This thesis is a critical analysis of the theology and ethics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism in America. Chapter One introduces the thesis and its method, which draws constructively from history, sociology, and anthropology while remaining substantively theological. Chapter Two describes dispensationalism's origins in nineteenth-century Britain and its dissemination and development in America. Chapter Three moves from broad, historical description to the contemporary and particular through an introduction to Faith Bible Chapel (FBC), an American Christian Zionist congregation. This description arises from an academic term spent at FBC observing congregational life and conducting extensive interviews, as well as fieldwork undertaken in FBC's "adopted settlement" in the West Bank, including interviews with Israeli settlers about partnerships with American Christians. The remaining chapters move to more explicitly doctrinal analysis. Chapters Four through Six are shaped by William Cavanaugh's concept of 'theopolitics' (Theopolitical Imagination, 2002): a disciplined, community-gathering common imagination of time and space. Through the exploration of a key historical text (The Scofield Reference Bible, 1917) and its continuing legacies in the life and thought of FBC, these chapters examine the theopolitics of dispensationalist Christian Zionism, demonstrating that it is a complex system of convictions and practices in which the disciplines of biblicism and biblical literalism form an eschatology which subordinates ecclesiology and Christology, nurturing an imagination of the roles of Christ and the church in time and space which sever social ethics from necessary Christological and ecclesiological sources. John Howard Yoder's work is used to bring this system into relief, and to establish that eschatology per se is not inimical to Christian social ethics. Chapter Seven concludes the thesis with a summary of its findings, as well as a discussion of the positive functions of apocalyptic in Christian social ethics, pointing toward the possibility of alternative ecclesial enactments of apocalyptic theopolitics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:611129 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Phillips, Elizabeth Rachel |
| Contributors | Plant, Stephen |
| Publisher | University of Cambridge |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/288883 |
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