Peter Goeman on Dispensationalism

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If you remember like the liberal movement in the mid 1900s, that was coming out of the post mill all mill circles.

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And what ends up happening, you have like Gresham Machen who like creates an alliance with the dispensational pre -millennialists.

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And the reason was because they were, they were so glued to the text.

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In fact, one of my mentors, Larry Pettigrew used to have a saying, which he probably got from somewhere else, but pre -millennialists don't go liberal.

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Welcome once again to the conversations that matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a treat for you today.

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I have received, I don't know how many requests to talk about eschatology over the years and. Briefly stated.

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I know I've explained this in more detail in previous podcasts, but the reason I haven't delved into this much is because my focus has been on other,

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I think more pressing issues related to social justice and now liberalism and those kinds of things in the church.

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And, um, it's not because I don't think eschatology matters because it certainly does. And it's not because I don't think it's interesting because I think there are things about it that are interesting.

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Obviously, if the Bible's interesting, then what it says about the end times is also interesting. Um, but, uh,

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I've just, I've wanted to, I think, keep a, uh, an alliance together of people from varying eschatological views who are focused on things like, let's make sure that we're opposing abortion and transgender stuff and in libraries and in schools and, um, other social matters, immigration and, um, and all the things that of course, if you're a regular listener, you know, we talk about, but it has come time for me to delve into this topic and, uh,

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I'm going to do it, uh, as fairly as I know how to do it, respecting the scholarly process and also, um, giving you who

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I consider to be some really good articulate, uh, voices on these topics. And so we're going to delve into a number of different eschatological viewpoints for your benefit.

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So you can understand better if that's something you haven't studied in detail as much. And, um, and we will see how these things do affect some of the other beliefs that we also hold.

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So, um, this is my first episode and I'm, this isn't live. So, uh, this, this may be something

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I'm recording that you're listening and this is months down the line, but, uh, we have with us a special guest from Shepherds Theological Seminary, professor of Old Testament and biblical languages, uh,

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Dr. Peter Gaiman. And he is, he's been there at Shepherds Theological Seminary since 2017.

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He loves guiding students through God's word. Uh, he is an expert in theology.

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He likes talking about pop culture. He likes, uh, obviously biblical Hebrew. He has an MDiv, THM, and PhD in Old Testament studies from the

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Master's Seminary. And so without further ado, welcome Dr. Peter Gaiman. Thank you for coming and being with us.

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Oh, it's a, it's a real privilege to be here. I've listened to many of your episodes, really appreciate all the work you've done on social justice.

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I actually even have your book. I forgot to tell you that. So it's just a real privilege to be here and engage in the conversation.

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Oh, that's an honor. Which one do you have? So it's the social justice one that you wrote. Um, the original one, it's like the blue cover.

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What was the title? Social justice goes to church. Yeah. Social justice goes to church. Yeah. So I think you were, you were like, you had just released it and run a deal on it.

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And I was following some of your stuff and I was like, you know what I've, and I had been studying the issues. And so I was trying to get as many books as I could.

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So yours made the pile. Oh, well, that's awesome. Yeah. That was an early one. That was 20. I want to say at the end of 2020,

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I think that, yeah, I think you're right. Yep. So, um, I was a little ahead of the curve, I suppose. Cause I didn't know what was going to happen in 2020.

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And, um, that's awesome though, that you have that. And, um, I would love to, uh, you know, talk about that topic with you, but I think this is a really pressing topic that, uh,

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I, I, I suppose for me, like looking at the political landscape, I haven't really wanted to delve into this, but looking at the theological and the church landscape,

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I have noticed an uptick in people saying dispensationalism is a heresy, full stop.

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Uh, if you believe in dispensationalism, you're subversive dispensate, uh, dispensationalism is the root of, uh, political problems and it's why the church isn't involved in politics.

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And you've probably heard all these objections, I'm sure. And so I want to, um, provide a pathway for, for those who do believe those or say those things for them to maybe simmer down a little and realize that most of the

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Americans in, uh, that are Christians, the United States, they are, they're going to be dispensational, whether it's from a charismatic background or even just a non -denominational

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Bible background. There's that is the vast majority of Christians in the United States and the people who vote, uh, for conservative, uh, causes and those kinds of things.

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And so I, this has become an issue in my mind, uh, on the political front, that is in social front of it, it's becoming a barrier to being able to work with people a little bit.

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And so I know we're probably not going to delve into that much, but I've already explained this to some extent, but I'm, I, I think we're, you know,

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I, I'm assuming that you probably track with me on that and you can see these kinds of barriers coming up and I'm hoping you can help us get over that a bit by showing a biblical case for dispensate dispensationalism, showing how, you know, maybe there are versions that are heretical, but there, there are certainly versions that are not.

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And, um, and just educating us on this, cause we desperately need it out there. So, uh, maybe to start off, if you could just walk us through what dispensing dispense,

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I keep mispronouncing it, dispensationalism, you could walk us through what that is as opposed to covenant theology.

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Yeah. And I would say we need a different marketing system because the name is hard to pronounce. The name doesn't really deal with what, you know, the system's about.

