Guest
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas is a professor of theology at Christendom College. His publications can be found in: Communio: International Catholic Review, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Catholic World Report, and his Substack, catholic460.substack.com.
Links
- “Against Catholic Zionism” (article)
- Dr. Tsakanikas’s Substack
Transcript
Eric Sammons:
The ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine has led many Catholics to side with Israel for theological reasons, believing God has promised certain land to the Jewish people. Is this legitimate, are Catholics obligated to defend the modern state of Israel? That’s what we’re going to talk about today on Crisis Point today. Hello, I’m your host, Eric Sammons, Editor-in-Chief of Crisis Magazine. Before we get started, I want to encourage people to hit the like button to subscribe to the channel, let other people know about what we’re doing here. Also, you can subscribe to your email newsletter. Just go to crisismagazine.com, put in your email address and we will send you articles each morning. You can follow us on social media at CrisisMag and all the major social media channels.
Okay, so I have a guest today, Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas. I did pronounce that correctly. I was practicing beforehand. Yes, he is a professor of theology at Christendom College. His publications can be found in Communio: International Catholic Review, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Catholic Report, and of course Crisis Magazine. And he has his own Substack at catholic460.substack.com. Welcome to the program, Dr. Tsakanikas.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
It’s a great honor for me. I’ve been a longtime reader of Crisis ever since in the nineties that I was, I actually did my undergrad at Christendom College, my graduate over at the John Paul II Institute, masters at Australia, and then my doctorate in Rome. But I remember reading Crisis Magazine and the libraries of Christendom College. So this is kind like, wow, this is great for me. This is the coolest thing ever.
Eric Sammons:
Oh, that’s great. That’s great to hear. Well, what we’re talking about is Dr. Tsakanikas had an article last week in Crisis Magazine called Against Catholic Zionism, and this is a topic obviously a lot of people are talking about. It’s very heated, very controversial. I think we’re both probably a little nervous about this podcast because it’s an area where you will find legitimate serious disagreement among people who normally will read Crisis Magazine, for example, conservative Catholics, conservative and traditional Catholics. You will find just for a good example, is I had an exchange with Steve Ray who’s a great guy, great apologist for the Catholic faith, love him to death. He’s written for us before and he definitely has a more pro-Israeli side from even theological perspective than I do.
And so I was like, okay, this is definitely something I think that we know is fraught with a lot of controversy. But I think it’s very important because I think as you do, and I saw from your article there’s a lot of to use the monotone misinformation going on about this. So why don’t we first just start with some basics and why don’t you define for us what we mean by Zionism just so we make sure we’re talking about the same thing.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
You can’t say here’s a definition and now we’re talking about the same thing because there’s all sorts of views of what Zionism is. It’s kind of like when you say Catholics believe this. Well, unless it’s official doctrine, unless it’s magisterial doctrine, especially the highest level being dogma, there’s one thing you’d say makes a Catholic, and that’s the dogma. Doctrine that’s supportive of the dogma comes in different levels of certainty and there’s room for disagreement as to how to use it and the like. There’s no room for disagreement on dogma. And so you can’t say politically, this is the Catholic position. There can be tons of political positions of Catholics. A similar way it’s always foolish to say the Jews believe that. That’s like talking about Catholics. You have so many political parties amongst Catholics and so many different prudential decisions on what politics should look like.
You can’t say this is the only Catholic position and you similarly can’t say this is the only Zionist position. So it’s always a danger to talk about Zionism because editors are going to do their best to give for instance, what kind of title should we give to something? And it can change when an article like this is moved from different people using it. But what I mean by Zionism is certainly this aspect of the return to a homeland, to protect Jews from all the antisemitism, to have a place for them to call home where they don’t have to live a fear of being under governments that will all of a sudden do pogroms. And so there’s different views for why you have this Zionist movement. We know towards the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, various antisemitisms that were going on, but especially after living under the Ottoman Empire in World War I and what Nazi Germany did in the Holocaust and World War II, everyone was a lot more open to let’s make sure that this kind of thing never ever happens again.
So certainly when it comes to where settlers under the British protectorate of that time from World War I into World War II, were already sponsoring a movement from Britain. So the British were actually the biggest sponsors of this, that you had a great mix going on in Zionism between the current inhabitants of that land that we know as the Palestinians and the Jews were moving more and more into that and looking for self-government in the lands that they were occupying. And they were an extension of what we viewed as liberal democracy. They were coming out of Europe and its movement towards, when I say liberal democracy, I mean liberal in terms of the virtue of autonomy, not in terms of leftist politics.
And so all of Europe and especially Americans were supportive of, hey, all the more where we can reduce fanaticism, where we can remove ourselves from various forms of Sharia law. And we have to remember all sorts of Palestinians were also very educated. You had French influences, English influences, English education systems, but Americans were very supportive of the aspect of a movement that would continue to, in that sense spread liberal democracy into the Middle East. And it was believed that this would be helpful.
