Apocalypse Now

It is very worrisome when a fanatical religious sect begins to influence a country to adopt destructive alliances with foreigners and when this same sect also displays indifference to catastrophes because of apocalyptic thinking. Am I discussing Ahmadinejad, with his hoped-for return of the 12th Imam and his support for the terrorist group, Hezbollah? Well, yes, that is kind of worrisome. Unfortunately, I’m talking about America and the ridiculous basis on which huge numbers of evangelical Christians support Israel without even allowing for the possibility of criticism. Indeed, they think it’s a religious duty. And one of their goals is nothing less than an apocalyptic struggle that will destroy the world, “rapture” existing Christians, and ultimately bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ.

This is no small group of people. Perhaps 25% of Americans are evangelical and fundamentalist Christians. And this particular view of Israel, the end times, and the duties of Christians today is widespread in their ranks. Evangelicals have major influence on the Republican Party. They are frequently stalwart participants in the “culture war.” Nonetheless, their view of Israel has created strange bed-fellows between ordinarily liberal American Jews and the socially conservative American evangelical Christians.

The negative consequence of evangelical thinking on this matter is not so much that the United States supports Israel. There have historically been good reasons to cooperate with Israel, some of which have become more pronounced after the 9/11 attacks. But we are two separate nations. We have two distinct sets of interests. Most obviously, Israel lives on the front-lines of the Arab and Muslim world. We do not. We can more easily adopt a strategy of containment and strategic isolation. They cannot. They have parochial interests that need not concern us, such as the question of borders with Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. So long as some in our nation believe we have a religious duty to help Israel, then there is no way for our two nations to evaluate our policies rationally.

These people should be disqualified from public life for an obvious reason: people who openly desire to bring about the end of the world, or believe they have a nonnegotiable religious obligation to support another country (and their constituent ethnic group), should not be taken seriously on foreign policy. For nonbelievers, this is obvious enough. It is important that Americans who don’t share these nutty religious views realize the motives of their fellow citizens.

But religion will still be taken seriously by those that believe. We can’t simply wish it away as old-fashioned or irrational. The only real hope to undo this mass hysteria is to refute the religious foundations of evangelical Christians’ views with sound theology.

Thankfully, this is easy enough to do. I have found probably the best and most rigorous explanation for the falsity of this view here. Other essays include this and this. I’ll offer a brief summary. Evangelical support for Israel stems from a recent arrival on the Christian theological scene: a concept called dispensationalism. Dispensationalism teaches that God’s promises have been revealed to mankind in different dispensations. Christianity in dispensationalist theology is an interregnum, one of several dispensations including the Old Testament rule of Kings and the Mosaic law. Jews, as the Chosen People, will figure prominently in the next stage after the rapture. For dispensationalists, Jews today can continue to follow the old Mosaic law and attain salvation; Christianity is optional because, for them, the earlier “dispensation” of Old Testament Judaism remains in force. And not only is Christianity optional, but Christians (and all people everywhere) supposedly have a religious duty actively to assist the Jews and the Jewish nation of Israel.

Until the 19th Century, almost all Christians endorsed a covenental view of Christianity’s relationship to Judaism; Christianity was the fulfillment of the Jewish covenant, where God kept his promises to the Jews by sending Jesus as the Messiah. Jews, Muslims, and anyone else persisting in denying Jesus’ divinity and the truth of Christianity were cutting themselves off from his salvific message. After all, doesn’t the Bible say, ” For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse: for it is written, Cursed is every one that continueth not in all things which are written in the book of the law to do them. But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, it is evident: for, the just shall live by faith. And the law is not of faith: but, The man that doeth them shall live in them. Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree: That the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ; that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” (Galatians 3:7-29) and also, “I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD ” (Jer. 31:31-34).

There is simply no Biblical or historical basis for the heretical view that believing in Jesus was optional for Jews, that the old law remained in force in any respect, or that the physical land of Israel had any real meaning now that the New Israel of the Church had come upon the scene. Likewise, after the coming of Jesus Christ, the passages that supposedly support dispensationalism seem to read more naturally to say that Christians (whether of Gentile or Jewish ethnicity) were the Chosen People. “There is neither Jew nor Greek . . .” (Gal. 3:25-29). (Of course, all this Biblical sparring is inevitable, though inconclusive, when Christians separate themselves from the authoritative teachings of the Catholic Church and the Magesterium).

While ostensibly opponents of the accretion of tradition-based interpretations of the Bible, dispensationalists adopt a far-from-obvious reading of the Bible that was invented very recently. It only gained currency among Americans because of its inclusion in the major 19th Century scholarly reference Bible used by Protestants, the Schofield Bible.

Part of the specific craziness of evangelical Christians stems from a mistaken belief that the Book of Revelations deals with events to happen in the future. This is simply untrue. For starters, if you set aside the on-again, off-again literalism of evangelicals, the language and the context of the book make it clear that it’s referring to Rome and the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 A.D. This scholarly work supports this thesis because it shows the book was written around 65 A.D. In other words, evangelicals believe that prophecies, which have been predicted and which have already occurred, are going to happen in the future. These prophecies essentially say the Jewish world will come crashing down and be replaced by the spiritual reign of Christ on earth through the Church. It’s already happened. We’re living in the happy times if we have eyes to see, or at least as happy as one can find in this world. After all, isn’t His Kingdom “not of this world”?

In short, a wacky, recent, and un-Biblical heresy called dispensationalism is leading Americans to support Israel in a way devoid of all perspective. In particular, American evangelicals have lost any sense of justice with respect to the Arab people, who have suffered mightily in Israel’s recent war in Lebanon and have also suffered under the equally nutty religiously-based beliefs of many Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Further, under the influence of a perceived religious mandate, evangelicals have forgotten any sense of their membership in what we call “The Mystical Body of Christ.” Christians believe that we are supposed to love all of mankind, but that we have a special solidarity with other Christians, with whom we are connected in this way. Instead, evangelicals frequently have total indifference and contempt for the rights and interests of Arab Christians. This contempt for Arabs takes a form that these same (otherwise sane) people would never adopt towards any other innocent civilians caught up in a war zone.

Religiously based injustice is no more right in the name of secular Zionism, moribund Old Testament mandates, or the so-called right of the Muslim world to remain free of Zionists. All these uncompomising religious judgments should be ignored by Americans when we deal with third parties. The different groups should all be addressed on the basis of some concept of justice, impartiality, and our own national interests.

Israelis who accept evangelical support surely did not share the millenarian goals of evangelical Christians. But living in a “tough neighborhood” as they do, they are more than willing to take free money and free political support from politically influential citizens of their major patron. I can’t blame them for that. But I can criticize these Americans as a bunch of heretics, who are indifferent to America’s interests, who have abandoned their Christian brothers in Lebanon and Palestine, and whose weak biblical reasoning should be exposed as selective and fraudulent. Perhaps these Christians won’t come home to the Catholic Church. But at the very least they should return to their own tradition and not perpetuate a rather marginal interpretation of the Bible invented by a single man fewer than 200 years ago.