Who was Arthur James Balfour?
According to Sizer he was “brought up in an evangelical home and was sympathetic to Zionism because of the influence of dispensational teaching.” Uncultivated, naïve dim-bulb that he was, his thinking processes dulled, like those of the rest of us Christian friends of Israel today, by low-brow pamphleteering and thus easily led by the Zionists, Balfour “regarded history as an instrument for carrying-out a Divine Purpose.” (Since when did this become a heresy?) In truth, however, Lord Arthur James Balfour was none of the above. He was a member of the most prominent political family of his day, noted for its achievements in science and the arts; he had a place at the very heart of intellectual and artistic circles in his days, was educated up to his ears, and was a widely-published critical-academic philosopher — a circumstance that earns him a long entry today in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The quotient of dispensationalism in Balfour’s intellectual makeup was zero. In fact, of all
Who was Arthur James Balfour?