From Prophecy to Statehood: The Christians Behind the Road to Israel
Christianity, Restorationism, and the Road to 1948
Part I of a Seven-Part Series
Part I of a Seven-Part Series
The modern State of Israel was not created by Christians. Jewish Zionists built the movement, institutions, communities, political organizations, and eventually the military capacity that made statehood possible in 1948. European antisemitism, pogroms, the Holocaust, British imperial policy, Palestinian Arab nationalism, international diplomacy, migration, and war all belong near the center of that history.
Christians nevertheless belong in the story.
Long before the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Protestant Christians were reading biblical prophecy as pointing toward a future restoration of the Jewish people to the land associated with ancient Israel. During the nineteenth century, some moved beyond biblical interpretation into public advocacy. Later, dispensationalism gave one influential branch of this tradition a systematic theology in which Israel and the Church remained distinct and biblical promises to Israel retained a future historical meaning.
None of this makes Christians the authors of Zionism. It does mean that before modern Jewish political Zionism acquired its best-known institutions, ideas about Jewish restoration were already circulating within British and American religious culture and, increasingly, within political life.
Some distinctions matter. Christian restorationism refers broadly to the older Protestant conviction that Jews would eventually return to Palestine. Dispensationalism arose later as a theological system in which Israel and the Church occupied distinct places within God’s purposes. Christian Zionism developed when Christian beliefs concerning Jews, biblical land, covenant, or prophecy became connected to political support for Jewish restoration or sovereignty.
The traditions overlap, but they are not identical. Nor have Christians who support Israel necessarily reached that position through the same theology.
Before Darby
Christian belief in a future Jewish restoration did not begin with John Nelson Darby. English Protestants had interpreted biblical prophecy in relation to a Jewish return for centuries, and by the nineteenth century restorationism had acquired particular influence within British evangelical culture.
Among its important advocates was Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, a prominent evangelical Anglican and social reformer. Shaftesbury supported Jewish restoration decades before Theodor Herzl organized the political Zionism most familiar to modern readers.
That chronology complicates the tendency to begin the Christian political story with Arthur Balfour in 1917. The Balfour Declaration did not introduce Jewish restoration into British culture. Protestant Christians had been discussing and sometimes advocating versions of that idea for generations.
Darby and the Continuing Place of Israel
Darby, born in 1800, began his ministry as a Church of Ireland priest and later became a major figure among the Plymouth Brethren. Recent scholarship cautions against presenting him as the solitary inventor of dispensationalism, but there is little question about the influence of the theological system associated with him.
One of its most consequential features was the distinction Darby maintained between Israel and the Church. Christian theology had often interpreted biblical promises to Israel through the Church, effectively absorbing Israel into a Christian theological story. Darby resisted that merger. Within his system, Israel retained a distinct future in the purposes of God.
The implications extended beyond biblical interpretation. If Israel continued to possess a future, then the Jewish people could not simply be treated as a remnant of biblical history whose theological purpose had been exhausted by Christianity. Promises concerning Israel might retain historical as well as spiritual significance.
Darby himself should not be transformed retrospectively into a political Zionist. His importance was different. He helped provide a theological structure within which the future of Israel and the Jewish people acquired renewed importance for generations of Protestant Christians.
Scofield and American Protestantism
That perspective reached a much larger American audience through C. I. Scofield. First published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible placed interpretive notes alongside the biblical text and became one of the principal vehicles through which dispensational theology entered popular American Protestant life.
Its influence extended through prophecy conferences, Bible institutes, pastors, missionaries, and congregations. Christians who never read Darby could nevertheless learn to interpret Scripture through a perspective in which Israel and the Church remained distinct and the Jewish people retained prophetic significance.
Scofield’s political importance was therefore indirect but substantial. He helped form a religious constituency prepared to view the future of the Jewish people as part of the biblical story.
Blackstone: From Prophecy to Politics
William Eugene Blackstone shows what could happen when biblical expectation became political advocacy. An evangelist and premillennialist, Blackstone moved beyond believing in Jewish restoration and sought governmental action on its behalf.
In 1891, he organized what became known as the Blackstone Memorial, urging President Benjamin Harrison and other leading Americans to support Jewish restoration in Palestine. He acted five years before Herzl published The Jewish State in 1896 and six years before the First Zionist Congress met in Basel in 1897.
