Recently in Hagee Category

Catching up a little but on the week's news, I note that Brody's hawked his Lieberman interview in a series of posts. In one, Connecticut's junior senator, in the course of defending his "dear friend" Pastor Hagee's Holocaust remarks (and I'm not going to criticize the defense), rather astonishingly declares:

I don't agree with everything that John Hagee has ever said or done. I can safely say that Pastor Hagee doesn't agree with everything I've said or done. But we agree on some big things. We agree on our basic religious beliefs. We believe in the God of the Bible. We believe the Bible is the inspired truth from God and all that comes with it, the God of creation, the God of revelation, the god of redemption and salvation.

John Hagee and Abraham Foxman have kissed and made up. In a "Dear Abe" letter, Hagee apologizes for causing offense in re: his theological musings on the Holocaust (from 1999, he clarifies). In a "Dear Pastor Hagee" response, Foxman declares himself satisfied--though not without a smack at Hagee's eschatological presumption: "We mortals sometimes get into trouble fathoming God's ways." I figured Foxman would not be out of sorts with the good pastor for too long, but there's no doubt that Hagee comes crawling out of this encounter with his tail between his legs.

When does a "controversial" preacher become a public pariah? In Jeremiah Wright's case, it was when he danced gleefully around the podium before dozens of cameras at the National Press Club. In John Hagee's case, it was when an old audiotape seemed to suggest that he believed God had acquiesced in the Holocaust to hasten the ingathering of the Jews in the Holy Land.

Never mind that a semi-respectable theological case could be made for what Hagee said. The tape proved to be the last straw for his endorsee John McCain, and McCain's disavowal of the pastor meant that one and all were free to pronounce Hagee beyond the pale of respectability.

Enter the revelation that McCain's best senatorial buddy, the self-anointed "Independent Democrat" Joe Lieberman, was listed as featured speaker at the annual "summit" of Hagee's fundraising support group, Christians United For Israel (CUFI). Such was the heat that even the notoriously unapologetic Lieberman, who at last year's summit praised Hagee as a Moses-like "Man of God,"
felt compelled to vouchsafe a few words of criticism even as he declared his intention of sticking to his plan to headline the CUFI event. As in:

I believe that Pastor Hagee has made comments that are deeply unacceptable and hurtful. I also believe that a person should be judged on the entire span of his or her life's works. Pastor Hagee has devoted much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism and building bridges between Christians and Jews.

Considering the hateful statements Mr. Hagee has made and Mr. McCain's repudiation of the pastor, it is odd and inappropriate for Mr. Lieberman to sit at Mr. Hagee's table again this year. The pastor is clearly a bigot.

Julia Duin's roundup of Jewish defenders of Pastor Hagee in the Washington Times has the virtue of making clear that holding God in some way responsible for the Holocaust is not beyond the bounds of Jewish opinion. Which isn't to say that Jewish opinion is unanimous on this subject--as if Jewish opinion were unanimous on any subject. Note Dennis Prager's disagreement with his own father.

For a statement of the anti-Hagee point of view, there's this posting by Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, in the Washington Post's department of religious kibbitzing, On Faith. According to Saperstein, Hagee's offense lay in blaming the Holocaust on European Jews for their failure to immigrate to Palestine. Although Hagee didn't say that, it is not an illogical conclusion to draw from his remarks.

By including the Book of Job in their collection of approved texts, the compilers of the Bible figured that Jews ought from time to time ponder the question of why an almighty God permits the apparently innocent to suffer. Whether a presidential campaign is one of those times is another question.

The Revealer is pushing the discovery by blogger Brian Wilson of an audiotape sermon in which John Hagee talks about the Holocaust as a fulfillment of divine prophecy (to bring about the Jewish ingathering in Israel) and pointing to the Jews in Israel as "spiritually dead." Wilson (and Jeff Sharlet, the Revealer's editor) see this as evidence of the famously philosemitic Hagee's "other" anti-Semitic side. That seems to me an exaggeration at best. Theological interpretations of the Holocaust as God's judgment is pretty standard in ultra-Orthodox Jewish circles, for example. And bear in mind that Hagee is exegeting the story of the dry bones in Ezechiel 37; it's typical evangelical interpretation to see God's action there as stirring the spiritually dead. I'm inclined to see this as Hagee indulging in the normal evangelical understanding of the Jews as not yet "awakened" through knowledge of Christ. That's hardly anti-Semitic. The tape, perhaps from the late 1990s, at most suggests that Hagee had not yet gotten around to rejecting "Replacement Theology"--the idea that the Christian covenant has completely replaced the old Jewish one--what's known in other theological contexts as supersessionism. Anyway, judge for yourself.