Jon Harris and Rod Martin are both good men, whom I wholeheartedly endorse on any issue except that which is Jew-adjacent, which is where they’ve lost their ever-loving mind, theological acumen, and possibly - I hate to say it - intellectual integrity. Becuase what I read in Harris’ piece on Jewish-related theology, shared by Martin on his considerably larger platform, hit historic Christian Theology below the belt in ways that had my mouth agape, with various stunts and low-blows I couldn’t believe it came from someone whom I’ve come to trust on most other matters. But it was, in no uncertain terms, appalling.
DISCLAIMER: I feel a bit of a traitor. Harris welcomed me back to X after being gone so long and told people to follow me. Rod Martin was the first Founding Subscriber of Insight to Incite ever. But it would appear that the Jewish issue is set to divide the Church just prior to Christ’s return as badly as it split the church just after His ascension. There’s nothing new under the sun, after all. As I’ve explained countless times in my tenure as Polemics Santa, there are no new heresies. There are only repackaged ones. And this is a repackaged one, and one that Paul warned us in his letter to the Galatians had the power to bewitch, or cast a spell, upon those he knew were otherwise good men.
If this issue sets apart friends, then let’s have it, along with the truth. Maybe tomorrow will bring better times among us. But not today, because what Harris presented does the type of damage to Biblical doctrine that only a man who knows the Scripture can do. No rank heretic can bruise the church’s doctrine as much as a legitimate exegete working for the wrong team. And Jews who deny Jesus are on the wrong team. Right now, both men are choosing them over the Historic Church.
Harris knows enough church history to know he inverted it, knows enough covenant theology to know he misrepresented it, and knows enough about basic argumentation to recognize that what he published is not a theological corrective delivered in good faith. It is a propaganda piece, constructed with enough true observations to make the false ones harder to spot, and we intend to take it apart piece by piece.
You can find Harris’ article, re-posted by Martin, here.
Lastly, at the bottom of this post, you’ll find an addendum of definitions in the event you find my use of certain terms confusing or overwhelming. Also, you’ll forgive me in advance if you dont’ get a new article tomorrow, on account of how long this one took me today.
THE RELUCTANT MODERATE WHO IS NOT RELUCTANT
Harris opens by telling us he has “never been that interested in eschatology” but feels a “responsibility” to offer guidance. A man who has never been that interested in eschatology does not produce four thousand words of densely sourced patristic and Reformation-era citations. This is false modesty designed to position him as a reluctant onlooker without a dog in the fight, only interjecting himself because he’s gravely concerned about a new-fangled false doctrine on the rise.
Before making a single argument, Harris tells us the people he is opposing portray Jewish people dishonestly, reject the promises God made to ethnic Israel (this is a good time to pitch my free book for premium subscribers, God KEEPS His Promises), question Jesus’s Jewish identity, hold views that corrupt our hermeneutics, undermine Christ’s human nature, and cut us off from our own church history. He names none of these people. He quotes none of them. And that’s helpful, when tilting at windmills and setting straw-men aflame.
Harris also misrepresents the opposing position from the starting gun, because covenant theology does not reject the promises made to ethnic Israel, and instead argues - as Paul does - that Jesus fulfills every last promise and that only Christians are the heirs of those promises (this would be a good time to pitch the second edition, Heirs of the Promise). Harris knows the difference, and he decided to straw-man instead of steel-man.
Only today I gave the kids a post-church lecture on the way home on why it’s necessary to present your opponent’s position as accurately as you can, or you’re just being lazy and dishonest. I wish Harris were in the backseat to hear it. Misrepresenting the opposing position before engaging it is not a theological corrective. It’s actually dishonest. In case you didn’t know, dishonesty in debate is the sign of a failed argument.
POLITICIZATION PROJECTION
Harris lectures his readers that politics is motivating the debate on Israel, implying that it’s on the other side of the aisle. This would carry more weight if his article did not describe Israel’s military victories as “seemingly miraculous” and endorse maintaining a strategic alliance for “regional dominance,” and frame the entire piece as a response to criticism of military and diplomatic support for a foreign government.
The projection runs deeper than Harris’s article. The theological position he is defending has been actively cultivated by interests that have no stake in Christian theology but do have a stake in American foreign policy. The Israeli government and its lobbying apparatus have spent decades and more than $150 million each year embedding Dispensational Zionism as the default assumption of low-church American Protestantism. Geofencing operations targeting evangelical churches, influence campaigns through Christian media, commandeering Salem Radio, and coordinated efforts to make support for ethnic Israel a matter of covenant obligation are documented facts, not conspiracy theories.
It takes a lot of gall for the side flown out regularly to be wined and dined at Israeli government expense for Potemkin propaganda pilgrimages to blame the other side of politicization. As Insight to Incite has gone to great pains to document from FARA filings and other verifiable means - receipts always provided - the Israel Lobby literally has unbelieving Jews helping to write American evangelical Sunday School literature. From when they first bought Jerry Falwell a Learjet, they have not been doing this because they care about Christian hermeneutics. They are doing it because a theologically motivated evangelical base is the most reliable constituency for unconditional political support of a foreign government, and Dispensational Zionism is the theology that produces it.
Consider who shows up to defend this theology whenever it comes under scrutiny. It is not primarily pastors or theologians. It is politicians who cannot name what half of the Bible the Abrahamic Promise is located, lobbyists who reject the New Testament entirely, and foreign government interests whose theological convictions begin at Genesis 12:3 and stop well short of John 3:16. When Ted Cruz lectures about God’s “eternal covenants” when not knowing the passage, that’s politicization. When every Biblical conversation about the Jewish people is actually about the Israeli nation state in particular, that’s politicization. It was, to put it mildly, projection at its finest.
THE ISLAM STUNT WAS HORRID, AND HE SHOULD BE ASHAMED
One of the worst displays of intentional well-poisoning I’ve seen in ages, well beneath Harris’s known character, was his dropping of a full section on the Islamic interpretation of the Abrahamic covenant. He does not quote a single Christian making an Islamic argument. He does not name a single person in his target audience who has ever appealed to the Quran. He places the Islamic view next to the theological position he wants to discredit and lets proximity do the work. “Muslims don’t think Israel has a lasting Covenant. Covenant Theologians don’t think Israel has a lasting Covenant.” It was…simply…vulgar. Apparently knowing that whatever Dispensational Bible-Belter Later reading the article surely has antipathy for Islam, he lumped in the position of every theologian you could ever name prior to the birth of John Darby, and put them in the same category as Muhammad.
Premium subscribers can access a PDF of this article (ad and graphic-free) after the paywall at the very bottom of this post.
This continues the Zionist canard that if unless you believe Jews are special, you’re basically an Islamist. The reader of Insight to Incite knows exactly how wrong that is. You’re aware that Islam and Judaism have had a 1300-year historic love affair prior to the establishment of an Israeli state in Palestine, and the two faiths looked at each other as partners and co-belligerents against their mutual mortal enemy, Christianity. You’re aware that Jewish Halakah and Islamic Sharia are two sides of the same coin and operate in exactly the same way, have the same structure, and serve the same purpose. You’re aware that the Talmud pulls punches on Islam and declares it far closer to Judaism than Christianity. You’re aware that Rabbinic teaching allows Jews to worship in a Mosque, but not a church. I’m not sure Harris is aware, but his comparison was vile character assassination nonetheless.
If Harris appealed to the anti-Islamic impulses of whatever pulpit committee might one day read his article by comparing our views with the Muhammadians, he also appealed to their instinctual revulsion to something called “Black Hebrew Israelites.” You know, just a little unnecessary racialism thrown in for no reason, no big deal. He did so with the identical technique, producing no names, no quotes, and no demonstration that anyone he is arguing against has ever cited that movement for anything. He used the image of black people who think they’re Jews, and in between the lines said, “The opponents I’m critiquing in this article hold the same views as these insanely idiotic black folk.” And just like that, Harris presented his position to the readers as the authentic, Apple-pie eating, flag-waving, Islam-opposing, Caucasian-endorsed position and all God’s people south of the Mason Dixie said, “Amen.”
This technique is called poisoning the well. It is a recognized logical fallacy, and in the hands of a minister writing about theological controversy among Christians, it fails not just as an argument but as an ethical framework. Harris knows that the position he opposes traces back to Augustine, Calvin, Matthew Henry, R.L. Dabney, and the Westminster Assembly itself, because he quotes those men approvingly in this very article. He chose to stand in their position next to a mosque and a Black Hebrew street preacher anyway. The covenant theology position, that the Abrahamic promises find their complete telos in Christ and His seed, is not the view of Muhammad. It is the view of every mainstream Confessional Protestant church. It is the view of John Calvin. It is the view of the Westminster Assembly. It is the view enshrined in the London Baptist Confession under which this publication operates. The Islam section exists not because Islam is relevant to this debate but because Harris cannot win the debate on its actual historical terms, and filling the room with scarecrows is what you do when the real opponents are too formidable to face directly. The real opponents are Augustine, Calvin, Henry, and Dabney. Harris would rather gesture at a minaret than answer them.
