Boast Not Against the Branches: The Reformed Tradition and the Jews

Too many Reformed Christians are ignorant of the prominent place their own tradition has historically afforded to the future of Israel and the Jewish people. That is the problem this short book sets out to remedy. In the decades since World War II, a certain post-war consensus has shaped how many Reformed and evangelical Christians think about the Jews, often leading them either toward uncritical Zionism or a studied theological indifference. Douglas Wilson charts a different course. Drawing on a wide collection of quotes from Reformed teachers across the centuries, many of them untethered from the twentieth century and its Left Behind novels, Wilson demonstrates that hope for Jewish conversion, rooted in Romans 11, is not a dispensationalist invention. It is a consistent thread running through the Reformed tradition from its earliest days. The point is not to endorse everything that went wrong in twentieth-century theology. The mistakes were real and need to be corrected. But correction is not the same as wholesale rejection of a heritage that contains genuine wisdom. Boast not against the branches. Paul's warning applies to the church's posture toward Israel, and Wilson shows what a chastened, historically informed, biblically grounded version of that posture actually looks like.