The Arc of a Covenant, page 12
Against a thousand years of Catholic (and Eastern Orthodox) theology, the English Puritans insisted that the Old Testament had to be interpreted literally as well as figuratively, allegorically, and typologically. When God said to Abraham in verse 8 of chapter 17 of the book of Genesis, “And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God,” Christians were obliged to interpret that as a literal promise of the actual Holy Land to real-world, physical Jews. It was no good talking about the symbolism, or saying that this was an allegory representing God’s promise of an eternal home in heaven to Christians; those interpretations might be and indeed were also true, but the plain, commonsense literal meaning of the text was not to be denied. Likewise, God’s promise of an eternal relationship with the Jewish people also had to be understood by Christians as still true today. The “New Covenant” that Jesus established with Christians went beyond but did not negate the “Old Covenant” that God had established with Abraham. God was faithful and His Word once given would never fail.
If the Jews were still in a covenantal relationship with God, it followed that the Jews of the contemporary world were still a people, a nation. They had a history and a future, and they remained a special object of divine care.
Many Protestants’ insistence on the literal meaning of the Old Testament combined with their close study of every page in the Word of God led them to another conclusion. What God says in chapter 12, verse 3 of Genesis to Abraham is also still true today: “And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”
When millions of Americans go into the voting booth today they bring with them a belief in this verse of the Bible. It doesn’t mean that they will always prioritize Israel over other concerns or that they will assume that God wants the United States to do whatever a given Israeli prime minister is proposing. Nor does it automatically free people from prejudice and keep antisemitic stereotypes at bay. Still, many Protestants feel and felt obliged to take those words seriously.
Not every verse in the Bible gets an equal amount of attention from evangelical Protestants. (Paul’s exhortations to remain single have never been popular, for example, among American evangelicals.) But the Abrahamic promises in Genesis became and remained prominent in the mind of American Protestantism because they are linked to what became a key concept in Protestant theology: the idea of a “covenant.”
Covenants are legal agreements between two parties. In Protestant theology (especially, though not only, in Calvinism) a series of covenants between God and humanity mark the basic stages in God’s work of redemption. God made covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses and the Israelites at Sinai; with David, and through Jesus, he made the “New Covenant” that, Protestants taught, was the one toward which the others all pointed. These covenants come with commandments and are the basis of moral obligation. God’s promise to Abraham came with the commandment to circumcise his male children on the eighth day. The Sinai covenant involved the acceptance by the Israelites of the Ten Commandments and the other laws in the Torah. The New Covenant of the New Testament offered a better path to a relationship with God and offered it to the whole world rather than only to the Jews. The Protestants took all the covenants seriously, and generations of preachers highlighted the texts that described them and made sure that the people in the pews understood what covenants were and why they mattered.
Once the promises made to the Jews were accepted as still valid today, something else became clear: at some point in the future God would bring the Jews back to the Holy Land. There are many biblical prophecies to this effect; one example is found in the book of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 11, verses 11 and 12:
And it shall come to pass in that day, that the Lord shall set his hand again the second time to recover the remnant of his people, which shall be left, from Assyria, and from Egypt, and from Pathros, and from Cush, and from Elam, and from Shinar, and from Hamath, and from the islands of the sea. And he shall set up an ensign for the nations and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth.
The first exile of the Jewish people is the so-called Babylonian Captivity, said to date from 586 to 538 BCE. Protestant exegetes read this passage from Isaiah as explicitly predicting a second return from a second exile.[10] The second exile was the one that began when the Romans crushed the Jewish Revolt forty years after the crucifixion of Jesus; was Isaiah predicting that this exile, too, would have an end?