THE HISTORY HARRIS INVENTED
Harris wants his readers to believe the expectation of a future national restoration of ethnic Israel is ancient and thoroughly orthodox, while the belief that Christ fulfilled it a recent novelty. This is so exactly backward it constitutes a full reversal of the historic record. The framework Harris is defending, which includes a future national restoration of ethnic Israel to the land, a rebuilt temple with reinstituted sacrificial worship, and a distinct eschatological program for Jewish people running alongside the church’s program, did not exist in recognizable form until John Nelson Darby developed it beginning in 1821. That is the consensus of church historians across confessional lines. Harris can refute it with primary sources or concede it by his silence.
Notice what Harris does not do in this article. He attacks “poorly argued diatribes against dispensationalism” in his opening paragraph, and then never once names Darby, never names dispensationalism as a theological system, and never defends it on its own terms. He tries to convey to his audience it’s the standard, historic, Christian view. In doing so, he lies, and he knows he lies. He complains about people conflating dispensationalism with Zionism and Protestantism, then spends four thousand words conflating all three himself. He wants the association to discredit his opponents while concealing the system's founder, because naming Darby would immediately expose the novelty of his own belief.
Harris has the audacity to conflate the view of some Reformed and Puritan theologians who expected a future mass conversion of Jewish people AFTER A FUTURE CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY with his own view, which is that Jews retain Covenant promises and blessings PRIOR TO THEIR CONVERSION TO CHRISTIANITY. Or to put it another way, it’s true that historic Christian figures have suggested God will restore Jews to the Covenant after, at some point in the future, they repent of Judaism and become Christians. Harris’ view (and Darby’s) is that Jews are entitled to such blessings and promises in unbelief. Those are two very different things. It is not a high-five to Dispensationalism that historic Christians believed Jews could re-enter the Covenant after becoming saved, because historic Christianity teaches that ANYONE will enter the Covenant after becoming saved. That doesn’t require believing Jews have retained a Covenant without Christ, which Harris believes.
These are not the same position, and conflating them is either confusion Harris should correct or deception Harris should confess. Spurgeon believed in a future Jewish conversion but was not a Dispensationalist, and we have him ON RECORD denouncing Dispensationalism.
Spurgeon warned that Darby's followers were "with a diligence never exceeded, and a subtlety never equaled, laboring to seduce the members of our churches to the subversion of the truth and the overthrow of the needful order and discipline of our Zion," adding that "there is nothing which they have so much to dread as being thoroughly unearthed and exposed; for their grosser errors are not generally made known to their dupes until they are fairly in their meshes” (Sword and the Trowel, June 1869).
Spurgeon called Darby’s Dispensationalism "an error of an opposite kind that has attained some notoriety in our day.” And he described his initial reaction as, "So we thought at first, as our spiritual instincts revolted at the heresy” (Sword and the Trowell, Volume 1, read p 345-350 for full context). It’s perverse that Harris would use him as an agreement.
None of the theologians Harris named would have recognized the theological package he is selling. Edwards, for example, believed in Jewish conversions within a postmillennial framework, in which the promises to Israel were being fulfilled through the advance of Christ’s kingdom in the church, rather than alongside it in a separate Covenant. Lloyd-Jones believed in a future conversion of Jews within a Reformed Amillennial framework, not a Dispensational one that believed Jews are today entitled to Covenant blessings and promises. Harris is using these men the way a defense attorney uses a hostile witness: selectively, out of context, hoping nobody checks the transcript.
The patristic citations fare no better. Harris lists Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen, Cyril, Chrysostom, Jerome, and Augustine in rapid succession to create the impression of broad patristic consensus. What those men mostly held was an expectation that Jews would be converted and incorporated into the church as the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises, which is exactly the fulfillment position Harris is arguing against. These church fathers would have brought Harris up on heresy charges and had him excommunicated. That’s not an exaggeration. They would set him outside the church. How dare he use them.
Tertullian said (in Prescription Against Heretics), “The Jews had formerly been in covenant with God; but being afterward cast off on account of their sins, they began to be without God."
