A Few Words On Dispensationalism & A Book List

 

“[i]f Higher Criticism is the error of the Bible-disbeliever, “Dispensationalism “, as it is called, is the error of many a Bible-believer.”

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;

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

Charles Ryrie in his 1965 book seeking to bring Dispensationalism up to date 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. Ryrie failed to understand that God is eschatologically done with Israel as a nation-State. Modern Israel is irrelevant to God’s ongoing macro plan of redemption or eschatology.

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.

___

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.”

Also, I am beginning to understand some of the leavening effect that remains inasmuch as there is a good amount of Plymouth Brethren hermeneutic that remains in R2K

A Prayer of Confession From Calvin & Commentary

“Lord God, eternal and almighty Father, we confess and acknowledge without pretense before your holy Majesty, that we are poor sinners, conceived and born in iniquity and corruption; prone to do what is evil, INCAPABLE OF ANY GOOD; and that in our depravity, we ENDLESSLY TRANSGRESS YOUR HOLY COMMANDMENTS. And so, in your just judgment, we deserve ruin and damnation. But Lord, we are displeased with ourselves for having offended you, and we condemn ourselves and our vice with true repentance, longing God for your grace to relieve our distress. May you, therefore, have mercy upon us, most gentle and merciful God and Father, in the name of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord. And as you blot out our vices and blemishes, extend and increase the graces of your Holy Spirit to us day by day, so that as we acknowledge our unrighteousness with all our heart, we might feel the sorrow that gives birth to true penitence, which as we mortify our sins may produce fruits of righteousness and innocence pleasing to you, through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

AMEN

John Calvin
Prayer of Confession

Note Calvin’s confessing that even those in Christ are INCAPABLE OF ANY GOOD. This lack of any good is according to God’s absolute standard. According to God’s absolute standard of righteousness even those in Christ are incapable of any good. This is all in terms of the Greek word Hamartia, which means “to fall short.” As Christians even our best of deeds fall short of God’s perfection and so even our best of deeds have need to be imputed with Christ’s righteousness. Calvin understood that no Christian could offer any of their good works before God saying … “This one, Holy Father, stands on its own apart from Christ’s righteousness imputed to it.”

So, no Christian ever frees himself from sin as Hamartia (falling short). Even our best of works, to be accepted by God, must be imputed with the righteousness of Jesus Christ. However, Christians can be free of Anomia (Lawlessness) in the sense of being free of being against the law or in the sense of being free from being hostile to God’s law. Regeneration gives us a love for God’s law so that we no longer live in Anomia (Lawlessness). So, as regenerate and in Union with Christ we still fall short of God’s perfect standard and so must confess our sins as Calvin leads us in the opening prayer always fleeing to Christ’s righteousness as our righteousness.

Calvin reinforces all this when he goes on to confess, “WE ENDLESSLY TRANSGRESS YOUR HOLY COMMANDMENTS.” Even our good works that are part of a Holy Spirit given sanctification are good works as from those who endlessly transgress God’s commandments. There is nothing we speak, think, or do that isn’t an endless transgression of God’s Holy Commandments. The problem, of course, isn’t with the Holy Spirit in us. The problem is that we live in a fallen tent and as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it; only our death puts an end to sin.

This being “incapable of any good,” works in us a proper humility understanding that all of our righteousness is in Christ alone.

If any of us thought we could offer up even one performance (good work) that was free of any need of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness it could only be because we have not yet come to understand God’s righteous standard.

The power of the Holy Spirit to conform us to Christ is not to be diminished but even considering that our confession should be “We are unprofitable servants” (Luke 17:10). Here Jesus teaches that even in obedience, the servant should humbly confess that his obedience is only what is to be expected.

This prayer by Calvin communicates all this.

What A Nation Is … What It Means To Lose A Nation

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.

Egalitarianism Is The New Gospel

“Egalitarianism is Atheism because it despises the order that the good God has established in this world and would, if it could, kick God off His throne saying He had no right to make some people better than others.”

Rev. Michael Spangler
Old Paths Podcast

This is consistent with what I said yesterday in the sermon; “Egalitarianism is a denial of the Creator-Creature distinction having the consequence of dethroning God and enthroning sovereign man.”

One cannot be an egalitarian and a Christian at one and the same time because to do so is to reinterpret Christianity through an Cultural Marxist grid that holds that man is the definer of all reality. One cannot flatten all the God ordained distinctions as egalitarianism does without necessarily flattening at the same time the distinction between the Creator and the creature. Only with the destruction of the Creator-creature distinction can the project to destroy all other distinctions between man and man be successful and once the Creator-creature distinction is snuffed out all other distinctions are merely arbitrary — social constructs — and will be wiped out.

Now, since the above is true, and as of recently NAPARC churches have affirmed egalitarianism by condemning Kinism – a doctrine that merely affirms the Creator-creature distinction — therefore we must conclude that NAPARC churches are of their father the Devil.

