BOOK REVIEW
The Once and Future Heresy
Gershom Gorenberg, The
End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, The
Free Press, New York, 2000, 275 pages
Reviewed by Thomas J. Herron
It was a button
that only William F. Buckley in the fun days at National Review could have designed. This was the Viet Nam
War era after the summer of love in San Francisco
when every group seemed to have its own special button with a unique
slogan. The one that National
Review was making available to its subscribers was certainly unique if only
because very few people besides the polyglot William F. Buckley could be sure
what it meant. It read “Don’t Immanentize
the Eschaton.” The truth was that, contrary
to what the subscribers thought, the phrase didn’t come from Mr. Buckley
but from Eric Voegelin, who coined it in a 1952 book The New Science of Politics. Those NR readers who were Catholic in the early 1970s, and that was
probably the majority of us, had a head-start on deciphering the puzzling
phrase because, somewhere in our education, we had heard of that division of
theology called eschatology; which deals with the four last things: death,
judgment, heaven and hell. So the eschaton in
this phrase dealt with the end of the world and a quick translation of the
button into plain English would be don’t try to create heaven on earth or
don’t try to anticipate the New Jerusalem spoken of in the book of
Revelation. What a difference three decades makes as now there are fervent National Review writers and readers who
are attempting to immanentize the eschaton
for a variety of political and religious reasons.
Gershon Gorenberg’s study
of the eschaton immanentizers
alive and well in Israel
today starts by introducing us to Melody, the almost red heifer, who was born
there a few years ago. The reason this cow became front page news in that
country is that if she were completely red, at age three, she could have been
slaughtered and used for ritual purification purposes for priests at Jerusalem’s
Jewish Temple, according to the prescriptions of Numbers 19. As you
probably know there hasn’t been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem
since 70 A.D., when the Romans, under Titus, burnt down the one built by
Herod. The territory atop Mt.
Moriah is
currently occupied by a holy Muslim site, the al-Asqa
mosque. However, there is a sizeable group of people who view the events
of the 20th century as prologue to the construction of the third Jewish Temple
on that site; not all of these people are in Israel
and, as this book indicates, most of them aren’t Jewish.
The book starts
off with a disappointment and chronicles a series of prior disappointments with
the arrival of the End Times; Melody is not completely red, she has a few brown
hairs on her tail. But Melody’s existence was enough to send Jewish
society in Israel
into convulsions, a fact that, if fully explored by the American media, would
sharply undercut the contention of that nation’s fervent publicists in
this country that it is a democratic society just like ours.
We should
understand at first that this really isn’t just a study of Jews or
Muslims in the Middle East. In the first chapters
the author interviews Rabbi Shmaria Shore
of the Temple Institute in a Jerusalem
pizza parlor. Shore was one of the experts who had to make a judgment on
Melody’s suitability. Gorenberg notices
the rabbi’s heavily American-accented Hebrew and switches to
English. It seems the rabbi was born Stephen
Shore in New
Haven and came to Israel
on the tail end of the student radical and hippie movements of the 1970s.
In this he found a ready companion in the author who followed a similar tack
from the West Coast and who found post-Viet Nam
America too
tame compared with the messianic fervor in the Holy Land.
This seems to be a common trait among a large number of the Israeli settlers on
the West Bank. As Gorenberg
states, his relocation to Israel
showed, “Simply deciding to live in the country rather than returning to
an easier life in California
would be a political statement.” The American connections
dominate this book with the actual landscape of the Middle East
serving as a backdrop to ideas that have largely been brewing in the good, old U.S.A.
for a long time. Mr. Gorenberg retains an
American connection with an associate membership in Boston University’s Center for Millennial
Studies and he uses American scholars extensively in his review of Muslim
ideas on the end of the world. Living in Israel
since 1977 has not encouraged the author to get to know the Palestinians to any
great degree or to learn Arabic to any depth.
However, Hebrew
speakers with strong American accents aren’t the only players in the
Melody story, one of the key actors has a strong Mississippi
drawl. The Reverend Clyde Lott was raised a Southern Baptist but became a
Pentecostal minister after studying for a mail-order divinity degree. Lott
noted that during the late 1980s there was a great deal of prophecy in
Pentecostal circles in Mississippi
dealing with when the Jews would construct the Third
Temple. Lott, a dairy farmer
by trade, decided to do something practical to help the eschatological process
along by importing a large number of cattle into Israel
so that the requisite red heifer could be genetically engineered. In his
efforts to secure the Lord’s Second Coming, Rev. Lott became a close
friend with the messianistic Rabbi Chaim Richman of Jerusalem’s
Temple Institute and stated that he “felt closer to him than to some
members of his own family.” There would again be no language
problem here as the rabbi is from Massachusetts.
Early on in the book we see both Jewish and Christian American hands at work in
forcing the End of Days upon the world with a definite Yankee faith in the
blessings of modern technology. As Gorenberg
states, “Lott isn’t the only person pulled to the vision of
Temple-building because it promises that a technical skill is essential to the
world’s salvation. Nor is he the only one in our technological age
to read the Bible itself as a tech manual, installation
instructions for the final, fantastic upgrade of the universe.”
Gorenberg describes the three faiths’ approach to
human history and the end of the world as the ‘divine novel’ with
each group playing supporting roles in the others’ drama. As he
puts it:
The theater of
the End is triangular, and in the eyes of apocalyptic believers on all three
sides, the great drama has begun. The sound system is hope and fear; each
time an actor speaks, his words reverberate widely. Three scripts are
being performed. The cast of Jewish messianists
has starring roles in the Christian play; Jews and Christians alike have parts
in the Muslim drama. What one sees as a flourish of rhetoric can be the
other’s cue for a battle scene.
