This is something that's been puzzling me a bit lately .
Are Gentile believers grafted into and are now a part of Israel ? Or is the church , the universal body of believers in Christ (Jew and Gentile) separate from Israel ?
Thanks in advance
If interested, there was a recent discussion on the issue (to a small degree) as seen here in the thread entitled
Can you help me understand something better?
Also, as said before, Dr.
Fruchtenbaum has given some good review on the issue that can be very helpful in understanding what it means for others - Jew and Gentile - to be considered a part of Israel. For more, one can consider where he has taught his Israelology course for Chafer Theological Seminary...recorded at West Houston Bible Church in Texas.
The entire course is available free online at the Dean Bible Ministries website. Audio files can be downloaded or heard online
here ): And the Powerpoint slides he did are found
here/
here. The main body of this course is the Israelology of dispensationalism taken from the instructors book Israelology: the Missing Link in Systematic Theology (also, the textbook for the study). Lesson one is introductory. Lesson two to the end of the course examines the Biblical sequence of Israel: past, present, and future from a Dispensational framework.
Also, for another excellent review (IMHO) by Fruchtenbaum, one can investigate his work entitled
The Jewishness of Premillennial Eschatology
As a Messianic Jew, Dr. Arnold Fruchtenbaum is quite extensive in his review. On Dr.Arnold's stance, there have times others have made it an issue that he may tend to hold to things
leaning in the direction of Dispensationalism - although I do personally see where all things within that framework are really an issue when choosing to view it a certain way. Many of his stances were taken with the expressed purpose of examining
Dispensations and Dispensationalism - the study of a system of theology that has spearheaded the work against replacement theology...and a system that insists on taking the Bible literally and insists on the fact that every promise made to Israel will be fulfilled to Israel.
Although I myself am not a Dispensationalist across the board, there are aspects (again) within it that I can see merit in when arguing that side. Dr.Fruchtenbaum actually mentioned the issue more in-depth before. As
he noted best in one response on the issue:
I have been receiving Messianic Good News for a number of years, but periodically noticed that whenever they do any attacking on Dispensationalism, it does not seem to be a dispensationalism that Dispensationalists would recognize. There was a tendency to use a straw man argument, claiming a view that Dispensationalists do not hold or taking a view that is held only by some Dispensationalists but not by all and making it a standard to judge all Dispensationalists. My request was simply that if he was going to criticize Dispensationalism, and he certainly has a right to do so, he should do it honestly and criticize what we do believe and not criticize what we do not believe. I offered them a copy of Israelology: The Missing Link in Systematic Theology on the condition that they would read it. This was not to convince them to become Dispensationalists but only that they would understand what it really does teach. In place of keeping it between the two of us, they choose to write a lengthy response, by another staff member, Kevin Daly, which goes on to simply repeat the same errors they were guilty of all along. They would quote a statement I made out of context and made it mean something that in context it could not possibly have meant. They launched a three-part critique, the first of which was published in their journal, Messianic Good News, and the second and third segments were chosen not to be published in printed form but posted on their webpage.
At least two people came to me personally, who were both on our mailing list and theirs, told me how disturbed they were by what was written since they know that it was not my position and never was and the accusations were simply quite false. One of the two even personally wrote to them asking them to print an apology for such mishandling of my material, but that was not forthcoming. Therefore, I promised to write a detailed response to be put on our webpage and that is the reason for this article.
Let me begin by simply defining the essence of Dispensationalism that would be held by Dispensationalists across the board. The essence of Dispensationalism is a consistent literal interpretation of Scripture, unless the text and context clearly indicates otherwise. It can be summarized in the simple Golden Rule of Interpretation as formulated by Dr. David L. Cooper: “When the plain sense of Scripture makes common sense, seek no other sense; therefore, take every word at its primary, ordinary, usual, literal meaning unless the facts of the immediate context, studied in the light of related passages and axiomatic and fundamental truths, indicates clearly otherwise.” With that rule is a corollary principle: “A text apart from its context is a pretext”. Therefore, literal interpretation does not deny the existence of symbols, or the existence of figures of speech, which all languages have. But in all languages, including English, we take what is written to be literal unless there is something that clearly indicates otherwise... Continue reading the full 43 page response article (PDF).
......The Old Testament promises a national salvation of Israel, it promises a natural restoration when the Jews will live in peace in the whole Promised Land, and nothing in the New Testament can cancel those divine unconditional promises, and if it does so it becomes a fraudulent document. If it precedes [proceeds] to provide additional information, that is a different issue.....But to interpret the Old Testament by the New means that the Old Testament documents cannot be understood, or the meaning cannot be determined until centuries later when the New Testament came into being and that is just a faulty way to treat the Holy Scripture.
The issue is not what constitutes salvation, salvation is by grace through faith and the content of our faith today is the death of the Messiah for our sins and His resurrection. Nor is there any question that when Israel is saved it is saved only because they believed the content of the gospel. But to say what constitutes Israel, and trying to make the Church Israel just carries no biblical warrant and you will not find a single verse that clearly uses the term “Israel” in reference to the Church.