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So it's like, you know, it's one of the things about, uh, the whole debate actually goes back to how dispensationalism came as a moniker to describe the whole movement.

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It was actually from the detractors of the premillennial movement to call them dispensationalists, even though that's never the name they called themselves.

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In fact, uh, recently there's just been a lot of really good scholarly work on this recently. And, uh,

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Crawford Gribben just wrote a, you know, probably the premier biography on Darby recently.

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And he showed how Darby himself never liked referring to dispensations, uh, would never have claimed to be a dispensationalist, uh, you know, just used premillennial language.

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And so it's often, you know, we, we often confuse things with the titles themselves.

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And so just admittedly, I think that there's a lot of that going on. A lot of people, you know, they'll define dispensationalism in ways that, you know, when

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I hear it, I'm like, yeah, those guys are losers, whoever they are. But is that really what dispensationalism is?

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You know, that's the, uh, that's the question. So the way I would define dispensationalism, you know, in the authoritative, you know, inerrant, uh, style, no,

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I'm just kidding. Uh, is dispensationalism really is just a system of theology that's built primarily on a hermeneutical commitment to consistency and originalism.

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Okay. I like using those terms, consistency and originalism, because they really,

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I think they, they help people understand. The terms that used to be used would be a literal grammatical historical hermeneutic, and that's true.

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But a lot of people just don't know what that means now. So I think in our current cultural context, it's better to understand it in the context of consistent and originalism.

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And so the whole intent of dispensationalism is to read the Bible as it applied in its original context.

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The author's intent is being primary in our interpretation, and we would interpret it just like anything.

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You know, I find it ironic where, you know, we have a lot of debates currently about how one is to interpret the constitution, for example.

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And what's really fascinating to me is that from a dispensational hermeneutical lens, you know, we would say, yeah, we believe in originalism, like in the sense that what the authors intended it to mean is what it ought to mean, we can't invent a new meaning and put it on the constitution, and the same would apply from a dispensational perspective to reading the

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Bible, is we can't invent new meanings and put them into the text. We need to pay special attention to what

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God, through His Holy Spirit, has inspired the author of Scripture to write down and preserve for us in His context, and in that environment, we should be able to discern the meaning.

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So how that would—and this is obviously how I would describe this. I think maybe my covenantal brothers and sisters might describe it differently, but where that might contrast with covenant theology, for example, would be that there's this openness—you could say it that way—an openness to allowing the reinterpretation of Scripture.

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So the thing that covenant theologians are actually very adamant about is this idea of New Testament priority.

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And, you know, many of your listeners will have heard that phrase before, some in a positive, some in a negative light. And so this idea of New Testament priority means that the

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New Testament is the clearest revelation that we have from God, and so we can go back and reinterpret the

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Old Testament—or they use different adjectives sometimes— reconfigure, reimagine, understand the true meaning or fulfillment of.

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And so the New Testament is, we take our understanding of what the New Testament means, and then we go back and say, even though the

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Old Testament seems to be saying something else, because we know what the New Testament says, the Old Testament has to mean this then.

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And so the subtle pushback from somebody like myself would be what we need to strive for is not a

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New Testament priority, but a passage priority, meaning that the context of a passage is where that meaning will be found.

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So a passage can never mean what it's never meant, to say it that way. And so that really is the defining debate in the hermeneutical landscape between the different camps, is how do you let passages interpret, or how should we interpret passages of Scripture?

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How do they interrelate? And so my proposition then would be that if we are understanding each passage within its own context, in the way that the original author intended, then we put together all of Scripture, Old and New Testament, in a harmony, and it gives us a cohesive whole story, which will help us understand everything then.

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And I think covenant theologians would also say the same thing, but we're approaching it from a different foundational understanding.

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And so if that's true, if that's true then, to kind of summarize this, if my hermeneutical presupposition is correct, then that is going to lead to probably the defining mark of dispensationalism, where there's an understanding that Israel is not the same thing as the

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Church. They're related, to be sure. It's not like they're unrelated at all. In fact, Scripture is very clear about their relationship in Christ.

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But the reality is that there's a future for Israel, as portrayed by the prophets in New Testament. And so that's where a lot of people get really upset with dispensationalists.

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And they say, you know, you guys are just running cover for the secret Jewish armada who's messing up the world and all that stuff.

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And it's like, okay, well, that's a whole different discussion, but let's just talk about what the Bible says. And the

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Bible, I would argue, makes a clear distinction in a prophetic future, not just for Israel, but for other nations as well.

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But it's okay, from my perspective, to have that future for nations, not just for individuals.

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So hopefully that wasn't too long, but that's kind of how I see the main foundational issues. Yeah. There's so many questions.

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You mentioned Darby, and I know John Nelson Darby is somewhat of a, like a marginalized figure now, even in political discussions.

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In fact, I was surprised some people know his name, but his name is becoming more and more frequently brought up as evidence that usually the political thing is that American evangelicals support the state of the modern state of Israel in some fashion.

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And this is related to because of John Nelson Darby and John Nelson Darby, though, was funded by Jewish interests.

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And so you can't trust anything in his Bible because it really wasn't out of any spiritual conviction.

