Category: Apologetics

A Few Words About Dispensationalism’s Origin & Influence

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, and Pentecostalism. Dispensationalism also found contributions from prominent Lutherans (Seiss), Reformed (Chafer, D. G. Barnhouse), many Baptists (Vance Havner), and of course the Brethren movement from which it arose. These various strains often jostled with one another but in the end they all adopted one variant strain or another of Dispensationalism. Indeed, even yet today the theology of Dispensationalism finds influences in the Reformed world as more than a few have argued that R2K is merely another variant of Dispensationalism. R2K certainly bears the mark of retreatism that was characteristic of Dispensationalism, as well as a Gnostic dividing the world into “worldly” (R2K’s common) and Spiritual.

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 has 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 many respects then Dispensationalism has been the religious glue that kept America together since Reconstruction ended. It also served as one of 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.

More Clergy Being Dumb … This Time Rev. Joseph Spurgeon

“These men who are trying to refute pastor Jerry Dorris are playing themselves and showing their foolishness. The irony of these posts is that in their scheme 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska is the actual ‘invader’ as a legal immigrant from the Ukraine and Decarlos Brown, Jr. is their American neighbor.

I am for ICE doing their job, our civil government protecting the border and even restricting legal immigration so that our nation can be preserved. But I’m also for treating individuals with respect and dignity as neighbors by proximity.

These men have lost the plot and are not as the Christians they profess to be.”

Rev. Joseph Spurgeon

1.) This began with Rev. Dorris writing a post saying he was politically against illegal immigration but that did not mean he would refuse to treat illegals as his neighbor. Rev. Dorris was clearly invoking the idea, from the Bible, of being a “good Samaritan.” Rev. Dorris was suggesting that all Christians must treat all illegals as neighbors.

2.) More than a few people (including myself) took exception to that, insisting that Rev. Dorris was making the parable of the Good Samaritan walk on all fours.

3.) Nobody has tried to refute Rev. Dorris as if he has not yet been refuted. Rev. Dorris has been refuted in spades.

4.) The irony that Rev. Spurgeon sees is not ironic in the least. He should know by now that the complaint that nearly all those involved have is not the immigration of white Christians into the nation, such as Zarutska. (She was Eastern Orthodox of some stripe.) The complaint is against bringing in those who are from, as the President has said, “third world fecal holes.”

** – Speaking only for myself, I think it unwise at this point to allow for any immigration at all. We need a period of adjustment.

5.) Decarlos Brown, and numerous other minorities in our country was a neighbor the same way that Ted Bundy or one of the Manson family members would be a neighbor if they moved next door.

6.) What Rev. Spurgeon (and Rev. Doriss) are doing to the parable of the Good Samaritan is they are replacing the poor chap in the parable who was beaten and robbed by the assailants for the assailants themselves who were beaten up because they fell down seeking to flee from the scene of the crime they committed. In that kind of Parable, Jesus would have expected the Good Samaritan to call the authorities to arrest those who had done the robbing.

7.) In the parable of the Good Samaritan it is clear that the chap robbed by the villains was the victim. What Pastors Dorris and Spurgeon are doing is turning the Robbers and Malefactors who did the beating in the Good Samaritan into the victim. In Pastors Dorris and Spurgeon’s world the third world equatorial immigrants who are here and who are bilking the system, who are essentially committing theft on a mass scale, and who are squandering our children’s inheritance by their massive fraud are the ones who are the victims and who need to have all the love and affection given to the genuine victim in the parable of the Good Samaritan. They have inverted the whole meaning of the parable. They have turned the parable of the Good Samaritan into one only a bleeding heart Arminian/Liberal could appreciate.

8.) In doing so Pastors Spurgeon and Dorris are ignoring the Scriptures that teach that one of God’s judgments against His disobedient people is to be cursed with being flooded with the Stranger and the Alien. When Pastors Spurgeon and Dorris write as they do people hear them say that “Christians should embrace God’s curse.” Quite to the contrary Christians who love God and their people will do all they can to not be visited with the curse. Pastors should not push principles (such as treating invaders as “neighbors”) that fault people for not wanting to be under God’s curse and for not wanting to have to live in their land where they are the tail and the stranger and alien is the head. (See Deut. 28:15f)

9.) Nobody, that I have seen in this conversation has denied the necessity of speaking the Gospel to the stranger and the alien while they are here. Nobody has insisted, as far as I can see, that the stranger and the alien are not image bearers of God. But the fact that the alien and the stranger need the Gospel and the fact that they are image bearers of God does not mean that we should become comfortable with the presence of the alien and the stranger in our midst. In point of fact, we should not.

