It is not by speeches and majority resolutions that the great questions of the time are decided – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by iron and blood.
– Otto von Bismarck (1862)
History may not repeat. History may not rhyme. Yet there are undoubtedly parallels between epochs. While identifying the proper parallels is possible, the exercise is fraught with errors by those dabbling in historical analogies. Many errors are the result of partisan disingenuity, who posit analogies not motivated by pursuit of truth, but in pursuit of advantage. Yet even for the minority, who honestly seek some framework, however inchoate and porous, by which to understand the times, existential complexities make the task exceedingly difficult.
Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, is doing his level best to mimic Bismarck. But neither Miller nor his master have anywhere near the same level of Bismarck’s genius. Indeed, neither Miller nor Trump are even at the level of that buffoon, Kaiser Wilhelm II (1888–1918) who dismissed Bismarck in 1890.
Bismarck, at least, recognized the limits of Prussian power and navigated and enhanced Germany’s position within Europe in light of those limits. The Trump administration vastly overestimates America’s relative power.
Last month, I was compelled to confront a church leader who was promoting some of the propaganda from Israel My Glory and other Christian Zionist ezines. I have no problem with advocacy on behalf of Israel, so long as the claims have a modicum of correspondence with objective realities. But some of the claims, this leader was perpetuating, were so obviously and embarrassing nonsensical that it discredits the Christian witness to spread them.
Moreover, his Christian Zionism was so zealous that I felt compelled to remonstrate that I was under the assumption that we were ambassadors on behalf of the cause of Christ, not an ambassador on behalf of Israel.
No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. – Luke 16:13
One could replace “money” with “Israel,” especially when there exists a wide variance between the concerns of God and those of a mostly secular Israel. The general issue of divided loyalties was the crux of the matter.
So, when a video labelled, “Zionist Pastor Jack Hibbs: SUPPORT Israel Or Else,” was pushed onto my YouTube feed, I took the clickbait. In this 9 minute video, its author, Peter Hager, excerpts twenty seconds of a discourse at an unknown conference.
Host:
[From] a theological standpoint, if we think that God will break, what He described as an everlasting covenant with them, how does our covenant of salvation stand?
Jack Hibbs:
You don’t have one. If God breaks His covenant promise with Israel, then you now have no assurance that you’ll make it to heaven as a believer.
The ever so brief clip is lifted from out of a longer discourse (33 minutes). Hager provides no link to this video in order for the viewer to understand the context, the minimum requirement of an honest advocacy. (The discourse was between Jack Hibbs and Tony Perkins on October 18, 2025, at a Pray Vote Stand Summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council.) Jack Hibbs follows up his claim of no assurance with the following logic.
Because if He breaks that one, He can break anyone he wants. The good thing is, the great thing is, his nature is that he’s not a man that he should lie. God keeps all of his promises.
From the Evangelical standpoint, the God of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures made promises to ethnic Israel. God has also made promises to all who would come to believe upon Christ Jesus for their salvation. If God violates the former promise, there exists no reasonable grounds for security of person and peace of mind that He will not violate the latter promise.
This is not so much a theological argument, but rather a logical one. It is well substantiated and well known throughout the world that Donald Trump does not keep any trade agreement, which is similar to a covenant, to which he signs. Hence, it is no longer worth the time and effort negotiating any new trade agreement with the Americans. Only a few nations have done so, contrary to the bloated promises by Trump back in April. And those who do, like the effete officials of the European Union, are playing for time, until such time that they can defend themselves. Perhaps, at that time, the Chinese and the Europeans can forge a framework by which the EuroYuan becomes the reserve currency. Regardless, the geopolitical position of America will be much diminished within the decade. And with the end of the Pax America, (just like at the end of the Pax Europa in 1914), the whole world will be chaos.
In truncating the Perkins-Hibbs’ video clip, Hager has disingenuously misconstrued Perkins’ and Hibbs’ argument. The rest of Hager’s rant (7 minutes) is sophomoric commentary, at one point insinuating venal motives to Hibbs’ position (grifting) without any attempt to provide evidence to substantiate that claim of corruption.
Nor does Hager understand the Evangelical Faith that he impugns. For biblical Christianity insists that the “pious life,” virtue, righteousness, etc. is not the path to salvation. For no person can be perfectly virtuous and just, which proves to be a reasonable, if humanly impossible, standard. For if the Divine Judge judges according to the pious life, and does not insist on ethical perfection, He has an impossible juridical conundrum. For if God accepts and saves persons with x moral crimes, whereas all others are damned, what about persons with x + 1 moral crimes, or x + 1 + 1 moral crimes, in infinite regress. What is the non-arbitrary, non-capricious juridical divining point which separates the sheep from the goats.
