Talking Out Of Turn

Earlier when we spoke of our trip to Israel we mentioned two personalities connected with the trip. One was the director of a Christian Zionist group, who promoted collaboration and help between Christians in the West and Jews in Israel, but who did not openly support Christian (“Messianic”) Jews in Israel. I have never met him face to face, although he did get my tapes for years at his request and paid me some nice compliments, and we didn’t see him in Israel. The other man was the director of a ministry which raised funds to provide direct financial assistance to Messianic Jews in Israel, many of whom could not rely on friends, family, or their communities, because of their commitment to Christ. We did see him on the trip—in fact he spent a couple of days with us—and when he announced that he was doing a speaking tour in the US, I invited him to speak to our group. This was over a year after the teacher had left for California, and a couple of months after September 11. The man’s name was Uri, and I admired and respected him. He had collaborated with the teacher on quite a few things—a couple of publications, a few trips, and the like—and they were very close for a time.

In the time since the teacher had gone to California, though, things had changed. Uri had called the leader of the Christian Zionist ministry to task for apparent hypocrisy and a failure to support brothers in Christ for fear of backlash from the Jews in Israel (who were happy to accept financial help from Christians but stood firmly against any Christian missionary work among Jews). Traditional dispensationalism has a soft spot for religious Jews, believing that they will go through the Tribulation and eventually accept Christ at His Second Coming as their Messiah, and our own hyper-dispensationalism even allowed for the possibility that they might be as saved as we are even though they deny Christ Himself, as I have mentioned before. So it has been no trouble for Christian Zionist (hereafter CZ) groups to ignore Messianic Jews and their plight in their desperate attempt to “get in” with the Orthodox Jews in Israel. The CZs denied the charges generally, and they admitted (although they wouldn’t go public with it) that they had helped Messianics, but that that wasn’t their ministry. In the fight Uri also pointed out what he considered to be a misuse of funds; the CZ organization had seen millions pass through its accounts, and he highlighted budgetary line-items that he didn’t think were sound use of funds and showed them to people as he went on tour this time.

As this skirmish became public knowledge, the teacher sided with the CZs (they were old friends with the leaders of both ministries, and they were generally more impressed by the humility of the CZ than by Uri’s penchant for telling the ugly truth as he saw it). I didn’t have much invested in the relationships here, but I had met Uri, and to be honest, I believed more in standing with brothers and sisters in Christ than in playing games with the religious leaders in Israel. As rabbinic as I could be at times, I could never side with them against somebody who named the name of Christ, particularly since these “somebodies” were people who didn’t even become the more popular kind of open Christians; one can almost get away with becoming a Catholic or Orthodox believer in Israel, since at least you will have another community to turn to. These were Messianics who attended synagogues that were regularly vandalized by other Jews, who “called no man father.” I didn’t feel right about pretending that educating American Christians about dispensationalism and the false dichotomy that pretends that all non-dispies are antisemites, was more worthy a cause than helping the real “home missionaries,” the Messianics themselves, living in Jewish communities and trying to scrape by. So, I tentatively sided with Uri.

He didn’t have much time for us (I don’t blame him for that, certainly); he flew in in the late morning, spoke in the evening on a weeknight, and then he was off again early the next morning for his next stop. It was a good speech he gave, highlighting the fact that Israel is only promised an inheritance in the land if they repent (and now I understand that from a non-dispensational perspective, fulfilled in the person of Christ and those who repent and believe in Him, with the land being a shadow fulfilled in the eschaton in our inheritance in Christ as the Israel of God), but CZs get it all backwards, and make all sorts of ways for Israel to come back to the land without repenting, doing the opposite of what God intended. It was really quite good. He actually didn’t spend much time on the fundraising for his own ministry, but a few of us committed to helping him out more as a result of the time he spent.

Where this little 24-hour period intersects my life in a big way is in what happened in the morning as we were going to the airport. It turned out that Uri had gotten into hot water with a lot of people, including former supporters, because he had denied the deity of Christ. In fact he was quoted in a magazine called Israel Today on this very issue. He firmly believed that Christianity in the Nicene and post-Nicene era had broken with the Jewish root of their faith on this, that making the “Son of God” into “God the Son” was “having another God before YHVH,” and while he never went so far as to say that Trinitarians weren’t going to be in heaven, he felt strongly enough about this that he went on record defending himself. He was a bit surprised that we hadn’t heard about it (it sounds like the teacher hadn’t heard about it either, or only picked up on it about the time that Uri was making his tour). When Uri heard that we weren’t mindless followers of everything the teacher said, he assumed that he could share this with us and that we would be sympathetic.

