"Christian Zionism"

I have several good friends who are, or at least once were, Dispensationalists in their theological framework. I'm not and, consequently, not a "Christian Zionist." But I am a Christian and a strong supporter of the American alliance with Israel. The Christian theologian who wrote "Is ‘Christian Zionism’ Really Heretical?" doesn't believe it is heresy, but also doesn't think that the question is relevant to whether Christians ought to support Israel. The issue arose because of a recent interview Tucker Carlson did with an anti-Semite during which Carlson made the assertion that support for Israel was heretical. That controversy led to, among other things, dissension within the erstwhile conservative Heritage Foundation, during which a young female staffer said, "...Gen Z has an increased unfavorable view of Israel, and it’s not because millions of Americans are antisemitic. It’s because we are Catholic and Orthodox and believe that Christian Zionism is a modern heresy."

.... This undoubtedly sincere statement raises a number of worthy and important questions that are, sadly, wrapped up in an obvious and distracting fallacy. The young woman’s generation has increasing antipathy to Israel, she says, because “Christian Zionism is a modern heresy.” But what has Israel to do with a modern Christian heresy? Has the state of Israel ever embraced or promoted or associated itself with Christian Zionism, other than to accept enthusiastic support wherever it can be found, particularly when in short supply? ....

The staffer’s complaint, then, is that if some segment of people support Israel for the wrong reasons, Israel is thereby unworthy of support. This embarrassing non sequitur does not speak well of the generation for whom she claimed to speak. People support right and good things for wrong and bad reasons all the time, and the wrong and bad reasons do not transform the right and good thing suddenly into wrong and bad. Her logic is so transparently poor that less charitable readers might view this public objection to “Christian Zionism” as a red herring to distract from what actually is just antisemitism. Alas, as much as one might wish that this uncharitable reading did not have good support, it is exactly what the likes of Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are doing when they rail against “Christian Zionists.” The epithet is a cloaking device for conspiratorial hatred of Jews. ....

...Christianity does maintain that national Israel’s covenant purposes and function have been put out of gear, retired, made obsolete in terms of redemptive-historical significance, but this is not what is often derided as “replacement” theology. Properly understood, it is fulfillment theology. [N.T.] Wright, again: “[T]o distinguish between a signpost and the building to which it points is not to say anything derogatory about the signpost." Much less is it to say anything derogatory about Jewish people. That anyone would abuse these doctrines in service of antisemitism is an affront to the Christian gospel, which, Christians believe, is for Jews and Gentiles alike. ....

If a Christian comes to understand and believe that the state of Israel no longer has redemptive-historical significance, the question is then disentangled from needless and distorting religious baggage and put squarely back into its proper domain. Nobody asks the religious rationale for why we should be allies with Canada. That is a matter of international relations, not biblical exegesis. What is its form of government? Do its citizens enjoy civil liberties and the rule of law? Do they share our moral values? Believe in human dignity? Is there freedom of speech, religion, press, and association? These are the relevant considerations—and the Jewish people and their state would be only too happy to be judged by them instead of the double standards to which they’ve become sadly accustomed. Like the Heritage staffer, I am a Christian, a theologian even, and I agree that Christian Zionism in the form of Dispensational theology is a terrible reason to support Israel. Unlike her and her Gen Z compatriots, I can spot a non sequitur and therefore I can also see the many good reasons to support Israel. (more)

Brian G. Mattson, "Is ‘Christian Zionism’ Really Heretical?" The Dispatch, Nov. 23, 2025.

"In memory, it’s all in black and white."

Many of us who were alive on November 22, 1963, had experiences similar to Patrick Kurp's:

No public event has shaken me so lastingly as the assassination of President Kennedy. I’m not speaking sentimentally, mourning the glory that was Camelot. JFK was a mediocre president, at best, and not a good man.

I had turned eleven a month before his murder. The killing taught me that everyone was vulnerable, even the most powerful and protected man in the world. I don’t mean that in the personal sense. I haven’t spent the last sixty-two years trembling with paranoia. I’m talking about history. No one is immune to its machinations. Few things last.

The way I learned of the assassination seems significant. Ron Ornsby and I were in the same sixth-grade class and had walked to our Safety Patrol post, carrying our flags and wearing Sam Browne belts. A driver stopped to tell us the president had been shot. ....

When I walked in the back door at home, I could see the silhouette of my mother crying in front of the television. For the next three days, we were forbidden to play outside and spent most of the time watching the news from Dallas and Washington, D.C. In memory, it’s all in black and white. ....

I was a high school senior that year. I was home because that was the day of my grandmother's funeral. We learned of the assassination from a television broadcast just before leaving to go to the church. We didn't know the President was dead until after my grandmother's interment. The lady who drove us to the cemetery stayed in the car, listening to the radio. When we got home, I called the school. I learned later that there had been crying in the halls and classrooms. The band from my high school had marched in JFK's inaugural parade.

Some time later, I learned that C.S. Lewis had also died on that day.

