From Israel to Red China to John MacArthur

JD Hall

Sep 25

I’m on the cusp of the biggest story of my life. That’s saying something, because I once broke the most-reported news story in the world for three full days. This one is exponentially bigger. I’m on a post-1948 funding and influence trail that extends from Israel to the United States, from the United States back to Israel, from Israel to Red China, and from Red China directly to Dispensationalist evangelicals. Including, I should add, some of the most prominent and best-respected Dispensationalist expositors of the 20th Century. And in the middle of it, I kid you not, is a guy you know as Jeffrey Epstein. The story is so big and so shocking that, combined with the average attention span, I worry about piling too much information on you at once. This article is a precursor to that one, explaining the background of how anti-Zionist Dispensationalism – once the majority view – was strangled to death by celebrity pastors taking foreign cash to do so.

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If you grew up anywhere near American fundamentalism or evangelicalism, Bible churches, independent Baptists, Dallas Seminary, Moody Bible Institute, or basically any church bookstore with enough prophecy charts to wallpaper a fallout shelter, you probably inherited one proposition without ever being told it was a proposition. You were taught that dispensationalism and support for the modern State of Israel belonged together like Samson and long hair. Questioning the political state established in 1948 was not just a foreign-policy disagreement. Somewhere along the way, it became a theological warning light.

That’s how the system functions now, anyway. Modern Israel is regularly presented as fulfilled prophecy, even though that prophetic interpretation didn’t exist until Darby. Modern Israel’s creation in 1948 is treated as the supernatural restoration of biblical Israel, its military victories have become prophetic milestones, and its territorial expansion and even its genocides against the inhabitants of Greater Israel are treated like checks on the list of things that have to be done.

That story has one considerable problem, which may surprise you. Early dispensationalists did not always talk that way, and many – perhaps half or more – opposed the Israeli state. I’m writing this article because I’m convinced I’ve inadvertently helped to flatten history. The truth is, despite Darby inventing the new Dispensational doctrines never before heard in Christendom, Dispensationalism had to evolve significantly in the mid-20th Century. Suddenly there was no room for the original perspective on when Jews would return to Palestine. In reality, Dispensationalism was not equated with Zionism until relatively recently.

Dispensationalists, of course, had always believed God had a future for national Israel ever since 1827, when it was invented. That was one defining characteristic separating dispensationalism from competing eschatological systems, except for Historic Premillennialism. They believed the promises made to Abraham and David would eventually be fulfilled literally to national Israel, that Christ would return, Israel would be restored, and the Messiah would reign. But believing in a future Israel and believing that David Ben-Gurion’s secular state founded in 1948 constituted that restored Israel are two different propositions.

For a significant period, dispensationalists knew the difference.

Current mythology runs backward. Today’s theology is projected into yesterday, and we are expected to believe the people who carried Scofield Bibles in 1917 would have looked at the Israeli flag flying over a secular parliament in 1948 and immediately declared the Abrahamic Covenant fulfilled. Some certainly moved quickly in that direction after 1948. Others absolutely did not. And almost none believed that they would be restored before a mass conversion of Jews.

The original Scofield Reference Bible had the Jew bias baked in, and it alleged that Jews were the chosen people despite not choosing Christ, but Scofield taught that Israel remained in what he called its “third dispersion” and that it would not end until Jesus returned.

Israel, Scofield wrote, “will be restored at the return of the Lord as King under the Davidic Covenant.”

Scofield did not say the third dispersion would end when Jewish nationalists established a secular republic while overwhelmingly rejecting Jesus Christ. He placed that restoration at the return of the Lord as King. He was being downright Messianic in this claim, because it matched what the few religious Jews at the time believed: that they would be restored at the start of the Messianic age, for whatever Messiah is anybody but Jesus.

SCOFIELD’S ISRAEL WAS WAITING FOR THE KING

Sure, Scofield was hardly ambiguous about what he thought remained future. His notes separated Israel’s dispersion, Christ’s return, national restoration, and the Davidic kingdom within a prophetic sequence. The old Scofield did not merely predict Jews would someday live in Palestine. Jews had lived there throughout history. His prophetic claim concerned Israel’s restoration under God’s covenant.