Hence, Christ Jesus voluntarily offered His life (with its infinite ontological worth) as a substitute for the mass of human beings who accept the divine amnesty scheme through trust upon Christ Jesus’ atonement. Herein, a person is justified, the formal juridical basis of salvation.
Such a person must also trust upon all the other aspects of Christ, that is practically operate upon His assertions, counsels, promises, etc., this not in order to be deemed worthy of justification/salvation. Rather, these serve as instrumental means by which one’s trust in Christ endures to the end (Luke 6:46–49).
Know of What One Critiques
When I was in Morocco in 1979, I had the typical youthful habit of denigrating the locals on the basis of Western standards. That is until a Syrian mid-level military official on holidays upbraided me. His point was that one should seek to understand persons and societies within their own cultural and social context. I have never forgotten this invaluable lesson and loathe myself for not remembering the man’s name. (“Honor to whom honor is due.”) For while my views of Islam and Muslim culture have not much changed, understanding inculcates a nuanced Dickensian perspective, rather than a Manichean stick-figure one.
Hager may reject and critique Christianity if he so chooses. But one should, at least, know what one is rejecting and critiquing.
Hager is so lazily ignorant about Evangelicalism to the point of sophomoric slander. I recall one pastor, nearing retirement and world weary, complaining that organizing his congregation to common cause was like herding cats. I recall old black ladies in my youth with no theological credentials contending with the pastor over his interpretation of certain passages. ‘Battling Baptists’ is a common epithet thrown at one denomination. Almost all Protestant Evangelical churches nowadays are in state of a schism and church/denominational splits.
Moreover, Protestant Evangelicals do not subscribe to “mortal sin.”
Who Is Peter Hager?
With such all-encompassing lies, dissembling, and other deceits, one might expect Hager to be one of those rubbies, one encounters in down-and-out downtown bars. Or an unemployed youth in his twenties or thirties living in his parent’s basement.
But his resume is somewhat successful. He attended Rutgers University, although it is unclear whether he acquired any degree. He is a commercial realtor for Keller Williams Realty in Plantation FL, and prides himself for building “a solid sales pipeline through years long trust-based relationships.” I do not how one builds long trust-based relationships without intellectual and moral integrity. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
A Hyperpower Lost in Its OWN Lies and EXCEPTIONALIST Self-Delusions
So justice is turned away, and righteousness stands at a distance. For truth has stumbled in the public square, and honesty cannot enter. Truth is missing, and whoever turns from evil becomes prey. – Isaiah 59:14–15a
Even before Trump rode the escalator down in the summer of 2015, I was noticing the increasing frequency of the lies and deceits committed by both factions in the U.S. Certainly, lies and deceits were increasing worldwide. But America, always wanting to be the winner, has also become the champion in prevarication.
What is remarkable is the flamboyant nakedness and brazenness of these lies and deceits. Either the perpetrators think that their interlocutors are really stupid, or they are intuiting, ‘I know that you know that this is a lie. What are you going to do about it?’
But it becomes difficult to conceive how a free civic society does not disintegrate in the face of a pandemic of lies and deceits. The ties that bind any society together require, at minimum, intellectual and ethical integrity and the keeping of promises.
I have become increasingly irritated with the counterproductive dissembling by Jews, Israeli and Diaspora, and their allies; defending in Gaza, for instance, what has become morally indefensible. Yet, their adversaries seem to be worse in this regard. I found little in Hager’s rant that was not fallacious, if not disingenuously so.
The fundamental problem with many Christian Zionists is not their belief that God will keep His covenant with the ethnic descendants of Jacob for the sake of the Hebrew Patriarchs.
The problem is the sin of presumption, actively operating upon promises belonging to the inscrutable transcendent will of God, (as if they knew how God will fulfill those promises), rather than upon the commanded will of God. Hereby, such Christian Zionists tolerate and justify injustices, travesties, and atrocities by Jews which they would not tolerate if committed by any other ethnic, cultural, and/or religious group. Hereby, such show themselves partial and hence unjust. In so doing, “the name of God is blasphemed among the nations through you.”
While numerous seminarians and other pundits have weighed in on this “controversy,” and while much of what is said here has been said elsewhere, it behooves to stomp upon this presumptive notion until all the guts have been forcibly oozed out.