Patrick Kurp, "'But O the Heavy Change, Now Thou Art Gone'," Anecdotal Evidence, Nov. 22, 2025.

Grace

Frederick Buechner:

AFTER CENTURIES OF handling and mishandling, most religious words have become so shopworn nobody's much interested any more. Not so with grace, for some reason. Mysteriously, even derivatives like gracious and graceful still have some of the bloom left.

Grace is something you can never get but only be given. There's no way to earn it or deserve it or bring it about any more than you can deserve the taste of raspberries and cream or earn good looks or bring about your own birth.

A good sleep is grace and so are good dreams. Most tears are grace. The smell of rain is grace. Somebody loving you is grace. Loving somebody is grace. Have you ever tried to love somebody?

A crucial eccentricity of the Christian faith is the assertion that people are saved by grace. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do. There's nothing you have to do.

The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you.

There's only one catch, Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.

Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.

From the entry for October 30 in Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, HarperCollins, 1992.

"Like a tree planted by the water-side"

From a 1971 W.H. Auden letter critical of liturgical reform:

As for the Psalms, they are poems, and to 'get' poetry, it should, of course, be read in the language in which it was written. I myself, alas, know no Hebrew. All I know is that Coverdale reads like poetry, and the modern versions don't.

Coverdale's version of the Psalms is the version used in the Book of Common Prayer.

Coverdale's Psalm 1:

1. BLESSED is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners : and hath not sat in the seat of the scornful.
2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord : and in his law will he exercise himself day and night.
3. And he shall be like a tree planted by the water-side : that will bring forth his fruit in due season.
4. His leaf also shall not wither : and look, whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper.
5. As for the ungodly, it is not so with them : but they are like the chaff, which the wind scattereth away from the face of the earth.
6. Therefore the ungodly shall not be able to stand in the judgement : neither the sinners in the congregation of the righteous.
7. But the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous : and the way of the ungodly shall perish.

liturgical reform – Snakes and Ladders

Lest we forget

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, an armistice ended combat between the armed forces of the Allied Powers and Imperial Germany. The day is observed variously as Armistice Day, Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day. It is a day to honor all veterans, living or dead. When I was in elementary school, the class paused for a minute of silence at eleven o'clock.

Inklings

From "88 Years of Middle-Earth, 75 Years of Narnia":

During the hectic middle decades of the twentieth century, from the end of the Great Depression through World War II and into the 1950s, a small circle of intellectuals gathered on a weekly basis in and around Oxford University to drink, smoke, quip, cavil, read aloud their works in progress, and endure or enjoy with as much grace as they could muster the sometimes blistering critiques that followed. This erudite club included writers and painters, philologists and physicians, historians and theologians, soldiers and actors. They called themselves, with typical self-effacing humor, the Inklings. ....

Just before the dawn of World War II, 88 years ago, one of the members of this group, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (better known as J.R.R. Tolkien), published a quaint little fantasy book for children entitled The Hobbit on September 21, 1937. It was followed by a trilogy of books beginning in 1954 called The Lord of the Rings....

Thirteen years later, John’s good friend Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C.S. Lewis) and fellow Inkling published an even quainter children’s book entitled The Chronicles of Naria: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe 75 years ago on October 16, 1950. It was followed by 5 sequels and 1 prequel. There is a new set of movies to be adapted for Netflix in which filming has already begun for the sixth published book, but the first in the series, The Magician’s Nephew. ....

...[B]ooks, articles, and videos have been made about the overt and subtle Christianity packed into the books Tolkien and Lewis have created. Middle-earth has been around for 88 years and Narnia for 75. ....

I don't think that The Magician's Nephew ought to be the first in the Netflix series, even though CSL himself recommended that as the proper reading order. There are also rumors that Aslan is to be voiced by Merrill Streep! Nevertheless, when the Netflix series comes, I will hope for the best.

Mark Wilson, "88 Years of Middle-Earth, 75 Years of Narnia," Catholic Bard, Nov 8, 2025.

Against domination

Joseph Loconte on one of the reasons Tolkien and Lewis remain relevant beyond just entertainment:

.... Tolkien and Lewis made a literary pact between them: They would write novels to undeceive their generation and quicken the moral imagination. ....

The result, The Screwtape Letters (1942), exposed how fear, hatred, and ambition could be manipulated to serve the lust for power. The devil and his minions want people “hag-ridden” by the future, Lewis writes, “haunted by visions of imminent heaven or hell on earth.” Once individuals become obsessed with controlling the future, they will be “ready to break the Enemy’s commands [God’s moral law] in the present” in order to attain the one or avoid the other.

Art was imitating life. To defeat capitalism and achieve its utopian vision of a classless society, freed from the vices of envy and competition, Soviet communism waged a war against its own population: the abolition of private property, show trials, executions, and gulags. To prevent “the bacillus of mankind” from polluting and destroying German society, Hitler launched his “final solution” against the Jews: the ghettos, the deportations, the sterilization policies, and the death camps.