In his note on Jeremiah 23, Scofield identified Israel’s final restoration with events following extraordinary tribulation and “in connection with the manifestation of David’s righteous Branch,” whom he identifies as Christ. He explicitly says the prophecy remained unfulfilled. Scofield said that Israel’s final restoration belonged to the return and reign of Jesus Christ.

One could certainly construct, as later dispensationalists did, an additional stage before that restoration. Jews could return geographically in unbelief and then, later, prophecy would be fulfilled. That theological move happened almost entirely after 1948.

The 1907 and 1917 Scofield editions both preached that revival would come before restoration. After the establishment of Israel, its 1967 edition struck all of those Scofield notes from the record, reversed its position to indicate that restoration would come before revival, and dared to put, “Edited by CI Scofield” despite the fact he had been dead for decades. Scofield, posthumously, rubber-stamped a major revamp of Dispensationalist doctrine.

This shift came from distinguishing between two things that, until then, Dispensationalists routinely treated as the same. One was a preliminary Jewish presence or political regathering, and the other was the Biblical restoration promised by God.

John Walvoord, the longtime president of Dallas Theological Seminary and one of the most influential Dispensationalists of the 20th century, would eventually formalize the distinction between the “Jewish presence” and “biblical restoration” as a way for both to be prophetic fulfillment and help fix the rift between the two Dispensational camps. Roughly 130 years after Darby, and only 85 years ago, Dispensationalism was going through the newest overhaul since the rapture was invented. By 1962, Walvoord could call the twentieth-century return a “partial restoration” and the creation of Israel the “first step” in a sequence culminating in Christ’s millennial kingdom. Even then, Walvoord still insisted that the present return was merely a prelude to tribulation, Christ’s return, and Israel’s actual exaltation and blessing.

If the 1948 state were simply the restored Israel of the prophets, Walvoord would not need “partial,” “first step,” and “prelude.” Those qualifications were doing heavy theological lifting. They were solving the problem of what happens when your coveted prophecy chart is wrong. If Israel had returned politically before the old prophetic sequence seemed to place its restoration, and Christ had not returned, and Israel had not yet converted, and the Davidic King was not ruling from Jerusalem, and politicians governed the nation, and almost all of whom were secular Zionists or Jewish ones, rather than believers in Jesus. Nevertheless, all in a sudden, the physical return of Jews to Palestine could occur in unbelief. The spiritual restoration could come later.

One of the men at the center of the fight to whitewash Dispensationalist teaching was Dr. John MacArthur’s mentor.

CHARLES FEINBERG

Charles Lee Feinberg was born Jewish and raised an Orthodox Jew. He had formally trained to become a rabbi before allegedly converting to Christianity and launching the most pro-Jewish ministry inside Dispensationalism. He trained deeply in Hebrew and Jewish studies before studying to become a rabbi, so he breezed through advanced degrees at Dallas Theological Seminary and became one of the twentieth century’s major dispensational Old Testament scholars. If anyone was positioned to enthusiastically identify the newborn State of Israel with fulfillment of Israel’s biblical land promises, Feinberg was the man.

Instead, even seven years after Israel declared independence, he told dispensationalists to calm down.

His 1955 essay “The State of Israel” is shocking when read against contemporary evangelical Zionism. Feinberg complained that recent literature concerning Israel lacked “the proper perspective” and asserted that “The present return to the land is not the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant.”

He was telling prophecy enthusiasts in 1955 that they were claiming more for the Zionist state than Scripture permitted. He asserted that Jews were returning to the land “in unbelief” and that “the current regathering to the land is not a regathering to the Lord.” He also explicitly warned that “material prosperity of Israel is not tantamount to spiritual prosperity.” Israelis were not prospering because they were presently within God’s will, he argued, but in spite of their “personal and individual rejection of Christ as Messiah and Savior.”

So, if you’re tracking, despite not yet alleging that 1948 was fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant, he was already claiming that God was prospering the Jews on account of their ancestry.

