needs closer attention. In the last chapter we noted that a number of seventeenth-century expositors believed in a future general conversion of Israel but placed the event at the very end of history. This view has contemporary upholders, one of whom writes, ‘All Israel can be saved only as the last rays of the sun fade away for ever and light celestial takes’ their place’.’ Justification for this belief is taken from two statements in Romans 11 which we must now consider.

First, Paul’s words on the incoming of ‘the fulness of the Gentiles’ (v.25), are taken to mean the conclusion of the kingdom of God in the world — ‘the fulness’ being equated with the complete number of the elect from among the Gentiles. If this is so, then the salvation of ‘all Israel’ which is to attend this fulness of the Gentiles must take place on the verge of eternity and signal the end of Gospel blessing for the world.

Paul’s use of the word ‘fulness’ earlier in Romans 11 does not, however, necessitate this meaning. The period of Israel’s fall in verse 12 is contrasted with her changed condition at the time of her ‘fulness’; fulness, then, for Israel cannot mean the sum total of elect Jews because there were obviously elect Jews at the time of her fall. ‘Fulness’ in verse 12 means the large numerical increase of converted Jews, but not excluding the possibility others being subsequently added. So in verse 25 it is not necessary to believe that ‘fulness’ means anything more than a large addition of Gentiles, ‘a multitude of the Gentiles’, says Matthew Poole’s Annotations, ‘greater by far, than was in the apostles’ days’. The verse says nothing which requires us to expect no further expansion of the kingdom of Christ thereafter. As a recent commentator writes, ‘“The fulness of the Gentiles” denotes unprecedented blessing for them but does not exclude even greater blessing to follow.”

A second statement quoted from Romans 11 to justify the belief that the conversion of the Jews will be at the end of the world is the phrase in verse 15, ‘what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ In these words Paul is adding to what he has already said in verse 12. In that verse he did not say what the blessing would be which would accompany the incoming of the fulness of the Jews but left it in the form of an exclamation: ‘If the fall of them be the riches of the world.. . how much more their fulness?’ ‘How much more?’ comments Parr, ‘as if he admired it and were not able to express or conceive.’ In verse 15, however, Paul does specify something of the nature of the blessing, it will be ‘life from the dead’. Some interpreters, including Origen and Chrysostom in the early centuries, take this phrase as referring to the physical resurrection of the dead, and so taken the verse would prove that the conversion of the Jews must be placed at the very end of time.

But there is no necessity for the phrase to be so taken in a literal sense. As Poole notes, life from the dead is ‘a proverbial speech, to signify a great change’. Certainly in the Scriptures the idea of resurrection is frequently used with a spiritual and figurative meaning. It is so employed by the prophets as, for example in Hosea 6.2, ‘the third day he will raise us up and we shall live in his sight’, and in Ezekiel 37, where Israel’s spiritual revival is forcefully described as their coming out of their graves. In Christ’s teaching, conversion is likened to quickening the dead (John 5.21), and the restored prodigal is characterized as one who ‘was dead and is alive again’ (Luke 15.32).

Not only is a spiritual interpretation of the phrase ‘life from the dead’ possible, there are indeed good grounds for regarding it as preferable.

(i) Verses 12 and 15 speak of the interaction between Jews and Gentiles in the advancement of the kingdom of God, and the riches coming to the Gentiles on the occasion of the Jews’ defection is represented as being exceeded by the blessing which would attend their restoration. While it is true that resurrection and glorification are the final and highest blessings belonging to the Church, they are benefits which do not naturally succeed to the Gentiles as a result of Israel’s recovery. But taking ‘life from the dead’ figuratively, Paul’s progression of thought advances smoothly: if Israel’s fall and dishonour brought the gospel of reconciliation to the Gentiles, how much more will her renewal and restoration to honour bring revival to the world? ‘For if the casting away of them be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ As Godet paraphrases it, ‘When cursed, they have contributed to the restoration of the world; what will they not do when blessed?’