Justin Martyr said, “all who through Him have fled for refuge to the Father, constitute the blessed Israel. But you [to the Jews], having understood none of this, and not being prepared to understand, since you are the children of Jacob after the fleshly seed, expect that you shall be assuredly saved. But that you deceive yourselves in such matters, I have proved by many words.”
Harris leans hardest on Augustine, the single most influential voice in Western Christian eschatology, who was the architect of the amillennial framework that understands kingdom promises as spiritually fulfilled in Christ and the church. The City of God is not a dispensationalist document. Citing Augustine in support of national restoration theology is not a historical argument.
In fact, Augustine wrote a document called Tract Against the Jews, using the phrase "carnal Israel" to distinguish ethnic Jews from the true spiritual Israel he identified with the church. The man Harris is borrowing to support Jewish covenant continuity wrote a treatise arguing the opposite, and Harris never mentions it. That is the same move he made with Calvin, Henry, Dabney, Tertullian, and Origen. Every witness Harris called disagrees with him on the central question.
THE THEOLOGIANS HARRIS MUGGED
Harris acknowledges that Calvin, Matthew Henry, and R.L. Dabney all interpreted the Genesis 12:3 protection clause as applying to the church rather than to ethnic Israel as a distinct ongoing covenant category. He acknowledges this because he has no choice. He then dismisses their readings in a subordinate clause and uses their names as credibility for a position they directly contradicted. Calvin was an explicit covenant theologian who understood the land promises as spiritually fulfilled in Christ and the church as the Israel of God in the fullest sense. Henry understood Jewish evangelism and incorporation into the church as the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant in Christ, not as preparation for a separate national restoration. Dabney held the ingathering of Israel meant a future gathering into the church, which Harris’s framework excludes by definition. Harris knows what these men believed. He quoted them. He then listed them as forebears of a tradition they would have opposed at length and with considerable energy. A man who can win on the historical evidence does not need to misrepresent what his cited sources believed. Harris misrepresents them because the evidence runs against him, and borrowed credibility is doing the work his arguments cannot do on their own.
HARRIS CONTRADICTS HIMSELF
Harris argues the Abrahamic covenant is unconditional, pointing to Genesis 15 where God passes between the animal pieces while Abram sleeps, establishing that fulfillment rests on God’s promise alone rather than on Israel’s obedience. Three paragraphs later, he quotes Leviticus 26:40-45 at length to establish the exile-and-return pattern, a passage which shows the covenant had explicit conditions: Israel must confess iniquity, humble their hearts, and repent before restoration occurs. Harris cannot have both. Either the covenant is unconditional and the restoration happens regardless of Israel’s response, or it is conditional and requires the repentance Leviticus 26 explicitly demands. He argues both simultaneously without acknowledging the tension, because he needs the unconditional frame to establish God’s binding obligation to ethnic Israel and the conditional frame to explain why the restoration has not happened yet. This is not a minor inconsistency. It is the load-bearing contradiction in the center of his argument, and he drove right past it.
Harris also deploys the Hebrew word “olam,” meaning everlasting, as proof the land promise is perpetually and literally binding on God toward ethnic Israel. Genesis 13:15 calls it an “olam” covenant, and Harris treats this as a trump card. He does not mention that Genesis 17:13 uses the identical word to describe the covenant of circumcision as an everlasting covenant. Harris does not believe physical circumcision is perpetually binding on believers. He cannot apply “olam” as a perpetual literal obligation for the land promise while quietly setting it aside for circumcision. The word either establishes perpetual literal obligation or it does not, and the same hermeneutic must govern both texts. Harris needs to pick a lane and explain why he abandoned it.
ON GENETIC THEORIES AND STRAWMEN
Harris spends considerable effort dismissing questions about the genetic continuity of modern Jewish populations by labeling them “conspiracy theories” and associating them with discredited movements. I could demonstrate the historic validity of some by pointing you to what the Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews have already admitted in their written histories, and I could help Harris dismiss a few others for being less convincing. I could also point out why calling something a “conspiracy” and waving your hands doesn’t work in 2026 America, and he should know this. It’s what pretentious people do when they don’t have an argument. But none of that matters, because the entire genetic argument is theologically irrelevant, and Harris would know this if he engaged the text he claims to be defending.
