Hermeneutics

Via the Huffington Post, here's a bit of Rev. John Hagee's "Adolph Hitler, servant of the Lord," sermon:

Going in and out of biblical verse, Hagee preached: "'And they the hunters should hunt them,' that will be the Jews. 'From every mountain and from every hill and from out of the holes of the rocks.' If that doesn't describe what Hitler did in the holocaust you can't see that."

He goes on: "Theodore Hertzel is the father of Zionism. He was a Jew who at the turn of the 19th century said, this land is our land, God wants us to live there. So he went to the Jews of Europe and said 'I want you to come and join me in the land of Israel.' So few went that Hertzel went into depression. Those who came founded Israel; those who did not went through the hell of the holocaust.

"Then god sent a hunter. A hunter is someone with a gun and he forces you. Hitler was a hunter. And the Bible says -- Jeremiah writing -- 'They shall hunt them from every mountain and from every hill and from the holes of the rocks,' meaning there's no place to hide. And that might be offensive to some people but don't let your heart be offended. I didn't write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth and it is the truth. How did it happen? Because God allowed it to happen. Why did it happen? Because God said my top priority for the Jewish people is to get them to come back to the land of Israel."

Now there's a couple of problems here that recall my earlier post about Hart's The Doors of the Sea.  First, Hagee does not preach with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  He more or less collapses the two.  With Hagee there is no hermeneutical leap, certainly not over something as broad and deep as Lessing's ugly ditch of history.  The hunter equals Hitler.

This is especially tempting for people with no historical consciousness who've been to the Holy Land.  When you read "Zion," you think the Western Wall.  When you read "The Abomination that causes desolation," you think The Dome of the Rock.  When you read all the prophetic material about the Babylonian captivity, you think 1948 and 1967.  You fail to see that the Bible, while not about today, is nevertheless relevant for today.  You think it's about today.

I find myself lapsing into this kind of thinking, especially after visiting Israel.  This week's OT lesson is God's words to the servant to rouse the exiles and lead them home,"to apportion the desolate heritages." You can't help but think of this miracle that the Zionist pioneers wrought, a miracle you've seen flowering in the Jezreel Valley. 

Only, in 1948 and 1967 the heritages weren't desolate.  They were full of Arabs who'd lived there from time out of mind.  There's the rub.

Secondly, Hagee's neo-Calvinst determinism collapses the distinction between world history and God's providence.  It's one thing to say that God can bend evil toward the good.  It's quite another to say that God sins in order that grace may abound.

Now obviously there is some relationship between the Holocaust and the founding of the modern state of Israel.  A time line will show you that the latter came on the heels of the former. 

The architecture of the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem suggests a relation.  You move through this prismatic shaped structure that's built in the side of a mountain, switching back and forth between rooms exhibiting unspeakable horror, until you arrive at the end, a balcony that overlooks suburban Jerusalem.  You, emotionally exhausted, survey Jewish homes scattered on the hills around Zion, as numerous as the sands of the seashore, and you intuit a relationship. 

Maybe the relationship is that the Holocaust makes the Jewish state a necessity.  Maybe the relationship is that God rescued a remnant from his covenant people in the European diaspora. 

But the problem with Hagee's straight lines is the crooked God that such lines yield.  His hermeneutics lack subtlety.  There's no room for mystery, for hope, for hard questions. Only an evil God whose marionettes like Hitler propel a pre-determined plot forward, and no innocent victims, just those who defied God's will and suffered the consequences.  Certainly not a good God whose sovereignty is hoped for and provisionally demonstrated in creation and resurrection.  Certainly not a God who hears the cry of innocent blood shed.