Falwell

I am not going to engage in the kind of harsh rhetoric emanating from many in this movement since the recent passing of the Reverend Jerry Falwell. Falwell's legacy, in my opinion, is a mixed bag. I try to make it a habit not to trash ministers, even if I disagree with many of their positions. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. I would cheerfully join in if the ridicule was being heaped on pseudo-reverends like stone-hearted black racists Jesse Hijackson or Al Sharpton, or crazed Pentecostal charismatic lunatics like Kenneth Copeland or Benny Hinn. These folks are shysters, plain and simple. There is no other way to label them.

But I can at least commend Jerry Falwell for his pro-life and anti-homosexual stances, though his views and theology regarding Israel and modern-day Jews were wrong-headed and dangerous. Falwell, like so many contemporary evangelical evangelists and televangelists, was a victim of faulty and misguided theology, emanating first and foremost from his embrace of the Zionist footnotes that the Scofield Reference Bible is replete with. As that reliable Zionist organ, Wikipedia accurately tells us "The Scofield Reference Bible promoted dispensationalism, the belief that between creation and the final judgment there were seven distinct eras of God's dealing with man and that these eras were a framework for synthesizing the message of the Bible. It was largely through the influence of Scofield's notes that dispensationalism grew in influence among fundamentalist Christians in the United States." [1]

The theology of dispensationalism is a phony siren song. Sadly, many well-meaning Christians, and I do include the Reverend Falwell in this camp, were taken in by its apocalyptic pronouncements. The Scofield Reference Bible was pieced together by Cyrus Scofield. Scofield is described here:

"As a young con-artist in Kansas after the Civil War, he met up with John J. Ingalls, an aging Jewish lawyer who had been sent to Atchison by the 'Secret Six' some thirty years before to work the Abolitionist cause. Pulling strings both in Kansas and with his compatriots back east, Ingalls assisted Scofield in gaining admission to the Bar, and procured his appointment as Federal Attorney for Kansas. Ingalls and Scofield became partners in a railroad scam which led to Cyrus serving time for criminal forgery." But it gets more troubling than this. "Untermeyer introduced Scofield to numerous Zionist and socialist leaders, including Samuel Gompers, Fiorello LaGuardia, Abraham Straus, Bernard Baruch and Jacob Schiff. These were the people who financed Scofield's research trips to Oxford and arranged the publication and distribution of his concordance." [2]

This is the individual that has been lionized by fundamentalist rapturists and evangelical Zionists like Falwell. Scofield was assisted by crooked Jews and opportunistic Zionist ideologues right from the beginning. Few Christians know that the Scofield Reference Bible was funded by Jews who cared nothing about biblical accuracy or religious scholarship, but only wanted to use Cyrus Scofield as a pawn to rush through the founding of the modern state of Israel, no matter what it took. Scofield's footnotes were only to be utilized to hoodwink biblically ignorant believers into embracing and making the Zionist project their own.

C.E. Carlson lays out the Jewish, Zionist scheme best:

"The scheme was to alter the Christian view of Zionism by creating and promoting a pro-Zionist subculture within Christianity. Scofield's role was to re-write the King James Version of the Bible by inserting Zionist-friendly notes in the margins, between verses and chapters, and on the bottoms of the pages. The Oxford University Press used Scofield, a pastor by then, as the Editor, probably because it needed such as man for a front. The revised bible was called the Scofield Reference Bible, and with limitless advertising and promotion, it became a best-selling 'bible' in America and has remained so for 90 years." [3]

That Falwell, Hagee, Robertson and many others would go along with this plan is hardly surprising. After all, the Scofield Reference Bible has made powerful inroads into the minds and theological worldviews of millions of Christians. The "subculture" is now a majority. The Zionist brainwashing of the American church is one of the saddest legacies of Scofield and his Zionist handlers. That so many read the Bible and understand it through this prism is a travesty and a tragedy, and explains, more than any other phenomenon, why the United States and its churchgoers often seem so monolithically pro-Israel and pro-Jew.

Arthur Bruce Bawer makes a good attempt to deconstruct the Scofield footnotes and exegesis when he writes:

"The Scofield Reference Bible looks like a lot of Bibles: Each page contains two columns of scripture separated by a narrower column of cross-references. What distinguishes it from most Bibles is that it also contains extensive footnotes. These footnotes add up to a highly tendentious dispensationalist interpretation of the Bible. There are whole books of Scofield's Bible in which the annotation is minimal, almost absent; but in other books there are pages on which the annotation takes up far more space than the text. Like Jefferson's Bible, then, Scofield's Bible is an extraordinary act of audacity. But the two men came at Scripture from utterly opposite directions. Jefferson sought to preserve Jesus' moral teachings and to remove materials (including accounts of miracles and prophecies) that seemed to him ahistorical and thus, as Jaroslav Pelikan has written, to 'find the essence of true religion in the Gospels.' Scofield also sought 'the essence of true religion', but he located this essence not in the moral teachings of the Gospels but in the miracles and prophecies, most of them located outside the Gospels. Jefferson's chaff, in short, was Scofield's wheat."

Bawer notes the disingenuous nature of Scofield's endeavor:

"The Scofield Reference Bible was a brilliant idea. Over the centuries, countless theologians had written learned books in which they grappled with the complex, ambiguous, often contradictory meanings of scripture. But Scofield plainly knew two important things about the people he wanted to reach. One: They didn't read books of theology, but they did look at their Bibles (if only occasionally). Two: they didn't want to grapple with complexities and ambiguities and contradictions: they wanted certitude, orthodoxy.

