The Missing Link

The story begins in Siberia, which is the right place for a story like this to begin.

Not a comfortable place. Not an academic office or a seminary library. Siberia — the eastern edge of Russia, as far from Jerusalem as a person can get without leaving the continent. That is where Arnold Genekowitsch Fruchtenbaum was born on September 26, 1943, because that is where his father was when his father was released from a Communist prison.

Henry Fruchtenbaum — a Jewish photographer who had fled Hitler's Poland — had been falsely accused of being a Nazi spy by Soviet authorities. This is the kind of thing that happens to Jewish people who escape one totalitarian regime by running toward another one. He served his time in a Siberian prison. His son Arnold was born in Tobolsk the year of his release.

This is the beginning of a story that runs from Siberia to Brooklyn to Cedarville to Dallas Seminary to Jerusalem to San Antonio, Texas — and eventually to the most important academic work on Israel's place in biblical theology produced in the twentieth century.

The story of Arnold Fruchtenbaum is the story of a man whom history kept trying to kill, and who responded by spending thirteen years writing a dissertation that changed how serious students of Scripture understand the covenant promises of God.

The Escape

After the war, the family returned to Poland — which was not hospitable to Jewish people in 1946 any more than it had been before the war. They escaped to Czechoslovakia. A year later, the communists seized Czechoslovakia. The family posed as Greeks and escaped again — this time to West Germany, where they were placed in British Displaced Persons' camps.

The chain of escapes is worth pausing on: Poland → Soviet Union → Siberia → Poland → Czechoslovakia → West Germany. Each step a flight from something that wanted them dead. In the displaced persons camps in Germany, Henry Fruchtenbaum taught his son the traditions of Orthodox Judaism. His grandfather had memorized the entire Tanakh in Hebrew by age eighteen. The family line ran deep into Hasidic leadership in Poland — a world that Hitler had destroyed.

It was in the displaced persons camps that the family met a Lutheran minister and his daughter who came to bring food and clothing. This minister would eventually connect the Fruchtenbaums with the American Board of Missions to the Jews in New York — now known as Chosen People Ministries. The family immigrated to Brooklyn in 1951.

Five years later, at age thirteen, Arnold Fruchtenbaum came to saving faith in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah.

His father was not pleased. Henry Fruchtenbaum was a Jew who had survived the Holocaust and the Gulag and two communist regimes. He had kept his Orthodox Jewish faith through all of it. His son's conversion was not a welcome development. When the family moved to Los Angeles in 1958, Arnold was forbidden to read the Bible, attend Christian meetings, or associate with Jewish believers. He complied — mostly — until he left home for college.

The discipline his father had given him — the Orthodox Jewish training, the Hebrew, the Talmudic tradition — would become the foundation of everything Fruchtenbaum built academically. The father who did not want a Jewish Christian son gave that son the tools to become the foremost scholar of Jewish-Christian theology in the English-speaking world.

The Education

Arnold Fruchtenbaum graduated from Cedarville College with a Bachelor of Arts in Hebrew and Greek. He then studied archaeology, ancient history, historical geography, and Hebrew at the American Institute of Holy Land Studies and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was in Israel when the Six-Day War happened in 1967 — witnessing firsthand the event that made Psalm 122 contemporary news.

He returned to the United States and entered Dallas Theological Seminary, graduating in 1971 with a Master of Theology in Hebrew and Old Testament. He married Mary Ann Morrow in 1968. Together they moved to Jerusalem, where he worked with the local Messianic congregation and trained young Israeli believers for Christian service.

The religious authorities in Jerusalem were not happy. Two years in, they applied enough pressure on government officials to force the Fruchtenbaums to leave Israel in 1973. The man who had been expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany had now been expelled from the land his ancestors had been promised by God.

He returned to the United States and spent several years with Chosen People Ministries before founding Ariel Ministries in San Antonio, Texas in December 1977 — named for the Hebrew word for "Lion of God," a Messianic title. The mission: to evangelize and disciple Jewish people.

And then he started writing his dissertation.

Israelology: The Missing Link

Thirteen years.

That is how long it took Arnold Fruchtenbaum to complete his doctoral dissertation at New York University. He received his PhD in 1989. The dissertation was titled Israelology: The Missing Link in Systematic Theology.

The title is the argument. Israelology — the systematic biblical doctrine of Israel — has been functionally absent from most evangelical systematic theologies. The standard works address God, man, sin, salvation, the church, and the last things. Israel appears in the last things section, often briefly, and almost always as a problem to be resolved rather than a doctrine to be developed.

Fruchtenbaum's argument — documented across more than a thousand pages — is that this omission is not merely an oversight. It is a load-bearing absence. What you believe about Israel determines what you believe about the covenants. What you believe about the covenants determines what you believe about eschatology. What you believe about eschatology determines what you believe about the Church's present role and future destiny. Pull Israelology out of systematic theology and the whole structure wobbles.

The work surveys four major theological systems — postmillennialism, amillennialism, premillennialism, and dispensationalism — on every major question relating to Israel: her election, her covenants, her rejection of Messiah, her current condition, her future salvation, and her role in the Millennial Kingdom. The conclusion is unambiguous: only the dispensational framework — which maintains the literal, national, unconditional application of the Abrahamic, Davidic, and New Covenants to ethnic Israel — is consistent with what the text actually says.

This is not a comfortable conclusion for most of evangelical academia. The academy has largely moved toward covenant theology or some form of New Covenant Theology, both of which read the Old Testament covenant promises as spiritually fulfilled in the Church. Fruchtenbaum spent thirteen years documenting exactly why that reading fails — lexically, grammatically, historically, and canonically.