(ii) The second advent of Christ which will accomplish the resurrection of the dead will bring a consummation of blessing to the Church — not an extension of it to either Jew or Gentile (2 Thess. I .9—I0). If the conversion of the Jews were understood to be in any way linked with the resurrection day the uniform teaching of many other parts of Scripture would require some time lapse to occur between the two. As Parr observes: ‘Though God can save men in an instant, yet he hath appointed means, which means cease at the resurrection, and therefore no calling to be then expected: for that is the time of revealing judgement, not of preaching Mercie.” This qualification of a time lapse must therefore be introduced in the literal view, the conversion of sinners and the coming of Christ to judgment being two quite separate things. On the other hand, if ‘life from the dead’ be understood spiritually it is easily apparent, according to the analogy of other scriptures, how the conversion of a large mass of people — a nation — would at once contribute to far-reaching quickening in the world. ‘And their seed shall be known among the Gentiles, and their offspring among the people: all that see them shall acknowledge them, that they are the seed which the Lord hath blessed.

... For as the earth bringeth forth her bud, and as a garden causeth the things that are sown in it to spring forth; so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all nations’ (Isa. 61.9—11).

(iii) Finally, as John Murray has carefully shown in his recent Exposition of Romans, the standard Pauline phrase to denote the resurrection of the body is ‘resurrection from the-dead’: nowhere else does ‘life from the dead’ refer to the physical resurrection and its closest parallel, ‘alive from the dead’ (6.13) refers to spiritual life.’

For reasons such as these, Puritan exegetes (comparable in this to Ambrose the early Church Father) took ‘life from the dead’ figuratively. Thus the marginal note of the Geneva Bible gives this note on Romans 11.15: ‘The Jewes now remain, as it were, in death for lack of the Gospel, but when both they and the Gentiles shall embrace Christ, the world shall be restored to a new life.’

This belief introduced a new perspective in the Puritan understanding of history. While some retained the view that Romans 11 taught a conversion of the Jews at the end of time, there is evidence that the main-stream of belief became committed to the view given above. In 1652, for example, eighteen of the most eminent Puritan divines, including men of presbyterial convictions as William Gouge, Edmund Calamy and Simeon Ashe, and Independents as John Owen and Thomas Goodwin, wrote in support of missionary labours then being undertaken in New England and affirmed their belief that:

‘the Scripture speaks of a double conversion of the Gentiles, the first before the conversion of the Jewes, they being Branches wilde by nature grafted into the True Olive Tree instead of the naturall Branches which are broken off. This fulness of the Gentiles shall come in before the conversion of the Jewes, and till then blindness hath happened unto Israel, Rom. 11.25. The second, after the conversion of the Jewes… 20

Before we leave Romans 11 we must comment on one other issue of major significance which cannot be passed over. A great part of the differences among Christians over prophecy relates to the interpretation of Old Testament prophecy. Those who insist on what is called the literal principle of interpretation argue that the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies respecting Israel’s future blessing and the world-wide success of Christ’s kingdom cannot be in the present age: the personal advent of Christ must intervene to introduce a new dispensation. According to this view certain of the grand predictions of Isaiah and the Prophets apply not to the Christian Church in her present form but to a future millennial kingdom.

It is difficult to understand how this opinion can be maintained in the light of the New Testament writers’ own use of the Prophets. The fact is that the age of highest blessing predicted by the Prophets is spoken of by the apostles as already in being — God’s gathering to himself a people (Hos. 2.23), Christ’s reign over the Gentiles (Isa. 11.10), and the day of world-wide salvation (Isa. 49.8); these are all texts quoted by Paul as having a present fulfilment (cf. Rom. 9.26; 15.12; 2 Cor. 6.2). Similarly we find James in Acts 15.14, 16, referring the prediction of Amos 9.11, ‘In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen’, to the conversion of Gentiles in the apostolic era, and the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, far from restricting the great predictions of Jeremiah 3’ to Israel in a future age, considers the privileges there described as already possessed in the New Testament Church (compare Jer.31.31 and Heb. 8.8). There is here not a trace of the idea that the witness of the Prophets to an age of coming blessedness must be referred to a millennial kingdom introduced by the Second Advent. On the contrary. there is plenty to warn us that the literal principle is a dangerously misleading guide to the interpretation of the Prophets. Paul is certainly not employing that principle in Galatian 4.26, 27 when he distinguishes the Jerusalem ‘which now is, and is in bondage with her children’, from ‘Jerusalem which is above’, and which he tells the Galatian believers ‘is the mother of us all’. It is to this spiritual Jerusalem that he then proceeds to apply the glorious prediction of Isaiah 54.1. The assertion that prophecies spoken of ‘Zion’ or ‘Jerusalem’ in the Old Testament can only refer to national Israel is untenable.