Thus, the dictatorships of the left and the right — political religions without God — each claimed to be the solution to an approaching apocalypse. Each demanded unquestioned loyalty to their political agendas. As Tolkien described Sauron: “He brooked no freedom nor any rivalry, and he named himself Lord of the Earth.” ....

Their most beloved stories — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Ransom Trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia — upheld the irreducible dignity of the individual. Against the literary establishment, they reclaimed the concept of heroism and reinvented it for the modern mind: Their unlikely protagonists include the children of Narnia and the homely inhabitants of the Shire. As Gandalf described the hobbits: “Soft as butter they can be, yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots.”

During the crisis years of 1933 to 1945, when the world descended into an abyss of grievances, propaganda, and state-sanctioned violence, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis stood together in the breach. They offered a vision of human life — rooted in a deeply Christian outlook — that embraced humility, self-denial, and the rejection of worldly power. .... (more)

Joseph Loconte, "Lessons About Power from Middle-earth," National Review, Nov. 8, 2025.

"It's not gonna rain forever"

Randy Newman:

You can stand alone or with somebody else
Or stand with all of us, together
If you can believe in something bigger than yourself
You can follow the flag forever

They say it's just a dream some dreamers dreamed
That it's an empty thing  that really has no meaning
They say it's all a lie but it's not a lie
I'm going to follow the flag 'til I die

Into every life a little rain must fall but it's not gonna rain forever
You can rise above—you can rise above it all
We will follow the flag together
We will follow the flag forever

Antisemitism

I always enjoy reading Kevin Williamson and usually agree with him. From today's "The Antisemitism Grift," and once again, I like what he writes:

One of the bits of Christian civilization that limps on in our time is the seedbed of antisemitism. It is a supreme irony: The central figure in Christianity is—I do not write was—a Jew, a Jewish man from a Jewish family who lived, until the advent of an extraordinary career, an ordinary Jewish life in a Jewish land. Christianity is not Judaism, and its fundamental claims are incompatible with Jewish orthodoxy. Pope John Paul II taught Christians to think of the Jewish people as “our elder brothers in faith,” and that seems to me the right way to go about it—a serious difference, but a loving disagreement within the family. It is, I think, the endurance of Jews that drives Christians a little bit mad—or a lot mad, at times—as though the Christian failure to entirely assimilate the Jewish people into our religion (its fragments) and into our Weltanschauung were the mark of some sort of a divine rebuke. Like much of what ails Christianity, this trouble stems from a Christian refusal to believe our own dogma and a Christian failure to understand that dogma in the first place. We behave as though God were unable to attend to His Own affairs, including His ongoing business with His chosen people. That is the democratic spirit in religion: the urge to give the Architect of the Universe a little nudge, here and there, and a little advice. (more, possibly behind a paywall)

Kevin D. Williamson, "The Antisemitism Grift," The Dispatch, Nov. 3, 2025.

Chivalry

Kevin DeYoung on a worthy aspiration:

We need heroes from the past, as well as inspiration for the present. And the knight has proved to be an enduring symbol of valor for almost a thousand years. But if Christian men are going to aspire to be these heroic defenders of Christendom, we ought to know what these knights were supposed to be like. ....

As medieval historian Maurice Keen explains in his book, Chivalry, the knight had three basic duties. The first duty was to defend the faith of Christ against unbelievers (note: not to wield the sword against other Christians). His next duty was to defend his earthly lord. His third responsibility was to protect the weak. In pursuit of these duties, the knight might be sent on a crusade far away, or he might be asked to exercise his responsibilities closer to home.

As important as these obligations were, the manner in which the knight carried them out was as important as the duties themselves. .... The chivalric ideal identified and codified which acts and which attitudes were considered honorable. Chivalry prized bravery, fortitude, and physical prowess—but also humility, gentlemanly behavior, and courtliness toward women. The two sets of virtues were never to be separated. At all times, the knight was to be noble and courteous. ....

What is missing from the present version of manly bravery is the insistence that charging into battle requires the “heavy burden” of virtue—and not just one virtue (fortitude), but all of them (prudence, justice, and temperance). If today’s would-be knights are serious about exercising Christ’s dominion on the earth, they must first be serious about exercising dominion over themselves—over their speech, over their anger, over their petty vindictiveness. It is not enough that we are ready to fight. We must also be courteous and not base, fair and not ruled by our passions, gracious and not a scoundrel. ....

There is nothing noble in fighting for its own sake. The devil knows how to prowl and devour and fight as well as anyone. Every culture celebrates warriors of one kind or another. Often, they are bloodthirsty and cruel. What the best of Christendom called knights to be was a different kind of warrior—humble, honest, fair, dignified in speech and gracious in character. That’s the chivalrous hero we ought to emulate, not the brawler who thinks self-restraint is for sissies and courtesy is for cowards. .... (more)

Kevin DeYoung, "In Search of Chivalry," Clearly Reformed, Oct. 30, 2025.