David Cooper
- Former user (Deleted)
David L. Cooper directed the Biola Jewish Department from 1925-1929. How he got to the post is another story.
Cooper said God called him one day in 1923, while shoveling out horse stalls on the farm where he and his wife were boarding. The over-educated 36-year-old seminary graduate with a Bachelors, Masters and Ph.D from Tulane, and a theological degree from Louisville Seminary where he studied under Greek scholar A.T. Robertson, was under-employed as a part-time university teacher and itinerant preacher in country churches and out of the way places. This life did not satisfy him, and all the while he praying to God for guidance as to his life direction, as he went about his chores. There, in the manure and hay, Cooper felt God’s definite presence and an illumination in his heart that he was to devote his life to the salvation of the lost sheep of Israel, a thought he had never previously entertained.
Thus convinced of calling, Cooper attended a summer Conference on Israel and Prophecy at Cedar Lake Bible Conference in Indiana. (The Bible Conference had been founded by R.A. Torrey and was currently operated by Moody Church.) There, David Cooper heard that Moody Bible Institute was starting a Department of Jewish Studies. Even though he had two masters degrees and a Ph.D., he immediately enrolled in undergraduate classes for the fall in Jewish Studies.
David Cooper flourished at Moody and went on to a second Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute. He gained proficiency in nine languages including Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Babylonian cuneiform, Latin, German and French.
In 1925, he accepted an offer from the Biola search committee seeking to replace the position recently vacated by James Vaus, to assume the role of Superintendent of the Jewish Department.
For four years, David L. Cooper engaged in a ministry of teaching, publication and research. Ever the scholar, Cooper also published four books in as many years at Biola: The Deity of the God of Israel, The New Sanhedrin, An Abridged Manual for Lovers of Israel, and his greatest early work, The Eternal God Revealing Himself to Suffering Israel and Lost Humanity for which (William Blackstone and Biola Professor Howard W. Kellogg wrote the introduction and foreword.
Cooper argued that whenever Christians present the gospel to Jews in the same way that we present it to Gentiles, we usually do more harm than good. He wrote: “If the Lord did not send out the apostles until after he had trained them for full-time service, certainly he does not wish people to enter into full time service unless they have sufficient and adequate training...and those who wish to give the gospel to Israel...require more thorough and efficient training on the part of the worker....The one who is not willing to take the time and expend the energy thus to train himself efficiently should not attempt to go into the Jewish mission field.”
Cooper believed that those who wished to dedicate their lives to Jewish evangelism must commit to a regime of meticulous and dedicated training, and a disciplined life of spiritual discipline and scholarship equal in rigor to rabbinical training. His ambitious goal of educating scholarly evangelists to save rabbis was derided by many at Biola, but retained the full support of Mrs. Lyman Stewart, who, in the immediate aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929, actually wanted to add staff to the Jewish Department.
But the throes of the Great Depression provoked the Biola Board to consider a long list of cost-reduction alternatives including the question, “Should we dispense with our Jewish Department and work with organizations doing the same work in Los Angeles?” In February 1930, Dr. Cooper was released from staff and the Jewish Department was eliminated as the first official cost reduction to stave off insolvency during the next five years of desperate cost cutting.
For the 43-year-old Cooper, now unemployed, yet still strongly guided by that Divine encounter in the Indiana horse barn just seven years before, a new chapter began. He went on to establish his own Messianic training institute her in the Los Angeles area under the name of the "Biblical Research Society." Devoting himself to Bible study and scholarship, he published The Biblical Research Monthly a subscription journal which continued for over thirty years. Cooper's books grew to become an impressive library for Biblical interpretation and Hebraic research. His cornerstone work was a seven-volume Messianic Series.
Cooper also trained a select group of students in his “scribe school” which involved intense, nearly one-on-one training and discipleship. Among the students of his scribe school were noted Bible teachers, Burl Haynie, Kenton Beshore and Tim LaHaye, all of whom have had long and fruitful ministries. Cooper is also remembered for his radio Bible classes and incomparable three-month-long National-Geographic-style study tours of Israel, with travel by steamship, jeep and donkey cart caravans.