Recognizing this, another school of prophetic interpreters has argued that no Old Testament predictions respecting Israel await fulfilment. The fulfilment has already occurred in the Christian Church. But this claim goes too far, for it leaves out of account Paul’s use of the Prophets in the chapter of Romans now under consideration. Having opened, as we have seen, the divine mystery that the casting off of Israel was not final, he turns for confirmation to the inspired testimony of Scripture: ‘blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be Saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins’ (v. 25b—27). This quotation, taken from Isaiah 59.20 and Jeremiah 31.34, would be valueless in this context were it not that the words quoted collaborate what Paul has already affirmed respecting Israel. The way he employs these texts is proof that the full scope of Old Testament prophecy has not yet been realized in history.

This is of major significance. We have already noted that predictions of Christ’s kingdom in Isaiah and in Jeremiah were considered applicable by the New Testament writers to the Church in the Apostolic age. Paul's use of the same prophets in Romans 11.26, 27 now shows that the fulfilment was only initial and by no means exhaustive. A larger fulfilment still awaits the Church, when the same covenant faithfulness of God which has already brought gospel blessings to the Gentile world will be the cause of the removal of Israel’s sins. Gentile and Jew are thus both contained in the same Old Testament predictions, and because these predictions admit of successive fulfilments and speak of the same salvation there is nothing to prevent what has already been referred to New Testament converts being applied to the future conversion of Israel. Jeremiah 31.34 has both been fulfilled (Heb. 8.8) and is yet to be fulfilled in a day of greater gospel blessing (Rom. 11.27).

If this is the right lesson to draw from Paul’s use of the Prophets in Romans 11 then there is a key given to us for the interpretation of a number of Old Testament prophecies which are similar to the two particular texts which Paul quotes. The Puritans saw this clearly and used the key to good effect in their expositions of the Old Testament. An illustration of this can be taken from the works of the eminent Robert Leighton. In a sermon on Isaiah 60. I entitled ‘Christ the Light and Lustre of the Church’, preached when he was minister of Newbattle, Scotland, in January, 1642, he had no hesitation in applying the exhortation, ‘Arise, shine; for thy light is come’, to the whole Church. At the same time he knew that Isaiah 60. 1-3 stands related to what is predicted in Isaiah 59.20, and that the latter verse is referred by the apostle particularly to Israel’s salvation. He therefore gives to his text its full scope:
‘This prophecy is, out of question, a most rich description of the kingdom of Christ under the Gospel. And in this sense, this invitation to arise and shine is mainly addressed to the mystical Jerusalem, yet not without some privilege to the literal Jerusalem beyond other people. They are first invited to arise and shine, because this Sun arose first in their horizon. Christ came of the Jews, and came first to them. . . . Undoubtedly, that people of the Jews shall once more be commanded to arise and shine, and their return shall be the riches of the Gentiles (Rom. 11.12), and that shall be a more glorious time than ever the Church of God did yet behold. Nor is there any inconvenience if we think that the high expressions of this prophecy have some spiritual reference to that time, since the great doctor of the Gentiles applies some words of the former chapter to that purpose, Rom. 11.26. They forget a main point of the Church’s glory, who pray not daily for the conversion of the Jews.’ George Hutcheson, in his valuable Brief Exposition on the Small Prophets, uses this same broad principle of interpretation. Expounding Hosea 2.23, ‘And I will sow her unto me in the earth, and I will have mercy upon her that had not obtained mercy. . .‘ he writes: ‘The Apostle doth apply this also, Rom. 9.25, to Israel in the spirit of Jew and Gentile, who were brought in to Christ even in his time, because the Covenant is the same with all the confederates, and there was then some accomplishment in part of this prediction. But the full accomplishment thereof is reserved for Israel (of whom this chapter speaks most expressly) at their Conversion as a Nation. And if we take it up as comprehending Jew and Gentile ; yet the full accomplishment thereof reserved for that time wherein the Conversion of Israel shall be accompanied with the coming in of the fulness of the Gentiles, and be as a life from the dead to the world, Rom.11.15, 25, 26.’

