** FATHER FRANK’S RANTS Rent Number 757 24 January 18 MALIGNANT PROTESTANTISM

THE US VICE-PRESIDENT IN ISRAEL SHOWS A WONKY THEOLOGY IN HIS KNESSET SPEECH
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‘The Old Testament seen as the body without the head, the New Testament’, Ludwig Wittgenstein noted. US Vice-President Mike Pence is no philosopher but he professes to be a Christian. In Tel Aviv, addressing the Israeli Knesset, he sadly proved he cannot notice the NT head missing from the OT body. A culpable blindness.

Pence’s speech was full of quotations from the OT. Truncated, headless stuff. Because he invoked King David but forgot Jesus ‘the son of David’, so described in seventeen NT verses. That means that Jesus, the Christ or Messiah, fulfilled and completed the OT prophecy about ‘the seed of David’ (II Samuel 7:12-14). To suck up to his hosts, Pence also mentioned Abraham, coming ‘4000 ago from Ur of the Chaldeans to Israel’. A Christian Vice-President might just have remembered that in St John’s Gospel Jesus declares: ‘Truly, truly, before Abraham was, I am’. That is, Abraham came into existence, he was mortal, but Christ pre-existed him. The Messiah existed before time, before creation, in his divine nature, with his Heavenly Father. Thus, Jesus is incomparably greater, superior to old Abraham.

Judaism has its own integrity and the rabbis are entitled to their own take on the OT. Pence, however, is not a Jew. Raised as a Catholic he later embraced Evangelical Protestantism. A brand of Christianity that, perversely, has sometimes privileged the OT over the Gospels. Tantamount, Wittgenstein would opine, to having a body without a head: a useless freak. The so-called Christian Zionists – an expression as self-contradictory as a round square or a four-sided triangle – are the most virulent example of such syndrome. The return of Jews to the Holy Land and the 1948 proclamation of the state of Israel accord with Biblical, millennial prophecies about the Second Coming of Christ, they claim. Had Pence stuck to Catholicism, he would have been saved from these brainless babblings.

‘My country’s very first settlers saw themselves as pilgrims, sent by Providence, to build a new Promised Land’, the Vice-President told the Knesset, suggesting a comparison with the Jewish colonisers in Palestine. Did he realise the enormity of the sinister, pseudo-providential parallel? Because the white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxons settlers gradually exterminated the native inhabitants of the New World, the ‘Red Indians’. The colonists robbed native Americans of their own lands and then drove forcibly the survivors into small territories termed ‘reservations’, where they still are today. ‘You will be like the Red Indians’: a fine prospect Pence was holding out to the Palestinians!

Prior to the Reformation, mainline Christian thought did not countenance the fantasies of a mass Jewish gathering in Palestine. Insofar as the OT speaks of the Hebrews being restored to the Holy Land, it pertains to their return from exile in Babylon. Something realised when, five centuries before Christ, the Persian Shah Cyrus freed Jews from captivity and sent them back to Palestine. References to Israel’s future glory mean the Christian Church. The Church is the new Israel or the ‘Israel of God’ as St Paul puts in Galatians (6:16). The Apostle of course was painfully aware how many of his people had not recognised Jesus as the Messiah. In spite of that, in Romans St Paul predicts that in the end ‘all Israel will be saved’. An excellent prophecy. Nothing about any idiotic ‘return’. Indeed, neither the RC Church nor other sensible Protestants, like Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians teach any version of non-Jewish, ‘Christian’ Zionism. Even the Church of England, with
all its feebleness and stupidity, draws the line at such malignant and heretical doctrine.

‘Jerusalem is Israel’s capital’, Pence said, sinking back again on the OT body and leaving out its true head, Jesus Christ. Who was not always radiant about the city of his royal ancestors. ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and those who are sent to you! How often I desired to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under their wings, but you were not willing!’ The last of seven apocalyptic warnings that Jesus pronounces against the religious hypocrites opposed to him. Wicked men who feigned piety while plotting to destroy the Son of David. And one of the murdered prophets was Zechariah, son of Jehoiada, a scourge of idolatry, whose last words were not forgiveness but ‘May the Lord see and avenge’.

Jerusalem was the destination of Jesus’ last journey while on earth but his people’s authorities refused to hear his message of love and, in concert with Pontius Pilate, had him crucified. In the year 70 the prophecy came true. The Roman armies burnt the Temple to the ground and obliterated Jerusalem from the map of Palestine. Many, like the poet Dante, saw Jerusalem’s ruination as divine chastisement for the execution of the Messiah. Today, in recognising the city as the capital of Israel, President Trump has disqualified himself as honest broker in any peace plan. Had he been astute, he would have placed the word ‘West’ before the city’s name. That would have hinted at East Jerusalem as the possible, future capital of Palestine. Unfortunately, the Donald blundered. Too bad.

To be fair, as a Christian politician Pence has some good points. He is opposed to abortion and to weirdoes in the US military. His wonky Protestantism is the trouble. A conception untrue to the Bible and to the divine purpose. Because, as the great philosopher rightly implied, having a body without a head is a monstrosity.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli

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