That drama, in
the form of novels about the End Times, is great business these days
particularly here in America.
The author describes the phenomenal success of the “Left Behind” series that fleshes
out premillennial dispensational theology for the
masses by Jerry Jenkins and the Rev. Tim LaHaye, the
latter a former protégé of such noted televangelists as Pat Robertson and Jerry
Fallwell.
It is interesting
to note that Rev. LaHaye, who was an official in
Moral Majority before he commenced his career as an end-of-the-world novelist
with $11 million in sales, called Catholicism “a false
religion.” In popularizing the dispensationalist position among
Americans, Jenkins and LaHaye can only be equaled by
the modern pioneer in this genre of apocalyptic literature, a New
Orleans tugboat captain who attended the premillennialist Dallas Theological Seminary, Hal
Lindsey, the author of the phenomenally successful The
Late Great Planet Earth of the early ‘70s. Mr. Lindsey, whose
approach to Bible interpretation is to start at the end and work back to the beginning, has had to revise his bestseller a number of times.
To give just one example, rather than give rise to the antichrist as early
editions foretold, the Soviet Union chose to
collapse. The fact that Lindsey has been proven spectacularly wrong in
correct interpretation of Bible prophecies has not lessened his standing among
Dispensationalist believers. He currently writes a column
on Middle East affairs for Joseph Farah’s
WorldNetDaily
web site, a column that could be confused with press releases from the
hard-line Likud Party. Mr. Farah, a noted born again Christian of Arab descent, who
always supports Israel over his ethnic brethren and publishes any Zionist
allegations no matter how absurd, makes us wonder what the Arabic
equivalent for Uncle Tom is. But then as Gorenberg
states, events in the Middle East have led
“fundamentalist Christians in far parts of the globe to read news from Israel
as printouts from God’s press office.” So Joseph Farah may just be God or Israel’s
press officer.
History of the Future
Mr. Gorenberg calls the reading of the future by believers in
the Christian, Jewish, or Muslim traditions “the history of the
future.” Really, what he has given us in The End of Days is a history of heresy from at least two of those
traditions. He starts with what he described as two religious revolutionaries
of the era of the building and destruction of Herod’s Temple.
We are all familiar with one, Jesus, but the other, Yohanan
ben Zakkai, a Pharisee, may
need a little introduction to most Christians; both would see the other as
leading a heresy from the true Old Testament religion among the children of Israel.
In the uproar over the release of Mel Gibson’s movie, people forget that
Jesus Christ, as recorded in the Gospels, not only had harsh words to say about
the chief priests and the Temple cult but against the scribes and Pharisees as
well, telling his hearers not to follow their example. Ben Zakkai was one of the Pharisees who foresaw the destruction
of the Temple during the 70 A.D.
revolt and whom Jewish tradition has it was smuggled out of encircled Jerusalem
in a coffin. From his new base at the Palestinian town of Yavneh, ben
Zakkai created what we today would know as Orthodox
Judaism centered on worship services in the local synagogue with study of the
written and oral law as paramount. While there were daily prayers for the
coming of the Messiah who would restore the Temple
cult (it was after all one vast slaughterhouse when it was in operation), the
essence of modern Judaism was study. This study was codified by the
intellectual descendants of ben Zakkai
into the two Talmuds
(Babylonian and Palestinian, the first having precedence) containing the oral
law (Mishnah) and rabbinic commentary (Gemara) with the latter having ultimate normative authority
in the Jewish religion. As for these early rabbis, the openness to
any type of “Judeo-Christian tradition” was slammed shut when, true
to the words of Christ, his followers were expelled from the synagogue with the
adoption in these first decades of the Eighteen
Benedictions, a prototype Jewish creed still recited in synagogue morning
prayer services, whose Twelfth Benediction was actually a curse against
“slanderers,” historically interpreted as the Jewish Christians:
And for those who
slander us, let there be no hope, and let all wickedness vanish in an instant.
May all your enemies, the enemies of your people, be quickly cut off, and as
for the insolent may you quickly trouble, shatter, overthrow and humiliate them
in our time. Blessed are you, Adonai, who shatters
the enemies and humiliates the insolent.
Among the
petitions for the end of the exile, return of the people to Jerusalem
and restoration of the Temple cult,
there is no room for the ever-discussed Judeo-Christian tradition from the
rabbis’ perspective.
It is the source of
no little confusion to both Jews and Christians today to understand, that just
as Orthodox Judaism from the time of ben Zakkai has rejected Christianity as a heresy, so must authentic Christianity reject the Jewish religion
from the time of the destruction of the Temple
as a heresy as well. Let us explain exactly what we mean by this so there
will be no confusion. In the recent years with the renewed interest in
Islam after 9/11, the words of British Catholic writer Hilaire
Belloc in The
Great Heresies that Islam is a Christian heresy have been
recalled. Belloc meant that Muhammad’s
religion was in the Old and New Testament tradition but that since he was a
pagan, he didn’t really understand Christian concepts of the Trinity and
the Church and so rejected Christ’s divinity and created a competing
religion.
In the same vein
the late convert Father Elias Friedman, O.C.D. has shown in his Jewish Identity
that the true Old Testament religion died with Christ on Good Friday as its
logical fulfillment and rose with him on Easter Sunday as the Church.