Nothing could have seemed more unlikely in the seventeenth century than that such an event would take place, but Protestant theologians felt that their understanding of the holy books required this interpretation, and there is a long tradition of Protestant predictions of an ultimate return of the Jews. In 1666, Increase Mather took to the pulpit of the First Church of Boston, the largest and oldest congregation in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and told his congregation that “the time will surely come, when the body of the twelve Tribes of Israel shall be brought out of their present condition of bondage and misery, into a glorious and wonderful state of salvation, not only spiritual but temporal.” They would “recover the Possession of their Promised Land.” Mather would go on to publish this theory in London in 1669 in The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applyed.[11]
The colonies did not have a publishing industry, and had to look to the mother country to publish and buy books. But the Puritan tradition of which Mather was a part flourished in seventeenth-century England as much as in New England. At the dawn of the century, theologian Thomas Brightman was writing of the Jews, “Shal they returne agayn to Jerusalem? There is nothing more sure: the Prophets plainly confirme it, and beat often upon it.” Lawyer, MP, and leading Puritan Henry Finch wrote in a 1621 volume called The Worlds Great Restauration, or, the Calling of the Iewes that the Jews would defeat Gog and Magog (which he interpreted as a prophecy referring to Islam) at the end of days and “sit as a Lady in…true Tsion.” He further emphasized to his readers, “Where Israel, Iudah, Tsion, Ierusalem, &c. are named in this argument [i.e., in the Bible], the Holy Ghost meaneth not the spirituall Israel, or Church of God collected of the Gentiles, no nor of the Iewes and Gentiles both (for each of these have their promises severally and apart) but Israel properly descended out of Iacobs loynes.” These views were very much in the Puritan mainstream.[12]
This kind of thinking endured intact in the American colonies long after ardor for Puritanism had died down almost completely in England. Similar predictions would flow from generations of American theologians and religious leaders. The most famous of them all, Jonathan Edwards, maintained that the Jews would even increase the amount of land under their rule beyond the Israel of biblical times: “And it is the more evident, that the Jews will return to their own land again, because they never have yet possessed one quarter of that land, which was so often promised them, from the Red Sea to the river Euphrates. (Ex. 23:31; Gen. 15:18; Deut. 11:24; Josh. 1:4).”[13]
For American divines it remained a point of dispute whether the Jews would convert to Christianity before or after their return to the Holy Land. Nevertheless, a sea change had taken place. In the new, Puritan understanding, the Jews were back in God’s plan, their covenant intact, with a role to play in the future under divine guidance. As the centuries wore on and the Ottoman Empire weakened in a way visible even from half a world away, divines in America from this intellectual lineage would continue to proclaim God’s plan in this regard with mounting excitement as this once unimaginably improbable event began to look possible.
These early American thinkers drew not only on the Old Testament for their beliefs but also on the Epistles of St. Paul. These letters by the most active of the early Christian evangelists are both the earliest Christian documents that survive (scholars believe that most of the epistles were written before any of the gospels assumed their final form) and the closest thing the Bible contains to a systematic exposition of Christian theology and ecclesiastical guidance. From the time of Martin Luther, whose meditations on Paul’s Epistle (letter) to the Romans led him to the key ideas on which he was to build his theology, Protestant laypeople and clergy combed these letters with the greatest possible attention for guidance on matters of faith and conduct.
Paul was a zealous Jew who led early efforts to persecute Christians until he had a vision of the risen Christ and embraced Christianity. Like Jesus, he would spend much time engaged in theological controversy with Jewish leaders (a story told at some length in the biblical book known as the Book of Acts). In the letters he wrote to various church communities of the day, he not only reflected on these controversies but also set out principles that in his view should guide the relations between Christians and Jews, principles that had apparently been neglected during the medieval period. As Protestants encountered Paul’s thoughts on the subject, many came to believe that the treatment of Jews was yet another area in which the Roman Catholic Church had gone wrong.[14]
Paul’s Epistle to the Romans is the longest and most theologically significant account of his thinking. In the eleventh chapter of the epistle, Paul examines the question of why the majority of the Jews, God’s Chosen People, had not accepted the Christian message, what God’s purpose was in this development, and what would happen in the future. First, Paul notes that it should not surprise Christians that only a minority of Jews had embraced the new teaching. Citing many Old Testament passages, he points out that over and over in Israel’s history the majority rejected God’s message and only a “saving remnant” remained faithful. But God was faithful even when humans failed. God stood by Israel even when Israel didn’t stand by God.
For Paul, as many Protestants understood him, this was a vital theological point. His doctrine of human salvation held that Jesus came to die for human beings because humans simply can’t do the right thing on their own. The failure of the Jews to remain faithful to God under their covenant wasn’t evidence of some uniquely pathological Jewish blindness or the result of a curse; it was simply one aspect of humanity’s larger problem. We all recognize that the moral law (however we might understand it) is correct and ought to be obeyed, yet none of us can live up to our own moral standards. If we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that we all fall short. But, and this is for many Christians the essence of Paul’s concept of religion, God loves us too much to leave us in this fix. From this perspective, the failure (as Christians understood it) of Israel to live up to the covenant of Moses begins to look less like an endpoint and more like a beginning. Israel’s inability to live up to the Old Covenant or to accept the New is only what must be expected, but human failure does not mean the failure of God’s plan. His plan for the Jews continues.
At some future date, as many Protestants interpreted him, Paul predicts, the Jews will be gathered to Christ and that moment, when it comes, will mark the culmination of world history. Noting that the failure of the Jews to embrace the gospel of Christ opened the door to the salvation of the gentiles, Paul speculates that the acceptance of the gospel by the Jews would mean even more: “For if the casting away of them [the unbelieving Jew] be the reconciling of the world, what shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?” (Romans 11:15).
