What are your thoughts on John Hagee?

I have written about John Hagee in a book called Christianity in Crisis 21^st Century. He is a committed Word of Faith teacher who believes that faith is a force, words are the containers of the force, and through the force of faith one can create their own reality.

Hagee is also a committed Christian Zionist. He has said some pretty bizarre things about his belief in that regard, which I chronicle in my books Christianity in Crisis 21^st Century and The Apocalypse Code: Find Out What the Bible REALLY Says About the End Times…and Why It Matters Today. For example, one of the things he does as a leading Christian Zionist is he routinely castigates those who do not share his two people of God theory as replacement theologians who are carrying Hitler’s anointing in their message, despite the fact that it is he—not those who he constantly impugns—who holds that Israel will soon replace the church as the focus of God’s plans. In fact, according Hagee’s view it is not the too distant future in which two thirds of Jews—whom he is now helping to herd into the Holy Land—are going to suffer a Holocaust that will make the Nazi atrocities pale by comparison.

Not only that, but I think it is truly tragic that Hagee places far greater emphasis on returning Jews to the Land than he does on turning Jewish people to the Lord. One of the quotes that I have in The Apocalypse Code are pretty telling. He says, “Let us put an end to this Christian chatter that ‘all the Jews are lost’ and can’t be in the will of God until they convert to Christianity!”¹ Incredibly then, he goes so far as to take the onus off the Jewish community and places it squarely on the Jewish Christ. He says, “If Jesus refused by his words or actions to claim to be the Messiah to the Jews, then HOW CAN THE JEWS BE BLAMED FOR REJECTING WHAT WAS NEVER OFFERED?”² In other words, he goes so far as to say that the Jewish people wanted Jesus to be their Messiah but Jesus absolutely refused. Says Hagee, “The Jews were not rejecting Jesus as Messiah, it was Jesus who was refusing to be the Messiah to the Jews!”³

Now think about this? If you had read through the Gospels even once, you know full well that Jesus emphatically contradicted what John Hagee is purporting. Who can forget—and I am sure not one person listening to me and I cannot imagine that Hagee could forget—who can forget the emotionally charged words that Jesus spoke as He was leaving the temple? He said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! (Luke 13:34).⁴ Or as the Apostle John put it: “He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11). It is very clearly the Jewish people in Scripture—the Scripture to whom John Hagee is alluding—who rejected Jesus not the other way around. Plainly put, Hagee’s spin is historical revisionism pure and simple.

I would add to suggest as Hagee does that the Jews are somehow entitled to building settlements in Gaza and yet excluded from the blessed salvation of the Gospel might well be the height of antisemitism, which he accuses others of. Worst still the notion that Jews in the twenty-first century are going to endure a Holocaust for the first-century sins of their fathers is as unbiblical as it is unthinkable.

Only a Gospel of peace and justice through faith in the one who died for both Jew and Gentile is potent enough to break the stranglehold of antisemitism fueled in large part by bad theology. Hagee is making some really outrageous claims against people and he ought to be called on it.

—Hank Hanegraaff

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The righteous will live by faith”

(Romans 1:16-17)

For further related study:

John Hagee (Christian Research Institute)

Christianity Still In Crisis: A Word of Faith Update (Robert Hunter)

What’s Wrong with the Faith Movement (Part 1): E. W. Kenyon and the Twelve Apostles of Another Gospel (Hank Hanegraaff)

What’s wrong with the Faith Movement (Part 2): The Teachings of Kenneth Copeland (Hank Hanegraaff and Erwin M. de Castro)

Modern Israel in Bible Prophecy: Promised Return or Impending Exile? (Stephen Sizer)

Christian Zionism in Action (Douglas LeBlanc)

In Defense of Zionism: Hagee’s Mandate for Supporting Israel (Kenneth Gentry, Jr.)

Beginning of the End (H. Wayne House)

Apocalypse When? Why Most End-time Teaching Is Dead Wrong (Hank Hanegraaff)

Notes:

1. John Hagee, Should Christians Support Israel? (San Antonio, TX: Dominion, 1987), 125
2. Ibid, 63
3. Ibid., 67-68
4. All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: New International Version (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984), unless noted.

Blog adapted from the February 7, 2017 Bible Answer Man broadcast.