Therefore Christianity, centered on the One, True, Catholic Church is the Old
Testament religion living on today. That is why the priest in one of the
Eucharistic prayers calls Abraham “our father in faith.”
Where then does
this leave the Jewish religion as invented by Yohanan
ben Zakkai? There is
only one logical answer, although in today’s politically correct
atmosphere it is a most unwelcome answer. From Belloc
and Friedman we can come to the conclusion that, just as Islam is a Christian
heresy that rejects Christ’s claim of divinity but honors him as a
prophet, Judaism is a Christian heresy that rejects him entirely as an impostor
in the vilest passages of the Talmud and other documents such as The Truth
about Jesus (Toledot Yeshu) although it does retain a study of
the Old Testament texts and some of the traditional feasts. It may be a
contra-intuitive position, but Christianity is older than Judaism as it is the
true Old Testament religion living on after the destruction of the Temple.
However, neither Jews nor many Christians grasped this, so the next 20
centuries would become a map of various heresies from both religions.
Well, if the
Jewish religion as we know it today is not a valid alternative approach to God,
what about the people who call themselves Jewish from an ethnic or religious
perspective? Aren’t they the heirs of the people who lived in the Holy
Land until dispersed by the Romans in the First Century?
Weren’t their ancestors the people to whom Jesus preached and who called
for his death on the first Good Friday? Aren’t people who call
themselves Jews today the undisputed descendants of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob? Don’t the people known as Jews at present have an undisputed
title to territory in the Middle East under the terms
granted to Abraham by the divine realtor as recorded in Genesis 15:18-21?
Well, the answer to all these questions is, in the main, no.
What most
gentiles fail to realize is that ethnically today the Jewish people are divided
into two groups, one which historically dwelt in the Mediterranean basin known
as the Sephardim and who spoke an early variety of Spanish known as Ladino. The
other group the, today, far more numerous Ashkenazim, came from Eastern
Europe and spoke a German dialect known as “juedische Deutsch,” or Yiddish. While in Hebrew
the words Sephardim
and Ashkenazim related to Spain
and Germany
respectively, it does not follow that these two groups only dwelt in those two
countries. The historical explanation for the vast numbers of Yiddish
speaking Jews in what was called the Pale of Settlement in the Czarist Empire
was that these people were the descendants from the original exiles from the
Holy Land who migrated through the Western Roman Empire and then from France
into Germany during the early Middle Ages. With anti-Jewish pogroms
associated with the Crusades, these Jews were pushed further east into the
Slavic lands, where they prospered. As the distinguished author Arthur Koestler, himself of Ashkenazi heritage, pointed out in his
book The
Thirteenth Tribe, these peoples may have had a gentile rather than a
Jewish ancestry.
The story of the
conversion of this Turkic people to rabbinic Judaism is one of the most unknown
stories of history. In apparently the eighth century A.D. their king, Bulan, desired to adopt one of the monotheistic faiths but,
as his tribe dwelt in what is today southern Russia, felt that acceptance of
Islam would put him under the control of the nearby Arabs and Christianity
would cause him to become a vassal of the Byzantines. So he invited
rabbis from Babylon to convert his
people to Talmudic Judaism. The Khazar kingdom
flourished for a few centuries until conquered by a Viking people, the Varangians.
Over time these Vikings would intermarry with the local Slavs to create the
Russian ethnic group we know today.
The descendants
of the Khazars moved west into the areas that became Poland,
the Ukraine,
where they became the Ashkenazi Jews, who under czarist persecution at the end
of the 19th century decamped in large numbers for New York
City and other places in the western world. The
consequences of the origins of what are, probably, 90 percent of today’s
Jews are startling. It means that the quote of the crowd on the first
Good Friday about the death of Jesus that “his blood be
on us and our children,” applies to no one living today, as the Second
Vatican Council rightly stated. It also means that most of the
inhabitants of the state of Israel
are not the genetic descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, although they
have displaced people who probably are. It also means that opposition to
Israeli policies or to the pernicious influence on American culture by Jewish
groups is not correctly termed anti-Semitism, because, for the most part,
today’s Jews are not Semites. Unfortunately, there is a great deal
of anti-Semitism in America
today, as we can see from statements from the U.S.
government and the neo-conservative press; it is directed against the true
Semites, the Arab peoples and in particular the Palestinians.
The fact that the
national aspiration of a large number of Jewish people since
the late 19th century have been aimed at setting up a large state in the
Middle East is itself a heresy from the Jewish
religion. About a generation after the death of Johanan
ben Zakkai, the Jews of the
Holy Land rose under Bar Kokhba
against the Romans with even more disastrous results. After two political
fiascos resulting in the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the Roman
Empire the rabbis imposed on their
followers through the Talmud—according to Jewish researchers Israel
Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky—three
oaths in which faithful Jews were 1) not to rebel against their gentile
governments, 2) not massively return to the Holy Land before the coming of the
Messiah and 3) not to pray too strongly for the coming of the Messiah.
With the breakdown of the Jewish ghetto regime of the rabbis after the French
Revolution, a secular ideology known as Zionism, the counterpart to the
nationalistic movements of 19th century Europe, spread among the newly emancipated Jews.