Now, hindsight’s 20/20, but when I say Zionism, I’m speaking about in terms of accepting what the British left after World War II and peoples who moved there after being displaced from all the wars, especially World War II and the atrocities that occurred in Germany. And that’s what the Vatican was speaking of when it was allowing these aspects to go on after the horrific Holocaust of World War II and the lack of effort to prevent it by so many governments that were turning a blind eye to it or whatever decisions were being made. And so that’s separate from a Zionism that I do not support and that is that this is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy that people who claim to be of Jewish ancestry are returning to their Jewish homeland in fulfillment of God’s promise of a new Exodus. I absolutely reject that in every possible way because Jesus is the fulfillment of all Old Testament prophecies about that future Exodus and so too many-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I was going to say, let’s break that down a little bit because the original, from my understanding of the history of Zionism really took to the fore late 19th century. Like you said, there was already some significant anti-Semitism of course in Europe, Russia, some various places. And so it was this idea of, okay, we need to find a land where basically we’ll be left alone at least. We won’t have these problems. Now, my understanding though in reading it is that it wasn’t really a religious impulse at that point in the sense of what you were later saying, but more of just a political reality of we’re getting persecuted, we need somewhere safe. And in fact, didn’t the original Zionist leaders, they were not looking only at Palestine, the Middle East, but also Argentina and other places in Africa. So was it mostly then at the beginning more of a political thing than a religious thing?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
That’s what it’s presented as in that 2018 Communio essay by then, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. And that’s pretty much how we opened that article explaining that it was more of a political, because so many of the founders of it were more agnostic, and so it wasn’t seen as supporting a kind of fundamentalist religious interpretation. And so when Theodore Herzl was gaining his grounds for it he certainly contacted religious groups, he was particularly active with Protestant groups in America, and the Catholic Church wasn’t too fond of sponsoring it, however. There’s pretty strong statements that Theodore Herzl records in his diary and is even reported in the Jerusalem Post. There’s articles where they write about Catholics for a thousand years weren’t supporting of anything of Jews returning to Jerusalem. We even see as early as Pius X, Saint Pius X, whose response seemed unable to accept that God was fulfilling prophecy.
And you’re like, okay, Jerusalem Post 2015, 2016 has been running articles in which this is the fulfillment of prophecy. It’s crazy. Christians don’t get it. So they’re promoting the aspect that this is the fulfillment of what was prophesied, which is totally ignoring Jesus Christ. But the Catholic Church was not supportive of this movement for Jews to take Jerusalem because of this very aspect of any tie to a religious fulfillment. And that’s why Pius X came across very strong to Theodore Herzl and said, absolutely not. We do not support that and cannot support it. He said some pretty strong things.
Eric Sammons:
So the idea is that even though it was kind was presented in my head of some political impulses at the beginning, but there’s always a religious tie to it because obviously Judaism is a religion, obviously this is in ancient holy land, which was the Jewish religion’s land thousands of years ago. You can’t separate the two completely. And so you mentioned that when Herzl, and they’re promoting this and growing, and we see this today that American Protestants in particular, evangelical Protestants in particular latched onto religious aspects. Can you kind of give us best you can, the Protestant evangelical argument for this, why did they latch onto this? Why did they believe this is something a good Christian should do to support the Jews going back to the Holy Land? Not for political reasons, but for religious reasons.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Again, I’m going to make that same statement I made it the start of the interview. When we say Protestants, right? So thousand something denominations. So I’m kind of lumping a lot together in a great generalization that certainly doesn’t incorporate all Protestants. I’ve stood at the Temple Mount with evangelical leaders who said to me, this is ridiculous that they are looking for a third temple and at the Wailing Wall just waiting for the third temple to be rebuilt. So not every Protestant is for a third temple when I say these things, but you had religious fervor in the late 1900s of very apocalyptic readings of all sorts of scripture. You had a rejection in America particularly as being founded in many of its cultural underpinnings as anti-Catholic, as anti-Rome, against the idea of the church being the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church being the church that Jesus Christ established.
And so it’s not going to look more so to how the Catholic Church has always understood itself as the reconstitution of Israel open to all Jews and non-Jews, not replacing anybody, but fulfilling that Jesus was always the end of the law, the Torah. So you find these very strong Protestant movements that this is fulfilling the Book of Revelation. How many religions started in upstate New York in the 19th century? Talk about the hotbed of Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormonism, all sorts of fundamentalist churches. And so the idea that they had of their last times and times, which actually many Israelis rightfully resent, the aspect we want to help other Jews go there to bring about the end times. And they’re like, that’s your crazy whatever, but at least we have some kind of support from the Christians in America. But the support was really coming from people with false prophecy, false doctrine that they didn’t even realize they were undermining the very doctrine of Jesus Christ as a fulfillment, the end or goal of the Torah.