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It was literally just a political plan for Zionists and specifically the

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Roth child, that's usually what's brought up. And I looked at this once and I was like, okay, so the Roth child's had their money everywhere.

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And I guess the publishing company that he used or something had some investment from Roth child's, which like is meaningless.

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It obviously that doesn't carry the weight of the argument being made, but you hear this all the time.

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And. I would be curious if you could respond to that because I think what really what's behind all that is this assumption that dispensationalism is novel.

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It's so new and the purpose for it arising is this political thing.

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So we can just dismiss it on those grounds, which I think there might be a powerful argument in there.

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If it really is novel and new, usually things that are novel and new are wrong. Like if 1900 years of church history, people weren't saying this and all of a sudden someone discovered this.

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That's a cause for alarm or at least looking into it. So is it novel?

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Is it new? Is it for a political purpose? Yeah, no, there, there's a lot to unpack in there.

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And, you know, obviously we don't have time to go through all of that, but I think that's such a great question because this is,

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I think what interests most people is they're connecting what they view in the political sphere right now and, you know,

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I mean, for lack of a better term, dispensationalism ends up being the scapegoat saying, you know, you are the reason a lot of this has happened now and, but, but here's the, how

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I would respond to that on the one hand, you know, you mentioned this earlier and I completely agree with you, the way to approach this isn't through some kind of emotionalism or, you know,

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I heard this on a podcast or read it on a blog post. You got to go back to the original sources. And a classic example of this is this idea that the rapture never existed before Darby, that he invented it.

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In fact, so many Christians have this idea that Darby, you know, took the idea of the rapture from a girl,

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Margaret McDonald, who was really influenced in this, in these charismatic circles and she had dreams and Darby heard it.

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It was like, wow, that's a great idea. I'm going to invent that, you know, and it's going to be so great. And you say, okay. And there have been really prominent

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Christians who have bought into that, you know, today, but even if you look back at Martin Lloyd Jones, he actually talked about that too.

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And so it's not just like these nobodies that were convinced by this, but I go back to, you know, the, you know, the recent biography that came out by Crawford Gribben, and this is, again, just his really good historical research, reading the writings of Darby and those all around him and Gribben's book, by the way, was published by Oxford Press.

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So it's not like it was self -published or anything like that. I mean, this was really fine academic work.

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Yeah. And one of the things that he found was that Darby actually, so it's specifically stated in the writings around Darby and some of his friends that they know exactly where he first heard the idea of the rapture from.

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And it was from a guy by the name of Thomas Tweedy, who was a missionary in South America. And so if you think about it, we have, you know, actual historical evidence for where Darby first heard the idea of a pre -tribulational rapture.

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And so it already was in existence prior to Darby, and it was one of the missionaries from the

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Brethren movement, who was in South America, who had mentioned that, and yet you'll still see most people saying, okay,

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Margaret MacDonald was the one who first came up with this, and it's repeated in all these seminary classrooms, and... But that's, to me, is one of the telltale signs of whether or not somebody is actually willing to have a real conversation on these things, is if they're willing to say, okay,

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I had always heard that, but I can actually see in the historical evidence that that's not true anymore. And so, yeah, we can actually argue about whether or not the pre -tribulational rapture existed in the early

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Church, or whether it, you know, developed in the early years or whatever, but there's too much evidence now for that to say that Darby was the sole inventor of it.

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I mean, William Watson had a book, Dispensationalism Before Darby, where he just looked at English sources, so only

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English from the 17th century, showing where people believed that the Church was going to be removed before the

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Tribulation. And so that's at least tracing it back to the 1600s, only in the English -speaking world.

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So again, you look at these things, they're all available for us, but of course we have to read the books, we have to do the research, and my good friend,

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Corey Marsh, and his co -editor, James Fazio, just came up with a book called

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Discovering Dispensationalism. And just by its very title, a lot of people are just turned off by it because they're like, oh,

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I don't want anything to do with it, but it's a really great historical analysis. They go through the different eras of Church history, saying, okay, dispensationalism as a system, obviously nobody should make an argument that dispensationalism as a system existed prior to Darby and Schofield.

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They systematized it, like Calvin systematized Reformed thought, and that's fine, but the reality is that the components of dispensational thought existed throughout

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Church history, whether it be a distinction between Israel and the Church, a future for Israel among the nations in the millennial kingdom, you know, all these things that a lot of people say it's so original,

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I mean, there's just so much evidence within the early Church writings, within the medieval period even.

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You know, I read another book recently, there's so many good books coming out on this now. Michael Spiegel from Dallas just came out with a book on the early

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Church eschatology, and he examined Irenaeus specifically, and Irenaeus, you read him, he sounds a lot like dispensationalists today, and that's a second century father.

