Who Was Arno C. Gaebelein? Bible Teacher, Editor of Our Hope
Arno C. Gaebelein was a Bible teacher, writer and editor who lived from 1861 to 1945. He was born in Germany, came to America as a young man, and served as a Methodist preacher before giving his life to two causes: preaching the gospel to the Jewish people of New York, and teaching the Bible, especially its prophecy, to Christians across North America. For decades he edited a monthly magazine called Our Hope. He helped C. I. Scofield prepare the Scofield Reference Bible, and he wrote commentaries on nearly every book of the Bible. He's remembered as one of the leading teachers of the premillennial, dispensational view of prophecy in his generation.
Here's a fuller look at his life, what he taught, and which of his books to read first.
From Germany to New England
Gaebelein was born on August 27, 1861, in Thuringia, in central Germany. He went to a German Gymnasium, a demanding school that gave him a grounding in languages, and he came to trust Christ as a boy. At about eighteen he crossed to the United States. He worked in a mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, while he learned English.
There he came under the influence of German Methodists. They gave him a license to preach, and he soon entered the Methodist ministry among German-speaking congregations. He served in New York City and Baltimore, where people called him the "boy-preacher," and then as pastor of a German Methodist church in Harlem. In those years he married Emma Grimm, a minister's daughter.
A mission to the Jewish people
In New York, Gaebelein began preaching at a mission to Jewish immigrants. The work gripped him. He became fluent in Hebrew so that he could speak with Jewish people about their own Scriptures, and he studied the Old Testament prophets with new eyes. In 1893 he began publishing a monthly for Jewish readers, and in 1894 he and a fellow worker, Ernst F. Stroeter, started Our Hope. The magazine began with a focus on Israel and Bible prophecy and grew into one of the best-known Bible magazines of its day.
Gaebelein loved the Jewish people and spoke against hatred of them in plain words. In his commentary on Zechariah he wrote:
The crowning sin of the nations is Anti-Semitism, which means anti-Bible, anti-Christ and anti-God.
Studies in Zechariah, Chapter I
His exposition of Romans 11, The Jewish Question, argues that God has not cast away His people, and that Israel's unbelief is neither complete nor final.
Teacher, editor and conference speaker
In 1899 Gaebelein left the Methodist Episcopal Church, troubled by the spread of liberal theology. From then on he worked independently. He read widely in the Brethren writers and came to share many of their convictions about the church and prophecy. For more than forty years he traveled the United States and Canada speaking at Bible conferences. He also started a publishing house to print his books and magazine.
He was a close friend of C. I. Scofield and served as one of the consulting editors of the Scofield Reference Bible, first published in 1909. Near the end of his life he wrote a short history of how that Bible was made. His own Annotated Bible gave readers a guide to every book of Scripture, and his separate expositions of books like John, Acts, Ezekiel, Zechariah and Revelation were widely used. He also wrote the chapter on fulfilled prophecy in The Fundamentals, the set of essays defending the historic faith that appeared in the 1910s.
He was active in a summer Bible conference at Stony Brook on Long Island. His son, Frank E. Gaebelein, became the first headmaster of The Stony Brook School there in 1922 and was himself a noted Christian educator.
What he taught
Gaebelein is best known for prophecy, but his first love was the person of Christ. He opened each issue of Our Hope with a short meditation on the Lord, and those meditations became The Lord of Glory. Its theme is Paul's "Not I, but Christ":
Not I — but Christ in our daily walk; Not I — but Christ in our service.
The Lord of Glory, The Pre-Eminence of the Lord Jesus Christ
The finished work of Christ. In The Work of Christ he describes that work in three tenses: past at the cross, present in heaven, and future at His return.
This work of the Son of God has a threefold aspect. It is a past work, a present work, and beyond the present, there is His future work.
The Work of Christ, A Threefold Aspect
The blessed hope. Gaebelein taught that this age will not end with a converted world, that Christ will come for His church before the great tribulation, and that He will then return with His saints to reign over the earth and restore Israel. He gathered the Bible's teaching on these things in Studies in Prophecy, The Harmony of the Prophetic Word and The Return of the Lord. For him, prophecy was never cold charts. It was about a Person:
That blessed hope will keep the person of the Lord Jesus Christ constantly before the heart.
Studies in Prophecy, "That Blessed Hope"
Israel and the church. He drew a firm line between God's promises to Israel and His calling of the church, and he read the Old Testament prophets as speaking of a real future for the Jewish nation.
The trustworthy Bible. He wrote against higher criticism and unbelief in the pulpit, and he counted the agreement of the prophets as a strong proof that the Bible is God's Word.
His last years
Gaebelein kept writing into old age. Through the 1930s and the war years the magazine reported the persecution of the Jews in Europe and denounced anti-Semitism. He died on Christmas Day, 1945.
Why he's still read
Gaebelein wrote for ordinary Bible readers, not scholars. His expositions follow the text chapter by chapter, explain it plainly, and keep coming back to Christ. Readers who share his view of prophecy find in him one of its clearest early teachers. Readers who don't still find his devotional books on Christ warm and worshipful.
Where to start
TheWay Library has twelve of his books, all free to read. Start with The Work of Christ, a short study you can finish in about an hour. Then read The Lord of Glory for his meditations on Christ, or The Return of the Lord for what the whole New Testament says about the second coming. If you want a commentary, his exposition of the Gospel of John is his fullest.
Our guide to Arno C. Gaebelein's books describes all twelve, and our collection of Arno C. Gaebelein quotes gathers his best lines. For other classics on the subject, see our list of the best books on the second coming. All his books are on the Arno C. Gaebelein author page.