That chronology should not be used to claim that Blackstone invented Zionism. Jewish ideas about national renewal and restoration already existed. His significance lies elsewhere: he demonstrates that an American Christian could translate prophetic belief into organized lobbying of the United States government before Herzl created the international political structure most commonly associated with modern Zionism.
The movement from Darby to Blackstone marks an important development. Theology had become political advocacy.
Hechler and Herzl
The encounter between Christian restorationism and Jewish political Zionism became even more direct through the Reverend William Henry Hechler. An Anglican clergyman with longstanding restorationist beliefs, Hechler encountered Herzl’s political program in 1896 and understood it through his reading of biblical prophecy.
His contribution, however, extended beyond theology. Hechler possessed connections within European aristocratic and diplomatic circles and helped Herzl gain access to influential political figures, including Grand Duke Frederick I of Baden. His efforts contributed to the diplomatic path that eventually brought Herzl before Kaiser Wilhelm II.
Hechler did not teach Herzl Zionism. Herzl already possessed his own political vision. What Hechler could provide was access.
That relationship captures an important aspect of the larger Christian role. Christians did not author Jewish nationalism, but Christian beliefs about restoration sometimes created allies whose networks could assist Jewish nationalists seeking political legitimacy.
Balfour, Lloyd George, and Protestant Political Culture
The story eventually reached the highest levels of the British government. Arthur James Balfour had been raised in a strongly evangelical Scottish Presbyterian household. David Lloyd George came from Welsh Baptist Christianity and later recalled a religious formation steeped in the Hebrew Bible.
Those backgrounds do not reduce the Balfour Declaration to Christian prophecy translated into foreign policy. Britain was fighting a world war. Imperial strategy, wartime diplomacy, competing territorial commitments, and British interests all shaped the declaration.
Yet religion need not disappear from the history simply because geopolitical considerations were also present. By 1917, ideas about Jews, biblical history, restoration, and the land had circulated within British Protestant culture for generations.
On November 2, 1917, the British government announced that it viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of “a national home for the Jewish people,” while also stating that nothing should prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.
Balfour was not a Darbyite. That is precisely the point. Christian interest in Jewish restoration had long since escaped the boundaries of a single theological system.
Wilson and the American Connection
Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister, approved the proposed text of the Balfour Declaration before the British government issued it publicly. An official State Department historical memorandum later recorded his approval.
Wilson’s Presbyterian identity cannot by itself explain the decision. Religious affiliation should never replace political history. His role nevertheless establishes a narrower point: an American president formed within Protestant Christianity participated in an important diplomatic development on the road toward a Jewish national home.
The challenge throughout this history is to avoid two errors. One is to turn every Christian political leader into an instrument of prophecy. The other is to assume that religious formation becomes irrelevant whenever political interests are also present.
Wingate and Military Cooperation
During the British Mandate, Christian involvement took another form through Orde Wingate. Raised in an evangelical environment, Wingate became an unusually committed supporter of Zionism. In 1938, during the Arab Revolt, he organized the Special Night Squads, joint British-Jewish units that conducted operations against Palestinian rebels. Their activities gave some Jewish fighters training and tactical experience that later contributed to the military development of the Yishuv.
Wingate also complicates any simple story of Christian benevolence toward Jews. The Special Night Squads employed severe counterinsurgency and reprisal methods, including collective punishment affecting Palestinian communities.
His place in the story reveals both the reach and danger of religiously informed political commitment. What began for earlier Protestants as biblical speculation about Jewish restoration could, under different circumstances, become direct participation in armed conflict.
Truman and Statehood
By 1948, the struggle over Jewish statehood had been transformed by forces far larger than Christian restorationism. European antisemitism had culminated in the Holocaust. Jewish displaced persons remained throughout Europe. Britain was withdrawing from Palestine. Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities were already fighting, and the United Nations had recommended partition into Jewish and Arab states.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the establishment of the State of Israel. President Harry S. Truman, a Baptist, recognized the provisional government within minutes.
The record surrounding Truman’s decision includes humanitarian concerns following the Holocaust, Zionist lobbying, domestic politics, strategic disagreements, Arab opposition, oil interests, and resistance within the State Department. Truman should no more be turned into a dispensationalist than Balfour should.
His role nevertheless completes part of the pattern. From nineteenth-century restorationism to American recognition in 1948, Christian political figures repeatedly appeared at significant moments in the history leading toward Jewish statehood.