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That's one of the things I wanted to ask you about, because, so my understanding has been that, as a system, it didn't arise until the late 19th century, but that in the form of Kiliasm, I hope

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I'm pronouncing that right, in the early Church, there is this rudimentary form of premillennialism, and that some, so historic premillennialists will claim this, and maybe we can get into the differences between historic and then dispensational premillennialism, but that they will claim it as theirs to separate themselves and say that the early

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Church believed what they teach, and now, but that it was actually so rudimentary, the basis for both systems, for both dispensational premillennialism and historic premillennialism are actually found in the early

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Church, and that sounds to me like what you're saying. Right, yeah, and I think it's important to understand, nobody really should debate this, is that the early

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Church was, well, let me say it this way, because you want to say it in a fair way, is that you'd have to say it this way, all the evidence we have, we'll say it that way, so out of all the evidence we have on the early

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Church, is that they were almost universally premillennial, and so that would include

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Irenaeus, it would include Tertullian, it would include Justin Martyr, all of them are definitively premill, all right?

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And so one of the interesting things about that, I don't think you can really deny that.

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In fact, I posted a quote by Justin Martyr recently on my

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Twitter page, where Martyr says that all Orthodox Christians of our time are premillennialists, and it's like, wow, okay, that's pretty distinct there.

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Now what's interesting about that is you have somebody like Justin Martyr who did not believe in a difference between Israel and the

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Church. He thought that the Church was Israel, okay, so he thought the Church was New Israel, and in one sense, so I think he's wrong on that, but I think it's okay, you shouldn't expect that every single person in Church history is going to believe the same thing.

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There's all these variations of belief, but out of all the evidence we have, the early eschatological position of the

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Church is premillennial. In fact, they used that to argue against that just insipid

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Gnosticism. It was actually a good apologetic tool, saying, listen, the spiritual isn't all there is, because when

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God comes back, it's going to be a physical kingdom, and so they use that as an argument against Gnosticism.

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And so even apologetically, it's very helpful. So you asked a little bit about the difference between historic and dispensational premill, and I think a lot of people make it more of a difference than there actually is, but the way that I typically—and you might ask that question in all fairness and get 10 different answers from 10 different people, so you're just going to get my answer, so here you go.

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So the way I would answer that is simply that historic premill allows there to be flexibility on whether or not you could be a covenant theologian and hold to it.

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So you could believe that the Church is the fulfilled Israel or the new Israel and not believe in a specific future for Israel, but still hold to a future 1 ,000 -year kingdom that's going to be brought about by the return of Christ.

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And so I think that's probably the biggest difference there is that you can believe in the timeframe of premillennialism eschatologically, but the ecclesiology and maybe even the framework of covenant theology, you're not going to buy—or you're okay with that, and you're not going to buy into the, as I would say, the dispensational distinction between Israel and the

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Church kind of idea. Although I need to also add with that that it's kind of murky on that because you do have people who historically have held to covenant theology that have held to a difference between Israel and the

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Church. So I wish it was clear, but I know you've studied a lot of history and you just know that those things get murky sometimes as you can't fit people nicely into boxes that way.

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Well, it seems like most of the covenantal guys I know, when I ask them about this, they will say, of course, all of Israel is going to be saved, and that means ethnic

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Jews. And I'm like, well, that's being called dispensationalism by some people online.

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But, you know, clearly you're—I mean, Jonathan Edwards believed that, right? I think towards the end of his life, he's reading the newspaper and looking at events in the

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Middle East and thinking, how does this fit in? Because he thought that the ethnic Jews were going to some return to the land or something like that.

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I remember reading that, I think, in Marston's biography of him. Yeah. So go ahead.

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I was just going to add on that, because that's a really great point, because the traditional, the

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Princetonian form of post -millennialism, a lot of the enemies of dispensationalism will often come from the post -mill camps, and I have a lot of really great post -mill friends, and I'm thankful for that, but one of the things that's really fascinating to me is you look at Charles Hodge and his great systematic theology, and he was such a great representative of that Princetonian post -mill movement, and he held to a future for Israel, and in his systematic theology, he talks about that.

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He even believed in a future Antichrist and stuff like that. And so you're just like, wait, you're post -mill, and you do all these things.

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You say all these things that dispensationalists get accused of. And so it is kind of fascinating to see that overlap.

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Well, let's talk a little bit more about dispensationalism itself, theologically. Like when

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I talk to a dispensationalist, typically our conversation starts in Daniel, I don't know if that's across the board, but it's like, let's open to Daniel.

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If I talk to a post -mill guy, it's always like Psalm 2 or something, right?

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That's where they like to start. And if it's an Amill guy, I guess it's like when

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Jesus is talking about, what's the name of that discourse? Is it the

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Olivet Discourse? Yeah, I think it's the Olivet Discourse that typically my friends who are

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Amill want to start with. And I've wondered, did the starting points then determine where you end up on this?

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But I think what you said at the beginning was good about the Hermeneutic, because a good friend of mine, maybe

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I'll even have him represent the Amill side, I don't know, Russell Fuller, who was a Hebrew guy at Southern Seminary for years, and he teaches now privately, but he is someone who believes that there's a future for ethnic

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Israel. He also believes that the promises or the prophecies,

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I should say, that are in the Old Testament made about Jesus aren't always clear from the

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Old Testament. So I remember having a conversation with him once and he's like, well, we have to read the Old Testament through the New Testament, essentially.

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And so that's, I think, how he comes up with the Amill understanding of things.

