3.03. The First Error: Blurring the Distinction Between Israel and the Church

Chapter Three: The First Error: Blurring the Distinction Between Israel and the Church THE FIRST ERROR: A fundamental tenet of dispensationalism is the belief that Israel and the church are distinct peoples of God.17 Indeed, a simple concordance search of the word "Israel" in the New Testament will lead to the conclusion that the New Testament writers never equated the church with the nation of Israel.18

However, what the New Testament writers did not do, the post-apostolic fathers quickly did. For example, around the turn of the first century AD, Clement appears to have ascribed to the church the promises of the Abrahamic Covenant in his Epistle to the Corinthians:

Let us then draw near to Him with holiness of spirit, lifting up pure and undefiled hands unto Him, loving our gracious and merciful Father, who has made us partakers in the blessings of His elect. For thus it is written, When the Most High divided the nations, when He scattered the sons of Adam, He fixed the bounds of the nations according to the number of the angels of God. His people Jacob became the portion of the Lord, and Israel the lot of His inheritance. And in another place [the Scripture] saith, Behold, the Lord taketh unto Himself a nation out of the midst of the nations, as a man takes the first-fruits of his threshing-floor; and from that nation shall come forth the Most Holy. Seeing, therefore, that we are the portion of the Holy One, let us do all those things which pertain to holiness,. . . .19

While Clement’s statement could perhaps be seen as ambiguous, the following assertions of Justin Martyr in Dialogue with Trypho (around AD 160) cannot:

[1] And Trypho remarked, What is this you say? that none of us shall inherit anything on the holy mountain of God? And I replied, I do not say so; but those who have persecuted and do persecute Christ, if they do not repent, shall not inherit anything on the holy mountain. But the Gentiles, who have believed on Him, and have repented of the sins which they have committed, they shall receive the inheritance along with the patriarchs and the prophets, and the just men who are descended from Jacob, even although they neither keep the Sabbath, nor are circumcised, nor observe the feasts. Assuredly they shall receive the holy inheritance of God.20

[2] What larger measure of grace, then, did Christ bestow on Abraham? This, namely, that He called him with His voice by the like calling, telling him to quit the land wherein he dwelt. And He has called all of us by that voice, and we have left already the way of living in which we used to spend our days, passing our time in evil after the fashions of the other inhabitants of the earth; and along with Abraham we shall inherit the holy land, when we shall receive the inheritance for an endless eternity, being children of Abraham through the like faith. For as he believed the voice of God, and it was imputed to him for righteousness, in like manner we having believed God’s voice spoken by the apostles of Christ, and promulgated to us by the prophets, have renounced even to death all the things of the world. Accordingly, He promises to him a nation of similar faith, God-fearing, righteous, and delighting the Father; but it is not you, ‘in whom is no faith.’21

[3] What, then? says Trypho; are you Israel? and speaks He such things of you? . . . . "As therefore from the one man Jacob, who was surnamed Israel, all your nation has been called Jacob and Israel; so we from Christ, who begat us unto God, like Jacob, and Israel, and Judah, and Joseph, and David, are called and are the true sons of God, and keep the commandments of Christ. 22

According to Saucy, Justin Martyr’s statements were "the capstone of a developing tendency in the church to appropriate to itself the attributes and prerogatives that formerly belonged to historical Israel."23 Saucy states: With Justin’s statement, the developing theology of replacement was complete. There was no longer any place for historical Israel in salvation history. The prophecies addressed to this people henceforth belonged to the church.24

Why did the early church fathers so quickly abandon the biblical distinction between Israel and the church? Saucy notes four factors. First was the developing antagonism between Judaism and early Christianity.25 The early strife revealed in the apostolic period (Acts 4:1ff; Acts 5:17ff; Acts 6:12ff; Acts 9:1; 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16; Revelation 2:9) was "acerbated by the failure of Christians to support the Jewish revolt against the Roman authorities in AD 66-70, the Christians choosing instead to flee Jerusalem for the safety of Pella, across the Jordan in Decapolis." The schism was again deepened by the Jewish proclamation at the Council of Jamnia (AD 90) that all who departed from the standard Jewish faith were cursed.26 The second factor influencing the thinking of early believers in terms of how they viewed Israel was the two-fold destruction of Jerusalem.27 With the first destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem as a result of the second Jewish revolt in AD 132-135, the early Christians began to see these defeats as evidence of not only God’s displeasure on Judaism, but also God’s vindication of Christianity. The early Christians thus abandoned any hope for the restoration of the nation of Israel.28 The third rationale was the refusal of Jews to accept Christ.29 As time passed, the church began to realize that the Jewish establishment was not going to change its mind about Jesus Christ. Hence, early Christian leaders began to see Jews less as converts to the gospel and more as enemies of the gospel. The fourth rationale involved the increasingly Gentile composition of the church.30 As the church began to be dominated by people without Jewish roots, the hardening of the Jews’ hearts and the waning hope for Israel’s conversion made it easier for the increasingly Gentile church to polemicize against Judaism and to seek a replacement theology.31 In sum, the basic premise of the early fathers was that God had permanently cut the nation of Israel off as his people as a result of her disobedience and idolatry in the Old Testament and her rejection and crucifixion of Jesus in the New. The faithful of the church age became the "new Israel" of God. They, along with the patriarchs and saints of previous ages, would inherit the promises given to national Israel, and these promises would be fulfilled in the millennial kingdom.32

Although Saucy calls the reasoning of these post-apostolic fathers "surely understandable,"33 it was equally certain error. As a result, the dispensationalism of the biblical writers was lost, even though the early fathers continued to hold to a literal millennial kingdom for the church and the Old Testament saints to enter. Moreover, this initial error led to a far more serious problem. The early fathers’ willingness to abandon the literal meaning of the biblical text -- in this instance in terms of the meaning of Israel and the church -- was merely a portense of things to come with regard to the second major error -- the systematic allegorizing and spiritualizing of Scripture. This is discussed in Chapter Four.