Theologian explains why religious Zionism is ‘heresy,’ the Church is the ‘true Israel’

(LifeSiteNews) — By its very nature, religious Zionism rejects the incarnation of the Son of God in the Person of Jesus Christ, and the Christian Revelation that He is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, the True Temple through whom the “true Israel,” the Church, participates in the Divine Nature of God, which is the true promised land as well.

These are some of the Christian doctrines elucidated by Christendom College theology professor Dr. Matthew Tsakanikas in a powerful September interview, where he also condemned the “reckless slaughter” of Palestinian women and children due to this heresy, emphasized the importance of listening to the local Catholic bishops in the region for wise council and warned against the systematic dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims in western media, particularly since 2001.

“I’m speaking against what would be called a religious Zionism,” the professor said in reference to what may be referred to as either Jewish or Christian Zionism. “I’m speaking against the false prophetic idea that the return of the Jews to the homeland in what was called Palestinian territory… was the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy.”

READ: Christendom College theology professor explains why religious Zionism is ‘anti-Christ’

Tsakanikas was speaking with former Franciscan University of Steubenville theology professor and author Fr. Daniel-Maria Klimek, T.O.R. and went on to emphasize that authentic Christians can only point to Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the law and prophets. “[Any] interpretation that takes place outside of that would be heretical” for it is “contrary to the incarnation and that Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of all promises of the Old Testament.”

This particularly includes “a final exodus of the gathering of all of God’s people into one nation, which is the reconstituted Israel, the Church. The Church is the New Israel, even as defined in Vatican II,” he said. “You have Israel according to the flesh, and then Israel reaching its true spiritual fulfillment, which is the kingdom of the Messiah,” a spiritual kingdom where the son of David, Jesus Christ is the head and reigns today and forever.

Jesus Christ, the new Temple, reconstitutes Israel into himself, the true land where all may rest in communion with God

Tsakanikas went on to unpack relevant Christian doctrine which is also presented in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, where it states,

The divine plan of Revelation… involves a specific divine pedagogy: God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural Revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.

The theology professor who earned his Sacrae Theologiae Doctor at the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome, emphasized that heretical religious Zionism “ignores God’s pedagogy, how God was incrementally moving mankind, individually, as a nation, institutionally, creating proper memories, developing our ability to come to worship God in spirit and in truth, which is what the Messiah accomplishes.”

This movement proceeded from the infancy of the “Israelite religion” when Moses brought the people out of Egypt with God giving them the law to begin their formation away from the influences of Egyptian polytheism into “proper monotheism.”

“There is a distinction between the Israelite religion under Moses and Judaism,” he explained.  Judaism begins when a remnant from the tribe of Judah returns to the Holy Land after the Babylonian exile around 538 B.C. This people reinstituted “the Deuteronomic laws as it awaited the Messiah” who eventually arrived being born in Bethlehem around 4 B.C. As a result of the Incarnation along with his passion, death and resurrection, Jesus Christ reconstituted Israel into Himself as the true “mystical Temple that all Judaism was awaiting.”

This new mystical Temple, the Body of Christ, the “true Israel,” is the Catholic Church (cf. 2 Cor 6:16, 1 Cor 3:16, Eph 2: 19-20) which through its sacramental life participates in the divine mystery of Christ drawing all mankind into communion with The Father through the Holy Spirit.

Tracing these steps from the Israelite religion to Judaism to the universal Catholic Church, Tsakanikas emphasized “the one thing that God always had as primary in his intentions for religion is what came last,” which is the Messiah and the Church He instituted.

Thus, the promises given to Abraham of the land and nation, the dynasty from which the Messiah would come, along with the blessing God desired to bestow upon the whole world, all prepare for, and are perfectly fulfilled in, Jesus Christ, who then takes them all into Himself, perfects, elevates and glorifies each with its eternal and spiritual fulfillment.

Hence, “what the Jews are truly awaiting is what Jesus has accomplished and done,” the professor continued. “He is the temple, which means you no longer need a physical land for Jesus. You no longer need a dynasty for Jesus. You have the fulfillment of the law and the prophets in him.”

“The true land in which we were supposed to rest was always God [Himself],” Tsakanikas explained. Moses radiating light after conversing with God in the tent temple revealed “he was a partaker of the divine nature. That’s what God always wanted to give to Israel. It wasn’t a physical geography. It was a physical geography so they could have a dynasty to give the Messiah who brings us back into resting in God the true land.” This was all accomplished through the sacramental life instituted by the Messiah, Jesus Christ.

