It focuses in particular on the approach of "the main US Christian Zionist organization, Christians United for Israel (CUFI)" founded and led by John Hagee. It also highlights the role of the 19th-century British evangelist John Nelson Darby [1800-1882] in elaborating Christian Zionism as we know it today, and the role of the 1909 Scofield Bible in popularizing it in the US. Somehow Christianity managed to go for 18 1/2 centuries without understanding the Christian Bible as prophesying what today's Christian Zionists see as the End Times and the particularly ghastly fate of Jews in it. Although, as Kirk notes, some "Protestant sects in sixteenth-century Europe held proto-Zionist ideas."
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| John Nelson Darby |
A focus on End Times theories like Darby's "premillenial dispensationalism" were very much a part of this current of thinking in the 19th century. Marsden explains:
... the millenarian (or dispensational premillennial) movement had strong Calvinistic ties in its American origins. The movement's immediate progenitor was John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), who broke with the Church of Ireland and became the leader of the separatist Plymouth Brethren group. During his later career Darby spent a great deal of time proselytizing in North America. He found relatively little interest there in the new Brethren sect, but remarkable willingness to accept his views and methods of prophetic interpretation.It's also worth remembering that Darby's influential tendency of Protestant theology was part of an ascetic, fractious Christian religious view. A 19th century sketch of him by George Stokes, "John Nelson Darby Stokes," The Contemporary Review; 07/01/1885, stresses this aspect. Darby was part of the Church of Ireland and was attracted to conservative ecclesiastical and theological "Separatist" ideas of the first quarter of that century that was highly critical of official state church positions, which they saw as too compromised by their need to conform to state requirements." Stokes describes the official Evangelical Church of that time as characterized by an "intense secularism. He writes, "The High Churchmen ... of that generation were simply ultra-Protestants of a political type."
The Brethren group was founded in 1831 and Darby soon became it's main leader. Darby also became "intensely ascetic" and focused on what he took to be the imminent end of the world as prophesied in the Bible:
The overstrained expectation of Christ's speedy personal Advent worked in 1830 the same practical results as they did in the second century with the Montanists, and again about the year 1000 A.n., when men thought the end of the world was surely at hand. ... Darby lived on Calary Bog - a lofty upland a thousand feet over the sea, just beyond the Sugar Loaf mountain-in a peasant's hut. He lived the life of an ancient anchorite, like an Anthony of Egypt, or a St. Kevin of Glendalough, in his own immediate neighbourhood. His raiment was of the meanest kind, his personal appearance neglected; so neglected, indeed, that a gentleman is said to have once flung bim a penny in the streets of Limerick, mistaking him for a beggar; while as regards food, his body seemed almost independent of such a casual consideration. Day and night were devoted to his pastoral work, striving to rouse his highland flock to a sense of the impending Advent. So ascetic, indeed, was his life, so rigorous his self-denial, so unceasing his labours, that his Roman Catholic parishioners concluded that one of the real old saints had risen up again in his person. This asceticism was not confined to Darby. It was a common feature of the movement. [my emphasis]Stokes also gives a vivid description of the kind of intense sectarianism which characterized the Brethren and its theological milieu:
The year 1848 was marked by a division, which has never since been healed [1885], but has been the cause of as much heartburning and bitterness as any religious feud that ever existed. It has been, indeed, an illustration of the oft-made remark that theological quarrels increase in bitterness in the inverse ratio of the difference between the combatants. ... The Brethren to an outsider appear one in doctrine, yet the hostility between an Ulster Orangeman and the most devoted Ultramontane is nothing as compared to the feeling with which an Exclusive or pure Darbyite now regards a Müllerite or Bethesda adherent of the same party. [my emphasis]And this description of Darby's later years describe a pretty authoritarian approach:
Those who disagreed with him on any point of doctrine or of discipline, he excommunicated at once, and regarded as outside the covenanted mercies of God. During the later years of his life he lived at the Priory, Islington, which, during the decade between 1870 and 1880, was regarded by his followers as a kind of local Vatican, Thence issued decrees on all topics, demanding instant and unmurmuring obedience. Why, even the very change of a meeting from one locality to another without permission was regarded as an act of carnal self-pleasing and rebellion, and punished as such. And the end of a movement for spiritual independence and in defence of the rights of the individual Christian conscience was a very disappointing one, for it only terminated in the establishment of a crushing and intrusive spiritual tyranny, embracing all the pretensions, but carrying with it none of the antiquity and historic glory which cast a halo round Papal Supremacy. [my emphasis]One of Darby's Brethren associates and later rivals, that Francis William Newman, went to Iraq as a missionary to Muslims. Like most Christian missionary efforts toward Muslims, it didn't have a great deal of success. He wound up being very impressed with the Islamic faith, which apparently influenced him in reading the Gospel of John in a way that led him to reject the divinity of Christ.
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