It is not too late for NAPARC churches to pull back from the abyss of unbelief and rebellion. There is still time for them to heed the long historical record of their Father’s testimony against them concerning this trajectory they are on. There is still time for them to heed the few ministerial voices seeking to love them by calling them back from the abyss. As Christ’s ambassadors we plead with you to pull back from this egalitarianism that has become idolatry and Atheism to you. Why would you wound so severely the bride of Christ? Why would you do such damage to your own souls? Why would you overthrow God’s order and providence in order to gain the applause of those on their way to perdition?

Book Review — “Lies My LIberal Teacher Told Me”

Completed … “Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me,” by Wilfred Reilly.” Reilly does a good job at quick overviews of various strains of the Cultural Marxist DEI PC narrative that has the white people in this nation under its sway. The summ effect of Reilly’s book is to give white people especially the ability to easily disassemble some of the major myths that are used to make white people feel guilty for their past. Along the way Reilly, often using a statistical approach, reveals the lies that are sold as “everybody knows this is truth,” as inflicted by secondary Government school teachers to University Professors.

Many of the sources that Reilly cites are from books that deal uniquely with the issue being covered in a particular chapter – and are books that I myself have read in the past. For example, in Reilly’s chapter that overturns the lie that Sen. Joseph McCarthy created a witch hunt atmosphere which was completely manufactured, Reilly appeals a great deal to M. Stanton Evans’ book, “Blacklisted by History.” Another example is Reilly’s appeal to the book “White Cargo” in order to overturn the lie that teachers tell that somehow black slavery was a uniquely heinous crime committed by White Westerners against the sons of Africa. “White Cargo” was one book I read years ago that made Reilly’s argument easy to navigate through. Still, having all these resources referenced in one place in order to overthrow the lies of the cultural false narrative is quite helpful.

Along the way Reilly skewers other assorted lies besides the ones touched on above. Reilly deals with the common lie taught that the Indians were noble savages who were spoiled by the arrival of the white man. Reilly deals with the lie that the 1960s counterculture was an Aquarius Utopia that advanced the happiness of nubile women who freely gave themselves in multiple and random sexual encounters. Reilly pulls back the curtain and reveals a wee bit of the flotsam and jetsam that became of many in that generation because of the lie that the Sexual Revolution was great for women and Hippies were the good guys.

Next up Reilly exposes the nonsense that somehow white people need to be ashamed of themselves for the clause in the US Constitution that held that black slaves were only to be counted as 3/5ths of a person for taxing and representation purposes. In this chapter Reilly still presupposes that slavery was wrong (a view I do not share) and argues that the 3/5ths clause was a mercy pursued against slavery as pushed by opponents of slavery. Reilly argues that by insisting on a 3/5ths clause that the Northerners were insuring that the South would NOT get the upper hand in voting in the US House and in the Electoral College by having a greater population count that would swamp Northern numbers. By only counting each slave as 3/5ths a person Southern power was cut and so in Reilly’s reckoning that was a good thing.

The chapter I learned the most from was his chapter defending European Colonization as a net positive for those peoples who were colonized. Here Reilly argues that the advancements in technology, education, medicine and legal infrastructure has to be considered in the consideration of whether or not Colonialism was a good or bad thing. Reilly makes it clear that this lie that all Colonialism was only evil all the time is one of the main lynch pins of Marxist thought that is used against the White European. So contentious is this issue that Poli-Sci Professor, “Bruce Gilley” work supporting the positive good of Colonialism has caused a major uproar in this field of study with attempts to ruin Gilley merely because he dared suggest that colonialism was a positive good. Reilly, also, in this chapter notes that colonialism has been pursued throughout history and that the Western White man is hardly uniquely guilty (if guilt is to be assigned at all) of somehow being uniquely evil in his colonial work. This chapter, for me, was worth the price of the volume.

The chapter I disagree the most with was the chapter that defended dropping the Nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I don’t think Reilly has done his research here. Reilly argues the traditional case that the dropping of the bombs saved American lives that would have been cost with an invasion of the Japanese homeland. However, other works suggest that the Japs had already agreed to the very same terms of surrender that were finally presented to them after the bombs had been dropped. In other words, we could have had the Jap surrender before the bombs being dropped on the same terms that were achieved before the bombs were dropped. So, this chapter left me unconvinced that the dropping of the Nukes on the Japs was not evil and unnecessary.

Next up is the lie that White flight in the 50s-70s was cause by racism. Reilly argues that this can not be sustained and that it was a matter of white flight being due to an uptick in the socio-economic status of White people during that period.

If you are new to these issues it would be a good book to get ahold of. I have a niece, for example, who I wish would read this volume but I suggest she is so far over the falls now that she can’t be rescued. This book is important because of people like my niece have bought into many of the lies that this volume unravels and have organized their lives consistent with those lies that they were told by their teachers.