The teacher, for the record, has never wavered on his teaching on the deity of Christ, that I am aware. He is so far from Arianism that he effectively pushes a kind of Sabellianism, although he denies the charge. The teacher took a rabbinic teaching that equated “El/Elohim” with justice and “YHVH” with mercy in the Old Testament, and expanded that to teach that “El” was the Father and “YHVH” was the Son. When pressed on exactly what that means in Old Testament passages, that’s when it gets a bit Sabellian. Certain people from Oneness traditions find that they have more agreement with the teacher on this than most people who claim to have some evangelical foundation, and this is why. The teacher never liked to talk about the Trinity, saying that the word and concept were pagan, and one of the most doctrinal chapters in his magnum opus is called “Unity of the Father/Son/Spirit of the Holy One.” He reacted hard against things like the “Nine-person Trinity” that Benny Hinn was pushing in the old days by teaching a kind of Unity that wasn’t Trinity. He read the historical statements of Trinitarianism through the lens of modern English usage and assumed that anybody who said that God was in Three Persons was teaching that there were in effect three Gods. Rather than subordinating Christ and becoming in effect a Jehovah’s Witness, however, he just confused Father and Son to the point that they are the same Person Who manifests Himself in different ways. The Spirit is almost (but not quite) depersonalized in this system, and that is partly because of an overly literal translation of the Hebrew ru’ach haKodesh (“Spirit of the Holy One” instead of “Holy Spirit”) and the way the rabbis use that to undermine a multipersonal view of the Godhead. The result is JW theology about the Holy Spirit, and Oneness theology about the Father and Son. In later years I was astounded to see how much this shallow theology affected everything else, and had a ripple effect on both doctrine, and people and their practice of obedience.

It was in this rarefied doctrinal atmosphere that I struggled with traditional expressions of the Trinity for myself, and what Uri said struck me right to my foundations. It made sense, based on the rabbinic presuppositions, and the doctrinal erosion I had experienced as I tried to make sense of the teacher’s anti-Trinitarian teaching. If everything the teacher taught was systematized, it was found to be inconsistent; to make it consistent with itself and with rabbinic commentary, one must demote Christ, making Him either a lesser God or a “divine being” without being “deity.” (It is hard to write this after what I’ve been through with the Jehovah’s Witnesses myself lately, so bear with me.) So I was very curious as to how Uri got to where he was, and he told me about a book called When Jesus Became God. I ordered it immediately from Barnes and Noble when we got home.

The author told a story about many men: Arius, Alexander, Athanasius, Constantine, Eusebius (one of Nicomedia and one of Caesarea), and even in the late chapters discussing the development of the doctrine of the personhood of the Holy Spirit (since the first Nicene struggle was a Christological struggle primarily). It was a compelling story. It was based on secret manuscripts (surprised?) found in a monastery somewhere. It was Dan Brown before Dan Brown was cool. It spoke of the political expediency of making the Being Who had spoken to Constantine in a vision into God, and it spoke of the humility and perseverance of those who denied that Christ was the same essence as God, and it spoke of the arrogance and bile of people like Athanasius. The heroes were Byronic; they fought the good fight and died in vain, although for a while Arianism triumphed to the point of Jerome’s most well-known quote: “The whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian.” And of course hidden manuscripts and whispered secrets survived, one generation to the next, waiting for the modern world to be ready to hear their story.

Gee, Beav, it’s just like The Da Vinci Code. It’s fascinating, compelling, and demonstrably false in every important detail.

But I believed it. It helped me to systematize my own theology in a way that was part Gnostic and part Jehovah’s Witness, although I didn’t know it and would have denied it if somebody had called me on it. I cautiously accepted it at first, then started to see what the ripple effect was on the rest of my doctrine and felt that it was a good thing. I believed, based on the troublesome passages in the New Testament, that God wouldn’t hold Trinitarianism against anybody, but those of us who knew better, knew that Jesus wasn’t God. It wasn’t necessary for our defective view of atonement specifically and soteriology in general.

I was disappointed that Tracey wouldn’t follow me on this one. It was so obvious to me. But Tracey had met Jesus, and once you’ve met Him, you wouldn’t miss this important fact about Him.

I signed up to be on Uri’s mailing list in which he explored the topic more, and tried to help him with my ignorant dictionary-wielding attempts at understanding Greek. I didn’t come clean with too many people; I admitted to my in-laws that I was questioning the deity, but only those who listened carefully would know that I had completely thrown myself off the cliff on this one. If the teacher caught it, he didn’t say much; he thought that I should emphasize the deity of Christ more, but he also said that he thought it was good to have one of us emphasizing His humanity and the other emphasizing His deity. I left it at that.

It took a while for the Lord to fix this in my life. I find that I can’t talk about it any further right now. There’s only so much confession of doctrinal treachery and treason that I can accomplish in one day. Later I’ll talk about how the Lord pulled me out of this mess. But this is where all my bridges started to burn, and I didn’t realize until a little later that I was still standing on them.