And that’s what the article was really going into to address that, and I hope we have a chance to discuss that again out of New York came another form of which cannot be called Judaism because there’s all sorts of way of worshiping as Jews. They wanted to have their safety as the prayer of Zechariah to worship without fear of their enemies. But you did see something come out of Brooklyn in the eighties and the nineties with the Rabbi Meir Kahane, which is now reaching into cabinet positions of the Israeli government that we might have to go into for that discussion of what has happened in which we see an even greater shift from a political agnostic Zionism that was going to spread liberal democracy, to a religious fervor of no separation between synagogue and state, which is at the heart of this Kahanism philosophy. Forgive me to the Jews if I pronounced that wrongly. And certainly the vast majority of Israelis are against this radicalized religious Zionism.
Eric Sammons:
So I do want to get in that in a minute. Now, the Catholic, so that was the kind of evangelical Protestants a lot of them ended up embracing. There was their own theological interpretation of the Bible, of Revelation. This idea of, like you said, it’s almost like the Israelis were willing to accept because they got a lot of financial and political support from the evangelical process. They kind of just looked the other way at some of the crazier things of the end times and all that stuff. But then you said St. Pius X was opposed to a lot of this, but yet today of course the Vatican recognizes Israel diplomatically as a state, as a nation. And so has something changed or are those two things compatible in some way? What has been the history of the Vatican’s kind of relationship with the modern state of Israel and Zionism?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Well, it’s always been tenuous. And in fact, now again to state to your audience, I’m a theologian. I am not a political scientist or a historian. I have to be familiar with political science and familiar with history in order to make sure my theology is being contextualized. But it’s my understanding, I don’t think it was even to the Oslo agreements around the early 1990s, 1993, that there was formal relations established with Israel between the Vatican and Israel. So of course, we’re always operating together in the same territory and the same lands, but our churches are Palestinian churches. We are Palestinian Christians. And so we have from the Maronite, the Melkite, various Byzantine. I’m not sure how much from Egypt, the Copts move up into there, but we’re very concerned with the treatment of Palestinian Christians who are being driven off their land and an increasing while, yes, there has been Muslim violence, but there’s also been an ideology amongst settlers, which is violently pushing Palestinians off the land because they don’t want a two-state solution.
And the Vatican was caught up in this. And so we see a transformation a little bit is because of the second Vatican council in which our attempts for evangelization are looking more at what we share in common with other religions than condemning the aspects of where they disagree with us. And I think in that movement of an emphasis, as Thomas Guarino writes very well about this in his book on the disputed questions of Vatican II. Vatican II is adopting the mystic principles in order to show where other religions are in agreement with us. They’re using the principles of analogy and participation. And so there’s an emphasis more on what we share in common for evangelization than condemnations of where we believe other religions are in error. But I think some of the problem came in with an ability with only emphasizing that, a problem enters in which we lack an ability to say no, that this is not healthy and this is not good.
And so I think we need to readjust and realize there are things that are not healthy and not good, and we must speak up and say, while we want to emphasize what is good and what we share in common, while we don’t want to go around condemning everybody, we’re not adequately representing the full truth, which is what the second Vatican council was calling for, representing the fullness of the Catholic faith in a dialogue. And so dialogue is emphasized too much agreement without saying a clear no when there’s a rising of ugly principles that we’re seeing.
Eric Sammons:
Right. I want to get now more into the theological issues here. This is really what your article is about. And this is really, I think the important thing for us as Catholics, I think what happens is we confuse the political with the theological. The fact is as Catholics, we can have various political views differing and even contradictory political views as Catholics. We can support the U.S. support of Israel, for example, for political reasons. We can oppose it for political reasons, but theologically that’s I think very important for Catholics where we can get into danger. And so what is kind of the theological argument that you’ve seen Catholics make even for why Israel, we should defend it, we should support Israel, and they have a right to this land. What are they and why are they frankly just very faulty and false?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
So with Catholics, I think there’s both the true part and the false part. The true part being what the second Vatican council did in part was recognize what was good in Republican forms of democracy and where we were more used to monarchies before World War I and World War II where there’s no more monarchies in the world in a sense anymore. And so we looked at the good principles that were within Republican forms of democracy and while the church had been resisting it so very much it was recognizing it was operating in a new area. Since Israel itself was also now operating according to these principles of Republican forms of democracy and we saw that spreading, Americans as Catholics, so Catholics as Americans, saw that as a healthy way to bring freedom to a region in which perhaps there’d be a greater availability for Muslims to be able to hear and accept Jesus without their fear of persecution and perhaps that kind of secular Israel will be more healthy and helpful to that occurring.
And so what we see now even more so is for instance, Republican Party, Republican platform, what we start seeing is because America was attacked in 2001 particularly, and the wars that have been going on, we felt in a sense a kind of anti-Muslim, which is more not Muslim, it was fundamentalist Muslims, just like you can’t say Jew, and that covers everyone. You can’t say Catholic, you can’t say Muslim and that covers everyone. It is a small but very vocal and powerful minority that has seized control of various reigns and radicalized approaches to Islam. And so I think many Catholics who are in America see Israel as it rightly has presented itself as a buffer to the spread of radical Islam. The problem is they’re not recognizing now and today there is also a very small, small radical movement inside the Israeli government now holding minister cabinet-level positions in which they are also calling for and supporting the parties that call for annexing what are lands that belong to the Palestinians, forcefully removing them from the land and rebuilding a third temple and restoring animal sacrifice.
