Promise-Fulfillment

Paul’s new book is now available at Amazon.com.

“Promise-Fulfillment” is the order of salvation history. Any true “biblical” theology will follow this principle. Christian Zionism takes ancestral Israel as the controlling center of its theology, focusing on a future Jewish kingdom. Because of its belief that the church age is a parenthesis in salvation history and that God’s kingdom has “not yet” actually arrived, it provides evangelicals and Pentecostals with a “promise-promise” theology today.
This book provides an alternate biblical theology to Christian Zionism’s dispensational theology. It focuses on a theology found in the New Testament—Jesus’ theology of “the good news of the kingdom of God.” The fact of Jesus Christ’s arrival in the first century with the “good news of the kingdom” as the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises of God is the controlling center of this theology. It is clearly a “promise-fulfillment” theology. The focus of this great salvation is the “Christ-event,” faith in Jesus’ redemptive death on the cross, not a focus on “Jewish ancestry” but faith in Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God that results in new birth and the new spirituality of the kingdom of God—his Spirit living and ruling in Christians today.
The New Testament Case against Christian Zionism takes the Judaism-gospel conflict in the early church as a biblical model to refute Christian Zionism’s Judaism-oriented theology. It traces the conflict of Judaism with the gospel in Jesus’ ministry, Luke’s Gospel-Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s Romans and Galatians Letters and John’s Gospel. The result of this authoritative evidence is that Christian Zionism and its theology are found guilty of perverting the gospel. They pervert the gospel today in the same way that Judaism perverted the gospel in the first century church—by a surprising return to Judaism after having received the revelation of Jesus’ good news of the kingdom of God.
The Judaizers of the first century, as well as Christian Zionism today, failed to recognize the unique moment of all salvation history that the New Covenant represented. They neglected, ignored and some even rejected this good news of the present kingdom of God, abandoning its unprecedented spirituality for the paltry hopes and defunct spirituality of Judaism. This is an extremely ironic development in the evangelical-Pentecostal community today.
Christian Zionism not only compromises the truth of the gospel, but it puts the world mission of the church in the 21st century in jeopardy. Just as the world mission of the early church in the first century was jeopardized by the Judaism-gospel conflict, creating a wall of hatred between Jew and Gentile that would compromise the gospel message in the Roman world, so pseudo-Christian Zionism’s “Israel-centered narrow-focused gospel” today puts the world mission of the Church in jeopardy again—especially in the Middle East and in the world of Islam. Another conflict today, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has created a new context of hate that, again, threatens to compromise the Christian mission.
The American media’s Israel-biased one-sided reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with America’s unconditional support of the State of Israel in the conflict, and pseudo-Christian Zionism aiding and abetting that hatred between the West and Islam, draws evangelicals and Pentecostals into this new context of hate. These influences and the resulting “wall of hatred” prevent the world of Islam from seeing the gospel as a true option for belief. This book will assist evangelicals and Pentecostals move toward a Christian view of the conflict, allowing them to view it in New Testament terms. It will help them avoid this “contemporary wall of hatred,” continue to be motivated by the love of Christ and engage in a robust mission among 2.5 billion Muslims. They, also, must hear Jesus’ universal good news of the kingdom of God as a true option for belief.

Paul’s website: www.christianityinculture.net

Paul Pomerville served as a missionary to Asia and Europe for thirteen years and as Graduate Professor and Department Chairman of Christian Missions and Cross-Cultural Communications at the Assemblies of God Seminary for two years. He is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Mission with a Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies. Paul is retired and currently lives on the Island of Bali in Indonesia.