At least between the inauguration of Obama and the Likud victory in Israel, Britain will have the most Zionist government in the world, headed by a Dispensationalist and with an expatriate Israeli (and purchaser of babies over the Internet) as at least the nominal Foreign Secretary (of Milly and the former UN Deputy Secretary-General who holds his hand at Cabinet, I think we all know who is the foreign policy expert in the room, and who is not).
The people who elected Obama are not pro-Israeli. Nor are they pro-Palestinian. They are pro-American. They know that they are paying for every bomb being dropped on Gaza. And they know that they do not currently have that money to spare.
Facing Brown and Miliband is David Cameron, who labours under the strange misapprehension that there is some strand in Toryism that believes profoundly in Israel, and who has surrounded himself with like-minded head-bangers such as Osborne, Gove and Vaizey. In fact, the only such strand in Toryism, Labourism or Liberalism is the one that believes profoundly in Britain. All else is strictly secondary and conditional.
When are we going to get a government, or the chance of a government, that so accords with the instincts and interests of this nation?
You may as well lay off Miliband. That's what Brown is going to do in 2009, lay him off, as in sack him.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't mean that we can't still have fun between now and then.
ReplyDeleteIs Dispensationalism really in Calvin, though?
ReplyDeleteIt isn't, but then what is?
ReplyDeleteDispensationalism is not an accurate expression of the Reformed tradition, and that tradition's most classically-minded expositors in the present day, such as the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, are forthright in their condemnation of it.
Independent congregations may require subscription to it, but no denomination, to the best of my knowledge, has ever done so.
But it was founded a man whose Evangelicalism had led him out of the Church of Ireland, and by a Congregationalist minister (who had awarded himself a doctorate - no university at that time would have given any credit to Dispensationalist material).
Mercifully, the Scofield Reference Bible is difficult to obtain in this country, and the Left Behind series has no British distributor, because it has no conceivable British readership, not even in Scotland, in Northern Ireland or on Merseyside.
Do you own a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible? And do you know about British Israelism in Northern Ireland?
ReplyDelete"Do you own a copy of the Scofield Reference Bible?"
ReplyDeleteNo, but if I ever see one then I'll buy it, in order to own the copy that someone else might actually be reading.
"And do you know about British Israelism in Northern Ireland?"
A bit, including that it is fulsomely condemned both by the Calvinist leadership there and by Ian Paisley, whose Free Presbyterian Church is thoroughly misnamed, being neither Reformed (in however hardline a form, such as that of its unconnected Scottish namesake) in theology nor Presbyterian in government.
The most notable British Israelite from Northern Ireland was the late Reverend Robert Bradford MP, an eventually excommunicated Methodist.
Their meeting near Durham Bus Station was recently revealed to have ties to the BNP.