Are you a dispensationalist?

Just because someone takes a futurist approach to eschatology does not mean they are a Zionist or a dispensationalist.

We are not disciples of Darby or Scofield. We are trying to trust that what God said in the Law and the Prophets agrees with what Jesus and the apostles taught, and that both stand in continuity with the eschatological expectations found in Second Temple Jewish literature.

Why does that matter? Because terms like Kingdom of God, Resurrection of the Dead, Eternal Life, Gehenna, and Son of David already had meaning before Jesus and the apostles. They were not inventing a new framework for a new religion or a new church. They were using language that was already defined and understood, then calling the Gentiles being grafted in to learn those terms according to their established meaning.

That is why Paul says the apostles received “grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles for His name’s sake” (Romans 1:5). The apostolic mission was not to detach Gentiles from Israel’s promises, but to disciple them into the faith and hope those promises had already established.

So no, this does not make someone a dispensationalist. That label is often used as a convenient dismissal by those who argue that Scripture was never meant to be understood in its plain prophetic sense, and that Jesus and the apostles were redefining Israel’s promises away from their first century Jewish expectation.

But the opposite is true. The apostles were Jews trained by Jesus, commissioned by grace, and sent to disciple the nations into the expectation of the faith they themselves had received.

Now, that does not mean the modern state of Israel is righteous in all it does. It does not mean the current Israeli government is living faithfully according to the covenants given to the fathers. But it does mean there is a remnant within Israel that will be redeemed and will inherit what was promised in the Law and the Prophets, because that is the expectation shared by God’s prophets, by Jesus, and by the apostles.

The real problem is that Gentiles gradually broke away from those promises and began redefining everything around themselves instead of being discipled into the faith they were meant to be grafted into.

As R. Kendall Soulen has argued, this was an “incomplete conversion” of the Gentiles into the Jewish matrix of the faith. The result is the modern Gentile church often standing at a great distance from the very categories, promises, and expectations it was supposed to inherit.

So it is simply incorrect to label biblical Gentile disciples as dispensationalists just because they see a future for Israel.

A Gentile disciple who believes in Israel’s future restoration and understands himself as grafted into those promises is not importing a foreign system. He is taking the Bible seriously.

The future of Zion is what we believe in because that future is the only thing that gives proper context to the terms: Kingdom of God, Resurrection of the Dead, Eternal Life, Gehenna, and Son of David. - Stephen Holmes