Puritan Views on the Conversion of Israel

What did the Puritans believe about unfulfilled prophecy? Was there a single view, or a range of positions, when it came to the church’s earthly prospects? These and other questions are deftly handled by Iain H. Murray in The Puritan Hope: Revival and the Interpretation of Prophecy. The following excerpt, on the future conversion of Israel, is from pages 41–45:

‘One of the first developments in thought on prophecy came as further attention was given to the scriptures bearing on the future of the Jews. Neither Luther nor Calvin saw a future general conversion of the Jews promised in Scripture; some of their contemporaries, however, notably Martin Bucer and Peter Martyr, who taught at Cambridge and Oxford respectively in the reign of Edward VI, did understand the Bible to teach a future calling of the Jews. In this view they were followed by Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva. As early as 1560, four years before Calvin’s death, the English and Scots refugee Protestant leaders who produced the Geneva Bible, express this belief in their marginal notes on Romans chapter 11, verses 15 and 26. On the latter verse they comment, ‘He sheweth that the time shall come that the whole nation of the Jews, though not every one particularly, shall be joined to the church of Christ.’ The first volume in English to expound this conviction at some length was the translation of Peter Martyr’s Commentary upon Romans, published in London in 1568. The probability is strong that Martyr’s careful exposition of the eleventh chapter prepared the way for a general adoption amongst the English Puritans of a belief in the future conversion of the Jews. Closely linked as English Puritanism was to John Calvin, it was the view contained in Martyr’s commentary which was received by the rising generation of students at Cambridge.

Among those students was Hugh Broughton (1549–1612) who had the distinction of being the first Englishman to propose going as a missionary to the Jews in the Near East, and also the first to propose the idea of translating the New Testament into Hebrew for the sake of the Jews. Broughton’s ardour for the conversion of the Jews found no sympathy, however, with the English bishops whom he had early offended by his Puritan leanings. Though given no preferment in the English Church he was so well known in the East on account of his learning that the Chief Rabbi of Constantinople wrote to him in 1599 and subsequently invited him to become a public teacher there! This early possibility of a mission to the Jews was thwarted by the Church authorities, but Broughton’s writings—of which the best known was probably his Commentary on Daniel, 1596—stimulated further study of the whole question.¹An interesting biographical account of Broughton is given in The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, vol. 18, 678.

Broughton was too much an individualist ever to become a leader of the Puritan movement. Two years before he was ejected from his fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1579, William Perkins had entered the same college, a man whom we noted earlier as doing so much to influence the thinking of many who were to preach all over England. Perkins speaks plainly of a future conversion of the Jews:

The Lord saith, All the nations shall be blessed in Abraham: Hence I gather that the nation of the Jews shall be called, and converted to the participation of this blessing: when, and how, God knows: but that it shall be done before the end of the world we know.²A Commentarie upon the first five chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, 1617, 159. And elsewhere in his writings, e.g., ‘A Fruitful Dialogue Concerning the End Of The World’, The Works of W. Perkins, 1618, vol. 3, 470.

The same truth was opened by the succession of Puritan leaders at Cambridge who followed Perkins, including Richard Sibbes and Thomas Goodwin. In his famous book, The Bruised Reed, mentioned earlier in connection with Baxter’s conversion, Sibbes writes:

The Jews are not yet come in under Christ’s banner; but God, that hath persuaded Japhet to come into the tents of Shem, will persuade Shem to come into the tents of Japhet, Gen. 9:27. The ‘fulness of the Gentiles is not yet come in,’ Rom. 11:25, but Christ, that hath the ‘utmost parts of the earth given him for his possession,’ Psa. 2:8, will gather all the sheep his Father hath given him into one fold, that there may be one sheepfold and one shepherd, John 10:16. The faithful Jews rejoiced to think of the calling of the Gentiles; and why should not we joy to think of the calling of the Jews?³The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, edited by A. B. Grosart, 1862, vol. 1, 99.