Paul, as many Puritan theologians came to understand him, believed that the conversion of Jews was delayed to allow the gospel to be preached to the non-Jewish world, giving non-Jews the chance to embrace Christianity and find God. Rather than cursing and reviling the Jews for their failure to convert, non-Jewish Christians should thank God for his mercy in delaying the end times to allow people from all over the world to enter God’s kingdom. God sent a “partial hardening” to the non-Christian Jews (i.e., they accepted some of his plan but not all of it), Paul wrote, so that there might be space before the end of the world for the full complement of gentiles to be converted and saved (Romans 11:25).
To medieval Christians the survival of the Jews was simply a sign of God’s continuing wrath. The theologians who followed the Puritan reading of Paul came to a different conclusion. The unbelief of the Jews may have been a defiance of God’s will, but it was also part of God’s plan: “through their [the Jews’] fall salvation is come unto the Gentiles” (11:11). Additionally, the Jews were still a special people with a special role in world history. Their dramatic conversion would be part of the events at the end of the world that prepared for the return of Christ, the Last Judgment, and the establishment of God’s true kingdom.
This new view of the Jewish future entered the wider cultural consciousness of the English-speaking world. In the seventeenth century, in Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” the suitor says that if we had enough time, “And you should, if you please, refuse/Till the conversion of the Jews.” Isaac Newton mentioned the restoration of the Jews, in a volume he wrote on the book of Revelation.[15] In Paradise Regained, John Milton wrote:
Yet He at length, time to himself best known,
Remembering Abraham, by some wondrous call
May bring them back, repentant and sincere,
And at their passing cleave the Assyrian flood,
While to their native land with joy they haste,
As the Red Sea and Jordan once he cleft,
When to the Promised Land their fathers passed.
To his due time and providence I leave them.[16]
Another doctrinal shift further influenced Protestants toward a less hostile attitude toward the Jewish people and their faith. From Martin Luther on, Protestant theologians stressed the role of election, of God’s choice in the process of salvation. You didn’t earn salvation by doing good deeds (or lose it by doing bad ones); indeed, it was blasphemous to think so. You were saved because God chose to save you in spite of your sins. As Protestants thought through the implications of this idea, many reached the conclusion that the question of salvation was entirely about God’s predestination. The Jews weren’t rejecting Christianity because they were particularly evil or rebellious; rather, it was part of God’s plan to preserve the nation of Israel in unbelief until, in his own good time, he willed their conversion.
Seen in this light, persecuting the Jews was irrational, even blasphemous. You were protesting against the plan of the Divine Architect of the Universe. You were protesting against something that (per Paul) staved off your own destruction. Ultimately, you were protesting against omnipotent will.
These changes led to another very important shift in the attitude of many Anglo-American Christians toward the persistence among them of a Jewish minority. In the Middle Ages, Jews were seen as threats to Christianity. Their refusal to accept the truth of the Christian gospel or to worship Jesus as the Messiah was felt as an argument against the truth of Christianity: if Jesus’s own people, who knew their scriptures best, thought he was a fraud, did this mean that Christianity was false? This fear meant less to the new generations of Protestant believers. The continuing existence of the Jewish people from the standpoint of Protestant theology went from being evidence that Christianity might be mistaken to evidence that the Bible was true. The world had once been full of many nations larger and more powerful than the Jewish people; that the Jews, small and persecuted, should have survived was a sign that God is real and that he keeps his word. God promised Abraham that the Jews would survive, and the Jews, unlike the Hittites, the Babylonians, and the Assyrians, are still with us today. And when and if the Jews should return to the Holy Land, Americans were predisposed to see that return as yet another sign that the God of the Bible is real and that the Christian religion is therefore true. The existence of the Jews was evidence for the existence of God; any sign that the Jews were returning to Palestine would be seen as proof that God was acting in history.
As a result of their theological reflections, American scholars and preachers came to several conclusions about the Jews:
Although they do not, in unbelief, have the salvation that comes alone through Christ, Jews remain under God’s special covenant and care.
The Jews are a nation, not a religious minority or a racial group.
To hate or persecute Jews is a crime against God, and it is a crime that almighty justice will avenge.
The gift of the Holy Land to Abraham remains valid and the Bible prophesies that the Jews will someday return to it.
It is a sign of God’s blessing on America if the American people understand these truths and build a special relationship with the Jewish people.
It was never the case that all Americans were Protestants or that all Protestant Americans accepted these ideas about the Jews. Nevertheless, these ideas influenced millions of Americans from the colonial era through the present day. The power of religion in American life rises and falls across the generations, but the salience of these ideas in American religion and in the broader culture remains. These views helped shape the American mind for centuries, and they are shaping it still, among secular people as well as among religious ones.
Historical and Theological Identification