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Whereas what you said seems different than that, which is, I guess my curiosity would be like, how do you jive things where Jesus seems to take a prophecy and you look back at the

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Old Testament, you're like, I don't see that here, but I guess, right? OK, this is the one saying that.

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So does that fit into the grammatical historical approach that you were speaking of before?

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Yeah, no, that's such a great question. And really, so the question you're asking, which,

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I mean, I think it's exactly the right question because it really is the crux of the debate, is how does the

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New Testament use the Old Testament? How does Jesus use it? How do the Apostles use it? And so to be completely transparent, that's probably the main reason why people don't wind up premillennial.

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There's actually so many, there are so many cool quotes from like postmill and Amill guys where they say, you know, if we just take the

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Old Testament prophecies by themselves, we have to be premillennial. And you're just like, yeah, that is exact.

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Often one of the things that I'll throw out to people just as kind of a jest is that if you didn't have the

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New Testament, what eschatological position would you be? And if they're honest, they would have to say premillennial because it talks about a future for Israel that comes after a tribulation,

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Zechariah 14, all those things. And so then the question is, does the New Testament change things? And so our presupposition, you know, it does go back always to my presuppositions, right?

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So my presupposition is that God is going to reveal himself through human language in the way that humans communicate.

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So when you and I communicate, for example, we had exchanged a few emails trying to set up times and things like that.

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Well, when we set up our time, I didn't read that and say, I think he's speaking metaphorically about just some time in the future.

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You know, it was just like, no, you gave me a time. And I was like, well, I know when that's going to be, and I don't want to be a jerk and not show up for that, you know, kind of idea.

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And that's how we normally communicate as human beings. But then for some reason, and I know, you know, there are reasons for this, but in my opinion, they're not good reasons.

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We'll take the details of scripture and then kind of minimize those and say, well, this is probably allegorical here and things like that.

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But the reality is that when Jesus uses the Old Testament and the apostles use the Old Testament, there are some difficult issues, no question about it.

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But so far, and again, this is where, you know, some of the listeners will be like, okay, he is totally crazy, but I'm going to say it anyway, is that so far in each of those instances that I've studied,

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I have not found an area where a compelling case couldn't be made for the fact that Jesus or the apostles were using the

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Old Testament contextually. And in fact, one of the greatest influences in my life on that issue was actually amillennialist

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Greg Beal. So Greg Beal, of all people, you know, he's an amillennialist. His hermeneutical works and his little book on the

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New Testament use of the Old, he gave principles there saying like, hey, we need to be looking for them to use things contextually.

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And very, very influential on little old me, you know, who doesn't agree amillennial, but really he just had such a great framework, so I really appreciate him for that.

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And the book I always recommend people on that is the book by Abner Chow, the biblical...and

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it's the hermeneutics of the biblical writers. And I think he makes just a fantastic case for the fact that in these difficult passages with Jesus using the

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Old Testament or the apostles using the Old Testament, they're actually using it in a way that is contextual with what the author of the

29:35

Old Testament intended. Now, so I'll say that like as a, you know, period, exclamation point, whatever.

29:41

But then I'll take a step back and say, even if it could be proved that there were one or two passages that were not used contextually, everybody still should agree that, you know, 99 % of the

29:54

New Testament use of the Old is a contextual use. So maybe there could be an allowance if we could somehow definitively prove that this was used non -contextually, and then maybe we open ourselves up to say, well, this was a special use that the

30:09

Holy Spirit inspired this author. But, you know, we're talking, you know, most of the time it's not even debated whether or not they're used contextually.

30:17

OK, so maybe the next place to go to would be.

30:25

The elements of continuity and discontinuity between church and Israel, then, so you go you take a walk through scripture, right, and you see these covenants forming between God and Abraham and God and David, and in each one there is a promise to descendants land is included in this.

30:47

There's going to be a future kingdom, and you walk through, as you just said, you get to even the later prophets right before Jesus or 400 years before Jesus comes back.

30:57

And they are saying the same thing, that there's going to be this restoration coming. And and so there's this imminency or anticipation that obviously that's why what the

31:09

Jewish people were confused about Jesus at first, thinking that he's he's that person. He's going to usher in all the things that we've read about and and they were ready for it.

31:20

So then this thing called the church, though, is instituted by Christ.

31:27

And I think that's where most of the battle now is, is that does the church absorb all these promises somehow?

31:33

We're because Abraham was looking for the city without foundation. Was that the church?

31:39

Was he just looking at the spiritual reality? It wasn't really going to be long term, a physical land like those were training wheels to get us to understand this greater meaning.

31:48

I don't know if Augustine was the one who came up with some of these interpretations or where that came from.

31:53

But it does seem like if you read most of the magisterial reformers, that's what they're saying.

32:00

Obviously, Catholic doctrine still holds this teaching. So maybe walk us through that.

32:07

How did that happen? And are we going to just say that most of the people who believe this in church history were wrong?

32:13

How could they get something so wrong if that's true? And then, you know, was there an element of truth to what they were saying?

32:20

Like maybe they were partially there because there there are things like does seem like the church is somewhat of a new temple.