Concluding, then, this short survey of the Puritan treatment of Israel in Romans11, the following points summarize the views which came to prevail:

I. The salvation now possessed by a remnant of believing Jews is yet to be enjoyed by far larger numbers of that race.

2. At the time when Paul wrote, this was not to be expected until a considerable number of the Gentiles had been evangelized and their evangelization would thus hasten the day of Israel’s calling: ‘blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in’.

3. In the economy of salvation there is an interaction appointed by God between Jew and Gentile; gospel blessing came to the world by Israel’s fall, a yet greater blessing will result from her conversion.

4. Nothing is told us in Romans 11 of the duration of time between the calling of the Jews and the end of history. ‘The end of this world shall not be till the Jews are called, and how long after that none yet can tell’ (Parr).

5. The quotations from Isaiah and Jeremiah, confirming Paul’s teaching, indicate that the full extent of gospel blessing predicted by the Prophets is yet to be realized. ‘As Isaiah, and other of the prophets, do put over this great flourishing of the church to the days of the gospel, the apostle, Rom.11 doth point at a more precise time wherein this in a larger measure shall be made out’ (Robert Fleming).

In modern times the acceptance of three beliefs has probably contributed largely to the assumption that the convictions just stated are merely of historic interest and not tenable for Christians today.

First, in the last hundred years the belief has held sway in English-speaking Protestantism that Christ’s advent must precede Israel’s conversion and the subsequent blessing of the world. Because main-stream Puritan thought did not accept this pre-millennial view of the advent, their position has been represented as encouraging the expectation of ‘a Christless and kingless millennium’, and, not surprisingly, where this charge has been believed, disinterest in Puritan teaching has been the result. To this subject we shall return in a subsequent chapter.

Second, another influential school of prophetic thought has maintained that any general or national conversion of Israel in the future would be inconsistent with the overriding message of the New Testament. This school of thought stresses that Israel, geographically and physically considered, could have distinct spiritual significance only in the period prior to the breaking down of the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile. Now, in respect of the privileges of the gospel, there is no longer Jew or Gentile — the perspective is no longer national, but spiritual and universal. Jerusalem is no more to be the centre of worship as it once was (John 4.21). Pursuing this same line of thought in reference to Romans 11 William Hendriksen, writes:

‘If here in Romans 11.26a Paul is speaking about a still-future mass-conversion of Jews, then he is overthrowing the entire carefully built up argument of chapters 9-11 for the one important point which he is trying to establish constantly is exactly this, that God’s promises attain fulfilment not in the nation as such but in the remnant according to the election of grace.’

Such statements as these are important and valid against any view of Israel’s future which supposes she will receive salvation on terms other than those proclaimed in the Gospel, or that she will obtain spiritual privileges distinct from and above those possessed by Gentile Christians. But as we have already seen, this was not the Puritan view: Puritans did not believe that there are any special and unfulfilled spiritual promises made to Israel apart from the Christian Church. All that they asserted was that it was in no way inconsistent with the New Testament economy that there should be a great revival in the future, bringing Israel as a mass into the Church and thereby fulfilling, in John Murray’s words, a ‘particular design in the realization of God’s worldwide saving purpose’. Hendriksen’s assertion is not accurate enough: the burden of Paul’s teaching in Romans 9-11is that salvation is of grace alone, but it is surely no necessary consequence of grace that it be confined to a remnant. Divine sovereignty may indeed justly so confine it, as Israel’s long-continued judicial blindness bears solemn witness, yet the same sovereignty may be displayed in a nation being born in a day and when converts are multiplied as the dew of the morning! There is no conflict between Paul’s gospel and the belief that in the ‘latter day glory’ vast numbers of the natural descendants of Abraham will own and serve their Redeemer, and that Israel will then show forth the glory of that gospel as, to a lesser extent, the English—speaking nations visited with revival have done in times past. Certainly, as the late J. Marcellus Kik wrote in 1948, the idea must be repudiated that Israel is to have some unique place in a future kingdom of God, but this does not leave us without belief in their future blessing:

