WATTS’S VIEW OF ISRAEL AND THE CHURCH
From:
http://scottaniol.com/wp-content/uploads/Aniol2.pdf
The answer to the previous question will become clearer in considering how Watts views the relationship between Israel and the church.
In several cases Watts calls Israel “the church,”{47} proclaims the “church or nation of the Jews” to be a “type or figure of the whole invisible church of God,”{48} and explains that for Israel “the church was their whole nation, for it was ordained of God to be a national church.”{49} This does not necessarily indicate a blurring of the two, however, for dispensationalists are not immune from calling Israel a “church”— both Darby and Scofield do so. For example, Darby mentions the “Jewish church (i.e., assembly) or nation” in his writings,{50} and like- wise, Scofield says, “It [‘church’] is thus appropriately used, not only of the New Testament church and of the New Testament churches, but also of Israel in the wilderness (Acts vii : 38), and of the town meeting of Ephesus (Acts xix : 32, 39, 41, ‘assembly’).”{51} As both of them high- light the underlying meaning of “assembly,” however, they seem to be using the term in its general sense rather than specifically referring to the New Testament body.
Watts, however, appears to use the term more specifically and sees at least a typological relationship between the two bodies and very likely a replacement of Israel by the church.
Watts manifests this replacement emphasis in several places.
He argues that God has rejected Israel as his people because of their sin and has replaced them with the Christian church:
God has fulfilled his word, and cut them off according to his threaten- ings, from his relation to him as their God, nor are they any longer his people; they have left their names for a curse to his chosen people, that is, the gospel church made up chiefly of Gentiles, who esteem the name of a Jew a reproach or a curse, and God has called his people, by another name, that is, christians, as he threatened so plainly by Isaiah, his prophet, chapter lxv. 15. These were the children of the kingdom con- cerning whom our Savior foretels, that they should not sit down with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven, but should be cast out into outer darkness; Mat. viii. 11, 12.{52}
The church, according to Watts, inherits all of the promises God made to Israel, albeit in spiritual form:
As those Gentiles who do, really and inwardly, receive the Messiah, and practise his religion in faith and holiness, come into all these inward, real, and spiritual privileges and blessings; so all that make a visible and credi- ble profession of faith, and holiness, and universal subjection to Christ, come into all the outward privileges of the visible church, under the gos- pel: Some few of which privileges are continued from the Jewish church, but the greatest part of them are abolished, because the gospel state is more spiritual than the dispensation of the levitical law, and not such a typical state as that was; and none are to be admitted into this visible church, and esteemed complete members of it, but those who make such a declaration and profession of their faith in Christ, and their avowed subjection to him, as may be supposed, in a judgment of charity, to manifest them to be real believers in Christ, the true subjects of his spiri- tual kingdom, and members of the invisible church.{53}
Watts’s ideas are perhaps best understood on this matter when it becomes clear that he views both Old Testament Israel and the Gentile nations as types of believers and unbelievers in every era. He argues that the Jews represent those “under the kingdom of God,” while the Gentiles picture those “under the kingdom of Satan.”
The physical nature of these two groups enters then a “more spiritual state and economy” in the New Testament, wherein birth no longer grants one entrance into one group or the other, but now “a visible profession of our being born of God, of real faith in Christ, of true repentance, and inward holiness...render [believers] real members of the invisible church of God.”{54} Again, Watts’s typological understanding of Israel in the Old Testament seems to downplay the importance of the nation itself in order to highlight the reality of its antitype, the church.
Footnotes:
47. For example, Watts dedicates an entire discourse to comparing the Jewish “church” and the Christian “church” in which he states that “the Jewish nation was once the only visible church of God among men, and the Gentiles were excluded” (Watts, Works in Nine Volumes, 3:603.)
48. Ibid., 3:598–99.
49. Ibid., 3:601.
50. John Nelson Darby, The Collected Writings of J. N. Darby, ed. William Kelly, 34 vols. (Sunbury, PA: Believers Bookshelf, n.d.), 2:35.
51. C. I. Scofield and Arno Clemens Gaebelein, Things New and Old: Old and New Testament Studies (New York: Publication Office “Our Hope,” 1920), p. 257 (empha- sis original).
52. Watts, Works in Nine Volumes, 3:612 (emphasis original).
53. Ibid., 3:613.
54. Ibid., 3:620 (emphasis original).