And yet, Feinberg said that God would ultimately regather Israel for His final purposes and that the Lord would give Israel the full promised land when the nation stood in “obedience and national spiritual restoration.” In other words, it was not yet fulfilled on account of their unbelief. To his credit, at first, he refused to cheapen what He believed to be God’s promises by declaring them fulfilled merely because secular politicians had planted a flag in Tel Aviv.

THE DISPIES WERE ARGUING ABOUT ZIONISM IN PUBLIC

This was far from a disagreement between seminary professors hiding behind Greek words and library dust. Popular fundamentalists were arguing about Zionism in public. Most were not on Israel’s side at first. How could they be? Up until then, they were taught Israel would need to believe.

Noel Smith founded and edited the Baptist Bible Tribune, the Baptist Bible Fellowship’s principal newspaper. He was a hard fundamentalist, a separatist Baptist, a conservative preacher and editor whose publication developed influence well beyond the churches formally associated with the fellowship. The Tribune itself describes Smith’s role as central to the fellowship’s founding and early growth.

Standing inside the fundamentalist and Dispensationalist world during the late 1950s and 1960s, Smith used the Tribune to attack Zionism and challenge assumptions about the State of Israel. His run of articles included “Who Owns Palestine?“ in 1957, “Basic Principles of Zionism“ in 1960, “The Revolution and the Jews“ in 1961, and “The Significance of Israel”in 1961.

The dispute existed because premillennialism did not automatically answer the political question of “Should Christians support the Israeli state?” Even back then, many Dispensationalists pointed to the Israeli treatment of their neighbors and their penchant for picking fights – not to mention their subversion of the United States government – and thought that other Christians had lost their minds for supporting it. Try finding a Dispensationalist today with that perspective.

Charles Ryrie, one of the most recognizable names in modern dispensationalism, published “Perspective on Palestine“ in Christianity Today in May 1969. Ryrie did something increasingly rare in later popular Christian Zionism. He refused to grant Israel moral immunity for their misbehavior.

Ryrie wrote that although God could use the acts of a political state to accomplish His purposes, that did not make wrongdoing right. Israel remained morally accountable. He compared the principle to the crucifixion itself. God sovereignly ordained the event, but that did not absolve those who committed evil in carrying it out. He further insisted that the return remained political, racial, and religious rather than spiritual because almost all the Jews involved remained unregenerate. They had “returned in unbelief,” so basically, it didn’t count.

One Christianity Today reader said that Ryrie’s article made sense and specifically praised seeing “a premillennialist” expressing concern for justice toward Arabs. Again, I’d beg you to attempt finding a modern Dispensationalist with that perspective. Most of them are chuckling about the Gaza child death ratio.

STILL ARGUING IN 1982

By the early 1980s, Jerry Falwell had become one of the most visible evangelical supporters of Menachem Begin’s Israel. The political and theological alliance was becoming familiar enough that many Christians assumed it was de facto dispensationalism.

About this time, Mark M. Hanna was no outside critic of Dispensationalism. He identified himself as a “moderate dispensationalist,” maintained a distinction between Israel and the church, and taught at Talbot Theological Seminary. In January 1982, Christianity Today published his essay “Israel Today: What Place in Prophecy?” and printed Falwell’s rebuttal in the same issue.

Hanna wrote, “I want to refute the notion that dispensationalism theologically requires a pro-Israeli stance.” He argued that texts describing Israel’s future glory were being lifted from their contexts and applied to current Israeli territorial claims. He also insisted, as Ryrie had before him, that prophetic necessity did not constitute divine endorsement of everything that the Israeli state did. Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, and Menachem Begin, he observed, had received no revelation equivalent to God’s explicit command to Moses and Joshua.

Then Hanna wrote the sentence that would sound almost impossible coming from many dispensational pulpits today. “Israel today is not the people of God.” But by this point in history, anti-Zionist Dispensationalism was starting to fade away for reasons I explain in the next section (hint: it’s money).

These men disagreed with one another about plenty, including how much prophetic significance to assign to the state’s existence. But they all agreed that Dispensationalism should not equate to support for the Israeli state.