32:26

Does seem like the people of right. So there are these elements of continuity. So maybe walk us through that. Yeah. Another great topic of discussion that we could spend hours on.

32:35

So maybe to kind of give us like a framework for that, you know, maybe

32:41

I'd say it this way. Just out of the gate, when we look at God's covenantal promises to Israel through the

32:51

Noahic—well, and I should say Noahic covenant even is fascinating to study in and of itself because that's to the whole world, all of creation, not just humanity, but all of creation is a participant in that.

33:02

And the promise specifically is to not flood the world again. And so it's interesting because if you were to ask, you know, the average

33:11

Christian, will God flood the world again? You know, most Christians would say no, absolutely not.

33:18

And you'd say why? Because God promised that he would not flood the world. So you're just like,

33:24

OK, God had promised specifically that he would not flood the world. And because of the, you know, letter of the promise, if you will, we know that that's what

33:33

God's going to do. And then you have the Abrahamic covenant promising specific things, you know, and the land boundaries aren't just—they're not just theoretical, they're very specific, you know, to the

33:46

Euphrates, to the River of Egypt. So there's these massive land boundaries which far surpass what current modern

33:53

Israel experiences today, and they actually far surpass what Israel ever experienced under the conquest and what they experienced under Solomon.

34:01

And so they have never received that land promise. So what are you going to do with that?

34:06

That's one of the big sticking issues. And of course, the counter -argument is that, well, that was just a type, and the type absolves and the counter -type.

34:14

I just—I'm not convinced by that, but that's another discussion. So you look at these promises and then you have them very distinctly laid out.

34:25

And patterning throughout Scripture is you see God being faithful to his promises throughout. For example, in the

34:31

Mosaic covenant then, which happens on the heels of the Abrahamic, God says that if you do this as a nation, you know, you will undergo famine, you'll undergo locusts, and you see that throughout

34:41

Scripture. You see them undergo famine when they sin. The whole book of Joel is about how they've sinned and now they've undergone this locust plague and all these things.

34:48

So just to the letter, fulfillment on the nation of Israel for their covenantal treachery.

34:54

And then within that same covenant, by the way, in Leviticus 26, as well as in Deuteronomy 4 and Deuteronomy 30, you have this promise that after Israel goes into exile—because even back then,

35:06

Moses saw the writing on the wall through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit saying, you will go into exile—but there's a prophecy built into the covenant that that's not going to be the end.

35:16

You will turn to the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And what's fascinating about that is that it specifically says you will be brought back into the land.

35:25

It will be given to you as an eternal inheritance. And so you say, okay, these are very specific. You go back to the principle of authorial intent and how we ought to understand those things, and you say, okay, this is really cool.

35:38

Like, we understand what Moses meant when he said that and how they would have understood it, and so that's then,

35:44

I would argue, how we should understand it. But then what ends up happening is as the New Testament comes on, you have these little bits of confusion, which is marked by the

35:54

Apostles in Acts. And Acts 1 -6 is probably the New Testament dispensational favorite verse, you know, where the

36:02

Apostles, after 40 days of the resurrected Jesus talking about the kingdom to the disciples, the disciples ask the amillennialist's least favorite question,

36:13

Lord, is it—if it's time you're going to restore the kingdom to Israel? And of course it makes no sense if Israel's the church there.

36:20

It makes no sense. But—and everyone acknowledges that, okay, they're actually asking about what they would have expected the

36:27

Old Testament to say, which is kind of weird if you had a 40 -day seminar with Jesus and you really missed a very basic component of what the kingdom was supposed to be.

36:36

And so they ask that, and Jesus says, it's not for you to know the time. Okay? And then, so the book of Acts shows that Israel just completely rejects not just Christ, but also his emissaries after resurrection.

36:47

So there's this complete rejection by the Jewish nation, and so they remain in exile.

36:53

So then the big question is, okay, well, what's going on here? And so that brings us to, like,

36:58

Augustine, which is what you were talking about, is if you fast forward a couple hundred years then, you're looking around,

37:04

Christianity has, by and large, taken over, you know, the known world, and you're just looking around saying, okay, like, this is looking pretty good,

37:14

I mean, we're able to have church councils, we can build these amazing churches, and yeah, there's this, you know, basically the only thing that's really weird is that the

37:22

Jews are just still doing their thing. They're living in rejection, and this is not maybe what we would expect.

37:29

So my take on this, again, you'd get some different opinions on this, but the way I would understand this is that Augustine's looking around, and he used to be a premillennialist, by the way, but then as he's developing his theology, he looks around and basically says, maybe this is the kingdom.

37:46

And that's how he starts to formulate his idea of the kingdom of God and how the spiritualization of some of these promises, now, he's not the one who invents that, by the way.

37:57

In fact, I'm not convinced that Augustine invents, you know, hardly anything eschatologically, but he really popularizes and systematizes a lot of that thought.

38:09

But with regard to that, he starts to really promote this idea of spiritualization.

38:18

And I think that that's more so influenced by Platonic thought than anything, the spiritual vision model, which my colleague

38:24

Mike Vlock talks a lot about, and so he has this idea that, hey, what we're observing in the world doesn't match with what we would expect if we took a literal understanding of Scripture, so let's spiritualize some of these aspects.