“So, trying to establish a land [today], trying to establish things based on blood or dynasty are taking us backwards, not forwards into the true religion God was trying to establish in stages through the pedagogy of God,” he explained. And this is the religion of “messianic Israel” accomplished in Jesus Christ.

Heresy engenders belief of Jewish supremacy rationalizing slaughter, murder and theft of land

The context of Tsakanikas’ interview was an article he wrote for Crisis Magazine in August where he laid out the teaching of the Church on these delicate matters and sought to apply it as a counterweight to the heresies of religious Zionism which are propelling what many have judged to be a genocide in Gaza.

READ: Zionism is incompatible with Christianity: here’s why

“Part of the reason I wrote that article was to draw attention to the Palestinian people who are being slaughtered,” he exclaimed, “especially when I see and hear from the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem that women are being shot by IDF snipers and murdered on Church property.”

READ: Israeli forces kill two Christian women in Gaza parish, destroy convent: Jerusalem Patriarchate

“These are my brother and sister Christians, [and] they are being murdered,” the professor condemned, adding that if he were in their position, with western munitions fueling these attacks, “I would be thinking, why aren’t the Christians in the West speaking up for me? Do they not care about the Mystical Body of Christ?”

While Tsakanikas has few objections to supporting what he calls “political Zionism,” which would equate to the affirming of a liberal democracy, with full equality and freedoms of speech and religion for all, including Palestinians, either with a one or two state solution, he sounds the alarm regarding the religious Zionism which has corrupted and subverted these long-established norms imposing Jewish supremacy, racism and colonialism.

“The problem we have today is the political Zionism, which I can support and in many ways do support, has turned to a religious Zionism since the ’90s,” he said. And having steadily grown in power, “that religious Zionism now is leading to the current government of Israel.”

This heresy fosters an obsolete Old Testament mentality where these religious Jews “speak as though they have a superiority over ethnically non-Jews” and thus a right to even violently confiscate the land of Palestinians through a brutal colonial process.

RELATED: Extreme racial supremacy pushed as mysticism by influential religious denomination

Israeli leaders affirm Jewish settlers executing ‘terror’ campaigns against Palestinians, Israel an ‘apartheid state’

Yet such overt aggressions are not without at least some dissent among the leaders of the State of Israel. Tsakanikas went on to affirm and echo the words of several present and former high level officials including Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar who warned in August “Jewish terror carried out by violent settlers” against Palestinians and the actions of radical National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to allow this to happen, along with other highly provocative demonstrations he has led himself, were doing “indescribable damage” to Israel.

“In other words, settlers think that they can take that land back because it’s God’s will, contrary to all international law,” the professor explained. Such religious Zionists believe, “‘We can be abusive to people because they’re not God’s chosen people.’”

Such a religious mindset proceeds from a radical Jewish denomination known as Kahanism after the late Rabbi Meir Kahane from the United States and has not only influenced religious settlers but has now also “entered into the cabinet of [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu.”

READ: Inside the rise of an Israeli faction seeking to provoke Armageddon

Even Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who ordered the genocidal siege on Gaza, agreed with Bar. Additionally, Tamir Pardo, the former head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, affirmed the long-standing contention of Christians in the region, and other Palestinian and world leaders, calling Israel an “apartheid state.”

Finally, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert warned Netanyahu in July that he would be receiving arrest warrants for turning a blind eye to crimes by settlers who are “Arab haters” and are seeking to violently expel Palestinians from their homes and villages “where they have lived all their lives.”

READ: Americans must wake up to the dangers of religious Zionists inciting violence in the Middle East

“These leaders of the Israeli people are hardly antisemites,” quipped Tsakanikas in his article referring to the often-used accusation which conflates legitimate criticism of Israel with antisemitism.

Not ‘anti-Jewish sentiments’: Critics address unjust activities, war crimes, and not ethnic or religious identity

Touching upon this subject Fr. Klimek affirmed that despite the “Western political culture” where “often language is very manipulated” these criticisms clearly don’t equate to “anti-Jewish sentiments” as they are simply a “critique [of] the unjust military policies of the Israeli government or the war crimes of the IDF.”

The Polish priest went on to recognize the courageous stand of Candace Owens in prioritizing her fidelity to Jesus Christ over her lucrative job with the Zionist Daily Wire in affirming, “if you’re going to be a devout Christian, you cannot justify the slaughtering of all these innocent Palestinian women and children and men,” even if it is due to false or “blind perceptions” with regards to Israel.