Those two things eventually became joined so tightly in American evangelicalism that pulling them apart now feels revolutionary. It was not revolutionary then. It was part of the argument. And beginning especially after 1967, some very interested people began working hard to make it.

THE MONEY STARTS MOVING

The easiest place to see how hard Israel worked to advance Zionist Dispensationalism and oppose non-Zionist Dispensationalism is Jerry Falwell, because his financial relationship with Israel was impossible to miss. Menachem Begin personally cultivated him, honored him with the Jabotinsky Award, brought him into meetings with Israeli officials, and by 1981 was using him as an American messenger. After Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak reactor that June, Begin personally called Falwell and asked him to explain Israel’s position to American Christians. Falwell did exactly that. Then he got a private jet.

Contemporary reporting confirms that Falwell’s ministry possessed an Israeli-made Jet Commander reserved for his personal use, while multiple later accounts said Begin and Israeli interests provided the aircraft because of Falwell’s advocacy for Israel. Journalist Grace Halsell reported hearing Falwell thank Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens for “that jet plane you gave me.”

By 1981, an aide to Begin was openly describing American evangelicals as “a pillar that Israel has in the United States” because they outnumbered American Jews many times over and were willing to make political noise. Falwell was useful because he could reach millions of Christians, organize them politically, and do it while presenting support for Israel as biblical obedience. He could also do it while attacking Dispensational non-Zionists, like he did when responding to Charles Ryrie’s aforementioned article, only a few months after being given the jet.

But Falwell was the celebrity version of something Israel had started building years earlier, which was an entire pipeline of evangelical pro-Israel influencers.

One of the most important men in that earlier operation was G. Douglas Young, founder of the American Institute of Holy Land Studies in Jerusalem. Young spent the years after the Six-Day War traveling through evangelical America, speaking in churches and seminaries, training students, and trying to move Christian Zionism from an eschatological curiosity into an active constituency for Israel.

The Israeli government funded him to do it.

Israeli Foreign Ministry archives contain a February 11, 1969 report titled “Report on Dr. G. Douglas Young’s Lecturing Tour in the Western States.” Historian Daniel Hummel, who dug through the Israeli records, cites that file specifically as an example of Israel sponsoring Young’s lectures. Young was not simply an enthusiastic preacher who bought a bus ticket and started talking about prophecy. The Israeli state was materially helping an evangelical insider carry a favorable message about Israel through American Christian circles.

Clearly, JFK was not still demanding this type of subversive Jewish funding go through FARA. They had already murdered him for it. It went under the radar, and Israel was funding Christian evangelists to preach Israel.

That was only one piece of the operation. After the Six-Day War, Israeli religious-affairs official Yona Malachy toured major American Christian institutions, including Dallas Seminary, Wheaton, and Biola. At Biola, where Charles Feinberg – the Jewish mentor of John MacArthur – was dean of Talbot Theological Seminary, Malachy urged the institution to make a public statement in support of Israel. Biola subsequently issued one connecting current events in the Middle East with preparation for biblical prophecy, and made the statement Israel demanded.

It’s unknown how much was in the briefcase.

By 1971, the relationship had become considerably more organized. The massive Jerusalem Conference on Biblical Prophecy brought roughly 1,400 to 1,500 evangelicals into Israel, and the Israeli government provided the Jerusalem conference center free of charge because they knew the content would create free ambassadors for Israel. The Israeli committee surrounding the conference included representatives from the Foreign Ministry, Tourism Ministry, and Religious Affairs Ministry, all government officials, there to support an evangelical prophecy conference. John Walvoord, Feinberg, G. Douglas Young, and other major evangelical figures participated in the broader prophecy network surrounding the event.

So did the young John MacArthur, who claimed that hearing his Jewish mentor complain in a sermon that “They have us come to Israel just to hear that unbelieving Jews get all the curses and the church gets all the blessings.” You and I hear that and think, “Correct.” John MacArthur heard it and claimed that it was a formative experience in becoming a Zionist.

