Is John Hagee a Christian?
That may seem to be an absurd question. After all, Hagee is the founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, a non-denominational evangelical church with more than 19,000 active members. So why would I ask such a question?
Well, Carl E. Olson* wrote a very intriguing post at Ignatius Blog in which he states:
While growing up in a “non-denominational” fundamentalist environment in the 1970s and ’80s, I knew very well by the time I was eight or years years old that the Catholic Church was “apostate” and was either part of or was the “great whore of Babylon” described in the Book of Revelation. This was an integral part of the “Rapture” theology that informed nearly every aspect of my thinking about Jesus, the Bible, and the world. Anyone familiar with books such as Dave Hunt’s A Woman Rides the Beast: The Roman Catholic Church and the Last Days (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1994), is familiar with this rhetoric, which has been around for centuries, dating back to at least the Reformation era, and which has been readily embraced by dispensationalist writers since the inception of that belief system in the 1830s.
An obvious example can be found in the popular non-fiction work of Dr. Tim LaHaye, creator and co-author of the Left Behind series. In Revelation Unveiled (Zondervan, 1999), a revised version of Revelation Illustrated and Made Simple (Zondervan, 1973, 1975), his commentary on The Apocalypse, LaHaye made his case for the belief that “Babylon the Great” of Revelation 17 is a system of false belief clearly identified with the Catholic Church. Drawing on Alexander Hislop’s The Two Babylons and Loraine Boettner’s Roman Catholicism, LaHaye (who was baptized as an infant in the Catholic Church) condemns the “mystery Babylonian religion” of the Catholic Church, (go here and here for details) and then writes:
After reading the above quotations, you may be inclined to think me anti-Catholic, but that isn’t exactly true; I am anti-false religion. … In some respects the religion of Rome is more dangerous than no religion because she substitutes religion for truth. Human beings would be better off with their God-given desire for truth unfulfilled that they might seek after Him. Romes false religion too often gives a false security that keep people from seeking salvation freely by faith. Rome is also dangerous because some of her doctrines are pseudo-Christian. For example, she believes properly about the personal deity of Christ but errs in adding Babylonian mysticism in many forms and salvation by works. (p 267)
There is another variation of this approach that is, however subtly, somewhat different from this approach. This variation—which may or may not (depending on the particular “prophecy expert”) condemn Catholic Church as she now exists—focuses more on figuring out the Catholic Church’s role in the future, when the “prophetic clock” is restarted by the Rapture. This is hinted at, for example, in a booklet titled The Coming World Church, published in 1963 (and again in 1978) by Back to the Bible, a fundamentalist organization, James DeForest Murch describes the “Coming Great Church” and renounces the ecumenical movement as apostate and inspired by Satan. He writes:
Evangelicals who are prophetically inclined are now warning us that we are witnessing the creation of an organization which is pictured in the Bible, not as the Bride of Christ, but as the adulterous woman bearing on her forehead the name, “Mystery Babylon.” They see the ecumenical movement as a stage on the road which can eventually lead to the creation of an ecclesiastical body which has all the admixture of truth and error found in the Church of Rome, universal in scope, and eventually heading up the Romish abomination itself. (p 22)
In the late 1990s I had a couple of conversations with the pastor of the largest Baptist church in the state of Oregon. He had given a sermon on the “church of Thyatira”, which is described in Revelation 2:18-29, and is often interpreted by fundamentalists as a description of the Catholic Church. The pastor used many of LaHaye and Company’s standard anti-Catholic talking points, but his real interest was in trying to ascertain the role played by the Catholic Church during the seven years of Tribulation he believed (as most dispensationalists do) will come between the “Rapture” and the Second Coming. When I spoke to the pastor on the phone about his anti-Catholic rhetoric, he was both very polite and very unapologetic. His position, in essence, was that while he believed some Catholics are “saved,” he was convinced that the unique size and influence of the Catholic Church strongly suggested that it would be, after the Rapture, the key institution of an apostate One World Religion. You simply cannot underestimate how obsessed such folks are with figuring out all of the details of their “end times” system!
That pastor’s interest in the future is, from what I can tell and what his quote above suggests, similar to Hagee’s stance. Which is, again, why I recently emphasized that while the issue of Hagee’s offensive remarks is important, it needs to be understood in the light of his seriously flawed theological beliefs. And, just so I’m not misunderstood or misrepresented, I’m not dismissing or making light of Hagee’s offensive remarks; on the contrary, I’m saying that as bothersome as they are, they aren’t nearly as troubling as his entire theological system, which is shot through with notions and presuppositions that are not in keeping with basic Christian doctrines, especially his belief that Jesus is not the Messiah of the Jews, his belief in a “Rapture” event separate from the Second Coming, and his belief that Christians will not endure the final tribulation.
Although Carl is careful to point out that he is not stating that Hagee is outside of Christianity, nevertheless there is available to us very clear and revealing material regarding this interesting topic:
I do come close to that line but it is one I’m reluctant to step over. From what I can tell, Hagee believes in the Incarnation and the Trinity, which are, of course, the two central dogmas of Christianity. But his beliefs about a lot of other important matters are certainly “out there,” to the degree that some Evangelicals—mostly from the Reformed tradition— would say that he and other dispensationalists aren’t true Christians (I talk about this in my book) i.e. Will Catholics Be “Left Behind? A Catholic Critique of the Rapture and Today’s Prophecy Preachers (Ignatius Press, 2003)
*(Catholic, husband, father, author, editor, apologist, smart aleck, illustrator, designer, music collector, book lover, and lousy tennis player. He is the editor of the online magazine IgnatiusInsight.com and moderator of the Ignatius Press web log, the Insight Scoop blog. He is also the author of Will Catholics Be “Left Behind? A Catholic Critique of the Rapture and Today’s Prophecy Preachers (Ignatius Press, 2003) and co-author of the best-selling The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code (Ignatius Press, 2004). He has written numerous articles on apologetics, theology, literature/art, pop culture, and religion, as well as several book reviews, for publications including The Catholic Answer, CatholicExchange.com, Catholic World Report, Catholic Parent, Crisis, Envoy, First Things, National Catholic Register, National Review Online, New Covenant, Our Sunday Visitor, Saint Austin Review, This Rock and Touchstone. He currently write a weekly Scripture column, “Opening the Word,” for Our Sunday Visitor, as well as regular pieces for Ignatius Insight.)