38:40

And then so you even have people like Eusebius then, the great church historian, making fun of the

38:45

Achilles, saying they put too much focus on the physical, but we know the spiritual's better. And so you start to see this movement then that exists long into the medieval period, where you have people doing all sorts of things, where they're really focused on the spiritual higher plane, you know, the monasticism really comes into vogue, where you have people just depriving themselves of physical goods and trying to reach this higher spiritual plane.

39:10

I was reading some of the monastic fathers the other day. It's just crazy the kinds of things that they advocated to try to reach this higher spiritual playing field, as it were.

39:20

And so really for a thousand years, there's not really anything that challenges that, until you start to get to some significant issues in the

39:29

Reformation, where you have, you know, obviously justification by faith being a huge debate, and so that becomes a major issue.

39:38

And one of the fascinating parts of that discussion is that you have a return to a literal hermeneutic and a rejection of allegory by Calvin and some of the

39:50

Reformers, and then they're actually using that new framework to argue against the

39:57

Catholic Church, saying, we can't allegorize, which I kind of skipped over this, but Origen was a huge promoter of the allegory hermeneutic, where you can read a passage and just say, ah, this doesn't really make much sense as it stands or doesn't mean as much as we want it to, so let's just start saying, when

40:13

Jesus rides the donkey, that's an allegory of the law impacting us or something like that. And so you have this running rampant through the

40:20

Church, but with the Reformers, then you have this return to a literal, grammatical, historical hermeneutic, and in fact, you have a famous quote by Luther where he says, you know, you pour into the

40:32

Church Fathers and you would have had so much better outcome if you would have just poured yourself into Greek and Hebrew and understood

40:40

Scripture that way. You're missing so much by just reading the Church Fathers. And so in the Reformation, you have this return to the hermeneutic, but they're still, in my opinion, they don't devote the time to study eschatology, and that becomes the next, you know, two or 300 years of battle, which we're still in today, is thinking through eschatological matters.

41:00

Yeah, so I mean, I know John Calvin didn't write a commentary in Revelation, and I think there's a comment where he says he doesn't really understand it enough to get into it, which is interesting, but when you were talking,

41:13

I was thinking, like, we did have, though, a number of Crusades, we had to try to take back the

41:19

Holy Land, we had Luther, who's famous for, right, his least popular book on the

41:25

Jews and their lies, but Luther is also trying to reason with the

41:30

Jews, even his last sermon, I think he makes an appeal that they would be saved, and he seems to think that this is an appropriate thing for them, that they are, in some ways, not fully complete because they've rejected their own tradition, their own, what should be their religion.

41:47

And so I'm not saying that's dispensationalism, but I'm just saying that it does seem like there is still this recognition that, hey, that land over there in the

41:56

Middle East and those people, there's something about them that is spiritually significant, like that never seemed to have gone away completely, in my estimation, at least.

42:06

And so then, obviously, it's not until, though, the 19th century when dispensationalism as a system is systematized, and maybe, you know, we could take this anywhere you want to take it,

42:19

I would like to maybe bring up some of the common objections. We already touched on it a little bit, but with Zionism, do you think if we take this reading of the

42:30

Bible that we are now compelled, because blessed is the nation who blesses

42:35

Israel, are we compelled now to support politically the modern state of Israel in a similar way to the arrangement the

42:43

United States has, is that a dispensational belief? Yeah, so one of the things that, you know, and I'm thankful for my mentors who have been really strong on this, and I think, you know, as Christians, this ought to be common sense, is that even if, so obviously if somebody disagrees with me, just don't tune out because this is,

43:02

I'm going to follow up my statement. So even if, and I would say, I do believe this, Israel is the chosen people of God in the sense that they were elect for a function in the

43:13

Old Testament. Okay. I believe the church is also chosen. Okay. But if Israel has a special role and relationship to God, and it's going to come to pass in the future, if that's true, that still doesn't downplay the fact that they are currently in rebellion and in exile, all right?

43:30

So the thing to interplay here is that we can believe something is true in Scripture about the future of Israel being very important, but they are not innocent right now in the sense that they're in rebellion against God, they're a very secular state, you know, those things, and any war crimes that they commit or things like that, they need to be held accountable for.

43:51

So, and history is, you know, history has recorded many, many of the, in like the

43:58

Palestinian -Israel conflict, there have been many, probably the wrong term, faux pas on each side.

44:05

Okay. And we can acknowledge that, and we don't give blind support in those areas.

44:10

But at the same time, we should acknowledge that if Scripture teaches there's a future for Israel, we should be, you know, supportive of that.

44:21

And there's a difference between supporting everything that somebody does versus supporting someone in general,

44:29

I guess you could say. So I guess maybe a family analogy would be good. If you have a son who's becoming an adult, and let's say he rebels, well, he's still your son.

44:39

You still have a relationship with him. You still love him. You want what's best for him. You want him to follow the

44:45

Lord. But at the same time, you also recognize that just because of what he's doing in his relationship, he hasn't turned to the

44:53

Lord. He's still in sin. And so you can't just wholeheartedly embrace him saying, yeah, you know, he is doing everything that he needs to do.