During this era, Israel also discovered that pastors made excellent investments. The Tourism Ministry began bringing evangelical ministers to Israel at little or no personal expense so they could return home and organize paying church tours. The ministry later bought advertising time directly on evangelical broadcasts, including Pat Robertson’s 700 Club. Cabinet officials personally briefed visiting televangelists and pastors, who then returned to the United States preaching about Israel to their congregations.

American Jewish organizations were working the same constituency from another direction. When Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures released His Land in 1970, presenting modern Israel through evangelical prophecy, the American Jewish Committee helped organize screenings.

Wild, right? AJC official Marc Tanenbaum privately praised the movie as one of the most effective instruments available for winning Christian sympathy and support for Israel. The shekels started flowing in.et HUGE 33% Discount

Young kept pushing. By 1978, he was openly calling for a “massive grassroots effort” to reach 45 million American Christians with what he called the positive story of Israel and the Jewish people. That same year, he became chairman of International Christians for Israel, created to coordinate worldwide Christian support for the Israeli state. Activists around the organization even proposed a “Christian Fund for Israel” that would ultimately channel Christian money toward Israeli health, welfare, and education.

So Falwell was not the beginning of this story. He was what happened when the machinery finally found a television preacher with millions of followers and political ambitions.

Israel did not invent Dispensationalism. It did something way smarter. It identified a theological movement already inclined to believe Israel had a prophetic future, spent money and institutional resources cultivating its leaders, subsidized its messengers and travel, encouraged its schools to speak publicly, helped stage its conferences, and eventually learned how to turn prophecy believers into a dependable American political constituency.

BACK TO FEINBERG

This brings us back to Charles Feinberg, because by now his position and role in all of this changed considerably from when I first mentioned him. As you recall, in the beginning, he was no Zionist, despite being obnoxiously Jewish and slathering his theology in a glossy coat of Jewish Supremacy. He still rejected any claim of Dispensational Zionism.

What makes him so important is that he also gives us the before-and-after tension better than almost anyone else. In 1955, Feinberg said that the modern return of Jews to Palestine was not fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant. But then came 1967. After that, he was part of the prophecy-conference world that exploded in the era, much like during Darby’s Restorationist era. He traveled to Israel 7 or 8 times before changing his theology and then helping reshape the dispensational conversation about Israel.

What happened in 1967 to cause this massive shift, not just in Feinberg, but in broader Dispensationalism? That answer is longer than I can give here, and will be covered in the next installment. If you think the answer is only the Six-Day War, you’d be mistaken. It was entirely financial, and 1967 was the year that money really started flowing to Dispensationalism.

Suddenly, for Feinberg and many others, the Israeli state was no longer just an abstract object of prophecy discussion. A foreign nation was an employer, benefactor, and patron of evangelical pastors and their various ministries. Or should I say “nations,” plural? Because, as you’ll find out, it wasn’t just Israel.

Feinberg stood right in the middle of that world. But for all of his Jewish influence on Dispensationalism, it pales in comparison to the influence of his young mentee, John MacArthur. And MacArthur did not merely read Feinberg and appreciate his lectures; he reportedly “chose him.”

MacArthur has repeatedly described Feinberg as his personal mentor at Talbot. He took his classes, spent time with him privately, and credited Feinberg with shaping his understanding of national Israel and biblical prophecy. Feinberg was formative in MacArthur’s theological development. MacArthur wasn’t just along for the ride to the infamous 1969 prophecy conference in Jerusalem.

Foreign influence was grooming him.

That is where I have to leave it, because the next part of the story gets much bigger. What we have established here is that the modern evangelical alliance with the State of Israel was not simply the inevitable unfolding of dispensational theology. People fought over it, revised it, cultivated it, funded it, promoted it, and organized it politically. Israeli officials understood the constituency’s value. They invested in it. They sponsored its advocates. They courted its institutions. They subsidized its travel. They worked with Jewish organizations to expand its reach. They rewarded men who could turn theology into American political support.

Next, we will ask the obvious question. What happened when that same influence network moved beyond prophecy conferences and pastor tours? What happened when it intersected with international finance, technology transfer, Red China, and major American evangelical ministries?