McCain Rejects Hagee Endorsement

Story here at Fox News.

John Hagee (his page, Wikipedia) is a dispensationalist pastor. For those of you who don't know exactly what that means, it's basically a Biblical hermeneutic that (among other things) teaches that God works with humanity differently in well specified historical periods (dispensations), with a focus on the entirely different (according to them) relationships between God and the people of Israel on the one hand and the Gentile world on the other. It places national and biological Israel in a prominent place in end-times scenarios, including the re-establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine (which, yes, has happened) and the rebuilding of the temple on the historical site in Jerusalem. The political upshot of this theology is that the state of Israel must be defended at all costs. This is what motivated Pat Robertson to claim that Ariel Sharon was being judged by God when he ceded the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Arabs.

McCain courted Hagee's endorsement because he needed the support of a key GOP constituency, evangelicals. It saddens me that to get evangelical support you have to go to this guy. After all, dispensationalism de-emphasizes the evangel at the expense of a theology that interprets Scripture with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other. Having Hagee's support also buttresses your claim as a politician to be a big supporter of the State of Israel.

Well, McCain has been forced to distance himself and finally reject Hagee's endorsement because of all of the looney things that Hagee has said over the years. Hagee called the Roman Catholic church the antichrist (not really a new argument for Protestants, but nowhere near as sophisticated as it used to be), and claimed that Hurricane Katrina was sent as a judgment on New Orleans for homosexuality (yes, I believe it's a sin, very much so... but Hagee seems to have forgotten about all the other sins going on in New Orleans and everywhere else). But what took the cake is Hagee's claim that Hitler was God's instrument to punish European Jews for not returning to Palestine to establish the State of Israel and to basically force the world to help to do so. It was this that caused McCain to do something he should have done a long time ago.

This kind of theology is not merely wrong. It's bad enough that it takes the focus off Christ and him crucified. It's also dangerous. It's the kind of theology that will lead this country into even more war in the Middle East if we follow it to its logical conclusions. We can support the existence of the State of Israel as a political position without using theology to justify it. However, if we do so it also means that we want an Israel that lives at peace with its neighbors, including a viable, democratic Palestinian state. That's the other problem with Hagee... by shunning the Palestinians he basically throws a whole bunch of Palestinian Christians overboard, but (ATTENTION: SARCASM) most of them aren't Protestants, so they're not really our brothers and sisters anyway, right?

However, one of my favorites was this YouTube clip:



Dispensationalism is like drinking theology from the toilet.