Iconoclasm in St. Louis: How Identity Politics Became Identity Theft

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Iconoclasm in St. Louis: How Identity Politics Became Identity Theft

The battle over the statue began as an exercise in identity politics, and before long it degenerated into an example of identity theft. The main protagonist in this story is Umar Lee, who was born Bret Darran Lee in 1974 to a southern Presbyterian family and grew up in Florissant, Missouri just outside St. Louis. Lee may or may not be Black, which is an ideological marker based upon but independent of biological fact, because he claims, according to The Jerusalem Post that he “has two younger siblings who are half African-American.”[1]

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"Catholic Zionism" Contradiction in Terms

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"Catholic Zionism" Contradiction in Terms

In the January 2020 issue of First Things, a new phrase was coined to advance the ecumenical efforts between Jews and Catholics. That phrase is “Catholic Zionism,” appearing here in the literature for the first time. It seeks to make itself the Catholic version of the more common “Christian Zionism” by divesting itself of the apocalyptic dimensions of the latter but continuing to advance the idea that God still owes land to the Jews and has been fulfilling that promise by giving them the present land of Palestine. The full title is: “Catholic Zionism: The Jewish State is a Sign of God’s Fidelity,” written by Gavin D’Costa. The author tries to convince his reader that Catholics should help in this divine endeavor and by doing so they become “Catholic Zionists.”

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The Old Covenant: Revoked or Not Revoked?

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More and more Catholics, Protestants and Jews are seeking to overturn 2000 years of Christian teaching concerning the Old Covenant. Although the Church has always taught that the Old Covenant is revoked, what we are now being told by theologians, clerics and lay persons in high places is that it has not been revoked. These critics, who refer disparagingly to the traditional doctrine by such names as “supersessionism,” “replacement theology,” “revocation theology,” etc., are all seeking for one thing – to establish the position that: a) the Jews retain legal possession of the Old Covenant; b) that this covenant is independent of, but runs concurrently with, the New Covenant; and c) most hold that the Old Covenant is the means by which God provides salvation to the Jews. We are hearing this new teaching from almost every quarter of the religious world and it is one of the fastest growing problems in the Church today. At its root, it emasculates the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ, and does so for the people who need it the most – the Jews.

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The Once and Future Heresy

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The Once and Future Heresy

Gershon Gorenberg’s study of the eschaton immanentizers alive and well in Israel today starts by introducing us to Melody, the almost red heifer, who was born there a few years ago. The reason this cow became front page news in that country is that if she were completely red, at age three, she could have been slaughtered and used for ritual purification purposes for priests at Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple, according to the prescriptions of Numbers 19. As you probably know there hasn’t been a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem since 70 A.D., when the Romans, under Titus, burnt down the one built by Herod. The territory atop Mt. Moriah is currently occupied by a holy Muslim site, the al-Asqa mosque. However, there is a sizeable group of people who view the events of the 20th century as prologue to the construction of the third Jewish Temple on that site; not all of these people are in Israel and, as this book indicates, most of them aren’t Jewish.

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