Christian Zionism and American foreign policy
From the Cullman Times
Roy Moore, brooding in defeat at the hands of a Democrat and the voters of Alabama, is oddly asking for financial donations from supporters. In an email to supporters, Moore’s campaign asked supporters to “dig deep” and donate anywhere from $25 to $1,000 to his “Election Integrity Fund.” The fundraising email was sent after Alabama’s secretary of state announced that “the most controversial” issue of potential voter fraud had been resolved after his staff found no evidence of anything improper.
Secretary of State John Merrill, a Republican, has a reputation of being thorough concerning voting issues in Alabama. He has investigated issues promptly and also is the architect of registering thousands of Alabamians to vote. With Moore still crying foul about fraud and irregularities in the Dec. 12 special election for the U.S. Senate, it’s become all too clear that the former chief justice simply has too much pride to accept defeat.
Even with calls from within his own party to concede from respected Republicans, Moore is acting like an undisciplined child, moping and whining about the outcome of the election.
From every indication coming from Montgomery and counties across Alabama, solidly in most cases under control of Moore’s Republican Party, there is nothing lingering to change the outcome of the election. Not even enough to barely budge the count.
Alabama’s voting rolls have been through major purges or cleanups through the years. The equipment used by voters has also performed accurately and with few mechanical issues. It’s difficult to understand what Moore envisions as fraud and irregularities.
Frankly, his prolonged holdout over the results of the election mean nothing, other than frustrating Republican voters and leadership who are ready to move on to the upcoming state elections in 2018. Some Republican leaders have also said they will watch Jones closely as he enters the Senate, hoping he lives up to the campaign promise of reaching across the aisle to work with Republicans and to respect Alabama’s decades-long conservative voting record.
Jones has been a gracious winner. He knows well that Alabama is widely known for conservative values and has voted Republican heavily in the elections of the last 20-plus years. In essence, he respects the Republican Party and conservative Alabamians more than Moore, who seems to care only for himself. From The Commercial Appeal
The city’s two Confederate statues have been taken down. Good work, Memphis. After years of political resolutions and public protests, legal disputation and moral consternation, state interference and indifference, the two statues were removed suddenly, quickly and cleverly without incident.
“The statues no longer represent who we are as a modern, diverse city with momentum,” Mayor Jim Strickland said after the statues were removed from their pedestals just hours after City Council ratified the sale of Health Sciences Park (formerly Forrest Park) and Fourth Bluff Park (formerly Confederate Park) to a privately funded nonprofit called Memphis Greenspace Inc.
By selling the two parks, the city outflanked a 2016 law that basically allowed the state to occupy the parks and prevent the city from “renaming, removing or relocating any statues, monuments and other memorials on publicly owned land” without the approval of two-thirds of the members of the Tennessee Historical Commission.
The city tried to play by the state’s rules, but the 29-member commission is heavily stacked with Confederate history buffs and apologists who twice rejected the city’s request to remove the Forrest statue. So the city changed its tactics and tried another legal maneuver.
“The law allows a city to sell land to a private entity,” Strickland noted Wednesday. “The law allows a private entity to remove items such as statues from its own land.”
Forrest, the Confederate general known for his deceptive battlefield tactics, his ability to maneuver to “Get there first with the most,” would have been proud. So would Forrest the baptized Christian, if accounts of his late-in-life repentance are as true as his supporters claim.
“We were born on the same soil, breathe the same air, and live in the same land,” the graying Forrest reportedly told a Fourth of July gathering in Memphis in 1875. “Why, then, can we not live as brothers?”
We certainly could not as long as our public parks promoted monuments dedicated 112 and 54 years ago by white citizens intent on protecting and preserving a racist system and way of life that subjugated and segregated people of color.
Mayor Strickland, City Council and city attorneys deserve much credit for their years of patient persistence.
“This is thousands of people who came together to put names on petitions, to donate money and time ... to get arrested, to get people out of jail ... so here we are today as the year draws to a close seeing justice and righteousness happen,” Tami Sawyer, community activist said.
The city’s take-them-down legal tactics certainly can be debated, and likely will be challenged in court, but the well-planned, late-night removal of two Confederate statues from public parks was the right and righteous thing to do.
Despite some decidedly mixed reviews, the Donald Trump Morning Show on Twitter has been picked up for a second season, at least apparently. Look out, though. The president may fall victim to something he, as a show-business sort of guy, ought to know is a problem: reruns too familiar to the audience.
For what seems like years now, Trump’s been tweeting about “Crooked Hillary” in reference to his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, and about “Obamacare” as if, instead of a health care plan, it was a disease.
So how’d Trump get going the day after Christmas? More on Twitter about “Obamacare,” with this: “Based on the fact that the very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate has been terminated as part of our Tax Cut Bill, which essentially Repeals (over time) ObamaCare.” And he took a poke at the FBI: “And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!” A lot of his tweets were in capital letters, as the president clearly is mad at the FBI, a questionable strategy given the ongoing investigation of Russian manipulation of the 2016 election.
Trump’s tweeting has gone, in terms of public perception and the view of his aides, from being an example of a savvy candidate who knows how to use social media to a daily “Uh, oh” or “Oh, no” moment wherein the president vents his anger as if he’s clearing his sinuses. His tweet storms are amusing to his political enemies, who believe them to be the equivalent of a daily foot to the mouth, but when Trump starts “warning” North Korea and implying military actions on Twitter, the humor in his behavior quickly vanishes.
Thus, Trump’s staff ought to make this a Resolution: First one up, hide the phone and the laptop.
Recently, the president declared our recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital. While I was not surprised, it was a painful announcement to watch on multiple levels. It was difficult as a supporter of civil rights and liberties which are often denied in Israel. But, even deeper, it was difficult as an Orthodox Christian, and that pain is compounded by knowing that this is championed by American Protestant Evangelicalism. In this article, I’d like to spend some time tackling the problematic theology of Zionism among American Protestants vis-a-vis ancient Christianity, and then talk about the sociopolitical ramifications of this policy shift.
The ancient doctrines of the Christian faith, passed down from Christ to the Apostles and their descendents to the present, had no preoccupation with an Israeli state, especially not in their eschatology (that is, their doctrine on the “last days”). At the time of Christ, Israel was a vassal of Rome, not a sovereign nation, and it was Christ himself who prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem that would occur in AD 70. Not until the fourth century would the Empress Helen tour the Holy Land to find many of the holy sites of Christianity and reclaim them. She funded the building of both the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (properly, the Cathedral of the Holy Resurrection) in Jerusalem. Churches still stand there today, which belong to the Orthodox Church. The Orthodox of the Holy Land are overwhelmingly Palestinian, and Palestinians were majority Christian before the creation of Israel. Today, Palestinians are only 2 percent Christian, as many have fled the persecution of Israel and the radicalization of Palestinian Muslims. I have met many Orthodox Palestinians who ended up here after being forced to leave their homes and businesses to make room for Israeli settlements. Many have been Christian since the time Christ walked those same streets. So, why do American Protestants so overwhelmingly support Israel?
The theology behind Christian Zionism comes from a Protestant doctrine called dispensationalism. It was invented in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby. Darby was the first to create a systematic paradigm of dispensationalism, which teaches that God acts in different ways at different times to administer his plan for the world. While this is built on earlier concepts that date all the way back to St. Irenaeus of Lyons in the second century, Darby goes much further. A key concept, unique to Darby, is that there is a prophecy from Isaiah that requires the re-establishment of the nation of Israel on earth, that this is separate from the Church, and that this must happen before the “end times.” This idea was strongly advocated by Darby, who traveled much of continental BEN AMIS Jim Powell of Young Harris Pavel Constantin, Romania Europe and North America to spread this idea during the 1800s. It has caught on in some Protestant circles, and is Gospel for them: Israel must be fully recognized and re-established before Christ can return.
However, there is no basis for this idea before Darby. The Scriptures do not teach it, and it is unknown to all fathers of the church and even the Protestant reformers. St. Paul, in the Scriptures, declares the Church of Christ the New Israel, and it has always, until Darby, been understood by all Christians that the church is the continuation and fulfillment of the nation of Israel. The idea that there was some special, divine plan for the nation who had rejected Christ would be bizarre to any Christian that lived more than 200 years ago. This is a radical break from what has always been known to be true by Christians the world over. Many would say it is a “different opinion” (the literal meaning of the word “heresy”) from all of Christianity before it. And yet, it has gained such traction that a large segment of Evangelicals in America accept it as gospel and expect American foreign policy to align with their theology, which is foreign to 1,800 years of all Christian teaching.
So, what does this mean for American foreign policy and the Middle East? Nothing good. The United Nations emphatically condemned the decision in a General Assembly vote after only one nation, the U.S., vetoed a Security Council resolution. Many Mideast nations are looking for other arbiters and refuse to accept the U.S. as an unbiased broker. Recently, Afghanistan and Pakistan sat down to negotiate problems between them with China as arbiter. Palestinian President Abbas refused to meet with Vice President Pence, who had to cancel his Holy Land tour in the midst of the turmoil and our closest ally, Britain, has strongly condemned our decision. As we receive rebuke after rebuke, the Trump administration touts that the world respects America again. They are either incompetent or liars, as the actions of our foreign allies say the opposite and polling shows respect of the U.S. slipping among foreign nationals.
Granted, many of the president’s most ardent supporters will see no problem, as this administration has vowed to be the most isolationist one in modern history. The problem is that the economy, trade, communications and many other facets of the world are truly global today. We cannot ignore the world as we did in the past. In the declaration of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, we find ourselves alone among world powers, having upset a delicate balance and embarrassed ourselves, all on the account of one man’s ramblings from the 19th century.