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Event remembers often-overlooked early Christian Zionist

William Blackstone died more than 80 years ago, but the Sept. 28 passing of Shimon Peres — the last of Israel’s founding fathers — lent a fresh note of mourning to an event later that same day at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.
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October 5, 2016

William Blackstone died more than 80 years ago, but the Sept. 28 passing of Shimon Peres — the last of Israel’s founding fathers — lent a fresh note of mourning to an event later that same day at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.

“Standing up and taking action in the face of injustice or a wrong in the world — that’s what Shimon Peres and William Blackstone were all about,” said Sam Grundwerg, Israel’s consul general in Los Angeles, speaking between American and Israeli flags set at the top of the park, with the San Fernando Valley unfurling behind him.

Peres and Blackstone lived in different eras and on different continents, yet both played key parts in the Zionist project. And while Peres’ contribution was well known to most in the audience at the local event, Blackstone’s part has been somewhat obscured by the years.

The program marking the 175th anniversary of Blackstone’s birth was organized by Paul Rood, an adjunct history professor at Biola University, an evangelical Christian university in La Mirada, southeast of downtown. It aimed to highlight the accomplishments of a man credited with planting the early seeds of Zionism in America’s Christian community.

“The bonds and friendships he created blossomed into something far greater than he could have imagined,” Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, interfaith affairs director at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said at the event. “And the very diversity of the crowd in which you sit demonstrates how it continues unabated.”

William Blackstone, born in 1841, underwent two epiphanies that defined his life and work. 

In 1878, having built a successful career in insurance and real estate in Illinois, he was decided to give up his profession to spend the rest of his life as a Bible teacher. The book he wrote after this first leap of faith, an exploration of biblical prophecy called “Jesus Is Coming,” would sell 3 million copies in 47 languages.

Ten years later, during a trip to Europe and the Middle East, he witnessed the poverty and deprivation of Jews forced out of their homes in Russia. After visiting Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine, he became committed to the twin causes of humanitarian aid for Europe’s Jews and Jewish settlement in Palestine.

Returning home in 1890, he convened a group of rabbis, ministers and academics in Chicago for a “Conference on the Past, Present and Future of Israel.”

The following year, five years before Theodor Herzl published “The Jewish State,” Blackstone collected more than 400 signatures for a petition in favor of a national Jewish homeland, including names like John D. Rockefeller, future President William McKinley and Supreme Court Chief Justice Melville Fuller. He would present the document to President Benjamin Harrison and then again to President Woodrow Wilson in 1916, at the urging of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

His activism led Brandeis to write that year in the Chicago Jewish Sentinel, “Blackstone is Zionism’s greatest ally outside of its own ranks.”

The 1916 petition and its influence on Wilson are credited with spurring the Balfour Declaration, which stated the British government’s intent to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and helped foment Israeli statehood. 

At the Glendale event, the Rev. Greg Denham of Cavalry Chapel South Bay explained that Blackstone’s Zionism was rooted in an understanding of biblical prophecy.

“He understood that everything is moving to Jerusalem,” Denham said, “to a kingdom that will never break down, where love and justice and truth and shalom will rule.”

Though today Evangelical Zionism is a powerful force in Christianity, Rood, a business executive turned history scholar, said, “Blackstone’s opinions ran counter to the mainstream views of Christianity of his time.”

“Blackstone saw the Christian church as proud, carnal, weak, unaware that it was dying from within,” he said.

Eschewing the sedentary life of a minister, Blackstone instead chose to become a traveling Bible teacher, gaining a following in Southern California and beyond. During his career as an evangelist, Rood said, Blackstone distributed tens of millions of Bibles in Japan and China. 

He also served as a trustee of Biola University (originally Bible University of Los Angeles) from 1914 to 1930. Last year, the university named a dormitory after him.

“If he could meet the students in the residence hall named in his memory, I believe that he would be proud of them,” Biola’s president, Barry Corey, told the audience on Sept. 28.

After his death in 1935, Blackstone was put to rest in the Glendale cemetery.

Following the recent ceremony at the top of the memorial park outside the cemetery’s museum, the cars of attendees formed an impromptu memorial procession down the long, winding driveway to Blackstone’s grave. There, Grundwerg presented Blackstone’s great-grandchildren a wreath, which he laid on the preacher’s headstone.

Margaret Blackstone Harrell, Blackstone’s great-granddaughter, remembered him as a man of great humility who happened to have a wonderful singing voice and gentle attitude toward his grandchildren, such as her father.

“Privately, he was a wonderfully loving man,” she told the Journal. “He wasn’t always traveling around the world.”

Speaking graveside, she recounted how Blackstone used to proudly show his grandchildren an autograph book from his time as a chaplain for the Union Army during the Civil War. Beneath all the flourishing signatures of captains and sergeants, in small, unadorned script, were the words “A. Lincoln.”

The lesson, Blackstone would tell his grandchildren, was that “it’s what you do and who you are, not what you say about yourself.”

Blackstone understood his own accomplishments not as a cause to boast. Instead, Harrell said, “God was allowing it to happen, just through him.”

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