The People Prophecy Could Fail to See
There is another side to this history that Christians cannot responsibly ignore. Palestinian Arabs, Muslim and Christian alike, were not characters who suddenly appeared when Jewish restoration approached political success. They lived in communities with farms, cities, churches, mosques, institutions, family histories, and political aspirations of their own.
Jewish restoration unfolded in a land already inhabited by another people whose future would be profoundly affected by the creation of a Jewish national home and, eventually, a Jewish state.
That fact exposes a moral weakness within Christian restorationism. The tradition could challenge centuries of Christian contempt for Jews by insisting that Jewish identity had not disappeared into Christianity and that the Jewish people continued to matter in the purposes of God. Given the long history of Christian anti-Judaism, that theological correction mattered.
Yet a theology capable of seeing Jews more clearly could still fail to see Palestinians clearly. When Christians approached the land primarily as the stage upon which prophecy would be fulfilled, Palestinian lives could become secondary to a sacred narrative centered on somebody else.
There was another tension. Christian support for Jews could be both affirming and instrumental. A Christian might reject antisemitism and support Jewish restoration while simultaneously understanding Jews primarily through Christian expectations concerning prophecy, conversion, tribulation, or the Second Coming. The Jewish people could therefore be valued while still being assigned a role within someone else’s theology.
Christian theology must therefore be evaluated not only by asking whether it improved Christian attitudes toward Jews, but also by asking what kind of Jewish existence it allowed Christians to imagine and whether its vision of restoration obscured Palestinian humanity.
Actors, but Not Authors
Christian restorationists did not create Zionism, and Christian statesmen did not create Israel. Jewish actors remained indispensable to the national movement, institution-building, diplomacy, migration, defense, and ultimately statehood. Ottoman collapse, British imperial interests, European antisemitism, the Holocaust, Palestinian nationalism and resistance, international diplomacy, migration, and war all shaped what happened.
Christianity nevertheless belongs within that history as one strand in the religious, intellectual, diplomatic, and political environment through which Jewish restoration became increasingly imaginable in powerful Protestant societies.
Shaftesbury represents the older British evangelical restorationist tradition. Darby helped give one branch of it a more systematic theology, while Scofield carried related ideas into American Protestant life. Blackstone turned prophecy toward political lobbying, and Hechler demonstrated how a Christian restorationist could become useful to Herzl’s diplomacy. Balfour, Lloyd George, and Wilson inhabited Protestant political cultures already familiar with biblical ideas concerning Jewish restoration. Wingate carried Christian Zionism into direct cooperation with the Yishuv. Truman, amid far more complicated political and humanitarian pressures, supplied rapid American recognition when Israel declared statehood.
They should not be collapsed into a single theological category. Their motives differed, their theology differed, and their political roles differed.
That diversity is what makes the history important.
The road to Israel passed through Jewish nationalism, European catastrophe, imperial government, diplomacy, migration, political organizing, and war. It also passed through Christian Bibles, sermons, theological arguments, lobbying networks, and political offices.
Recognizing that Christian strand does not diminish Jewish agency. It gives Christians a more complete account of their own involvement.
It also enlarges Christian responsibility. A theological tradition that helped some Christians recover the continuing importance of Jewish history could simultaneously encourage them to look past Palestinians. A theology capable of resisting one ancient Christian blindness could create another.
By May 1948, however, the central question had changed. Jewish sovereignty was no longer merely a subject of prophecy, advocacy, diplomacy, or Zionist aspiration. Israel existed as a state.
Christianity now had to respond not to an anticipated restoration but to a political reality. Prophecy would meet government, military power, borders, competing national claims, and the unresolved fate of another people.
That is where Part II begins.
Notes
Robert O. Smith, More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford University Press, 2013).
Donald M. Lewis, The Origins of Christian Zionism: Lord Shaftesbury and Evangelical Support for a Jewish Homeland (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Crawford Gribben, J. N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism (Oxford University Press, 2024).
B. M. Pietsch, Dispensational Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Ariel Lionard Feldestein and Katrin Levy, “Beyond Chance? Herzl, Hechler, and Ideological Convergence in Early Political Zionism,” Religions 17 (2026).
U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, vol. V, pt. 2.
Matthew Hughes, “Terror in Galilee: British-Jewish Collaboration and the Special Night Squads in Palestine during the Arab Revolt, 1938–39,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 43, no. 4 (2015): 590–610.
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, “Recognition of the State of Israel.”