Modern Messiah
The modern Messiah
was an unbelieving Viennese journalist named Theodor Herzl, who on seeing the
outbursts of anti-Jewish feelings in France with the Dreyfus affair, felt that
Jews needed a state of their own and was originally willing to settle for land
in Uganda. However, the more traditional Jews of Eastern Europe
redirected his quest towards the Holy Land and literature started to appear
showing Moses leaning out of a cloud to pass his staff to Herr Herzl, who was not fluent in Hebrew. Zionism became a
project of secularized Jews to prevent their assimilation into their host
nations. As Gorenberg relates,
If modernity had
you, your faith, Zionism, allowed you to remain a Jew, by reframing the Jews as
a nation. The Bible became national literature; Hebrew would be the
nation’s vernacular, not the sacral tongue. From the start,
Zionists claimed to be better Jews than the Orthodox: The Orthodox only
prayed for redemption; Zionists were making it happen. Juggle both pieces
of the idea: Zionism was messianism, but it was
also something transformed.
Zionism was also
the favorite Jewish group of another rabid nationalist group, the German Nazi
Party, and the Third Reich cooperated
with Zionist organizations in shipping unwilling German Jews to Palestine
in the days before the start of the Second World War. Great
Britain, who then occupied Palestine,
and under terms of their Balfour Declaration was trying to do right by both the
Jews and Arabs, was looking for an alternate colony for Jewish immigration, in
places like Uganda
or Madagascar.
With the start of the war immigration was halted, the Nazis adopted other
methods in dealing with the Jews of Eastern Europe, and Zionists occupied a
disproportionate number of leadership positions in the Judenrat councils that were
established in the ghettoes as part of the Final Solution. The
Revisionist Zionists, who ultimately became the Likud
Party, in the first years of the struggle, were writing to Adolf
Hitler suggesting that they make common war on the British. The Fuehrer
turned them down as he wished to maintain the British Empire
as a pillar of world stability, but the Zionist underground did attack their
British protectors in Palestine as
soon as the war was over.
Some of the
Orthodox rabbinate got on board the Zionist train. A Lithuanian rabbi Avraham Kook, whose family would play a leading role in
Israeli religious affairs, moved to the Holy Land early
in the twentieth century and felt, in a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking that
the fact that Jews were returning to their homeland….
was proof that the divine redemption had actually begun. Secular Zionists
pioneers who farmed the land and built new towns, he said, were
carrying out God’s will-unknowingly, despite themselves-and would
eventually return to religion.
What the rabbis
saw in Zionism was an antidote to the socialistic and communistic ideologies
that were sweeping through Eastern European Jewry. British journalist Douglas
Reed pointed out many of the leading Ashkenazi families contained both
important Zionists and Communists. For writing about these undesired
facts, Reed, a leading Fleet Street reporter of the World War II era, got
banished from the world’s press about the time of Israel’s
founding in what has come to be the usual treatment of people like Joseph Sobran or Patrick Buchanan in our day who dare to openly
talk of ideological tendencies among Jews.
The ways of God
are mysterious indeed; by the time the number of immigrant Jews reached a
critical mass in the Holy Land, around 1929, a cycle of violence by both Jews
and Arabs began at the flash-point shrines of the Temple Mount and Hebron,
sacred to both Islam and Judaism, and that violence has continued unabated
until the present.
By the way, what
were the borders of the Land of Israel
that was being ‘redeemed’ by Zionism? The Likud
Party under the leadership of Ariel Sharon in May 1993 committed Israel to
“biblical borders.” What territory does that exactly
encompass? According to Israel Shahak there are
several variations, “the most far-reaching among them include the
following areas within these borders: in the south, all of Sinai and a part of
northern Egypt up to the environs of Cairo; in the east, all of Jordan and a
large chunk of Saudi Arabia, all of Kuwait and a part of Iraq south of the
Euphrates; in the north, all of Lebanon and all of Syria together with a huge
part of Turkey (up to lake Van); in the west, Cyprus.” This is a formula
for a constant war of conquest of the entire Fertile Crescent
coupled with the expulsion of the native peoples. It is interesting to
note that the U.S. military currently occupies two of these nations and
dominates three others, Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, that make up greater
Israel within its ‘biblical borders,’ while neocon
officials within the Bush administration are currently threatening to invade
Syria, another country on this list. Many of the Muslims interviewed in Gorenberg’s book appear paranoid, but when we see the
ultimate dimensions of the Zionist project, their paranoia appears to have a
large basis in fact. Of course the fact that the Zionist ideology is so
near to total success is due in large measure to the imposition of American
military might in the Middle East. To understand
how that happens we have to turn from the history of Jewish heresy to the
parallel track of Christian heresy.
It would appear
that the basic heresy among Christians concerns the relationship of the Old
Testament and its people, Israel,
and the New Testament and the Church. This problem was apparent almost
from the beginning when the second century figure, Marcion,
saw a major disjunction between the loving Father mentioned by Jesus and the
stern Yahweh of the Old Testament. Marcion
solved his dilemma by discarding all of the Old Testament as well as Luke and
John’s Gospels. At around the same time that Marcion
was teaching his theories to the Christians of Rome, another sect, centering on
Montanus,
taught the imminent return of Jesus Christ, spoke in tongues, prophesied and
preached a rigorous discipline. Fast forward to the 11th century where a
Benedictine abbot in Sicily, Joachim of Fiore, was
also taken with the supposed differences in the two Testaments and came up with
what probably is the prototype of all dispensational theories. Joachim
taught that there were three distinct phases of revelation to humanity tied to
each Person of the Blessed Trinity. The Old Testament was the age of the
stern God the Father, the New Testament era, or Church Age as it might be
called today, was the period of God the Son’s loving
ministry. Joachim also postulated a coming era the age of the Holy Ghost
that would be the completion of the Spirit’s action on the first
Pentecost. What should be noted is that the Catholic Church condemned most of
the theories of Marcion, Montanus,
and Joachim as heretical.
Reuchlin
Around the time
of the Renaissance, not only was the study of Greek resumed in the Western
world but Hebrew was studied as well. What is not well known today is
that part of the Reformation was caused by the modernist scripture scholars of
that day applying Jewish sources to the study of the Bible. One of the
major German literary figures of the late fifteenth century, Johannes Reuchlin,
started the study of Hebrew under the direction of rabbis, and not only did
some more grammatically correct rendering of the psalms but dabbled in the
Cabbala, the Jewish book of black magic, as well. Among all the other
cries for reform of the Church in Germany
during that era, people like Reuchlin were showing
that the rabbis had a different method of interpreting the scriptures than that
of the official Church. This scholar became involved in a prolonged
battle with a sincerely converted Jew, Johann Pfefferkorn,
over the anti-Christian elements in the Talmud. This debate was
ultimately elevated to the pope, who decided that the rabbinic writings could
be used as an aid to interpretation of scripture. By then, an alternative
method of Bible interpretation as well as a novel theory of salvation by faith
alone had been developed by Augustinian theologian Martin Luther, whose major
assistant Melanchthon was Reuchlin’s
nephew. While Reuchlin rejected the Protestant
position, his dabbling into Talmudic and Cabbalistic sources lit the flame on
the dry fields of the German church and found a ready audience among the German
clergy. As Hilaire Belloc
has noted, at that point both the Catholics and the Reformers still believed in
only one Church and Luther probably felt that his reforms would help convert
the Jews. When they rejected his approaches, he took time from his
polemical battles with Papists and Anabaptists to pen Against
the Jews and their Lies, something for which the Lutheran Churches have
been doing public penance in recent decades.
Regardless of
what Luther felt about the Jews, the Old Testament and things Jewish became
central to a large part of Protestantism and in particular the Protestantism of
the British Isles. A large minority of these
people never accepted the Elizabethan compromise that resulted in the Anglican
Church as a mid- point between the traditional Catholicism and the Reform and
felt there were still too many popish remainders in both church and society
like the horrible feast of Christmas. Early in the 17th century many of
this party, the Puritans, felt that England
was irreformable and decided to create a New
England in the new lands across the Atlantic
where they could impose the Old Testament law code on a modern society and show
that God was prospering his
elect by working on December 25th. These first emigrants left the
mother country too soon to fight alongside the Puritan party in England,
which would come to power in a few decades under Oliver Cromwell, behead
the king, admit the Jews to the country, and conduct a war of ethnic cleansing
against the Catholics in Ireland.
The Puritans ultimately failed in their attempt to create an Old Testament
theocracy in Merry Olde England, but a love of things
Jewish would long remain in that society. As a way of drawing the Jewish
immigrants together with the native Puritans, the medieval English
stonemason’s guild was taken over and given a large body of mythology
dealing with the construction of Solomon’s Temple in what the world would
come to know as the Free and Accepted Masons, a long-term official enemy of
the Catholic Church.
In the New
World a new nation was developing, and, as G. K. Chesterton would
say, America
had the soul of a church. However, this famous British convert to
Catholicism needs to be corrected on this point, America
has the soul of a heretical church. In New England,
by the year 1800, the solvent of the Enlightenment had been working away at the
foundations of the Old Testament theocracy. In the generation after the
Revolution, Puritan institutions like Harvard
College adopted Unitarianism, and
their now liberal beliefs had come to center on “the fatherhood of God,
the brotherhood of man and the neighborhood of Boston.”
The Athens of America was becoming estranged from the theological theories of
Jonathan Edwards but would become the center of whatever American progressive
theories would be current. The older Puritan theories of the Old
Testament theocracy were migrating with the frontier line to the South and
West.
The first stop of
the Puritans’ “psychic highway” after they migrated west of
Lake Champlain was upstate New York, which, in the early decades of the 19th
century, was the trend-setting center of America, to which only southern
California can compare in our own day. The region got the name “the burned over
district” due to the incredible number of religious and intellectual
movements that got their start there. Charles Finney, a lawyer turned preacher
started modern American revivalism with tent meetings throughout the area
beginning in 1825. That generation’s version of the New Age movement,
Spiritualism, was started with the Fox sisters’ table rapping in Newark,
New York in 1848, but soon involved a huge
following throughout the country. Feminism also got its start that same
year in nearby Seneca Falls with the first woman’s
suffrage convention.
A uniquely
Protestant heresy got its start there too.
Based on the alleged revelations from the angel Moroni near Rochester,
Joseph Smith claimed that the American Indian tribes were actually the ten lost
tribes of Israel,
about whose fate generations of Old Testament readers had fixated on and that
Jesus Christ had appeared to them as well. Mormonism is the Protestant heresy par
excellence as it adds books of scripture to the sola scriptura faith. While Smith and his
colleague Brigham Young would ultimately lead their Church of the Latter Day
Saints or Mormons to what is now Utah, they were both sons of New England
immigrants to upstate New York, as well as Freemasons, and their Temple
ceremonies incorporate many lodge rituals, not to mention their resurrection of
Old Testament polygamy. However, the Masons,
whose rituals had been a major part of American public life in the Revolutionary
era, suffered a setback when they murdered William Morgan in Batavia, New York
in 1826 for having published a book exposing Masonic doctrine. This
would give rise to the first of the modern political groups, the Anti-Masonic
Party, that would later become an element in the future Republican Party.
However, the
biggest spiritual event in America in the first half of the 19th century
centered around a long-standing Protestant pastime of reading the prophecies of
Daniel and Ezekiel together with Revelation in order to come up with the date
for the Second Coming of Christ. By
1820, William Miller of upstate New York, a farmer and War of 1812 veteran, had
read the scriptures and came up with the date of 1843 for Christ’s return.
Over the next two decades he traveled the country and amassed a large number of
followers. In 1843 he discovered that his date was off by one year but set October 22, 1844, the Jewish Day of
Atonement, as the definitive date for the end of the world, and many of his
followers sold all they had and prepared to meet the Lord on that day.
When “the Great Disappointment” happened, many of Miller’s
followers drifted back to the established churches, but a hard-core of
believers under the leadership of Ellen White explained that Christ was first
returning in heaven and proceeded to establish the highly
Judaizing Seventh Day Adventist Church with worship
on the Saturday Sabbath as well as keeping the kosher dietary laws as central
elements of their beliefs. This body would also have a profound animus
against the Catholic Church, something which is typical of groups that obsess
on applying the Old Testament today.
In the British
Isles, at about the time Prophet Miller was spreading the word of
the imminent Second Coming, something similar was taking place.
Around 1830 a Scottish preacher by the name of Edward Irving was preaching a premillenial rapture of the saints based on the writings of
a South American Jesuit Manuel de Lacunza. His
theories were also aided by a local Scottish mystic named Margaret Macdonald;
their theories on the rapture also called for the return of the Jews to the Holy
Land to reestablish their kingdom when the elect were caught up in
the clouds to meet Jesus. The theory quickly spread to the Protestants of
Ireland who were at this period going through something of an identity crisis.
While the Protestant ascendancy in the Emerald Isle were a major part of the
British Establishment centering around the Dublin Castle government since the
period of French Revolution, the conservative governments in London were trying
to avoid an uprising by the Irish peasantry by coming to a modus vivendi with the peasants’
Church through repeal of the Penal Laws and establishment of a seminary at Maynooth to train Roman priests. This created a
bitter controversy among Irish Protestants with the ultimate disestablishment
of the Church of Ireland
coming in later decades. The word — much beloved of the spelling
bees of my youth — antidisestablishmentarianism
dates from this controversy. Irving’s
doctrines about the rapture and the imminent Second Coming found an eager
follower in John
Nelson Darby, a Church of Ireland
cleric whose initial ministry was in evangelizing Romanists and who ultimately
founded the Plymouth Brethren sect. It isn’t clear if Darby
was instrumental later in setting up the Church
of Ireland’s soup kitchens
for the starving Irish during the Great Famine where they would be fed if they
converted to Protestantism.
In addition to
their belief in the premillenial rapture of true
Christians, what Irving, Darby and the latter Dispensationalists all have in
common, according to Dave MacPherson, is the emphasis
on “the ‘distinction’ between the church and Israel.
They define ‘Israel’
as ethnic Jews or Israelites. They insist that this
‘distinction’ necessarily becomes an end-time
‘dichotomy’ (a physical separation) between the church and ethnic
Jews, that God has to remove the church from earth before He can again deal with
the later group.” The mindset of the premillenial
dispensationalists would find expression in America in Judaizing
groups such as the Adventists, through the efforts of the morally
degenerate C. I. Scofield, who would import
Irving and Darby’s theories in his notes to the Scofield
Reference Bible and which would also be a prominent feature of The Fundamentals series of Bible
commentaries funded by American petroleum magnates in the first years of
the 20th century. Early in the 20th century, a Philadelphian named Clarence Larkin reduced
all of Irving, Darby, and Scofield’s theology to a series of schematic diagrams.
God’s dealings with humanity are shown as a discontinuous series of
actions known as dispensations, not as the eternal divine plan. The Church goes
up when Jesus comes down, and the Jews go back to the Holy Land;
there is no way this theory can be squared with Catholic theology.
Larkin’s diagrams of impending Armageddon are all black and white; what a
pity they couldn’t be merged with the color coding of another
Pennsylvanian, Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge so that the End Times
could be mapped in living color.
The
Dispensationalist message was also propagated through a series of educational
institutions like Chicago’s
Moody Bible Institute, the Philadelphia
College of the Bible and Hal
Lindsey’s alma mater, the aforementioned Dallas Theological
Seminary. As the Zionist movement was gaining steam around the year 1900,
the followers of Darby and Scofield would soon become
these Jews’ favorite Christians.
But the basic
question is just how Christian are premillenial
dispensationalists? They claim to have accepted Jesus Christ as their personal
Lord and Savior and want to spread their witness among all the unsaved,
particularly Catholics. As Gorenberg relates in
his book, one of the most active groups of Christian Zionists these days is Pastor Chuck Smith and his Calvary Chapel
of Costa Mesa, California.
Actually Calvary Chapel is a fast growing franchise church now spreading throughout
the country like the Burger King of churches. In Philadelphia,
most of the local Calvary Chapel’s pastors and congregation are former
Catholics; no doubt John Nelson Darby would be proud.
Really Christians?
But are they
really Christians? The answer is, despite their protestations to the
contrary, no. Premillenial dispensationalism
has been called “God’s Plan B” due to the fact that, with
their classic emphasis on the Old Testament, Jesus Christ came to earth to
become the king of Israel.
The Jews rejected his claim; what was He to do now? Well according to their theory, the Son
of God, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity and the Word through whom the
universe was made, had to improvise a back-up plan known as the Church, which
involved the gentiles. At some point the present dispensation, known as
the church parenthesis, will come to an end and the gentile believers will be raptured to the clouds so that God can start dealing with
the Jews again as He originally planned. So the answer for any
Catholic to the dispensationalist’s question about trusting Jesus is,
“why should you?” According to the premillenial
dispensationalist theory, Jesus didn’t know what he was on earth to
do. The premillenial dispensationalist Jesus
isn’t worthy of belief; no wonder the Jews love the dispensationalists.
So we come back
to the present, where groups of alleged Christians and Jews are actively
seeking to jump-start the end times—each supremely confident that they
have God’s ear. What we see is that President G. W. Bush is right;
there is an axis of evil at work in the world today; only in theological terms,
it is the fusion of Dispensationalists and Zionists; from a political
perspective it is a Republican-Likud coalition.
We can also see in the vicious attacks on Americans who oppose the current
administration’s Middle East adventures by Jewish
and Christian neocons in the government and the media, the outline of a heresy
hunt. Does anyone really believe that, if given the power, a leading
Dispensationalist like Attorney General John Ashcroft would not willingly send
all dissenters to Guantanamo
with the belief that he was furthering God’s kingdom here on earth? The
other night I saw one of America’s
leading Dispensationalist preachers, Rev. Pat Robertson, complain loudly on his
television show, that American troops might be withdrawn from Iraq
before they could impose “democracy” and the Muslim clergy would
take over. Rev. Robertson said we should impose democracy as “we
have the troops and weapons on the ground over there.” Apparently
the Dispensationalist version of the Bible contains a few more verses in the
Book of Proverbs than does the Catholic version like, “might makes
right,” “the end justifies the means,” and “all power
flows from the barrel of a gun.”
One would want to
ask Rev. Pat if his vision of “democracy” in Iraq
flows from Old Testament theocracy or from the “liberty, equality,
fraternity” of the Paris
Commune that his neocon advisers are more familiar
with. We should also ask Rev. Robertson what he has against the Muslim
clergy: don’t they want to influence the moral tone of their society,
have women in modest public attire and have the government prohibit the sale of
alcohol? Isn’t this what the American Dispensationalist clergy did
when they had power several decades ago? So what’s the big
difference here?
Heretical Ideas
Unfortunately
American Catholics are not immune to these heretical ideas. Recently the
U.S. Catholic Conference’s secretary for Jewish relations, Dr. Eugene Fisher, could tell
the Jewish Week newspaper on July 23,
2002 in response to a Vatican document:
If you put off
the moment that Jews will come to recognize Jesus as the Messiah until the end
of time, then we don’t need to work or pray for the conversion of Jews to
Christianity…. God already has the salvation of Jews figured out, and
they accepted it on Sinai, so they are OK. Jews are already with the Father....
We do not have a mission to the Jews, but only a mission with the Jews to the
world. The Catholic Church will never again sanction an organization devoted to
the conversion of the Jews. That is over, on doctrinal, biblical and pastoral
grounds. Finito.
These are
interesting comments. Like the rabbis of the Talmud, Dr. Fisher is saying that
the Jews have no need of the person and work of Jesus Christ. His life and
death did not impact the Jewish people in the slightest. About what
happened on Mt. Sinai,
Fisher, like the rabbis, conveniently glosses over the Genesis story of the
Israelites worshiping the golden calf and how angry Yahweh and Moses were about
the incident. But never mind. Neither Jewish
mass murderers like Leon Trotsky or Ariel Sharon, nor Jewish swindlers like
Ivan Boesky, George Soros, or the Russian oligarchs
who destroyed that country’s economy, nor Jewish Hollywood pornographers
or abortionists—none of them need Jesus Christ because they’ve been
saved—both individually and collectively—since Sinai. Catholics
may question why the American bishops have kept Dr. Fisher in so prominent a
position for so long since he clearly is using it as a basis to teach heresy.
As of late Eugene Fisher has been very busy working for Abe Foxman
of the Anti-Defamation League in the yearlong “scholarly” attack on
Mel Gibson’s movie.
Unfortunately
Eugene Fisher has many imitators throughout the Catholic bureaucracies in this
country and the lightning rod directing the fire of the proponents of
“Catholic-Jewish dialogue” is The
Passion of the Christ. One of the things we here at Culture Wars have been remiss at is
getting our message out to young Catholics who get all their information from
electrons and not dead trees. Not that I am making excuses for that, but it
just is the way things are. There is a whole series of Catholic blogs (web logs) linked in a web ring known as St. Blog’s
Parish written by and directed towards these young Catholics. While
many of them are refreshingly orthodox, when they do stray into political
commentary they seem, in the main, to have had neocon
brain surgery in the recent past, and they end up sounding like Anne Coulter or
David Frum.
One of the prime
examples of this is the web site and blog maintained
by Dr. William Cork the head of the Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of
Houston. Bill Cork is certainly a prolific web writer maintaining a site with
his writings as well as a blog
titled “ut unum sint…iustus ex fide vivit: an ecumenical blog.”
Actually it might be better titled press releases from the ADL/AJC for
Catholics, but more on that later. Dr. Cork does have an interesting
background having been raised in the Judaizing Seventh
Day Adventist Church,
before becoming a Lutheran minister as an adult. Cork
then became a chaplain, a job he truly loved, with an Army reserve unit and
took the basic chaplain’s course when the school was here at Ft.
Monmouth, New Jersey. He
noted that the standard Protestant service was not appealing to the Lutheran
and Episcopal student chaplains with their liturgical traditions, and he
started to attend the Catholic Mass. Shortly after that, he was received
into the Church and had to resign his chaplain’s commission, so his
conversion did cost him. Apparently his wife and children remain
Adventists.
Dr. Cork, as
mentioned above, has a current position in Houston
helping form the faith of young adult Catholics. The only problem is the
faith that he’s forming them with. Bill Cork seems to be on a one-man
crusade against what he calls “right-wing Catholics” who have to be constantly checked for anti-Semitism and what he
calls a “replacement theology.” What he apparently means by
that is the notion that the Catholic Church has replaced the Jews as
God’s People and that these people. as the
unquestionable descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are true Semites and
currently in a valid relationship with God. So Catholics who adopt Bill
Cork’s position would definitely be in ecumenical relations with
Dispensationalists and Adventists. In a very long article posted on his
web site, “Anti-Semitism and
the Catholic Right,” Cork
aims his fire at Robert Sungenis of Catholic
Apologetics International who had taken exception to a statement from the Vatican
on Catholic-Jewish relations, the one that gave rise to Eugene Fisher’s
comments above. Sungenis and CAI are, according to the Young Adult Minister for the Houston
Diocese, the carrier of the dread anti-Semitic bacillus, as transmitted
directly from people like Fathers Denis Fahey and Charles Coughlin. In
fact, Cork relates, Sungenis on his web site has plagiarized from Nazi sources
in stating that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was of Jewish ancestry. As his
source on Father Coughlin, Cork
refers to Radio Priest: Charles
Coughlin the Father of Hate Radio by Donald I. Warren (New York: The Free
Press, 1996). Having written an article on Father Coughlin in this
magazine, I was very familiar with the book. Obviously Bill Cork hadn’t
read it when he was trying to throw mud on “right-wing Catholic”
Robert Sungenis. If he had he would have read
on p.139 that the Roosevelt Jewish ancestry was well
publicized in the American press in 1935 and that the Nazis got it from both
American gentile and Jewish sources, and that it was believed by the leading
rabbi of the day, Stephen S. Wise.
But that was
then, and this is now. For the past year Bill Cork’s blog has been a running attack on Mel Gibson, Hutton Gibson
and The Passion of the Christ.
For a man with a Doctorate of Ministry degree, Cork
has an amazingly simple worldview: the Gibsons and
the movie are bad; Abe Foxman and the ADL are
good. Dr. Cork is currently speaking at synagogues in the greater Houston
area, so no doubt he has a brilliant future ahead of him; he could replace Dr.
Fisher at the USCC when the latter retires. No doubt he hasn’t read
Culture Wars lately, but if he does
maybe, based on what we’ve discussed in this article, he can find another
descriptive for those Catholics who don’t feel Jews are saved by their
nature and don’t accept Israeli empire building or Jewish domination of
American culture other than “anti-Semite.” Why does the
bishop of Houston keep a man who
feels that Jews don’t have to convert to Jesus Christ in a sensitive
position with the formation of young adults in his diocese?
So the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride out from the Temple
Mount throughout the Middle
East and the world. The fact that their saddles were made in
the U.S.A. by
both Jewish and Christian zealots who felt they were doing God’s work is
something that should cause us all to stop for a moment’s
reflection. The fact is we might be living in the End Times. When zealots
feel they know the mind of God and can force His hand, they might end up with a
lot more than they bargained for. What a shock if at the Great White
Throne Judgment, those who sincerely believed that they were establishing
God’s kingdom here on earth find out they were actually working for the
other side.
Thomas J. Herron is a frequent
contributor to Culture Wars.
This review was published in the May, 2004 issue of Culture Wars.
Further Reading:
Robert F. Baldwin, The End of the
World: A Catholic View, Our Sunday Visitor., Huntingdon, Indiana, 1984
Hilaire Belloc, Characters of the
Reformation: Historical Portraits of 23 Men and Women and Their Place in the
Great Religious Revolution of the 16th Century, Sheed & Ward, London, 1936, republished TAN Books and
Publishers, Rockford, Illinois, 1992
Hilaire Belloc, The Great
Heresies, Sheed & Ward, London, 1938, republished TAN Books and Publishers, Rockford, Illinois, 1991
Christianity in America, Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch, George M. Marsden, David F. Wells, John D. Woodbridge, eds., William
B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1983
Elias Friedman, O.C.D., Jewish
Identity, Miriam Press, New York, 1987
Michael A. Hoffman, II, Judaism’s
Strange Gods, Independent History and Research Book, Coeur D’Alene,
Idaho, 2000
Arthur Koestler,
The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and Its Heritage, Omni Publications, Palmdale, California, 1976
Dave MacPherson,
The Rapture Plot, Millennium III Publishers, Simpsonville, South Carolina, second ed 2000
George M. Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture:
The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1980
Douglas Reed, Far and Wide, First
Published 1951
Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion,
Veritas Publishing Company (Ply) Ltd., Bullsbrook, Western Australia, 1985
Israel Shahak, Jewish
History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto
Press, London, second edition 1997, forwards by Gore Vidal and
Edward Said
Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Pluto Press, London, 1999
William Whalen, Separated Brethren, A
Survey of Protestant, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox and Other Denominations in the
United States, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., Huntingdon, Indiana, Rev. Ed., 1979
Web
Sites:
Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators: A Reappraisal, Laurence Hill, Westport,
CT, 1983 (out of print but available on line)
On C. I. Scofield,: .Scofield: The Man behind
the Myth, http://www.poweredbychrist.homestead.com/files/cyrus/scofield.htm
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