READ: Candace Owens is out at Daily Wire after opposing funding of Israel’s war

“In actual Catholic teaching, we make a distinction between identity and activity,” Klimek said. Such criticism “is not anti-Jewish, it’s not attacking anybody’s identity. It’s the activity of the destruction of human life” which is being condemned. This includes denunciations of “even many accounts of raping victims among the Palestinians,” and “the colonialism with the settlers against indigenous Palestinian lands.”

“And so the critique, of course, is against unjust activities and not an attack on anyone’s personal religious or ethnic identity,” he concluded.

‘Who knows better’ than Catholic bishops in the region when it comes to evaluating this conflict?

Fr. Klimek went on to introduce a source for whom both he and Tsakanikas believe Christians should give priority when seeking to understand and judge the reality of events on the ground in this conflict. He read an excerpt from a June 30 statement by the Justice and Peace Commission of the Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land, which brings together the bishops of the several Catholic rites in the region (Latin, Greek, , Melkite, Maronite, Armenian, Syriac, and Chaldean).

These Catholic bishops of the region issued a harsh correction against those “in Israel and abroad” who were attempting to argue that Israel’s ongoing assault upon the Palestinian people fulfilled the Catholic Church’s just war doctrine. The bishops wrote in their letter that they were “outraged” such “political actors” were construing this doctrine “in order to perpetuate and legitimate the ongoing war in Gaza” in a way which was seeking “to justify the death of tens of thousands, our friends and our neighbors.”

Continuing they explained why Israel’s conducting of the war violates the doctrine’s criterion of proportionality with the Palestinian death toll being “tens of thousands of people higher than that of Israel, and one in which a clear majority of the Palestinian casualties have been women and children.”  This also indicates a failure to honor the absolute duty of differentiating “between civilians and combatants.”

Thus, they demanded “our theological tradition, must not be used in order to justify this violence,” as instead their Christian witness is “one of transformational love, one of freedom and equality, one of justice and peace, one of dialogue and reconciliation.”

Tsakanikas provided feedback on this point in particular to Western Christians who often automatically defer to Israel partisans, even with regards to such a horrendous assault like this one. He said:

You talked about all the bishops of the Middle East, of all the particular churches that exist in that geography. And I want to remind people, who knows better, the bishops as the preservers of Apostolic Tradition, who are on site in the Middle East, or Americans making commentary from ideologies, limited by the press coverage and political affiliations to which they belong? Who is on the ground with better insight to tell us what is going on and what Church teaching is?

People need to consider that very carefully. These are the apostolic successors whose family members are involved in all of this, who know the Tradition. And the church began in the East. And so, they’re from the most ancient churches who have come together to say, ‘do not use just war theory to justify what’s going on.’

Anyone who ignores that needs to seriously consider how well they’re listening, gathering the facts, taking counsel from wise men, which is what we’re supposed to do when it comes to making prudential decisions.

READ: How do Christians in the Holy Land understand the Israeli occupation of Palestine?

Religious Zionists aggressively reject two millennia of Christian moral development

With western Christians often being prevented from seeing or considering the unanimous and constant judgment of Catholic, Orthodox and other Christian churches in the region, or perhaps due to significant propaganda efforts, along with their flatly refusing to actively listen and be open to such important witnesses, anti-Christ results have grossly metastasized with the assistance of western governments facing little political resistance at home.

Such evil outcomes can be recognized in the Israeli army’s even zealous rejection of natural morality which remains reasonably based on the inestimable dignity of the human person.

As a clear result of the incarnation of God in the Person of Jesus Christ, over the last two millennia there have been developments in understanding morality and law which have made the world much more human regardless of creed. While the essence of such natural moral principles is accessible to reason alone, they have been authoritatively articulated and defined by the teaching of the true Israel, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.

These moral principles have also guided the establishment of law throughout the world, including international law which has been systematically ignored by the Zionist Israeli government for decades with its anti-Christ agenda coming into great relief over the last year amid reports of the Israeli army committing genocidal and even sadistic atrocities, almost daily, against the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank.

Though massacres by the Israeli army against this decimated people have been routine occurrences for decades, the death toll of Palestinians since October 7 of last year includes reliable reports of at least 43,783 including 42,020 in Gaza – 69% women and children, with an estimated 10,000 more buried under the rubble (est. 4,900 women and children), and at least 763 in the West Bank (~166 children), with 500,000facing food insecurity and at least 37 deaths of children attributed to malnutrition.

Such deaths include testimonies of children “incinerated,” “shredded,” “missing body parts,” “being crushed by buildings,” starving to death and toddlers being “definitively” and intentionally shot by Israeli snipers. (Related video.)