Paul settled this question in Galatians 3:28 (and elsewhere, because he repeated it several times) when he emphasized that in God’s eyes, there’s neither Jew nor Greek. He settled it again in Romans 2:11 when he told us that God is no respecter of persons (this was repeated three more times, each time in reference to Jews, explaining that their ethnicity is irrelevant to God). Paul settled it in Romans 9:6 when he explained that not all who are descended from Israel are Israel.
Galatians 3 makes abundantly clear that the covenant promise runs through Christ and to those who are in Christ, not through a Y-chromosome. Whether a modern Israeli carries significant Semitic ancestry or not (the best-case scenario is that they have significantly more Semitic lineage than I believe, and significantly less than the Samaritans, who the biblical Jews would have shunned as Gentiles) is simply beside the point. The Bible does not distribute covenant membership by DNA. God’s Covenant doesn’t require a blood quantum. Harris’s entire framework depends on genetic and ethnic continuity being theologically decisive. Scripture says otherwise.
The fact is, it’s not necessary to believe that Benjamin Netanyahu is really Jewish. It is necessary to believe that Jesus was the Son of David, a descendant of Abraham, and an ancient Israelite. Those are confessional claims every orthodox Christian holds without reservation. What is not required, and what politically interested parties find extremely useful to insist upon, is the claim that Jesus shares an identity category with the modern Israeli state and its American lobbying apparatus. The word “Jewish” is doing enormous political work in this conversation that it is not doing in the New Testament. The recent conversations about Jesus’ Jewishness dealt with the loaded implications of the term, as people with purely political motivation use the term to imply that Jesus was a Rabbinic Jew, in which case, He wasn’t and isn’t. Implying the debate was about his genetic relation to Abraham or David is either dishonest, or ignorant.
The religion of the Pharisees that Jesus opposed became, after the Temple’s destruction, the foundational tradition of what we now call Judaism. Jesus did not practice that religion. He fulfilled and superseded the covenant that religion claims to represent. The demand that Christians affirm Jesus’s Jewishness in the modern political sense of that word is not a theological requirement. It is a political one, and the people making it most loudly are the same people who reject everything Jesus said and did. Those demanding the term be used as a litmus test to polite society are the very ones politicizing the term on Harris’ side of the debate.
HARRIS BRAGS HE INTERPRETS PROPHECY LIKE UNBELIEVING JEWS
Honestly, if I had to pick one thing from Harris’ article as the evidence of how the Galatian bewitching blinds a man’s cognitive capacity, it’s this. In his section on Jewish expectations at the time of Christ, Harris catalogs what first-century Jews hoped the Messiah would accomplish: political liberation from Rome, land restoration, a rebuilt temple, a reunited Davidic kingdom. He presents these expectations as evidence that the Old Testament promises point toward a national restoration program. This is simply unbelievable. Why? They were wrong, and they crucified their Messiah on account of it. And Harris uses their opinion on prophecy - so wrong they murdered Jesus - as proof that because he interprets prophecy like unconverted Jews proves he’s right. It’s just shocking.
The disciples on the Emmaus road expected political restoration and were corrected by Christ Himself opening the Scriptures to them. Jesus denounced their Zionism. The crowd shouting Hosanna expected a conquering king and crucified him four days later. Harris is citing the theological errors of people who missed the Messiah as positive evidence for his framework. That is not exegesis. That is irony.
Harris compounds this by arguing that Jesus “could have corrected their Old Testament assumptions” about the kingdom being tied to a physical nation “but He did not.” This is an argument from silence, and a weak one. Jesus did correct them, repeatedly and extensively, after the resurrection. Luke 24 records Christ opening the Scriptures to explain that the Messiah had to suffer before entering His glory, which is precisely the correction Harris says never came. Acts 1 records the disciples asking yet again about restoring the kingdom to Israel and Jesus redirecting them entirely toward the Spirit’s mission among all nations. After the Holy Ghost came, Zionism and its timetable were never brought up by any Apostle in any of the Bible ever again. That’s why Jesus told them they’d understand soon enough, and left it at that. Short of the Holy Spirit, Jews and Dispensationalists are always going to be worried about who gets keys to the desert trailer park.