This note of joy is significant. It had already been struck by Peter Martyr. If a widespread conversion of the Jews was yet to occur in the earth then the horizons of history were not, as Luther feared, wholly dark. Maintaining the truth that the great day for the church would be the day of Christ’s appearing at the end of time, Sibbes nevertheless saw warrant for expecting what he calls ‘lesser days before that great day.’ He continues: As at the first coming of Christ, so at the overthrow of Anti- Christ, the conversion of the Jews, there will be much joy . . . These days make way for that day. Whensoever prophecies shall end in performances, then shall be a day of joying and glorying in the God of our salvation for ever. And therefore in the Revelation where this Scripture is cited, Rev. 21:4, is meant the conversion of the Jews, and the glorious estate they shall enjoy before the end of the world. ‘We have waited for our God,’ and now we enjoy him. Aye, but what saith the church there? ‘Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.’ There is yet another, ‘Come, Lord,’ till we be in heaven.⁴Ibid., vol. 2, 498. Other references in Sibbes are given by Sidney H. Rooy in The Theology of Missions in the Puritan Tradition, 1965, to which I am indebted.

From the first quarter of the seventeenth century, belief in a future conversion of the Jews became commonplace among the English Puritans. In the late 1630s, and in the national upheavals of the 1640s—the period of the Civil Wars—the subject not infrequently was mentioned by Puritan leaders. As a ground for hopefulness in regard to the prospects of Christ’s kingdom it was introduced in sermons before Parliament or on other public occasions by William Strong,⁵William Strong, Thirty-one Select Sermons Preached on Special Occasions, 1656, particularly sermons 12 and 20.William Bridge,⁶See a sermon before the House of Commons in The Works of William Bridge, 1845, vol. 4, 404. George Gillespie,⁷Sermon preached on March 27, 1644, Works of George Gillespie, 1846, vol. 1. and Robert Baillie,⁸See the Epistle Dedicatory to his sermon ‘Satan the Leader in chief of all who resist the Reparation of Sion’, 1643. to name but a few. The fact that the two last-named were commissioners from the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland at the Westminster Assembly, which was convened by the English Parliament in 1643, is indicative of the agreement on this point between English and Scottish divines. Some of the rich doctrinal formularies which that Assembly produced, bear the same witness. The Larger Catechism, after the question, ‘What do we pray for in the second petition of the Lord’s Prayer?’ (‘Thy kingdom come’), answers:

We pray that the kingdom of sin and Satan may be destroyed, the gospel propagated throughout the world, the Jews called, the fulness of the Gentiles brought in . . . that Christ would rule in our hearts here, and hasten the time of his second coming.

The Directory for the Public Worship of God (section on Public Prayer before Sermon) stipulates in similar language that prayer be made ‘for the conversion of the Jews.’

This same belief concerning the future of the Jews is to be found very widely in seventeenth-century Puritan literature. It appears in the works of such well-known Puritans as John Owen, Thomas Manton and John Flavel, though the indices of nineteenth-century reprints of their works do not always indicate this. It is also handled in a rich array of commentaries, both folios and quartos—David Dickson on the Psalms, George Hutcheson on the Minor Prophets, Jeremiah Burroughs on Hosea, William Greenhill on Ezekiel, Elnathan Parr on Romans, and James Durham on Revelation: a list which could be greatly extended.

Occasionally the subject became the main theme of a volume. Perhaps the first in order among these was The Calling of the Jews, published in 1621 by William Gouge, the eminent Puritan minister of Blackfriars, London; the author was a barrister, Sir Henry Finch. A slender work, Some Discourses upon the Point of the Conversion of the Jews, by Moses Wall, appeared in 1650,⁹Published along with a secular piece, The Hope of Israel, by Manasseh Ben Israel. Wall’s discourses consist mainly of eight reasons ‘why we ought to mind their Conversion’. and nineteen years later Increase Mather, the New England divine of Boston, issued his work, The Mystery of Israel’s Salvation Explained and Applied.

That there shall be a general conversion of the Tribes of Israel is a truth which in some measure hath been known and believed in all ages of the Church of God, since the Apostles’ days . . . Only in these late days, these things have obtained credit much more universally than heretofore.

So Mather wrote in 1669.’

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