BOOK REVIEW
You don't need to be apocalyptic, but it
helps Standing with Israel by David Brog
Reviewed by Spengler
"You don't need to be crazy to be a Zionist, but it helps," went the Israeli
national joke of another era. By the same token, you don't need to be
apocalyptic to manage US policy in the Middle East - but it also helps.
The importance of Christian eschatology in shaping US attitudes toward Israel
disturbs enlightened world opinion, and David Brog's new book will inflame
these concerns. At the heart of Christian support for Israel in particular and
the Jews in general are Dispensationalists, who support Israel with more
passion than do American Jews themselves. Their preoccupation with End Times
has entered American popular culture through Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series
of bestsellers.
Standing with Israel has many virtues, but one big flaw, namely the
author's failure to ask, let alone to answer, the obvious question: How is it
possible that an idiosyncratic current in non-conforming Christianity,
deeply concerned
with End Times prophecy and until recently quite obscure, has taken on the
decisive role in the great events of the day, as Brog reports?
Nonetheless, critics as well as supporters of US Middle East policy will find
Brog's report of great use. A Jew and a partisan of Israel, Brog served as
chief of staff to US Senator Arlen Specter and staff director of the US Senate
Judiciary Committee, with the opportunity to observe the politics of foreign
policy at first hand. He leaves no doubt that philo-Semitism is bred in the
marrow of evangelical Christianity. America's alliance with Israel stems not
from the machinations of powerful Jews, nor from America's imperial ambitions,
but rather from an impassioned surge of religious feeling at the grassroots of
US politics. Twenty-eight percent of Republicans may be characterized as
"religious right", Brog observes, making them "the largest single voting bloc
in the party".
This is all the more disturbing to enlightened world opinion because End Times
prophecy, the Rapture of the faithful, and the Second Coming of Jesus figure
prominently in Dispensationalist thinking. There is a bit of mad mysticism
about the Christian Right, but the same could be said about the 17th century's
master spy and diplomat, the "Gray Eminence" Father Joseph du Tremblay. No one
but a mystic could have the stomach for a full-dress religious war, and that is
precisely what we have gotten into.
Belief in the Rapture followed by seven years of tribulation does not quite
qualify as strategic realism, but it might be a more practical guide to foreign
policy than, say, belief in the Balance of Power or in the democratization of
the Middle East. I do not believe in a coming Rapture, but I do not think it
any less likely than the success of democracy in that region. In fact,
Apocalyptic inclinations provide a better sort of mental preparation for Middle
Eastern politics than the pap dished out by the political scientists. Sadly,
there are no solutions to the problems that bedevil the region (Crisis
of faith in the Muslim world, November 1, 2005).
Some years ago (The
sacred heart of darkness, February 11, 2003), I drew
attention to Aldous Huxley's study of Father Joseph du Tremblay, who succeeded
so brilliantly precisely because he was a religious mystic. "Huxley was
half-mad with mysticism by the time he fixed his gaze on Father Joseph, but
sometimes it takes one to know one. [Cardinal] Richelieu's diplomat and
spymaster trained in a school of mystical 'self-annihilation' that substituted
the interests of France for the plans of divine providence. France herself was
God's instrument for salvation of humanity, Father Joseph believed, such that
her interests justified any means, no matter how horrible," I wrote at the
time.
The rational criteria by which diplomats attempt to resolve conflicts do not
apply to conflicts whose origin lies not in rational self-interest, but in
existential desperation. That is why men like Father Joseph du Tremblay, who
walked barefoot across Europe in his rough Capuchin's robe to confront emperors
and princes, appear quite mad in normal conditions, but rise to the peak when
normalcy breaks down. And normalcy, as I have argued in the past, is overrated.
The Dispensationalists are developing an aptitude of sorts for US Middle East
policy, for what might be called existential reasons. Try to explain to someone
from State Department or Foreign Office that the Middle East is a train wreck,
and that nothing can be done to stop it, and they will dismiss you as a crank,
and for very good reasons. If there is a train wreck in the Middle East, most
of the present employees of the State Department and Foreign Office would
become redundant.
Today's diplomats must believe that the problem is manageable, whether through
a land-for-peace exchange or through regime change and democratization. If they
did not believe this, they would stop being diplomats and do something else.
Radical Protestants, though, see little downside in the proposition: worse
comes to worst, it might be the Apocalypse. For the Dispensationalists, the End
of the World is an existentially acceptable proposition. When dealing with the
Middle East, that is an advantage.
It is important to note that although Dispensationalists form the core of
Christian Zionism in the United States, leaders of the denomination are the
first to emphasize, in the worlds of Reverend J Randall Price, that "while
critics of Christian Zionism link it with Dispensationalism,
Dispensationalists, especially outside the US, are a minority in the movement.
In fact, the roots of modern Christian Zionism are with non-Dispensationalists
and began some 250 years before Dispensationalism was developed as a system."
Nonetheless, Brog is correct to focus on the Dispensationalists, for reasons I
will elaborate in a moment.
American Jews regard Christian Zionist enthusiasm for Israel with suspicion, if
not hostility, and Brog is at pains to assuage the concerns of his
co-religionists. It is true, he allows, that to the Dispensationalists, the
return of the Jews to Israel is a sign that the End Times are near, but it is
not the sign, just one of a number of signs. Many Jews find
discomforting the evangelical view that great wars will wipe out most of the
Jews in the tribulation preceding Christ's return. Brog observes:
There
is a wonderful irony in secular critics of Christian Zionism, typically Jewish,
complaining about the great disasters that will befall them upon Christ's
Second Coming. These critics, of course, don't actually believe that there will
be a Second Coming of Christ. If there will be no Second Coming, then there
will be no mass conversion or death [of the Jews]. So what exactly are these
critics worried about?
Behind this illogic, writes Brog, "there
is a fear that even if sincere, this Christian enthusiasm for Israel could
instantly morph into the hostility of the past", as in the example of Martin
Luther's shift from sympathy for the Jews in the heady days of his break with
the Catholic Church to roaring Jew-hatred in his later pronouncements.
In these matters Brog is rather out of his depth, for conventional religious
history offers little aid. If the usual story is true that Luther turned on the
Jews out of disappointment at their refusal to convert after the Reformation,
one would have to dismiss the reformer as a capricious simpleton. And if Luther
was so dense as to imagine the Jews would accept baptism merely because he had
eliminated the pope and the adoration of the saints, and so volatile as to
shift from a philo-Semite to a rapid Jew-baiter, what, a fortiori, can
be expected of such Dispensationalists as the Reverends Pat Robertson and Jerry
Falwell?
But the usual account misses the obvious: the philo-Semitism of the young rebel
turned into the anti-Semitism of the institutional leader precisely because
Luther had become an established leader, with responsibilities to the
Protestant princes who had taken up his cause and established his denomination.
The Catholic Church was in some measure correct to qualify Luther as a
"Judaizing heretic". Luther had drawn extensively upon the critique of Catholic
doctrine promulgated by the medieval rabbis, including their argument that
Original Sin could not be reconciled with Free Will. He expelled from the
Protestant Bible the books not included in the Hebrew canon, and forbade
worship of saints and the adoration of the Virgin Mary as pagan implants into
Christian doctrine.
If the Catholic Church denounced Luther as a Judaizer, his more radical
adherents threatened to Judaize even further. Michael Servetus, the Spanish
physician who is widely credited as first discovering the circulation of blood
in the lungs, electrified the Protestant world in 1531 with his book attacking
the Trinity. The Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli's correspondence shows that
Servetus' book made a deep impression upon German-speaking Protestants. Radical
Protestantism threatened the established order after the Anabaptists seized the
city of Muenster in 1534 and held it for 18 months.
That is the background to Luther's infamous screed of 1543, "The Jews and Their
Lies". He had good reason to fear that as long as the Jews remained a point of
reference for Christian reform, the reform movement would become
uncontrollable. To extirpate the Judaizers, Luther decided to extirpate the
Jews. Luther recapitulated Spain's persecutions of 1492, which exiled the Jews
to prevent the spread of Protestantism (No
one expects the Spanish Inquisition, June 22, 2004).
Utter ignorance about Christianity underlies the distrust of American Jews for
their would-be allies among evangelicals. Irving Kristol, the sage of
neo-conservatism, denounced "the political stupidity of the Jews" some years
ago, [1] but the definitive account of the Jews' theological stupidity remains
to be written. Protestants proposed to assist the return of the Jews to Zion as
early as the 17th century, when no more than a handful of Jewish mystics sat in
the ancient land of Israel to maintain the Jewish presence. [2] There are a few
Jewish writers with a keen appreciation of Christians and a spontaneous
affection for them as Christians, not merely as allies of convenience, but
their influence on Jewish opinion at large seems marginal. [3]
It may seem strange, but the only Christians who identify with the Jews to the
point of taking up their cause have been eschatologically oriented radical
Protestants. That has been the case since the first days of the Reformation,
and remains true today. Christ's Kingdom is not of this world; Christian life
is a pilgrimage to the next world. The stations along this journey recapitulate
the history of Israel: Christ's sacrifice on the Cross relives the Exodus from
Egypt, and the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai is transmuted into the
descent of the Holy Spirit to Christ's disciples on Pentecost.
But the Jewish and Christian sacred calendars and the journeys they evoke have
this fundamental difference: the Jewish journey is the actual journey of a
people out of bondage to redemption, and from exile to redemption once again,
while the Christian journey is the journey of the soul to a kingdom not of this
world. Despite the intimate parallelism, the two religions do different things
for different people, in Jacob Neusner's terse characterization. Judaism wants
of this world that every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and
that there shall be none to make him afraid; Christianity looks to a better
world beyond this one.
For impassioned Christians, the Kingdom of God is no vague promise, a footnote
in a formula to be mumbled on Sunday morning, but the promise of a Savior who
is a living presence in their lives. For the evangelicals, who daily seek to
bring Christ into their lives, emphasis upon End Times is a constant reminder
that this life is mere pilgrimage, and that Christ's promise embodies something
better than this world. But precisely because impassioned Christians understand
their lives as pilgrimage, and look toward the culmination of their pilgrimage,
they cling all the more avidly to the roadmap that has been given them for this
pilgrimage. And this roadmap is the life of Israel.
For that reason the evangelicals, like the Puritan founders of the United
States and the radical Protestants of Luther's era, identify with the Jews not
as an abstraction, but as a living and breathing people. The sufferings and
trials of Israel are their trials and suffering, and God's promise to Israel of
redemption stands as surety for God's promise to them.
Christian anti-Semitism, to be sure, is alive and well, but it flourishes among
conventional, middle-of-the-road, mainline Protestant denominations, notably
the US Presbyterians, who voted in 2004 to pull investments out of any
multinational corporation doing business in Israel. American Presbyterian
leaders publicly embraced Hezbollah in 2004 and made overtures to the new Hamas
government in Palestine. I do not believe that the Presbyterians,
Episcopalians, and other left-leaning denominations in the United States have
any special concern for the sufferings of Palestinian Arabs. Rather, I think
they simply hate Jews as they always have. The US never was so hostile to the
Jews as when mainline churches held sway. Despite the public humiliation of
Switzerland for its treatment of Jews during World War II, it is a matter of
record that this small country accepted 21,000 Jewish refugees during the war,
or precisely as many as the whole of the United States.
"Established Christianity" is something of an oxymoron, after all; the object
of the religion is not to make the adherent comfortable in this world. That is
the mission of the New Agers, Gnostics, and sundry purveyors of spiritual
self-help. When Christianity becomes a Sunday excursion rather than a daily
commitment, the notion of pilgrimage becomes irrelevant, and the Jews and their
concern become not an example but an irritation. Moderate Christians are
soon-to-be-ex-Christians, which is to say that they are proselyte neo-pagans.
Like most pagans, they hate the Jews. The collapse of the mainline
denominations and the corresponding growth of the evangelicals is the best
thing that has happened to the Jews in a very long time.
Although Dispensationalism begins with the Irish Protestant circle of John
Nelson Darby in the first half of the 19th century, the United States is the
true home of this denomination. Americans are migrants by definition, and
pilgrims by avocation. The journey to redemption is the dominant theme of the
American imagination. Ernest Hemingway famously said that the American novel
proceeds from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, with its astonishing image
of a black slave and a young white boy rafting together down the Mississippi
River. In its setting and premise, Twain's book created the next best thing to
an American Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but the second half of the book fails
of its promise, deteriorating into backwoods farce. Americans know that they
are on their way, but do not know quite where they are going, or how they will
know when they get there. The end of the American journey only can be conceived
in apocalyptic terms. In the mega-churches of the US exurbs, Darby's tones
strike a chord in the American spirit.
The State of Israel exists, Brog recounts, because a Bible-believing provincial
stumbled into the US presidency in 1945. As Brog quotes Harry Truman's adviser
Clark Clifford, "He was a student and believer in the Bible since his youth.
From his reading of the Old Testament he felt the Jews derived a legitimate
historical right to Palestine." Truman overrode the unanimous opinion of his
cabinet to cast America's vote behind the founding of the State of Israel in
1947.
Appreciative as he may be for the ministrations of Christian Zionists, Brog
tries to apologize for their eschatological views. That not only condescends to
American evangelicals but, even worse, it betrays a misunderstanding of what
inspires Christian passion. Christians identify with Israel precisely because
Israel's living history provides the beacons for their own journey to
redemption, a journey whose end implies the change in the foundations of the
Earth. Prophecy does not concern me, but I know something about shaky
foundations. Not only chance, but also Providence favors the prepared mind.
with End Times prophecy and until recently quite obscure, has taken on the
decisive role in the great events of the day, as Brog reports?
