Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne, Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
Epstein was well connected
With a list of the Who’s Who
He blackmailed all the goyim
In service of the Jews
The Clergy in the Church
Play the role of Keystone Cops
They retain all the value
Of a pig rolling in its slop
O. T. Allis
Professor Princeton/Westminster
Semitic Philology
The stew that was Dispensationalism not only arose from the odd teachings of Edward Irving and John Nelson Darby as systematized by Scofield, Chafer, Ryrie, Pentecost, and others, it also folded into itself revivalism, common sense realism, Keswick and Holiness teaching, Pentecostalism, with additional contributions from prominent Lutherans (Seiss), Reformed (Chafer, D. G. Barnhouse), many Baptists (Vance Havner, John MacArthur, Jerry Falwell, W. A. Criswell, etc.), and of course the Brethren movement from which it arose. These various strains often jostled with one another for supremacy but in the end they all adopted one variant strain or another of Dispensationalism. Indeed, more than a few have argued that R2K is merely another variant of Dispensationalism and has been skewered by being called “Reformed Dispensationalism.” R2K certainly bears the mark of retreatism that was characteristic of Dispensationalism. R2K, also, like Dispensationalism divided the world into “worldly” (R2K’s common) and Spiritual arenas. Finally, R2K, like all Dispensational models emphasized covenantal discontinuity as opposed to covenantal continuity.
What few people know is that D. L. Moody used Dispensationalism as a tool to reunite a fractured nation after the War of Northern Aggression. Moody, who was hardly one to be overly concerned with theological systematization, used Dispensationalism as a tool for sectional reconciliation arguing that as Jesus was coming back at any moment previous disagreements between warring Christians should be put aside and the business of saving souls should unite us all. In such a way sectional recriminations were set aside for the greater work of soul saving.
In many respects then Dispensationalism has been the religious glue that kept America together since Reconstruction ended. It also served as the means by which we have been enslaved by Israel. Dispensationalism so emphasized the ongoing integrity and necessity of Israel that all of World History was changed because of Dispensationalism’s errant premise that Israel remained God’s earthly chosen people and that all Christians were duty bound to bless Israel upon pain of divine retribution.
A Few books that will forever cure you of Dispensationalism;
Charles Ryrie in his 1965 book seeking to bring Dispensationalism up to date wrote that the main distinctives of Dispensationalism were
3.) Overall point of history was to glorify God
Ryries second point requires asking the question, “By what standard.” All Protestants who believe in the inerrant and inspired and infallible word of God believe that Scripture should be read via a literal and plain hermeneutic. However, reading the Scripture via a literal and plain hermeneutic looks very different when somebody sane does it as compared when a Dispensational comic book theologian does it.
Everyone agrees w/ #3… we just don’t agree with how the Dispie thinks history is going to glorify God.
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It’s startling how big a part eschatology and teleology plays into one’s theology. Indeed, I don’t think it would be too much to say that one’s eschatology is the engine that drives all other sub areas of systematic theology. Tell me a man’s eschatology and I’ll tell you his soteriology, ecclesiology, anthropology, etc.
I’m reading Hummel’s “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism” now and Hummel makes the point that the reason that what he calls “new premillennialism” was able to take hold in the states is because people’s attitudes about the future were altered by the War of Northern Aggression and the desire for reconciling white people North and South. The new eschatology allowed the previous postmills to create a dualism that allowed them to be optimistic about the church while being agnostic about the world. If agnostic about the world there would be no reason to not embrace Yankee versions of reconstruction. The price that had to be paid for this “reconciling theology” though was the surrendering of the postmil eschatology that had previously been held widely in the Reformed Church in America. If Jesus was coming back at any minute then there was no need to see all of life needing to conform to God’s revealed law Word. The job at hand was to get souls saved. The job at hand was not to shine the brass on a sinking ship (the world).
Also, what is interesting here is that Plymouth Brethren theology (Darby) became owned by Baptists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians alike as filtered through their particular flavor. So the Plymouth Brethren eschatology owned the day without the Plymouth Brethren denomination reaching any kind of ascendency. Still, the AnaBaptist flavor of the Darby Plymouth Brethren doctrine leavened the whole denominational landscape in America resulting in Prophecy conferences, Bible Colleges peppering the landscape, and the rise of the Missions Movement.
I keep thinking as I read this … “Ideas have consequences.”
A nation as a nation cannot exist as nothing more than a marketplace bizarre of workplaces and stores in which tokens earned at the former are then spent at the latter. Mistaking the economic machinery for a nation is the fallacy of assuming that man is nothing more than the sum of his economic spending habits. This is what we might call “the Libertarian fallacy.” A nation is more than the sum of economic individual choices as existing in that nation. A nation is a nation where there is a shared genetic stock who have a shared religion/faith who together built a shared culture with a shared language, a shared history, and a shared sense of purpose all yielding shared memories.
What happens to a society whose people have no reason to go on beyond their set routines interspersed with bouts of hedonism? What happens to a nation that loses its soul? We are living the answers to those questions. Because Christendom has reduced itself to an economic zone no longer asking or answering the larger questions of life we have lost the ability of self-understanding …. of understanding who we are together as a unique people. Having jettisoned our Christianity in exchange for bouts of libertarian hedonism we have lost the ability to think corporately. We have lost the ability to think of ourselves in terms of community being connected not only to the living who share our familial lines but we have even lost the ability to see ourselves connected to both our Fathers and our descendants. Because we have abandoned the God of our Fathers all other roots have been lost to us as well.
And so we have no auto-immune ability to resist the alien and stranger in our midst. No auto-immune ability to identify the rancid theology that is coming to us from our pulpits that reinforce our alienation, even teaching that the alienation is a positive good that should be gleefully embraced.
The first thing to go then was our undoubted catholic Christian faith. With the dissipation of that Christian faith came the dissipation of corporate self-identity. There can be no sense of belonging to a particular nation apart from a shared faith that serves as the coagulating agent that clots a particular people together.
T. S. Eliot long ago warned us that what we are now experiencing would come to pass;
”If Christianity goes the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren; and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”
T. S. Elliot
Christianity and Culture; The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture — pg. 200
So, because our Christian faith declined the result of that was redefining and reducing a nation to be an economic zone where tokens earned at the workplace are exchanged for goods in the marketplace. What was lost was the ancient Christian teaching that a nation is composed of a particular people, descended from the same ancestors, as located in a particular place. Several generations later we stand on the ledge of a nation that no longer can be a nation because it is now filled with peoples who own contesting religions that work to alienate even people who share the same common Fathers from one another. Now add to this the stranger and alien who serve strange gods from foreign lands and the consequence is “things fall apart. The center cannot hold.”
As far as solutions go, the only one I have is a return to the faith of our Fathers but it strikes me that God may indeed be purging us for our rebellion against His kindness towards us. If you’re a parent with young children the best you can do right now is to pass on to them a Christian faith that is so totatlistic that it explains every aspect of their being and thinking. This must be done because the enemy will search high and low to continue to snuff out all competition to their retooling of the now declining Christendom, so as to refashion it into a haven of demons.