This Scofield gave them in spades. His footnotes never offer up different possible interpretations of a text; instead, they set forth, with an air of total authority, a detailed, elaborate, and consistent set of interpretations that add up to a theological system that few Christians before Darby could have conceived of -- and that, indeed, marked a radical departure from the ways in which most Christians had always believed. Yet Scofield brazenly proferred his theology as if it were beyond question. And he presented it as if it were traditional, and as if every other way of understanding the true nature of Christian belief marked a radical departure from the true faith.... The chutzpah here is mind-boggling." [4]

Chutzpah is the appropriate terminology, for the Scofield Reference Bible has Jewish fingerprints and influence all over it. That fact that all of its countless footnotes are so friendly to Jewish and Zionist interests is not by coincidence. It was planned this way right from the beginning. Jettisoning Jesus' harsh pronouncements and thundering denouncements of the Jewish leadership of his day, Scofield simply juxtaposed his own hackneyed interpretations alongside these clear and foreboding words, perhaps smilingly, as he nudged Christians in the direction of dire Zionistic collusion.

Jerry Falwell, in his lifetime of preaching and ministry, followed the path that Scofield hollowed out for him. Despite the aspersions that Falwell cast on the "secular Left" and "abortionists" and "homosexuals" he never named the enemy. That enemy was organized Jewry, of both the secular and religiously Talmudic variety. Falwell even agreed to employ the term "Judeo-Christian", an oxymoronic phrase conjured up in the shadowy halls of Jewish criminal groups and organizations like the ADL and others. But at the behest of Abe Foxman, frontman for Ziocriminality, Jerry made frequent references to our "Judeo-Christian heritage" the "Judeo-Christian roots of America" and sundry other inaccurate phraseologies. This is vintage Scofield.

The Reverend Falwell, who I believe was a well-intentioned man, was taken in. There can be no doubt of that. He bought, hook, line and sinker, the Scofieldian "truism" that today's unrepentant, stiff-necked anti-Christian Jews, of both the American and Israeli vein, were still "God's Chosen People."

This flies in the face of centuries of Christian teaching on apostate Jews, and contradicts the clear words of Martin Luther, the venerable father of Protestantism, who stated in words that would be described as poisonously anti-Semitic today.

"I had made up my mind to write no more either about the Jews or against them. But since I learned that these miserable and accursed people do not cease to lure to themselves even us, that is, the Christians, I have published this little book, so that I might be found among those who opposed such poisonous activities of the Jews who warned the Christians to be on their guard against them. I would not have believed that a Christian could be duped by the Jews into taking their exile and wretchedness upon himself. However, the devil is the god of the world, and wherever God's word is absent he has aneasy task, not only with the weak but also with the strong. May God help us. Amen.

Luther went further:

He did not call them Abraham's children, but a 'brood of vipers' [Matt. 3:7]. Oh, that was too insulting for the noble blood and race of Israel, and they declared, 'He has a demon' [Matt 11:18]. Our Lord also calls them a 'brood of vipers'; furthermore in John 8 [:39,44] he states: 'If you were Abraham's children ye would do what Abraham did.... You are of your father the devil. It was intolerable to them to hear that they were not Abraham's but the devil's children, nor can they bear to hear this today." [5]

How did we drift so far from our theological moorings in the United States of America? How have we gotten to the point where no evangelical will condemn the sins of the Jewish people? Why would Falwell never point out the obvious, that the leftist movements he despised and rightly saw as destructive to America's moral framework were emanating from one group dedicated to the eradication of Christianity? Why could the Reverend Falwell never bring himself to condemn these anti-Christ Jews who own the Left lock, stock and barrel? Three reasons: the Scofield Reference Bible, dispensationalism and Zionist-imbued theology.

Excuse me for not piling on in the tarring and feathering of Jerry Falwell, especially right after his sudden death yesterday, but I can't help but think that Falwell and others of his fold are more misguided than villianous. I don't think that this TV preacher, whose stands against abortion, homosexual sin and liberalism (all worthy positions) was an intentional agent of radical Zionism. I believe that Falwell, like countless patriotic and good Americans, was duped and led astray by unsound doctrine.

If that position doesn't make me anti-Zionist enough (and I think Zionism is pure evil) then so be it. But even a flawed man can be commended for the good deeds he did perform. He can at least be complimented for speaking against the manifestations of Jewish control and manipulation, even if he did not name the beast aloud.

I am simply trying to conduct myself in a manner that I hope is consonant with true Christian charity. Jerry Falwell was on the wrong side of the Jewish question, but do his other beliefs count for nothing? Before we decide to slander and defame him, we must ask ourselves "What are we doing to make sure that the rest of America doesn't fall for the Zionist agenda and all its concomitant schemes?" The propaganda has been mostly successful, to be sure, and the fact that even our interpretations of the Holy Scriptures have been skewed and distorted, shows how adroit the Jewish supremacists have been in subverting true Christianity. Like everything else they touch, it has been made moot and harmless as doctrine. Christianity, the Americanized brand of it, has drifted far from the counter-cultural subversive teachings of a radical "anti-Semitic" Christ. We must recapture the truth. This doesn't mean that criticisms of Falwell's teachings are not in order. But excuse me if I don't wish him hellfire and brimstone on the day of his death. To do so adds nothing to our credibility, our validity or our ideas.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scofield_Reference_Bible
[2] http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/hoax/scofield.htm
[3] http://christianparty.net/scofield.htm
[4] http://www.911-strike.com/christian-zionists.htm
[5] http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/luther-jews.html