What was fringe and crazy is now mainstream and becoming even more mainstream in the modern Israeli government. And that is why you’ve seen the State Department reacting. People see it as just a Democrat thing. It’s not just a Democrat thing. If you do your research and you do your reading, you see that there are things going on in which these radical groups are an even more radical rejection of Jesus Christ, and they’re waiting for the Messiah and they’re returning to Old Testament principles that are no longer valid, that while they serve to unite the people and protect them, while God was developing them spiritually and morally because of the political economics that were way different back then, those politics and economics are not the same 2000 years later.
There have been real developments that Jesus Christ our Lord God and Savior has brought about that have benefited the entire world and even penetrated into Muslim and Jewish thought and absorbed without even always recognizing it, that has made the world so much better. And so I think what we find though is in our allegiance to political parties, we’re also finding that this allegiance to Israel is ignoring some things that Israelis, for the most part have always been against, and that is this radicalized religious Zionism that Benedict XVI was trying to make clear is absolutely unacceptable.
Eric Sammons:
So is this religious kind of fervor that’s happening in Israel, is the idea to rebuild the temple and to kind of return to even animal sacrifices like that? I’m not really familiar with it to be honest. So what is it that they’re trying to accomplish?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Well, they just had, they’re constantly having these radical settlers who are trying to perform a Passover sacrifice on the Temple Mount, which is forbidden for them to even access and stay on, particularly to pray on. And so some of these more radicalized ministers, this Itamar Ben-Gvir, G-V-I-R, he just went on there against Torah law of the ruling Jewish rabbis who say none are to gather for prayer on the Temple Mount. It’s one thing to be at the Wailing Wall, that’s not the Temple Mount. The Temple Mount is where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are, and it’s under the control of while it’s considered occupied, it’s under the control of Muslim police. And so they brought this minister who was a follower of this radical Kahane rabbi, this minister who’s been convicted of incitement to racism, who’s been convicted of supporting terrorist groups.
He’s now the Minister of National Security in Israel, and he brought thousands of Jews there to worship on the Temple Mount in violation of all this. While the United States is working hard to bring peace in the Middle East, it’s trying to get a ceasefire. I applaud the Biden government for doing all it can to bring about this ceasefire because there are women and children and massive quantities that the UN is intervening and saying, this is bordering, I’ll avoid the words, but this is so serious the slaughter that’s going on and our Palestinian Christians are being shot, women and children in the head on church property by the IDF. And so these groups that he led on there are groups that want to, 15 years ago they drove 200 buses around Jerusalem and on the side of the bus were posters that said that was a picture of a third temple on that Mount, the Temple Mount with no mosque and with no Dome of the Rock.
In other words, they’d finally taken it back and they were in control and they drove it through Muslim neighborhoods to tell them what they were going to do. That was 15 years ago. Those similar groups funded from New York, those similar groups today, just yesterday on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple Tisha B’Av. This anniversary is when the Romans destroyed the temple. But people forget, it’s also the anniversary because it was the exact same day, almost 600 years earlier, that the Babylonians destroyed the temple on the exact same month and day that the Temple of Solomon was destroyed by the Babylonians, it was destroyed by the Romans. So they commemorate it.
Where they brought thousands of people on that day in the hopes of the third temple being rebuilt and in the middle of the United States trying to bring peace to that area, the State Department condemned it. There are condemnations that are not in mainstream American news on what went on yesterday to derail this war that’s on the verge of happening between Iran and Israel. They were on there trying to ensure that there is no two-state solution. And this was going on and it was over religious views to get the third temple rebuilt with animal sacrifice.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. Boy, there’s 15 different ways I want to go with this, but I’m going to continue to stick to some of the fundamentals and of theology here because I think what we have here is a confusion often I see between the modern state of Israel and the biblical nation of Israel. And so one of the things I thought your article was very good about was kind of distinguishing and talking about what’s the Catholic theology.
This is a very controversial topic in Catholic theology I know, of kind of the status of Judaism, the status of Israel today because you have some people advocating for dual covenant theology, meaning both covenants are basically valid, both the old and the new are valid. You can be saved through either one. You have replacement theology that the new covenant replaced the old and basically out with the old in with the new. What would you say though is the proper Catholic theology of what is Israel today? What is the place of Judaism? Is modern Judaism, even ancient Judaism, there’s so many ways we can go about this I know, but what are some of the basics here as Catholics that we should understand?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Well, those are a lot of questions. I’m trying-
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, I know.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Yeah. And again, I’m not a political scientist and the theology I teach, so I certainly teach a lot of Old Testament, New Testament, but a lot of ecclesiology and de deo trino. So going into aspects of Judaism in itself is more a study of religions and comparative religion, which is, I’m certainly not an expert in that. But in terms of, no, we don’t accept a dual covenant, and there’s not one covenant for the Jews and one covenant for the Christians. The one covenant was always working towards the Messiah. So Judaism was always separated from, and Khristos is just the Greek word for Messiah. So the real religion God always wanted was the religion in Greek, the Khristos. And so we’re simply claiming that the Khristos has come, and this is what Judaism was always meant to be. It’s not being replaced. So you can’t have either a dual covenant or a replacement covenant.
You can have the Israel that God is always reconstituting through the development of his promises and covenants to where God intended those promises and covenant to arrive, which was always at the Messiah. And what’s so crazy about this is even the Talmud, I did an article in the Communio: International Catholic Review, thing that was called Unmasking the Pharaoh in the Garden of Eden: A Canonical Exegesis. And I go into where it’s more towards the end of the article where the Talmud itself says, and this Talmud is recording about the time of Jesus what the Jewish rabbis and sages had to say about the Messiah. And they said the world went for about 2000 years. So it’s going a very biblical dating of the world, 2000 years without knowledge of Torah. So this was where it was breaking down before the flood and then it had Torah for 2000 years since Abraham.
In other words, they believe Torah began and it’s reestablished within Abraham. And now since the time of Abraham, 2000 years later bringing us about the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, this should have been the time of the Messiah, but our sins and faithlessness prevented him from coming. And our expectation is that the reign of the Messiah would be for 2000 years. And it’s very interesting at the time of Jesus of Nazareth, the Talmud was expecting the Messiah to come and that all of Torah was waiting for the Messiah. And here we’re like, well, it’s interesting because we’re at these wild points in history 2000 years later where the Messiah is not an earthly kingdom. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world”. And so Jesus has been reigning from heaven, like Psalm II says, “Sit at my right hand till I make your enemies my footstool”.
So in other words, the religion of the Messiah, the Khristos has now spread around the world. A Jew, the greatest Jew of them all, has brought billions of people to sing the Jewish Psalms. He’s fulfilling everything that Judaism promised of bringing all nations to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is the Son of David. This is who was being awaited, but you interpreted it all too physically and earthly. And so this is why I added St. John of the Cross to the article to explain that God’s promises are always more about the spiritual fulfillment. You can’t have an eternal kingdom without it being something spiritual. You can’t have someone reigning forever without someone transcending time, and you can’t have any of this without the divinity of God being shared with man. That’s what Christianity is all about. And that’s what Judaism was always working towards. And so there’s no replacement.
Eric Sammons:
So I saw somebody say, and this might be a crude way to say it, that in a sense Abraham for example, was a Christian in the sense that he was awaiting Christ, his fulfillment-
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
He saw him on a day and hoped for it, what John’s Gospel says, John chapter eight.
Eric Sammons:
So it’s a smooth transition, so to speak, of one religion, God’s religion that is being promised and then being fulfilled. So you can’t say that modern Judaism is a separate covenant that somehow saves, it just goes against everything in the Bible and Catholic theology.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
It was always clear, it saved because of faith in the Messiah to come. What was saving in Judaism, and remember first it’s Israelite religion from 1400 to 900 BC, it’s Israelite. Then it separates itself from the Civil War into Judaism and Northern Israel. And so what was it that was saving? Keeping God’s law and there is a beginning of faith through hope in the Messiah to come. So it was always saving was faith in the Messiah to come, even though it was a bit dark and dim, it wasn’t as clear that’s what was saving. And so that’s what I want to add part of it.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah. So the law, then you talk about what St. Paul says about what’s the end of the law, and so explain that a little bit here. What end means in this case and who is the end of the law?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
So in the article we’re going into why the land doesn’t matter anymore. Can we please stop killing each other over real estate in the Middle East? And so the Lord promised Abraham in Genesis chapter 12, that he was going to give him the land and make them a nation. That from them, from them would come the name a dynasty, kings, and that this would bring about a worldwide blessing. So what we see is a movement of stages of a child moving from infancy into maturity, moving through stages. Well, you can’t know who to look for of the promises of God unless they’re, prophecy’s a long time, you have to know the genealogy that the person’s going to come from. So God certainly had to have a nation, but to have a nation, you need land. So what did God do ?through Moses he establishes the deliverance of the land under Joshua.
Once the land is finally under them and the land is being cleared only because the people that were there were satanic. They were practicing, you read the Wisdom of Solomon chapters 10 through 12, I think it’s particularly chapter 12, off the top of my head. They were practicing sorcery and sacrificing babies and eating them and drinking their blood. That’s why Israel’s judge of the nations had the right of the death penalty to go in there and free the land from this horror. So the very reasons God allowed these things to be done to clear the land, but that land existed to establish the people to keep God’s law and as God led them forward into the wisdom tradition, not just a legal keeping of law, but how do you develop virtues in mankind? So we see the wisdom literature developed through the wisdom of the Promised One, Solomon, and then ultimately through Solomon we see the coming of the promised child of the Son of David, who is going to bring the whole world into accepting this one true God.
That’s Jesus Christ. So in other words, once the Messiah comes, the land no longer matters as much and is no longer essential to the promises, the race no longer matters because the one who is the promised Messiah after many generations, and there’s reasons to believe it was going to be many, many generations. I wrote an article on Homiletic Pastoral Review on this comparing the prophecies of Isaiah and how long they took to be fulfilled with Josiah. And then that same amount of generations from the time of the return from Babylon to the birth of Messiah, that it was going to be this long. And that’s probably why the Talmud said it was going to be 2000 years until the Messiah came from Abraham. Even the Talmud says this. And so once the Messiah, so in other words, what was God’s original goal? It was to bring humanity into family with God.
Well, what’s family with God? It’s sharing in his Holy Spirit, his eternity and divinity. So once the Messiah gives us to share in the spirit that he brings, he is the spirit giver. He is the one who establishes a bridge between heaven and earth. And what is the word for the bridge builder? Pontifex, the one who facere, fex makes the panta, the bridge. Jesus is the bridge between heaven and earth and from his headship, from his humanity, divinity, God’s own divinity, through accepting God’s will, not a nominalist will, not a legalistic will, a will that we’ve be developed bodily emotionally and intellectually. God wants our development. That’s what law is for, our development, not our suppression.
The true law is life in the Holy Spirit, which builds virtue and freedom. And that’s why real democracies only flourish under virtue and flourishing, it needs virtue. That’s why our founder said, without virtue this republic cannot flourish. So that’s why for freedom Christ has set us free. So what is the goal? The goal was for us to partake in the freedom of God and that freedom is inseparable from virtue, which means being able to obtain what’s good for us through the excellent development of ourselves for what is truly good, not arbitrary law. So Jesus is the end of the law. Law here means development in wisdom because Torah is always about the wisdom of God.
Eric Sammons:
So the land then, from what you’re saying then maybe you can make a political argument that the Jews needed a land to be free because of anti-Semitism and persecution and the Holocaust, all of that, but that there’s no theological argument that this specific land is theirs from God anymore. Correct?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Actually, quite the opposite. The land is not theirs according to Christianity. In other words, because God always said, Deuteronomy 18:18, “I’ll send you prophets and if you don’t follow them, you’ll be cut off. If you don’t keep my law, you’ll be removed from the land”. Jesus only wanted the salvation of his brother Jews. Jesus is a Jew, certainly he’s God. So he transcends that and that’s why he brings the law to its true goal. But he made very clear in Matthew’s Gospel, which I reference repeatedly, what do you think the Lord is going to do to his vineyard when the people keep killing his prophets and when he sends his son, they kill his son saying, we can’t let the son take possession of all of this. He said, what do you think they’re going to do when those tenants kill his son?
They said, he’ll kick them off the land and give it to other tenants. And Jesus said, that’s right. And that’s what’s going to happen to Jerusalem and Jerusalem will be under the foot. So skipping a few chapters, will be under the feet of the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles is fulfilled. In other words, let’s go right back to the Tisha B’Av, which is a sad day for all Jews, and I’m sad for them too. I don’t rejoice over this. This is horrific. It’s sad. I don’t want genocide anywhere. I don’t want the genocide of the Jews. I don’t want the genocide of Arabs. And so how much more clear could you get that when God destroyed the temple on the same day, Tisha B’Av, of when the Babylonians destroyed it and then the Romans and Jesus warned, this generation will see the destruction of this temple.
40 years later, the temple was destroyed on the exact same day as the Babylonians destroyed it. So God removed that temple because he no longer wanted worship in an earthly way. He wanted true spiritual worship. And that true spiritual worship comes from believing God loves us and he loves us so much he became one of us. And that kind of faith changes human love and human justice. It makes us see it’s not about an eye for an eye, but it’s about learning to love as God loves. And how does God love? God loves us first. God loves us before we love him. So we say, well, oh, so then I should love God back and that makes the love equal. No, your love is still not like God because you’re loving him back for first loving you. Do you want to become like God?
Then you need to love others before they love you, and now you’re becoming more human and more in the image of God, and that’s what the whole sermon on the Mount is doing when it moves through the Beatitudes. And Moses said to you, but I say to you, it’s trying to teach that only through faith in Jesus Christ who loved us before we loved him, who is faithful even despite all of Israel’s unfaithfulness, even despite the New Israel, the Catholic Church, and all of its earthly unfaithfulness, God is still faithful to all of us. God still loves us and forgives us all. And so when God removed that temple after returning them to the land in 520 or so, 530 B.C. according to our Western calendar. After returning them to the land, the second temple being rebuilt, the promise of the Messiah since they weren’t going to accept the Messiah and they weren’t going to accept the worship that he instituted when he took bread and wine and implemented it as the new daily sacrifice replacing the daily, the two lambs sacrificed every day according to Judaism.
So if they weren’t going to accept him, God removed the temple and all sacrifice for over 2000 years. And so when I say Jesus is now the land, you don’t have to fight over Jerusalem. You don’t have to fight over the territories between the Jordan River, the Mediterranean, Lebanon to Egypt. You don’t have to fight over that for religious purposes. Let’s make it work for the good of all humanity and laws that are fair to you regardless of all religions. Jesus is the land means God’s promise to Abraham has been fulfilled in the religion of the Messiah, which was always the goal of the three promises.
And so if you have received the Holy Spirit, then Holy Spirit is eternal life and divinity, and that’s what God was always promising you were going to share in. That’s the covenant that God would give you eternal life and you would have communion with God. So if you have eternal life through the Messiah, you’re living in the land. The meek inherit the land because they’ve truly surrendered the will to God and stopped thinking in a human earthly real estate way. And now they’re thinking about we’re in the image of God through intelligence and love activated by actually knowing God in spirit and truth and actually loving God in spirit and in truth. And now eternal life has infused us and is pulling us up. We’re already partaking in the heavenly kingdom. That’s the land.
What did the temple represent? The temple was a microcosm of the land. Who was kicked out of the tent temple after the Golden Calf? 11 tribes of Israel. So what did the temple always represent? Communion with God. Whenever Moses went into the tent temple, he came out radiating divinity. What was he showing? When light came out of Moses he was showing he was partaking in the true land, God’s divinity. That was the promise that they were all really blocked from. And so the physical land was teaching them to live in God’s law so they could eventually enter the temple again. Well, the temple now comes to us out of heaven through the resurrected body and blood of Jesus that shares his resurrected life of the Holy Spirit with us. That’s the temple, that’s the land, that’s the Ecclesia, the gathering of God’s covenant people. That’s the New Israel, not a replacement of old Israel. Israel being brought to the promises was always meant to be brought to. I think what’s causing some of the problems is this idea of we don’t have to worry about the conversion of Jews.
Eric Sammons:
Right.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
And I think that mentality is causing massive confusion. And I’m not saying go out and convert Jews. I’m saying love every human, share Christianity with them, but to pretend that there’s a dual covenant, that you don’t have to worry about the Jews. There’s some other covenant they can live by, you just committed, in my opinion, apostasy, you have rejected Jesus who was the true land, the true temple, and the true gathering. And you’ve offered someone something other than Jesus. In my opinion, Christians when they do that are entering into apostasy.
Eric Sammons:
Yeah, because we’re called to convert all the nations, all the peoples, and that includes Jews. That’s our calling is to evangelize everybody, whether the Jews, Muslims, atheists or whoever. And I think that was really, I really liked that a lot because there’s so much confusion because it’s called Israel, honestly, I think that’s part of it. In a land called Israel, people read the Old Testament, they’re like, okay, we have to support this because we support land in Israel. Like you said, the land is Jesus Christ. The temple is Jesus Christ.
That’s what we’re going towards. Now, one of the things, and I think this will be the last question I ask you is, it tied into what you were just saying at the end there, there’s a common interpretation in St. Paul, I believe it’s in Romans. He talks about kind of, people interpret it as at the end of time before the second coming, there’s going to be this conversion, a mass conversion of Jews to Christianity. What is it that Paul is actually saying and what’s kind of a Catholic way of looking at and does this tie in it all to modern state of Israel?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
None of it ties into the modern state of Israel. You are absolutely right. The confusion is we’re calling something Israel and people are like, well, God loves Israel. That is not the Israel of 30 to 70 A.D. which was disbanded from all that territory and sent amongst the nations as God warned he would do, especially according to Deuteronomy 18:18. And so I don’t say this in any way rejoicing. This is horrible. I see how much worse it is when Christians abandon God’s covenant in favor of political solutions, when we choose Barabbas over Jesus and we do it all the time in our politics. And so I think we have to make that absolute distinction that it calls itself Israel, and that’s causing all the confusion. In no way is it the fulfillment of a prophecy. And I’d have to warn people in fact trying to encourage it because you think it’s prophetic could be a part of leading to what is Christian apostasy. And so I agree from a purely political standpoint, I like the Republican forms of democracy that Israel establishes and I support that.
But I see that shifting and changing, and I also have to speak out against the abuses that have being done to the Palestinian people by the illegal settlements that are being done in which you incite the Arabs to respond. Then you say to the whole world that’s unaware of what you’re doing to incite them, like driving 200 buses around Jerusalem showing you’re building a third temple and there’s no longer a mosque and then saying, oh, look, they’re crazy and radical and they attack us for no reason. When you’re spreading the message, we’re going to kick you off of your ancestral lands, we’re going to take your land. There are Christians losing their land. There are certainly claims that I can’t verify right now on Twitter about people in Bethlehem that are Christians having their land just usurped from them. But there’s clearly testimony from the bishops of the reckless killing without reason of people on the church property during this current war testified to and signed by the Latin Patriarch.
There are movements in there that are causing them, and this is even worse and probably don’t have much time to discuss it in which there is a kind of Jewish, I don’t even like calling it Jewish because it’s not fair to all the good Israeli Jews who are fighting against this. And there’s so many of them. And I want to honor that, this Kahane, Kahanism from Rabbi Kahane who’s from Brooklyn, who spread this, and there’s so many followers that are involved in this illegal settler movement in which they have been clearly ruled against and mentioned from the Washington Post to writers in the Arab world, James Zogby, as racist and convicted by Israeli courts for inciting racism and supporting terrorist organizations. These are Jews, not radicalized Muslims. And so I’m-
Eric Sammons:
I think often American Christians were so in tune to the threat of radical Islam because like you said, because of 9-11, that we are blind to anything else and we are blind to the fact of the reality of Palestinian Christians. I’m very grateful to the Latin Patriarch for trying to remind us of that. And also we’re blind to reality of Palestinian Muslims who really aren’t radical. They have no desire to fly planes into our buildings or anything like that. They just want to live in peace and they’re not being allowed to. And we act like they’re all just one step away from basically killing us and so we support Israelis going after them. And what I wanted to go back to though was what did St. Paul mean when he talks about the Jewish people, it sounds like at the end of time will be come back or something like that. What is he actually talking about there?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
I believe, and so do the vast majority of other theologians up until Christians started adapting the religious Zionism, which is false prophecy, which is contrary to Catholic doctrine, that they were very clear this is the mystical body of Christ, that the Israel of God are all who belong to God’s covenant family. All who in Romans chapter eight through Jesus Christ receive the Holy Spirit and so become sons of God, sons in the Son of God, that is all of Israel. It’s in other words, Frank Sheed jokes, in his Theology for Beginners, or maybe it was one of his other pamphlets. It was probably more one of his street preaching pamphlets. But I know when the end of the world will be. Oh, really? Yeah. When Jesus completes his mystical body. When the last soul that is called by God to enter his mystical body. When that mystical body has been completed, when the redemption has been shared with the full number of the elect. Well, who are the full number of the elect? All Israel.
So again, people keep looking to all Israel means, oh, all the Jews that have now taken the land back because prophetically God has been calling them, it is God’s positive will that they take this land. No, it’s not. The fulfillment of the ultimate Exodus is Jesus Christ. That’s why Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration are with Jesus at the Transfiguration. He is the goal, the fulfillment, the end of the law and the prophets. It also says a lot more. How the people rebelled against Moses, how the people rebelled against Elijah, they were also comforting Jesus, as Romano Guardini writes.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, well, I think this is going to be enough for us for today, although I know we could do this for hours. So I think the key points here I think really are the confusion of the political modern state of Israel with what Israel really is in Catholic theology, what it was before the time of Christ, what it is now. It’s the same Israel, but it’s also new. You can say both things are true. And really the land is Jesus Christ. The temple is Jesus Christ. I think that’s the important thing as Catholics. So when we’re debating the politics of this as Catholics, I think the important thing to remember is don’t bring in bad theology to defend your political positions, just on political grounds.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
You have hit the nail. Obviously you’ve hit the nail and are way more concise than anything I’ve said. That is absolute-
Eric Sammons:
I’m basically just putting it all into a couple sentences of everything you’re saying, but you give the background why that’s true. So I appreciate that.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
And we need to hold our American politicians accountable for this. America is being hurt by not properly speaking and being the only one defending some of the indefensible illegal activities that are going on, and it’s injuring Americans and it’s injuring America.
Eric Sammons:
Right. Yeah. And it is unfortunate because the reason Israel has such influence on American politics today is because so many Christians, including Catholics in America, have this false theology, and so they feel like they have to be on that side and that gives them a lot of influence then on the state of Israel on our politics, which is unfortunate. Well, again, thank you very much. I will link to the article that we’ve been talking about from Crisis In the show notes. I’ll link to your Substack. Is there anything else that we should know about what you’re doing or anything like that?
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
On the Substack, there’s a little bit about, it’s called the Transfiguration, well, it’s called Second Peter, the Transfiguration gives the understanding of the second coming, and I think that article complements it. It’s much longer. It’s a homiletic and pastoral review article. It’s much longer, but I think it goes into a lot more on how Jesus was revealing himself in the Transfiguration to be the joining of Heaven and Earth, which is the temple. I think that if people look for that, that might be helpful to them.
Eric Sammons:
Okay, great. Great. That’s awesome. Well, thank you Dr. I really appreciate you being on the program today.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
I appreciate you very much. Thank you. I want to say, you call me Doctor, but Matthew is good. So Mr. Sammons, since we’re-
Eric Sammons:
I’m trying to be formal for the podcast as soon as we get off-air, I’ll just say Matthew.
Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas:
Very grateful. So thank you so much.
Eric Sammons:
Okay. Until next time everybody. God love you!