10.) Rev. Spurgeon has been slow witted ever since I came across the good Rev. years ago. We make allowances for such people. However, it is those who are advocating for the kinds of things that Rev. Spurgeon is advocating for who have lost the plot and are not the Christian he professes to be.

11.) What Spurgeon and many like him have missed is that Genocide of the white Christian in the West is being attempted. Immigrants from third world fecal holes are the bombs that are being used in order to replace us. When one is in war one typically does not go out of their way to treat the bomb that is intended to wipe them out as a neighbor.

12.) Pastors like Dorris and Spurgeon are turning the Christian faith into a suicide cult.

Random Observations On Dispensationalism & A Reading List For Dispies

All of this in the context of reading Daniel G. Hummel’s “The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism; How The Evangelical Battle Over The End Times Shaped A Nation.”

In 1957 A. W. Tozer warned that;

“A widespread revival of the kind of Christianity we know today in America might prove to be a moral tragedy from which we would not recover in one hundred years.”

He was referring to Dispensationalism.

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In 1967 there was an updated version of the C. I. Scofield Dispie Bible released. One of its most significant updates was a note on Genesis 12:1-4 where the Holocaust (TM) was introduced into the notes. The new note clarified that God’s promise to Abraham- “I will curse those who curse you” — was;

“A warning literally fulfilled in the history of Israel’s persecutions. It has invariably literally fulfilled in the history of Israel’s persecutions. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Bagel – well with those who have protected him. For a people who commit the sin of antisemitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Now, the kicker here, that is not in the notes, is that the Bagels and Christian Zionists were the ones who got to define what antisemitism meant.

Look, when I see this stuff, it only convinces me that as a Christian I am playing on team stupid.

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Charles Ryrie in his 1965 book he authored sought to bring Dispensationalism up to date. Ryrie wrote that the main distinctives of Dispensationalism were;

1.) The distinction between Israel and the Church

2.) Literal and plain hermeneutic
3.) Overall point of history was to glorify God

Ryrie’s first essential fails to take into account that OT Israel was the Church in its cocoon stage. The distinction between Israel and the Church was always the distinction between caterpillars and butterflies. Ryrie’s Dispensationalism always insisted (and still insists) that God, after the death, resurrection, ascension, and session of the Lord Christ, still has a plan for Israel that is tied to God’s eschatological and redemptive clock.

Ryrie failed to understand that God is eschatologically and redemptively done with Israel as a nation-State. Modern Israel is irrelevant to God’s ongoing macro plan of redemption or eschatology. And “No,” Romans 11 does not prove me wrong.

Ryries second point requires asking the question, “By what standard.” All Protestants who believe in the inerrant, 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. For example, when there is Sensus Plenior in the text to read the text that way is to read it according to its literal and plain hermeneutic. For example, when the text requires a archetype and type reading to read it in just such a way is to read the text according to a plain and literal hermeneutic. For example, to make a proper distinction between allegory and parable and then to read those aright means a plain and literal hermeneutic is being used. The point is, is that Dispensationalism doesn’t get to claim that it alone is reading the Scripture according to its original intent while everyone else is limping along trying to keep up with the Comic Book interpreters. When Dispies slice and dice the Scriptures into seven compartmentalized epochs, when Baptists refuse to see the continuity of Scripture so as to not bring covenant children to the Baptismal font, when Pentecostals insist that speaking in tongues is required for believers, they are all not reading the Scripture according to its plain and literal meaning. However, Dispensationalists exceed all in this category.

Everyone agrees with Ryrie’s #3… we just don’t agree with how the Dispie thinks history is going to glorify God. For example, the Dispie thinks that history will glorify God with doom and despair being the necessary keynotes before Christ return, whereas Biblical eschatology theology understands that the King is going to return to a world where the Great Commission has been fulfilled.

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A reading list to cure what ails the Dispensationalist;

1.) John Gerstner – Wrongly Dividing the Truth
2.) O. T. Allis – OT Prophecy & The Church
3.) Gentry/Bahnsen – House Divided: The break up of Dispensational Theology
4.) Daniel G. Hummel – The Rise & Fall of Dispensationalism
5.) Steven Sizer – Zion’s Christian Soldiers: The Bible, Israel and the Church
6.) Steven Sizer – Christian Zionism
7.) O. Palmer Robertson’s “The Israel of God”
8.) Allison Weir — Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel

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“The dispensationalist believes that throughout the ages God is pursuing two distinct purposes: one related to the earth with earthly people and earthly objectives involved, while the other is to heaven with heavenly people and heavenly objectives involved.”

Lewis Sperry Chafer
Systematic Theology – p. 448

Dispensationalism is NOT Christianity. This sets the Abrahamic covenant on its head and works to the end of keeping the Bagels as God’s chosen (earthly) people. That is total trash thinking and largely explains where we are today with our problems with the Bagels.

But how different is this from Doug Wilson’s advocacy of “The Covenant With Hagar” crapola?

The Continuing Problem Of American Clergy, or Rev. Dorris Needs To Read The Novel; “The Camp Of The Saints.”

I don’t know Rev. Jerry Dorris from Adam. Never met him. Never talked to him. Never corresponded with him on social media. All I know is that he is a Reformed Baptist clergy in Kentucky.

I suspect that it is possible that Jer and I might agree on a number of things. However, on the issue considered in this fisk, Jer and I are on different planets.

Below is a post by the good Rev. Dorris, and my reply. I didn’t reply to him online because I know it wouldn’t do any good having been in more than a few of these kind of conversations.

Pray for the clergy in America. We have fallen so far from our Father’s standards.

Rev. Jerry Dorris writes,

I can recognize that through the state’s failed immigration policies we have allowed dangerous patterns of immigration that have altered neighborhoods and reshaped the nation. As a Christian, I can say plainly that this was wrong. It should stop, and it should be reversed decisively. That conviction does not compromise my duty to communicate the gospel.

Bret replies,

So far, so good.

Rev. Jerry Dorris continues (RJD)

God has allowed our nation to fail in this area (of failed immigration policy), and that failure demands correction. Yet through it, He has brought the nations to our doorstep. What was politically reckless has become, by His providence, a gospel opportunity.

Bret responds,

It is true that the Gospel should be heralded to men from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Even those tribes, tongues, and nations, who have broke US Law in order to be here. In point of fact we, as Christians, should advocate that once these illegals are put into prison camps, built by FEMA, in order to accommodate them until they can be shipped back to their country of origin, they should have the Gospel preached to them by itinerant ministers coming into the camps to preach for just such a reason. In just such a manner we can pray that God might send many of them back to their homelands as converts to their own people.

In just such a way I can both love my neighbor and work in the context of God’s providence that brought them, by way of law-breaking, to this country.

Keep in mind here before we push on from this point that when we speak of “love of neighbor,” we must consider not only the alien and stranger who has been brought here in order to replace White Anglo Saxon Christian America, but we must also consider, as neighbor, our White Anglo Saxon Christian neighbor who the elite NWO bastards in this country intend to replace.

RJD wrote,

I can hold those truths together. I can oppose the policy while loving the neighbor God has placed in front of me. The state’s failure does not excuse hatred. That is the danger for Christians. Political frustration begins to govern moral posture. Anger aimed upward (State) turns sideways (neighbor). The neighbor becomes a symbol rather than a soul.

Bret responds,

Understand here that RJD does not seem to understand that the alien and stranger that is now potentially the neighbor of various and sundry Christians, has been placed here with the intent of rolling Christ off His throne. The illegals that have been brought here by the NWO elites have been brought here to destroy the White Christian population. The NWO elites intend to pull Christ down from His throne and by the elimination of White people the NWO elites are accomplishing their agenda to cast down Jesus the Messiah by diminishing the presences of the one people group who throughout history has built Christendom wherever their feet have trod.

If I am to love the stranger and alien, I must first start by loving them enough to seek to remove them from my community. I can, at one and the same time, bring them a meal, or help babysit their children, while doing all I can to have them put into FEMA camps for extradition. There is nothing inconsistent in the least with doing both of those things at the same time.

Indeed, if I don’t seek their removal, I am not loving my White Anglo Saxon neighbor by allowing their presence and influence be diminished in the Nation built for the White Anglo Saxon Christian.

Rev. Dorris’ danger as a Christian clergy is by allowing his political acquiescence to govern his moral disposition. Rev. Dorris has completely forgotten his duty to love God and his neighbor. Rev. Dorris has forgotten his love for God by failing the first commandment. Dorris seems not to understand that by swamping us with practitioners of other religions from third world countries that the gods they bring with them are being prioritized over the God of the Bible as their gods will now receive equal consideration by the same NWO elites who brought them here.

Dorris has allowed the alien and strange to become a symbol of evangelistic possibility at the cost of the souls of his White Anglo Saxon Christian brothers.

But … by all means, I do pray that while we are trying to save our nation that we should speak Christ to those strangers and aliens who hate Christ and hate His church. Preferably, when they are in the kind of camps the Japs were during WW II. (Which by the way would be high living for them considering where the living conditions of where they came from.)

Well, at least, when they aren’t trying to stuff, pin, and sink our 4 y/o grandchildren into a horse trough full of snow with a mop handle.

RJD writes,

You are not permitted to hate the neighbor because the state failed. You can seek national correction without abandoning personal faithfulness. When politics reshapes your posture toward the lost, it has exceeded its authority and must be resisted.

Bret responds,

1.) It is the very gnard of love to advocate for legislation to round up illegals to ship them back to their country of origin while giving them extra hand me downs I find in the attic so their children won’t play in the street naked.

2.) Scripture calls for us to “hate that which is evil.” If strangers, aliens, and foreigners are evil is it ok to hate them then?

3.) I wonder if RJD would have faulted Cortes for all the hatred he showed to the Aztecs?

4.) Try a thought experiment here. Pretend, if you can, that it is the 12th century. For whatever reasons the European elite has decided to import Mooselimb hordes into European homelands. You know with each boatload of Mooselimbs that settle in your once Christian land that your Christian faith is going to be, soon enough, jettisoned because these Christ haters get to vote.

Would Jerry say it is “hate” to want to keep the Mooselimbs at arm’s length?

Vos On The Implications Of The Image Of God In Man

“The man bears God’s image means much more than that he is a spirit and possesses understanding, will, etc. It means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God. This is the nature of man. That is to say, there is no sphere of life that lies outside their relationship with God and in which religion would not be the ruling principle. According to the Roman Catholic conception, there is a natural man who functions in the world, and that natural man adopts a religion that takes place beyond his nature. According to our conception, our entire nature should not be free from God at any point; the nature of man must be worship from beginning to end. According to the deeper Protestant conception, the image does not exist only in correspondence with God but in being disposed toward God. God’s nature is, as it were, the stamp; our nature is the impression made by this stamp. Both fit together.

Geerhardus Vos
Reformed Dogmatics Vol. II – pg. 13-14

1.) This quote proves that Vos would have abominated R2K with its teaching that there are spheres of life that lie outside the Christian’s relationship with God and in which the Christian religion is not to be the ruling principle.

2.) This quote also attacks the Thomistic Roman Catholic paradigm of Natural law. When Vos offers;

According to the Roman Catholic conception, there is a natural man who functions in the world, and that natural man adopts a religion that takes place beyond his nature. According to our conception, our entire nature should not be free from God at any point; the nature of man must be worship from beginning to end. According to the deeper Protestant conception, the image does not exist only in correspondence with God but in being disposed toward God.

Vos is telling us that one can’t excise the natural man in order to place him in a natural law realm that isn’t conditioned by religion. Religion does not take place beyond man’s nature. Thomists (Roman Catholic and “Reformed”) are the ones who will advocate that the image of God in man only exists in correspondence with God. The Reformed always taught this was not the case but rather that the image of God in man was found in man being disposed toward God, when not in rebellion against God.

3.) Natural Law advocates work assiduously to make sure that religion is not the ruling principle in every area of life. Whether it is the stout Natural Law types like R2K, or whether it is the Amber Ale Natural Law types, both try to place some kind of buffer zone between religion and every area of life to the end of muting the impact of religion.