The Abrahamic Covenant and Thread 2

The Abrahamic Covenant is the foundation of everything Fruchtenbaum builds.

Genesis 12:1-3 — "I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee... and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed." This is Thread 2 — Corporate Election in Christ. God chose a people. Not because of their merit. Not because of their size — Deuteronomy 7:7 is explicit that Israel was the smallest of the nations. God chose Israel because he chose Israel. The election is real, corporate, and unconditional.

The critical question Fruchtenbaum addresses — the question that divides dispensationalism from replacement theology — is whether that covenant has been transferred, abrogated, or fulfilled in the Church.

His answer is no. Romans 9-11 is the definitive text. Paul, who understands the Church better than anyone, who wrote Ephesians 2-3 on the mystery of the Church, nevertheless insists in Romans 11:1-2 that God has not cast away his people. Mē genoito — God forbid. The strongest negative available in Greek. The covenant promises to Israel are "without repentance" — Romans 11:29. The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable.

This is not Paul hedging his ecclesiology. This is Paul insisting that his ecclesiology — the glorious mystery of Jews and Gentiles united in one Body — does not cancel the prior covenant with national Israel. Both are true simultaneously. This is what Fruchtenbaum calls the distinction between the two programs of God: the program for Israel and the program for the Church.

Footsteps of the Messiah and Thread 3

Footsteps of the Messiah: A Study of the Sequence of Prophetic Events is Fruchtenbaum's other major contribution — and the most comprehensive dispensational treatment of eschatology available.

Seven hundred pages tracing Thread 3 — the Royal Trajectory — from the Davidic Covenant through Daniel's Seventy Weeks through the Tribulation through the Second Coming through the Millennial Kingdom to the eternal state.

The Davidic Covenant — 2 Samuel 7:12-16 — promises David a son who will sit on his throne forever. This is Thread 3's anchor. The covenant is unconditional. David's greater Son must eventually sit on David's literal throne in David's literal city and reign over David's literal people. Fruchtenbaum traces every step of how Scripture gets from 2 Samuel 7 to Revelation 20.

Daniel's Seventy Weeks is the roadmap. Sixty-nine weeks have been fulfilled. One week remains — the seven-year Tribulation — which will conclude with the Second Coming of Israel's Messiah. Fruchtenbaum's treatment of Daniel 9:24-27 is the most thorough in print, drawing on the Hebrew text, the intertestamental background, and the Talmudic context to show that the "prince who is to come" is the Antichrist, not Titus, and that the Tribulation is a future event, not a past one.

The Millennial Kingdom that follows is literal — 1,000 years, with a literal king on a literal throne in a literal Jerusalem, with national Israel restored to the land and the Gentile nations coming up annually to Jerusalem to worship. Fruchtenbaum gives 200 pages to what the Old Testament actually says the Kingdom will look like. Most Christian eschatology ignores this material entirely.

The Six-Day War and Zechariah 12:10

Fruchtenbaum was in Jerusalem in 1967 when Israeli forces captured the Old City and the Western Wall. He was twenty-three years old. He had escaped the Iron Curtain as a child. He had grown up in displaced persons camps. He had been expelled from his own father's house for believing Jesus was the Messiah. And now he was standing in the city his ancestors had prayed toward for two thousand years, watching Jewish soldiers weep at the Western Wall.

Zechariah 12:10 — "And I will pour upon the house of David, and upon the inhabitants of Jerusalem, the spirit of grace and of supplications: and they shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son."

This verse describes Israel's national mourning at the Second Coming — the moment the nation recognizes the one they rejected. Fruchtenbaum's Israelology documents this in meticulous detail: Israel's national salvation is a future event, triggered by a specific historical moment, involving the literal descendants of Abraham in the literal city of Jerusalem.

Romans 11:26 — "And so all Israel shall be saved." Not spiritual Israel. Not the Church. Israel — the same word Paul has used throughout Romans 9-11 to mean the Jewish people. The salvation is national, literal, and future. It is the fulfillment of the Abrahamic Covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and the New Covenant simultaneously — all three finding their terminus in the moment described in Zechariah 12:10.

This is what Fruchtenbaum spent thirteen years documenting. This is what the critics of dispensationalism want to spiritualize away. And this is what the history of the Jewish people — from Abraham to the Holocaust to 1948 to 1967 — keeps insisting is literally, physically, nationally real.

Why This Matters

Replacement theology — the teaching that the Church has permanently replaced Israel — has consequences that extend beyond academic theology.

The history of Christian anti-Semitism is largely the history of replacement theology applied to the way Christians treated the people God's covenant still covered. If the covenant promises to Israel have been permanently transferred to the Church, then the Jewish people are simply a failed religious community with no special divine significance. History shows what that conclusion leads to.

Dispensationalism — Fruchtenbaum's dispensationalism specifically — produces a Christianity that stands with Israel because it reads the Bible plainly enough to know that God still does. Not because of political calculation. Not because of sentiment. Because Genesis 12:3 says "I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee," and God means what he says.

That sentence was written to Abraham. It has never been revoked. The Church has not replaced the beneficiary. The covenant is still in force.

Arnold Fruchtenbaum — born in Siberia, escaped from behind the Iron Curtain, expelled from Jerusalem by religious authorities, thirteen years writing the dissertation that filled the missing link — spent his entire career documenting why this is the only reading of the Bible that takes it seriously.

He was born into a world that wanted to erase both Israel and the Jewish people. He responded by writing the most comprehensive academic treatment of Israel's biblical significance in print.

The God who made the covenant with Abraham keeps it. The story of Arnold Fruchtenbaum — from Siberia to San Antonio — is one piece of evidence that this is true.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible