On Hagee

The television last night went on about John Hagee, and McCain's "rejection" of his endorsement. It's not hard to see what's driving this story: Obama has been embarrassed by his intimate 20-year association with a racist anti-American demagogue, so the media was out to find, or manufacture, a similiar association that would embarrass McCain. The appropriate analogy is that if I rob a bank, and you pick up a dime off the sidewalk, well hey, we both took something that didn't belong to us!

But my point here is how bogus the story really is. As I understand it, the particular controversy are Hagee's remarks about Hitler. Despite the efforts of some in the media to pull these out of context, it is apparent even from what they quote that the remarks don't mean what the media say they mean.

Is there really any doubt that the worldwide revulsion at the Nazi attempt at genocide was indispensible to creating the historical moment at which Israel was granted its statehood? I would be surprised to learn that there is much disagreement among historians on this point.

But it follows that, if you believe in a sovereign God, and if you believe that the modern state of Israel is the heir to God's Old Testament covenant and therefore destined to play a specific role in the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, you are pretty much obligated to believe that God used the Holocaust to accomplish his divine purposes. For my part, while I subscribe to the first of the above statements, I am no longer persuaded by the second, although I once was. So I would not tend to subscribe to Hagee's formulation in the way he intends it. But so what? Subscribing to the Left Behind narrative may be practicing sloppy theology; it may distort your foreign policy in irrational ways; but in an era in which our presidential candidates spend more energy swearing fealty to Israel than our own country, I don't see how any of this makes Hagee a bad person, or otherwise beyond the Pale.

The Huffington Post quotes the remarks (from a 1990 sermon) in full:

"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."

Two points about this. First, it is very difficult to read this as being motivated by hatred for Jews. The Huffington Post headline, "Hagee Said Hitler Was Fulfilling God's Will," only does justice to what Hagee actually said by narrow technical criteria.

My second point is theological, and aimed at those whose rejection of Hagee's beliefs is part of their broader problem with the nature of evil: why do bad things happen? I do not mean to make light of this question, for there is indeed much pain, suffering and death in this world, and no shortage of evil. And this doesn't even address those who, having rejected the Gospel of Christ despite years of hope and prayer by their loved ones, damn themselves to an eternity of torment.

I cannot do justice to these questions in the short time I have, so I must content myself with one question: what is the alternative? If you reject God's sovereignty, you are left believing either that God is watching our earthly plight, wringing his hands in powerless futility, or that God could do something to relieve our suffering but doesn't care enough about it. And frankly, neither of these alternatives is particularly comforting.

UPDATE: Half Sigma and his commenters make these points as well.