Dispensationalism has recently borne the brunt of many aspersions of dangerous heresy, usually from Reformed types. New Covenant Theology has also been subject to similar aspersions in the past. Reformed types have historically been prone to label those who disagree with them as heretics, an indication of arrogance and lack of grace.
After the Council of Dordt (1618–9), Calvinists went on a witch hunt against those of Arminian persuasion, this during a lull in the Eighty Years War (1568–1648). Those of Arminian persuasion were demoted, excommunicated, exiled (i.e. Hugo Grotius), imprisoned, even executed. (I am not an Arminian and spent most of my life within Reformed Baptist circles.)
Reformed types attempted to declare Amyraldism heretical in 1675 (Helvetic Consensus). As John Frame’s essay, Machen’s Warrior Children, observes, this spirit within Reformed circles led to schisms within the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) over matters, not essential to the Faith. Reformed types go beyond what is written (1 Corinthians 4:6), with regard to what constitutes heresy, and are hence prone to schism and oppression, the latter element discernible in seminarians nowadays, who in their arrogance, lord it over their congregants.
But nothing and no one should be deemed heretical unless their notions and conduct are explicitly and incontrovertibly deemed heretical by Scriptures. Heterodoxy is a sufficient epithet. To go beyond is to invite psycho-social suffocation and sclerosis within an Assembly.
For this very reason, make every effort to add to your faith virtue; and to virtue, knowledge; and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance; and to perseverance, godliness; and to godliness, brotherly kindness; and to brotherly kindness, love. For if you possess these qualities and continue to grow in them, they will keep you from being ineffective and unproductive in your knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
– 2 Peter 1:5–8
Scriptures expressly declares that as one’s knowledge and understanding increases, one will be increasingly productive and effective. Purification of doctrine will also lead to ontological benefit within the context of the New Covenant. “By their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:16, 20) has also application to doctrine.
That being the case, it is in a Christian’s own self-interest to increase knowledge and purify their doctrinal understanding. Unless waywardness reaches thresholds, delineated expressly and incontrovertibly by Scriptures, external interventions are unnecessary.
God will correct error, often through the deleterious consequences which naturally result from living according to the errors that one believes. A problem arises in those who promulgate errors, but do not live according to those errors, and hence never realize their errors (Matthew 23:3–4).
While I perceive many flaws in existing theological covenantal/dispensation frameworks, I cannot nor have ever deemed subscribers to those quite complicated frameworks, as heretics.
It is quite possible that the logic of those errors may lead to heresy downstream. A Christian, usually a Dispensationalist, who subscribes to Zionism, with the expectation that God will restore ethnic Jews to their homeland in the latter days, is not a heretic.
That is unless and until he/she goes beyond merely observing, and starts justifying, even participating in, travesties and atrocities committed by the Israeli government and society, which he/she would not do if committed by anyone other. Such are hereby acting upon their own private understanding of the inscrutable Sovereign Will of God, instead of the declared Will of God. Many sins are involved in this: presumption, partiality, and the idolatry of choosing Israel over Israel’s God and the cause of Christ. But generic Christian Zionism is not heretical.
Another principle can be observed in the 2 Peter 1:5-8. One’s productiveness and profitability is dependent upon a number of elements, not merely knowledge, understanding, and doctrinal purity. I conceive these conditions within the construct of bottleneck. If one is unkind and unloving, as indicated by unjustified aspersions of dangerous heresy, all of one’s knowledge, understanding, and doctrinal purity become unprofitable.
If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
Many apologists for Israel and its government claim that the recent sea change in Western attitudes towards Israel is largely due to Hamas propaganda. Such are much too generous in this accreditation (as well as implicitly condescending of Western peoples). The Palestinian motto “from the river to the sea,” unreasonable and pragmatically impossible in light of the facts on the ground, only appeals to an extremist minority and repels the rest.
It is rather that the Israeli government and Jews, both Israeli and Diaspora, have become their own worst enemies. In their hubris, the Netanyahu government thinks that they can do in Gaza what the Americans could not do in Afghanistan, namely, to extinguish the organization that massacred innocent civilians. Even if the IDF could exterminate Hamas, they could not extinguish the animus. Other violent partisans would just replace them.
This web site is dedicated to a grandiose project, certainly one too grand for me to accomplish, yet necessary if Christianity is to remain a vital and vibrant force. As we fall short of even that to which we aspire, we might as well aspire large.
That Christianity shall again become a vital and vibrant force; I have little doubt. But this is far from true in the West at the present time.