WATCH: ‘The West cannot hide’: Compelling documentary presents Israel’s ‘live stream genocide’ in Gaza

Soldiers in the Zionist army have also uploaded videos to social media celebrating their “extreme brutality and torture, violence, [and] utter disrespect for human life” with regards to their treatment of the Palestinian civilians.

Furthermore, one Israeli human rights organization has documented the transformation of 12 Israeli prisons into “de-facto torture camps” for deliberate subjection of Palestinian detainees “to harsh, relentless pain and suffering” with most never even being charged with a crime.

Tortures in these camps include public confirmation of sodomizing detainees with reports of Israeli soldiers “inserting objects into detainees’ anuses,” such as, in at least one case, “a telephone device” with “additional accessories,” which the Zionist army torturers then called for sadistic amusement. As of July 31, 53 Palestinian detainees were known to have died in these torture camps.

Systematic brazen lies in saturating Zionist propaganda, consequences may include nuclear war

Furthermore, Zionism is known for practicing massive and systematic propaganda deceit to maintain their brutal genocidal and expansionist agenda in Palestinian territory. Having caught a radical Zionist rabbi blatantly lying in a live streamed debate, Catholic commentator Candace Owens observed in September that Zionism “takes so many lies to maintain” and that its apologists have an ability to blatantly lie and feel no remorse.

As is well-documented, such brazen lies were on full display in July when Zionist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke before the U.S. Congress repeating long-debunked atrocity propaganda about the events of October 7, blaming Hamas for the deaths of perhaps hundreds of Israelis who were intentionally killed by the Israeli army themselves that same day, and ironically made the false allegation that protesters were being paid by Iran while standing before the Israel Lobby’s “bought and paid for” U.S. Congress which afforded him 58 standing ovations in a 60 minute speech.

READ: Netanyahu utilizes ‘big lie’ tactic in address to US Congress, receives 58 standing ovations

The anti-Christ Zionist consequences of massive systematic lies, deception, torture and murder on an industrial scale, are not even limited to the Middle East but now threaten the world with a nuclear Armageddon. As Netanyahu escalates to provoke Lebanon and Iran into a regional war, which could involve Russia and the United States in direct conflict, Israel’s war doctrine to launch their own nuclear weapons rather than negotiate, if it considers itself facing military defeat, is also a possibility in facing these formidable foes.

Like unborn children, Arab world dehumanized in western mainstream in order to rationalize atrocities

Fr. Klimek also cited the “famous book” Orientalism, by Edward Said, to highlight another contributing factor for such catastrophic outcomes in the Middle East. In that work Said identified an ongoing “dehumanization of the Arab world” which has been occurring “through a certain mainstream western lens” for quite a long time.

The priest theologian described it as something akin to “the inversion of the ‘chosen people’ mentality being also dehumanization of the other sides.”

“We live in a culture where in order to justify atrocious actions, we need to linguistically or intellectually dehumanize,” he explained. “So, you dehumanize the unborn child, you treat it as if it’s not actually a baby, a child, a human life, so you can justify abortion.”

In the same way, “you dehumanize the Arab world, the Arab and Muslim world, but not only Muslims, so many Christians [as well],” Klimek observed, “while at the same time elevating another group of people as ‘God’s chosen race.’” This type of “horrible justification” allows many in the West to “truly rationalize” terrible atrocities.

Such distortions are directly “opposed to the universal natural law ethic” that “Christian tradition, especially in Catholicism calls us to,” he concluded.

Tsakanikas concurred recalling how western media, “particularly since 2001 has fed us a nonstop diet of hating the foreigner, especially the Muslim,” and emphasized the need to recognize the importance of being able “to enter dialogue” with Muslims, even as a means of evangelization.

‘Hate does not come from God,’ charity, humility and repentance ‘way forward’

Turning toward a solution the professor emphasized the necessity of charity and humility among all.

“The Jews need to know that we Christians love them. The Muslims need to know that we Christians love them. We sinful Christians need to know God loves us despite our sins and to stop thinking we’re not sinners,” Tsakanikas said.

“And so let’s all work towards the humility of Jew, Muslim, Christian. We are sinful people. We need to come to self-knowledge and recognize we’re letting hate drive our hearts. Hate does not come from God,” he continued.

“Finding a way forward to loving each other is what God wants for each and every one of us,” the theologian concluded. “So, I offer that prayer for each and every one of us.”

A more comprehensive theological discussion on the heresy of religious Zionism can be found here: Christendom College theology professor explains why religious Zionism is ‘anti-Christ’

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