Arno C. Gaebelein


Arno Clemens Gaebelein was a Methodist minister in the United States. He was a prominent teacher and conference speaker. He was the father of educator and philosopher of Christian education Frank E. Gaebelein. He edited the journal Our Hope for many years, an outlet of the then-budding Fundamentalist movement in American Christianity.

Career

Being a dispensationalist, he was a developer of the movement in its early days. Two of his books, Revelation, an Analysis and Exposition and Current Events in the Light of the Bible explain the dispensationalist view of eschatology.
Gaebelein did not support the Christian Zionists in their alliance with the World Zionist Organization. In a 1905 speech, he said:
In 1899, Gaebelein left the Methodist Episcopal Church because of complaints of theological liberalism. George Marsden notes that he was one of the early fundamentalist leaders to advocate ecclesiastical separation.
Gaebelein was an advocate of gap creationism. He also was the editor of Our Hope, a Christian periodical, for a number of years, and was an assistant to C. I. Scofield on the Scofield Reference Bible.
Gaebelein had complex views on Jews. He admired Judaism, but also saw the "true" form of Judaism as inherently involving Jesus. George Marsden refers to some of Gaebelein's writing as being anti-Jewish. In the November-December 1896 issue of Our Hope, Gaebelein wrote that "Scriptural – not Talmudic or Rabbinical, still less Reformed – Judaism is as much as divine revelation as Christianity. The canon of the New Testament has no higher Divine authority than has that of the Old. Neither is complete without the other. All he needs is personal, saving faith in his own Jewish Messiah, the Christ of God, nothing more. And all that was Divinely given him through Moses he has full liberty to retain and uphold as far as possible when he becomes a believer in Jesus Christ." David A. Rausch wrote in 1980 that Gaebelein and Our Hope chronicled Nazi anti-Jewish atrocities and the beginnings of the Holocaust quite clearly and directly in the 1937-1945 period, when this information was available and public, yet not widely acknowledged or acted upon. While there were various regrettable passages published suggesting that the persecution would actually all turn out for the better and be a "blessing", Rausch thought the coverage was largely to their credit in retrospect, accurately calling out the possibility of anti-Semitism not just in Germany, but in the United States, and denouncing it.

Works