Renewed interest in prophetic teaching is a likely result of the Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy, to be held June 15–18.
According to many scientists and military authorities, world affairs cannot long proceed as they are without erupting into global catastrophe, whether a civilization-erasing nuclear war, life-choking environmental pollution, overpopulation and famine, or something else.
Evangelical Christians have always believed, however, on the basis of the inspired Scriptures, that it is God who will consummate the course of history, and that he will do so, moreover, in his own revealed way. Early in this century Western intellectuals looked to science to usher in a global millennium, and accommodating liberal Protestants decided that the scientific method rather than the Holy Spirit would lead men into all truth. For all that, Bible-believers remained confident that human history is moving inexorably toward a catastrophic divine judgment of men and nations, and that if a millennium were in the offing, only God and not human ingenuity would bring it to pass.
Whatever one may think of dispensationalism as a system of biblical interpretation, the fact remains that early in this century, when the historical prospects seemed about as remote as a Swiss Navy, men like C. I. Scofield, A. C. Gaebelein, J. M. Gray, and H. A. Ironside insisted on the basis of Old Testament prophecy that Jewry would be regathered in Palestine, and would at first reassemble in unbelief in Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah of promise. At the same time, they averred, Russia would emerge as an archfoe from the north.
In view of Paul’s revelational philosophy of history in Romans 9–11 as well as Old Testament passages, many students of biblical prophecy also pointed out that before the second coming of the crucified Lord in power and glory a reawakened Jewry will turn in faith to this Christ so long rejected.
Many other evangelicals, to be sure, held no such eschatological expectations about Israel, and insisted instead that because of the Jews’ rejection of Jesus the Messiah, the prophetic promises were now wholly preempted by the Church of Christ.
All evangelicals agreed, however, in looking for the crucified Messiah’s return in final judgment upon men and nations as the climax of history, an expectation based upon both Old and New Testament writings. Many considered the prophetic vision of an earthly kingdom of universal justice and peace too explicit and insistent to dismiss; others identified such hopes with the Church and the eternal world to come. And some saw no more import in the Jewish return to Palestine than in Russia’s later return to Czechoslovakia, or if they found humanitarian significance in the provision of a Jewish homeland, they made no necessary connection with Old Testament prophecy.
Such differences may encourage dismissal of evangelical eschatology as a maze of contradictions. But the fact remains that evangelicals do indeed share a great deal of conviction about what Winston Churchill called “the awful, unfolding scene of the future”; their confidence holds firm in the scriptural disclosure of God’s purpose in human history and in the divine consummation of the course of the world’s events.
The Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy proposes to emphasize what it is that evangelicals consider certain about the future outcome of history. In view of the present state of world affairs, it is well indeed that their differences on secondary issues not becloud their major agreements. There need be no doubt about God’s revealed purpose in the redemption of a lost humanity, and its implications for the cosmos and history no less than for the individual.
While devoutly interested Holy Land tourists will constitute the conference audience, the gathering will hope for some hearing at a distance also by the Church as a whole and by the world at large. And it will seek to extend earlier conversations with Jewry. In Christ’s day the Sanhedrin had gone so far as to acknowledge the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth to be empty and had witnessed the subsequent conversion of Saul of Tarsus, its own official persecutor of the first Christians. It was this brilliant Jew who, confessing that Jesus Christ is indeed the Risen Lord, then led the Christian missionary thrust to the Gentile world.
Interestingly, perhaps regrettably, the Jerusalem Conference emerged as an effort wholly independent of the churches. The fact remains that many of Christianity’s enduring concerns have not been nurtured by twentieth-century ecumenism. The once acclaimed eschatological orientation of the World Council of Churches’ Evanston Assembly soon buckled under socio-political priorities. The roller-coaster course of new-Protestant theology, moreover, has played hit and miss with the doctrine of last things; as a result, dialectical and existential restatements of eschatology have forfeited theological initiative to an emphasis instead on the primacy of this world and its material survival needs.
It was Gaylord Briley, an evangelical promoter, who first saw an opportunity to blend the continuing evangelical interest in Holy Land travel with a prophetic conference in Jerusalem. Enlisting the cooperation of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem, he broached the idea to Editor Robert Walker of Christian Life magazine and Sam Wolgemuth of Youth for Christ International, and then elicited an official conference call by Dr. W. A. Criswell and Dr. Harold John Ockenga. At this stage I was asked for program suggestions and must largely assume responsibility for securing breadth and balance among the speakers.
The conference will, I think, achieve numerous worthy objectives. Among them are those of reminding the ecumenical church and the world that evangelical Christians do indeed take Bible prophecy seriously, and of stimulating fresh and earnest study of the prophetic Scriptures in the context of the Gospel and the Christian mission in the world.
Evangelicals cannot neglect an enlightened interest in persecuted Jewry’s need for a national homeland, but they dare not on that account be uninterested in the requirement of social and political justice throughout the Near East, nor need they make partisan commitments to the expanding political aspirations of one or another of the Bible Land nations. Evangelical compassion reaches to Arab refugees no less than to regathered Jews. In the conflict between Jew and Arab, the Christian community recognizes strategic tensions on which the Bible itself is not silent. Indeed, evangelical Christians see not only the future of Israel and of the Arab world, but also the future of all nations, in relation to the Coming King of kings. And under his holy Lordship, they gladly and confidently look for his soon return.