‘Even in the present time there are some within the Church who simply cannot believe that the old dispensation has been terminated. They still look for a temporal Jewish kingdom whose capital, Jerusalem, will hold sway over all the earth. This was the carnal conception of this kingdom which Christ fought and the apostles opposed, and against which his Church must still fight. It is true that we look forward to the conversion of the Jewish nation, and that the whole world will be blessed by this conversion. But that is something entirely different from the idea of a temporal Jewish kingdom holding sway over all the nations of the world.’

In this connection it needs to be added that though a number of the Puritans believed that the Jews would be restored to their own country none supposed that the land of Israel would ever again have the theocratic and symbolic significance which it possessed during the Old Testament era. They would have agreed with the nineteenth-century Reformed author who, after stating the case for Israel’s restoration, wrote: ‘As to the question, then, what will the Jews do in the Holy Land? we reply that they will do just what the English do in England, or the Americans in America. They will traffic, will cultivate the soil, will fill professional and mechanical pursuits, and be a Christian people, in an interesting and important country.’

A third commonly-accepted belief which militates against a consideration of the Puritan view is that Scripture witnesses to a steadily worsening world and thus demands from us a very different expectation with regard to the whole period which lies between us and the coming of Christ. ‘Scripture certainly does not sustain the notion’, writes Herman Hoeksema, ‘that the Church will experience a period of great prosperity, antecedent to the coming of the Lord. The very opposite is true.’ If this assertion is correct then the exposition given of Romans 11 must ipso facto be erroneous.

There can be no doubt that both by alleged Scripture evidence and by appeal to the dark character of contemporary history, evangelical Christians have been long acclimatized to regard the opinion stated by Hoeksema as proven. We think, however, that it may be honestly questioned whether the Scripture passages appealed to can bear all that is deduced from them. Foremost among these passages is the Olivet discourse of Christ, recorded in Matthew 24, Luke 21 and Mark 13. This prophetic discourse followed Christ’s announcement concerning the temple, ‘There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down’ — clearly a reference to the destruction of the city which came about at the hands of the Romans in A.D. 70. In the discourse itself there is much that applies specifically to the ‘breaking off’ (Rom.11.19) of the Jewish nation in the first century A.D. The convulsion of the Roman Empire, earthquakes, ‘Jerusalem compassed with armies’, ‘the abomination of desolation... in the holy place’, the exhortation to pray that flight from the city would not be necessary on the Sabbath day, the appearance of false Messiahs - all these things point to events which were shortly to take place and which are now past history. The great tribulation predicted for the Jews on account of their apostasy has been fulfilled. As Paul writes, ‘the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost’ (1 Thess. 2. 16). And yet these texts and others in the Olivet discourse are often quoted as though they have had no fulfilment!

Nevertheless it is certainly true that the Olivet discourse looks forward to the second advent and it may well be that some of the ‘signs’ which preceded the overthrow of Jerusalem will recur on a grander scale as the world draws near its end; to accept this, however, is by no means the same as saying that the Olivet discourse comprehensively describes the whole course of world history between the first and second advents. The claim that what is in view is ‘the course of This Age down to the time of the end’, and that, therefore, ‘until the very end, evil will characterize this Age’, is one which, we think, goes beyond the evidence of our Lord’s own words.

