Dispensationalism is Fueling War and Distorting Scripture

 

On the 11th day of Lent, the US and Israel began bombing Iran.

Again.

Almost immediately, they murdered more than 170 children at an elementary school in Minab. Thousands have been killed across the region. To add insult to injury, millions of American Christians justify this horrific carnage by quoting scripture, including the person prosecuting the war, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

Right after the start of the invasion, Hegseth, who has Crusader symbols tattooed on his body, cherry-picked the book of Psalms to conclude his press conference:

Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle. He is my loving God and my fortress. (Psalm 144:1)

Dispensationalism

Hegseth and several other high-ranking officials, such as Ambassador Mike Huckabee, participate in a weekly bible study at the White House facilitated by dispensationalist Ralph Drollinger. Dispensationalism is a fanciful ideology, invented by white evangelical men in the 19th century to sanctify British colonization, which formed the foundation of Christian Zionism. 

For decades, most Jewish people in the West knew full well that Western Christians were brandishing this bogus theology as part of a master plan to remove Jews from their societies. So they rejected the idea that Palestine is the biblical promised land for modern Jews. 

In other words, Jews in Europe and the US knew that Christian Zionism was (and is) the foreign policy of white Christian nationalism. 

Ralph Drollinger and the dispensationalists do their dirty work by dividing history into divine dispensations. They claim that we are just a few fulfilled bible prophecies away from the final dispensation: “the millennial reign of Christ.” 

Hoping to help fulfill these prophecies themselves, Drollinger and the dispensationalists unquestionably support the modern nation-state of Israel, which they literally equate with the biblical descendants of Abram. 

In Genesis 12, God promises Abram that everyone who blesses his future progeny will be blessed, and everyone who curses them will be cursed. This passage has been weaponized by members of Congress and Ambassador Huckabee to invoke the wrath of God and cancel anyone questioning Israel’s genocidal policies.

Dispensationalists like Drollinger, Hegseth, Huckabee and John Hagee, the founder of the 10 million-member “Christians United for Israel,” also say that anyone who does not support Israel is “antisemitic.” 

The brutal irony is that these men also believe that Jews who do not recognize Jesus as the Messiah are going to burn in hell. Citing Romans 9-11, where the Apostle Paul wrestles with why most of his fellow Jews aren’t into Jesus, Drollinger says that the Jews “badly stumbled.”  

The dispensationalists who are fully committed to evangelizing Jews find their “good news” in Revelation 7, which says that in these end times, 144,000 Jews will turn to Jesus and become some of his most effective evangelists. They “will herald the Second Coming of the Messiah throughout the world.” 

Drollinger and the dispensationalists say that all these events—including the genocide of Palestinians, the violent displacement of the Lebanese, and the destruction of Iran—will take place in the lead-up to Armageddon, the final battle.

Commanders in every branch of the US military have proclaimed Armageddon has begun with the current invasion of Iran.  

This is what Ralph Drollinger and the dispensationalists say that Revelation says.

A More Hopeful Apocalypse

The good news is that other scholars, such as Brian Blount, argue that Revelation says something entirely different.

Blount is a retired pastor and theology professor who reads the bible in historical and literary context. He also comes from the Black church, which gives him an interpretive advantage, as he reads the bible through the lens of oppressed people.  

In his commentary on Revelation, Blount says that the last book of the Bible was written by and for a marginalized and persecuted community experiencing their end times in the first century. Revelation called the early Christians to “faithful resistance,” to refuse to fit in, and to reject acquiescence to imperial values at all costs. 

Revelation is apocalyptic literature, which utilizes metaphor and hyperbole to “reveal” reality. It pulls the curtain back on power. Speaking in code, it incessantly critiques empire with all its greed and violence.

According to this reading of Revelation, despite all the hell the first-century followers of Jesus were caught in, and even though the forces of chaos and destruction seemed to be victorious at every turn, God was in control. 

In the Book of Revelation, the lamb who was slaughtered is actually a roaring lion. This means that divine Love conquers the empire in a radically nonviolent way. Crucified love is at work and winning, even though it seems like chaos and destruction reign. 

Palestinian pastor Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac says that the explosive growth of Christian Zionism has not come out of a political disagreement, but a theological crisis. The wealthy and powerful coopted crucified Love and turned the Jesus tradition into a sick-and-twisted obsession with end-times prophecies.

This crisis within Western Christianity is a call to action. 

As tens of millions of American dispensationalists counterfeit the bible to promote destructive and violent agendas, we must not only deconstruct the bible. As Palestinian liberation theologian Naim Ateek says, we must de-Zionize it too.

Above all, de-Zionizing the bible begins by doubling down on the identity and vocation of the real Jesus, a prophetic dark-skinned Palestinian Jew who lived under Roman occupation, and was killed by occupation forces for speaking truth to power.