ROMANS 9:6 IS CURIOUSLY OMITTED
Harris quotes Romans 9 through 11 more than any other passage in his piece and builds his case for ethnic Israel’s ongoing covenant significance substantially on this text. He never addresses Romans 9:6: “For they are not all Israel who are descended from Israel.” Paul draws an explicit distinction between ethnic descent and covenant membership in the very passage Harris is using as his primary proof text, and Harris skips it entirely. This is not a peripheral verse. It is Paul’s thesis statement for everything that follows in chapters 9 through 11. The entire argument about the remnant, the hardening, the grafting of Gentiles, and the salvation of all Israel is built on the foundation Paul lays in verse 6, which is that ethnic descent and covenant membership are not the same category. Harris cannot engage Romans 9 through 11 seriously without dealing with the verse that opens the argument.
Paul reinforces this in Romans 9:8 when he writes that “it is not the children of the flesh who are children of God, but the children of the promise are regarded as descendants.” Harris quotes the chapters on either side of these verses but skips touching this like a hot potato. He never touches them. This is not an oversight in a four-thousand word article that quotes this passage repeatedly. That’s a choice, and that choice show’s he knows the verse hurts his case, and he’s afraid to touch it. That’s how confident he is in his own position.
HIS OWN WITNESSES UNDERMINE HIM
Harris quotes Edward Bickersteth (1841) as a restorationist forefather who argued Christian nations should help Jews return to Palestine. He neglects to tell his readers that Bickersteth explicitly stated Jews have no valid claim to the Holy Land given their general unbelief.* [EDITOR’S NOTE: I was wrong on this point. Harris did, in fact, state that he supported the idea of Christians helping the Zionist project, but that it wasn’t a mandate based upon prophetic fulfillment. That’s my bad. Instead of deleting it, I’m making this disclaimer and apology instead- JD]. Bickersteth’s actual position is considerably closer to the one Harris is arguing against than the one he is arguing for, and Harris quoted him as support without mentioning the part where his own witness agreed with the opposition. Bickersteth also said any help done should be done, “without injustice to others” and referred to it as “peaceful aid.” One wonders if he’d approve of carpet-bombing women and children in Gaza. Just kidding. No one wonders that.
Harris then closes his historical claims by citing Charles Ryrie and J. Vernon McGee, two of the most committed dispensationalists of the twentieth century, as evidence that even serious theologians recognized the modern state of Israel does not qualify as the prophesied restoration because of Israel’s lack of repentance. Harris agrees with them on this point, which creates a problem he apparently did not notice before going to print. If the most theologically committed national restoration advocates in modern history agreed that the modern state does not fulfill the prophecy, and Harris agrees with them, then what exactly is his quarrel with people who are skeptical of the modern state’s theological significance? The people Harris is opposing are not arguing anything more radical than what Ryrie and McGee argued. Harris has conceded the entire practical question to his opponents while trying to make their skepticism look like a threat to orthodoxy. He called witnesses to close his case, and they testified for the other side. That’s what you call a collapsed argument.
THE HAMAN THREAT
This one was really vile. Harris closes by invoking Haman as a warning to critics of Israeli policy, implying that people making theological arguments about the Abrahamic covenant occupy the same moral position as a man who attempted to exterminate the Jewish people in Persia. This was an argument given by Josh Hammer at the David Horowitz Freedom Institute when attacking Tucker, and it blows my mind that Harris is repeating literal Jew propaganda using the Holy Scripture of an Almighty God for geo-political policy gains.
That is a threat dressed in exegesis, and it is manipulative beyond description. It is also theologically incoherent. If the demand Christians form a protectorate for Jews (absurd on its face) applies to diaspora Jews rather than to the Israeli state specifically - as Harris claims in the article - then the Haman warning cannot logically be directed at critics of that state’s foreign policy. Harris reached for the most frightening rhetorical weapon available, aimed it at people who disagree with his eschatology, and apparently did not notice that it does not fit the target even by his own definitions.
WHOSE FOLDER IS BIGGER
Harris closes by claiming to have a folder of Christians who deconstructed because Christianity was too Jewish, presented as evidence hidden in his desk somewhere, that the theological trajectory he is opposing leads people out of the church. My question is, whose folder is bigger, his or the Apostle Paul’s? Paul wrote Galatians because Christians were being dragged into the Judaizing heresy. He wrote Romans 9 through 11 because Jewish believers struggled to understand why unbelieving Jews were removed from the Covenant and replaced by Gentiles. The Letter to the Hebrews exists entirely to argue that Jewish Christians should not return to the shadow now that the substance had come in Christ. The New Testament epistles are saturated with the pastoral emergency of people being told they needed to become more Jewish to be fully included in the covenant, and Paul called that a different gospel and pronounced anathema on the people teaching it. Going back under the Law becuase one believes Jews have a special relationship with God was one of Pauls’ greatest bugbears. Did he ever warn of the threat presented by people thinking Christianity was too Jewish? No. That’s absurd.
The New Testament repeatedly presents as a clear and present danger the heresy of Judaizing. Never once does the New Testament even hint at warning Christians not to divorce themselves from the Jewish vibe. Not once. Meanwhile, all one has to do is look around at X or Facebook and find the “Yeshua people” apostatizing by the moment, out of Christianity and back under the Law. I don’t know how many names are in Harris’ secret folder, and why he wouldn’t share any of those names to demonstrate the veracity of his claims. But poke your head into social media, and you’ll see those who’ve abandoned the gospel for a “Jewish” Christianity that’s not Christianity at all, and you’ll see them by the tens of thousands.
THE VERDICT
Harris’s article claims to be a theological corrective grounded in Scripture and church history, delivered reluctantly by a man with no particular eschatological investment. It is not. It is a politically motivated defense of a broadly Zionist theological framework that did not exist before 1821, built on an inverted reading of church history, decorated with the names of theologians who contradict its conclusions, sustained by internal contradictions Harris never acknowledges, and designed to make covenant theology look like it shares a pedigree with Islam and Black Hebrew Israelism. His own sources undermine him. His primary proof text contains verses he never quotes. He cites the wrong expectations of people who missed the Messiah as positive theological evidence. He invokes Haman against people making theological arguments. He accuses his opponents of conflating dispensationalism, Zionism, and Protestantism and then conflates all three across his entire article. And he does all of this while posturing as a man who never wanted to talk about eschatology in the first place.
Jon Harris is a friend, and friends tell each other the truth. The truth is that this article is beneath him. His article is poison. It is theological hot garbage. There is nothing about it remotely resembling careful historical or theological work. It is vile. It deserves to be forgotten. But it will not be, because this kind of unholy skubalon is difficult to live down.
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ADDENDUM: DEFINITION OF TERMS
Zionism: The belief that Jews are entitled to a Jewish nation-state, in context, usually in Palestine.
Dispensational Zionism: The belief among evangelicals that Jews have retained Covenant membership, Covenant blessings, or Covenant promises, even without faith in Christ. It is accompanied by the belief that Christians should therefore help establish, in some way support, or even protect a Jewish state in Palestine.
Dispensationalism: The novel doctrine invented (whether admitted or not), by an Irish-English sect known as the Plymouth Brethren, usually attributed to John Nelson Darby, propagated and popularized by the Oxford-owned and Oxford-published ‘Scofield Bible,’ which has grown to become the current majority view in low-church, non-Confessional evangelicalism. Its central tenet is the rejection of historic Covenant Theology. As it pertains to this debate, its most notable doctrinal distinctive is the belief that Jews remain in Covenant with God, retaining certain Covenant blessings or promises irrespective of their rejection of Christ.
Covenant Theology: The sole view of the Christian Church until the invention of Dispensationalism, held to by each of the three pillars of professing Christendom (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Confessional Protestantism), asserting that the conditions and promises of the Old Covenant have been fulfilled completely through Jesus Himself, and is superseded by the New Covenant. As it pertains to this debate, its most notable doctrinal distinctive is the belief that Covenant blessings and promises are available to both believing ethnic Jews and believing Gentiles equally and identically, and that unbelieiving Jews have no Covenant membership, Covenant blessings, or Covenant promises available outside of Christ. It is referred to as “Replacement Theology” by its critics as a pejorative.
Eschatological Futurism: The belief that certain prophecies, most notably the millennium, are awaiting their future fulfillment. Both Historic Premillennialists and Dispensational Premillennialists fall within this category, despite their wide differences. It is juxtaposed with Amillennialism, Post-Millennialism, or Full Preterism, which are not futuristic eschatologies. As it pertains to this debate, it’s important to understand that all Dispensationalists are Eschatological Futurists, but not all Eschatological Futurists are Dispensationalists.
Historic Premillennialism: The belief, dating back to the early church, that the millennial reign is literal and will occur in the future. It differs from Premillennial Dispensationalism in that, like Amillennialism or Postmillennialism, it maintains a Covenant Theology view in which Jews do not retain Covenant membership, blessings, or promises without faith in Christ. It also happens to be my view.