Probably the next most frequently referred to passage in support of the view that the world will progressively darken is 2 Timothy, chapter 3, which commences, ‘This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come’. The popular citation of this text without a consideration of its precise import and context is an unhappy illustration of how debate on prophetic issues is too often conducted. The peril of which Paul speaks is the contagion liable to be received from the prevalence of such men as those described in the verses which follow. In particular, they are ‘evil men and seducers’ (v. I3), who were alive at the time when Paul wrote, hence the exhortation to Timothy in verse 5, ‘from such turn away’. And while in their personal character they would go from bad to worse (v. I3), their public influence according to Paul was soon to pass. They resemble Jannes and Jambres who deceived Pharaoh and the Egyptians long ago, and like those two deceivers they were to have their day: ‘Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith. But they shall proceed no further: for their folly shall be manifest unto all men, as theirs also was’ (v. 8—9).

Paul was thinking primarily of his own time! The only wider bearing which we may legitimately give to the passage rests on verse one, where Paul says that during the whole period which he calls ‘the last days’ there would be a recurrence of perilous seasons or times. One such time had arrived even as Paul wrote this last letter to Timothy in the days of Nero; others were to follow — Paul does not say how many nor how often. All he does assert is that in the present dispensation (which is what the New Testament means by ‘the last days’), there were to be some periods of grievous conflict for the Church. This is far different from the claim that Paul expected nothing but such seasons and anticipated nothing but ever-increasing wickedness! In fact the New Testament gives us other features of ‘the last days’. It tells us that the full Pentecostal endowment of the Spirit belongs to ‘the last days’ (Acts 2.17), and that the ‘last days’ is the new era in which God has spoken by his Son (Heb. 1.2). The last days are the gospel age, ushered in by Christ’s incarnation and death, and they are the last because no further earthly dispensation is to follow. The last has come!

Such is, we believe, the correct interpretation of 2 Timothy 3.1. In the words of Thomas Boston, in a sermon on ‘Perilous Times in the Last Days’, he says: ‘Even in the days of the gospel, in which sometimes there are sweet and glorious times, yet at other times there come difficult and perilous times.’ Similarly B. B. Warfield, after referring to the same passage, writes: ‘It would be manifestly illegitimate to understand these descriptions as necessarily covering the life of the whole dispensation on the earliest verge of which the prophet was standing . . . we must remember that all the indications are that Paul had the first stages of ‘the latter times’ in mind, and actually says nothing to imply either that the evil should long predominate over the good, or that the whole period should be marked by such disorders.’ It only remains to be said that while the Scriptures seem to indicate a time of serious declension immediately preceding the advent, this provides no proof that a great era of revival cannot intervene between now and Christ’s coming. One can [not argue logically from the evidence for a final apostasy —evidence sometimes overstated — that a downward tendency must mark all future history

But the objection may be raised, ‘If there is to be a great extension of Christ’s kingdom in the future, with attendant spiritual prosperity, how can a state of declension immediately preceding Christ’s appearing be harmonized with it?’ This question only has force if the calling of the Jews is envisaged as being so close to the end that time would scarcely allow for such progress and such a reversal. No proof however, is forthcoming to show that the period of time involved must be so limited in duration. As we have observed, Romans 11 says nothing on the length of the period between Israel’s salvation and the second advent. Peter Martyr’s answer to this same objection, written four hundred years ago, can therefore still stand:

‘What shall we say unto the words of Christ wherein he sayth, Doost thou thinke that when the sonne of man commeth he shall find faith upon the earth? Verely if the Jewes be in such great plenty converted unto Christ, and that with the commodity of the Gentiles, (Footnote: ‘With the commodity of the Gentiles’ is the translator’s rendering of Martyr’s ‘et cum utilitate Gentium’, literally, ‘with the benefit (or advantage) of the Gentiles’. Martyr’s Latin Romans was published the same year as the English version, 1568.) as we have before declared, then shall there remain much faith, which Christ when he returneth unto us shall find. But we may answere, that here is no contrariety…. peradventure the Jewes shall return again and shall acknowledge their Messias, and shall confirm the Gentiles being wavering and seduced. It is possible also, that when the Jewes shall believe, and the Gentiles shall after a certayne tyme put to their help, then, as the nature of the fleshe is, may arise some security, and licentiousness, especially if Antichrist follow, by means whereof an infinite number both of the Jewes and of the Gentiles may be alienated from Christ: so that that shall be true, that Christ when he commeth shall find very few which purely and sincerely shall confess him.’

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Excerot from The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray