Wednesday, December 27, 2017
Trump, Israel, and the Evangelicals
I have a longer post at my blog about Israel, Trump, his Evangelical Christian base, and the belief some of those Evangelicals have in dispensationalism. It's the idea that at the end times, after the rapture, the Jews will all be converted to Christianity and Jesus will return to reign from Jerusalem for 1000 years. This will be familiar to those who have read/watched the Left Behind stuff.
As I watch Trump do things like move the US embassy to Jerusalem in order to placate his Evangelical base, I have to wonder how much of the Evangelical fervor for Jerusalem is based in dispensationalism. Religious history scholar Diana Butler Bass has a recent article about this: For many evangelicals, Jerusalem is about prophecy, not politics.
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I remember the scripture passage where Jesus said he didn't know the day or the hour, only the Father knows. I assumed that meant as a man on earth he didn't know, but as the resurrected Christ he does know. Basically the people who have this dispensationalist worldview think the actions of humans can bring about the Second Coming. Stanley Kopacz made a comment on a previous thread this being hubris, and I certainly concur with that.
ReplyDeleteMy mother said that Great-Grandma used to obsess about the End Times. Mom said she would get depressed listening to this as a young girl because she had hopes and dreams of things she wanted to do, and she was afraid she wouldn't get to do them. She said later she had an insight that part of the reason Great Grandma was so wrapped up in this was that she was afraid of death, and thought she wouldn't have to die if the Parousia happened. Maybe the fear of death figures into some of these people's obsessions.
I think Trump doesn't have a clue about theological points of view, but knows what will please his base and is pandering to them.
It does seem like a scary idea - the good people getting sucked up to heaven and those not worthy having to stay here though a bunch of tribulations. Is this part of Catholic theology? I don't remember this being mentioned at RCIA.
DeleteI've given the whole Left Behind series a miss, so I'm not completely sure what they teach. I can tell you this:
Delete* When we die, each of us is subject to a particular judgment, at which time our souls go to heaven (either directly or via purgatory), or to hell.
* At the time of the Last Judgment, everyone will be resurrected, and then Christ will come again, and the sorting of the sheep and goats will take place.
"For many evangelicals, Jerusalem is about prophecy, not politics"
ReplyDeleteWell, the president whom they supported has made it about politics. And I don't think the Christians in Israel and the Middle East have the luxury of being apolitical.
Yeah, that's a dangerous part of the world. Trump doesn't care, of course, if his decision about the embassy leads to violence. He just cares about staying in power.
DeleteJust one more thought about how this allegedly is not about politics: we're talking about moving the seat of government. That strikes me as intrinsically political. That it is moving to a controversial site further heightens the political aspect.
DeleteThe idea that the current state of Israel has some dispensationalist destiny is, again, inherently political - it merges the theological and the political. Evangelicals may be starting from a theological point of view, but they're ending up smack in the middle of politics. Politics is its own legitimate sphere of human activity, and as such its considerations need to be respected.
In broad outline, as best I understand the issue, Protestants and Catholics hold rather similar positions about the "end times." According to the Catechism, the Second-Coming is always "immanent." Regarding Israel, the Catechism says,
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674 The glorious Messiah's coming is suspended at every moment of history until his recognition by "all Israel", for "a hardening has come upon part of Israel" in their "unbelief" toward Jesus. St. Peter says to the Jews of Jerusalem after Pentecost: "Repent therefore, and turn again, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for establishing all that God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets from of old." St. Paul echoes him: "For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?" The "full inclusion" of the Jews in the Messiah's salvation, in the wake of "the full number of the Gentiles", will enable the People of God to achieve "the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ", in which "God may be all in all".
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According to my understanding (which is no doubt faulty, so don't trust it too much) of Paula Fredrickson's current book, Paul: The Pagan's Apostle, Paul believed the Second-Coming was indeed immanent—to happen in the lifetime of those to whom he preached. He opposed Gentile circumcision not because he believed it was not necessary to "conversion," but because, quite simply, Gentiles couldn't "convert" to Judaism any more than Greeks could convert to being Romans. Pagans were "turning to" the God of Israel (through Jesus) just as it had long been predicted they would. They weren't "converting." Religion, ethnicity, "politics," and so on, she argues, weren't seen as different entities. They could not really be separated, much as it seems (according to crystal's post) many Evangelical Christians today don't see a distinction between their religion and their politics. There were always Gentiles on the fringes of Judaism (known as "God fearers." Gentiles turning to the God of Israel wasn't a new thing, but the accelerated pace of Gentiles turning to the God of Israel (through Jesus) would have confirmed for Paul that the end-times were at hand. But Jews would always remain Jews. They would recognize Jesus as the Messiah, but they wouldn't "convert" to Christianity and become non-Jews.
Catholic, for some reason, seem to be largely uninterested in anything having to do with the "end times" or events thereafter. In "popular" Catholicism, for example, you die and go to heaven, and that's the end of it. But of course even according to Catholic doctrine, the huge balance of eternity (if eternity can be divided into periods) will necessarily be after the resurrection of the dead and not in heaven.
So most of us (including me) look upon this "Evangelical Conservative Republicanism," with beliefs in the end of the world, as a collection of "quirky opinions" (to use Diana Butler Bass's term), but of course the Catholic view of the "end times" is no less "quirky." Catholics just don't talk about it much, and (a good thing?) they separate politics and religion to a greater extent than Evangelicals.
I don't think there is anything in magisterial Catholicism that would hold that the modern nation-state of Israel was divinely established as an instrument to bring us to the end times.
DeleteInteresting, David. I had no idea the catechism says that Jewish people will be converted at the end.
ReplyDeleteI know Aquinas believed that when people died, their souls in heaven would be incomplete until they were reunited with their resurrected bodies, but I would bet that most Catholics and other Christians believe the soul goes to heaven, and that's the end, as you wrote. That makes us all dualists :)
Episcopalians are quite firm in the teaching that your soul hangs out in heaven until the Judgment, at which point you get an eternal corporeal form. This was debated heavily when a lot of people were thinking about cremation, but didn't know if that meant your body couldn't then be resurrected. It was pointed out that those who had died in fires or simply decayed to dust were not excluded from corporeal resurrection, so cremation was deemed OK. Our old Episco church had a consecrated scattering ground (basically a raised garden in small walled chapel). It is now a Catholic church, and I am not sure how the Catholics handle that, given that scattering is verboten. It is the final resting place for several elderly friends, so I hope they handled it with care.
DeleteBeing against fossil fuels, I'm against cremation. If they take my remains and just put them in the ground in something biodegradable, that's the lowest footprint possible. Just something regarding "my" body and cremation and resurrection. I'm 69 and I'm sure that I don't have the same atoms I was born with several times over. I'm already scattered around the earth. Chances are, some of the oxygen atoms I breathed in have been exhaled as carbon dioxide, released as free oxygen again by photosynthesis, circulated by the winds and are being rebreathed at this moment by everyone on this forum. And vice versa. Along with oxygen breathed by Jesus.
DeleteSave fossil fuels by avoiding cremation, or take up more space in the cemetery and pollute ground water by being buried sans vault and embalming (assuming you can find a funeral home/cemetery that will allow it). Sounds like a wash to me. I told Raber to do whatever is cheapest, as I'm only carrying $10k in life insurance now.
DeleteI think cremation is the cheapest. When my mom died, my sister and I were appalled at how much burial stuff was, so we did have her cremated (and her ashes scattered over San Francisco bay by plane - no kidding).
DeleteThis is all eschatology - the "last things" for Catholics. I think it really makes a difference whether you are conservative or liberal .... conservatives like those at the National Catholic Register are all over this ... What Every Catholic Should Know About Prophecy of the End Times. But liberal Catholics would say it's not to be taken literally. There's this from the Jesuit site, Thinking Faith ... Catholics and ‘the Rapture’
ReplyDeleteMost priests I have heard who mention this subject in homilies have the take that, yes, the temporal world as we know it will come to an end. But we don't know when. What we do know is that our earthly life will come to an end when we die. If we are in a right relationship with God, we don't have to worry about either the end of the world, or our own personal end time. Makes sense to me. Actually science supports the fact that life on earth will end, when the sun goes "red giant". My prediction, for what it's worth, is that the end of the world and the Second Coming of the Lord will come about when something outside of human affairs like a giant meteor happens, and life as we know it is no longer possible here. If human wickedness was what would bring it on, it would have happened long since.
ReplyDeleteThere was an old movie titled Waterworld, based on a prize-winning book, that I watched a couple of weeks ago. In it an asteroid hit the Earth, killing everyone, but an alien race somehow saved everyone's life and they all ended up living on another world - all the people who had ever lived on Earth, from the time of Neanderthals. Everyone kept asking, is this heaven? :)
DeleteThat was "Riverworld", Crystal, based on Philip José Farmer's novels. In that cosmos, souls were immortal but manufactured by an ancient race. Another race manufactured the giant Riverworld planet and human bodies for the souls to migrate to.
DeleteYes, that was the book. I read it long ago when I was a teen. I guess a few versions of movies have been made from it.
DeleteI tried to read the book; interesting premise, but I couldn't quite get into it. Maybe the movie would be better.
DeleteThere are some different versions but the one I liked best was this one. I think it was supposed to be the first of a series because it doesn't go to the end of the book, but no others came after it.
DeleteIf I were an Israeli cognoscent of the views of SOME American Evangelicals, I'd wonder, "With friends like these, who needs enemies." And what is my government thinking? Red Heifers, etc.
ReplyDeleteThe Israelis are naming a train station after Trump. Apparently there's a whole spate of such honors in progress. I guess if they can snuggle up to That, they can get into bed with anything that furthers their ends.
DeleteChances are in Israel there'd be a court case objecting; that'll take ten or twenty years.
DeleteAnd presumably Trump will be gone, one way or the other, by then.
DeleteYea, I think Trump is using Israel to keep his Evangelical base happy, but I think it may just make things worse for Israel.
DeleteYup. I like to think he will have to answer for pouring gas on that conflagration in Israel/Palestine.
DeleteI think there are a variety of Catholic theories about the Second Coming. In all of them, the how and when is up to God, not Donald Trump and where he puts the U.S. embassy, though I think the move to Jerusalem helps destabilize the regiin, and is therefore a national sin that should be expiated by voting that nutbar out of office in 2020.
ReplyDeleteFundiegelical ideas about the End Times are low-church Protestant misinterpretations of Revelation.
I don't think it's that Trump is trying to bring the end times about - he probably doesn't nelieve in that stuff - but I think he's pandering to the beliefs of his Evangelical base by getting closer to Israel.
DeleteA few years ago, our then pastor announced that he was going to give a series of talks on Revelation on weekday evenings. The first week, oodles and scads of parishioners showed up and jammed the hall. The pastor began by saying Revelation is not about the "Rapture" and he was not going to dignify the "Left Behind crap" by talking about it.
ReplyDeleteThe following week, a corporal's guard showed up.
I had the experience later of working through Wilfred J. Harrington on Revelation in the Liturgical Press's Sacra Pagina series with a seminary professor. It's a ripping good story if you don't treat it as tea leaves and goat entrails. One of my secret desires is to direct a dramatic reading, with several voices, on an abstract stage set, preferably in church. It could be done in an evening and would be, I suspect, sensational. Father Harrington himself (he's a pretty good Jesuit for a Dominican) suggests something like that.
I'm all for bringing back liturgical drama! I had my students do a table reading of "The Harrowing of Hell" last summer. They had fun with it, and it gave me a chance to do my own modern English translation and gloss for them to use. It was also a good way in to biblical allusions. The Millennials do not know their Bible.
DeleteRevelation does seem like fiction to me but it has really caught the imagination of so many. The four horsemen of the apocalypse show up even in the Sleepy Hollow tv series :) Maybe there's something about disaster that fascinates people.
DeleteWhile the Orthodox accept Revelation as a part of the canon Scripture, they do not read it as part of the liturgy. As one Orthodox bishop put it "We have lost the key to interpreting it."
ReplyDelete"We have lost the key to interpreting it." Good reply, and I think it is a true statement.
DeleteI think that's important to keep in mind for all scripture stuff - so much depends on how it is interpreted.
ReplyDelete