Abstract
This brief concluding chapter sums up the central points of the work as a whole, arguing that Brightman’s “consistently literal” hermeneutic led him to separate God’s promises for Israel and for the church, reimagining Christian hope through the idea of “chosen” nationhood. The chapter suggests some lines for future research in both an English and New English context. Although the book ends its examination of Judeo-centrism in 1660, it is suggested that English interest in Jewish restoration was a consistent theme from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. While this book has highlighted significant crossovers between Brightman’s works and those in found in contemporary dispensational Christian Zionism, this chapter argues that puritan theological positions should not be used to either justify or condemn contemporary eschatological viewpoints.
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Notes
- 1.
See Johnston, Revelation Restored.
- 2.
Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, pp. 1–42.
- 3.
Gribben, Puritan Millennium, p. 233.
- 4.
Killeen, Biblical Scholarship, pp. 43–102.
- 5.
Ernest Lee Tuveson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress (Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, 1972), pp. 71–112.
- 6.
Richey, Politics of Revelation, p. 40.
- 7.
Christianson, Reformers, p. 106; Gibson, “Eschatology, Apocalypse and Millenarianism”, p. 247.
- 8.
Jue, Heaven, pp. 3–7.
- 9.
As mentioned above, Robert O. Smith’s forthcoming More Desired than Our Owne Salvation: The Roots of Christian Zionism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013) appears to pick up some of these themes.
- 10.
Richard Baxter, The Glorious Kingdom of Christ (London, 1691), p. 62.
- 11.
Baxter, Glorious, p. 56.
- 12.
Phililicrines Parrhesiastes, [Henry More], Some Cursory Reflexions Impartially made upon Mr. Richard Baxter His Way of Writing Notes on the Apocalypse (London, 1685), pp. 10–11 Emphasis in original.
- 13.
Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, pp. 195–224.
- 14.
Charles Ryrie, Dispensationalism (Chicago: Moody Press, 1995), pp. 38–41.
- 15.
Stephen Sizer, Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? (Leicester: IVP, 2004), pp. 26–30.
- 16.
The use of contemporary historical scholarship to justify particular eschatological positions in a problem I address elsewhere. See Andrew Crome, “Historical Understandings in Millennial Studies: A Case Study of Christian Zionism” in Beyond the End: The Future of Millennial Studies, eds Joshua Searle and Kenneth Newport (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2012), pp. 20–46.
- 17.
Robert Greville, The Nature of Truth, Its Union and Unity with the Soule (London, 1641), pp. 178–79.
- 18.
John Spencer, A Discourse of Divers Petitions of High Concernment (London, 1641), p. 14.
- 19.
Richard Baxter, The Saints Everlasting Rest (London, 1650), p. 85.
References
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Crome, A. (2014). Conclusion. In: The Restoration of the Jews: Early Modern Hermeneutics, Eschatology, and National Identity in the Works of Thomas Brightman. International Archives of the History of Ideas Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 213. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04762-1_7
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