45:00

And so I think there's a appropriate perspective where you can say, yes, God has a special plan for them. And they've been, you know, it's the

45:07

Romans 9 issue where, you know, they've been given the covenants, the promises, they've been given so many different things, and that's so valuable.

45:13

And then they just threw it in God's face. And so they're still in rebellion, still in exile, but we love them.

45:21

We still care about them. We want to see them thrive. But at the same time, we can just be honest and say, but they're not where they need to be right now.

45:29

And so, you know, the whole issue of should we unilaterally support them without question?

45:34

No, I mean, I think that's kind of silly because you wouldn't do that in any kind of context where you support somebody no matter what they do.

45:42

But at the same time, you can just be honest, saying the Bible does talk about how in the future this nation will have a full -hearted repentance to God.

45:52

They will, Zechariah 12 .10, mourn as one mourns for an only child, realizing that they had crucified their

45:57

Savior. And so we can look forward to those things. But in general, we shouldn't also use, you know,

46:03

Israel as a byword or a thinking to ourselves, like, you know, everything is the problem of the

46:09

Jews and, you know, the world, all the world's issues. And that, unfortunately, I think that that's what we're seeing, even in a

46:14

Christian community today, is people say, well, let's go to the other end of the spectrum and just, you know, say only bad things about them, you know?

46:22

Right, right. Yeah, I've said before that the people, they call it being a noticer when you see that a

46:30

Jewish person is behind some kind of, uh, evil, uh, vice or social, uh, problem.

46:36

And, um, but I, I've, uh, and it's true that Jewish people tend to have an outsized influence in many influential areas because they're high performance people and every people has their in -group preferences, uh, religious

46:48

Jews in particular have kept a very, uh, even in foreign nations, they've kept an identity secure, which is, um, a fascinating topic in and of itself.

46:58

But anyway, um, I I've said though, that if you're actually a good noticer, you can notice more than one chain or one, you know, you can, you can actually see the full picture, not just one, uh, strand in the, in the fabric.

47:12

So, so not just one thread. Um, and, uh, I, I think that is happening on Israel. There is a hyper fixation, um, not to say there aren't threats, not to say there aren't, um, subversions going on through AIPAC or, um, that they push.

47:28

Obviously you go to Israel, they push some of the most liberal policies in the whole middle East are pushed by Israel, uh, regarding homosexuality and abortion and these things.

47:37

They are, they are a secular Jewish state. They're a part of the liberal order. Uh, obviously those things are true.

47:43

Um, but you know, it is, it does seem to me that when Zionism first arose and you can correct me if I'm wrong on this, you probably read more about the history.

47:53

I took a class in middle Eastern studies when I was in undergrad and studied some of this, and I've read a few books on it, but my under, this is my understanding that there were people, um, who were all over the map, uh, as far as like religious beliefs, you had secular people, uh, you had, um, a lot of post -millennialists,

48:13

I bet they would outnumber dispensationalism, uh, dispensationalists, uh, for the Christians who were supportive of Zionism.

48:20

Initially, you even had antisemites who wanted to get Jews out of their country so they could be in Israel, right?

48:27

Uh, you had all these different, um, all these different things coalescing at once.

48:33

And then of course, there's an interest in Jew, because of their history in Europe and their experience there, they want to have their own place.

48:39

That's kind of safe from molestation and those kinds of things. And, um, and this is what comes together.

48:46

It's this, you know, the Balfour declaration, all of that is this political move. It is not a, it's not motivated by dispensationalism.

48:54

In fact, I don't even know that that's a factor that should be examined to, uh, maybe, maybe it is a factor that's bigger than I think, but I, I, it doesn't come up in the literature when

49:04

I read about early Zionism. So, um, I mean, what do you think about that? Is that the big contributor here or is that minimal or where does that land?

49:12

No, I, I think you're on the right track for that because as I've studied that issue and part of the reason, just admittedly, is

49:19

I've studied it more and more over the last couple of years, because it keeps being brought up by people who are against dispensationalism is that, you know, to put it in the starkest terms possible, if it wasn't for dispensationalism,

49:32

Israel would have no modern state, and I think that that couldn't be further from the truth. Honestly. Uh, just the timing doesn't work.

49:38

If you check the chronology, the Zionist movement, uh, well, first of all, it is fascinating to, to, even as you were mentioning, there were so many different people who were supporting of the

49:49

Zionist movement or against the Zionist movement, uh, uh, for various reasons.

49:55

And one of the, you know, one of the histories I was reading recently was talking about how, uh, one of the, the people who were most against, uh,

50:06

Israel having, uh, land in the Middle East, in the modern state of Israel, were actually

50:12

American Jews, which was super fascinating to me. And they just did not want that. And they were, they were very much against, uh, their fellow

50:20

Jews having land there. They wanted it somewhere else. And there were actually two other locations that were being considered.

50:25

You had South America and you also had middle of Africa that were being considered. So, uh, there was a huge debate.

50:31

So it wasn't as if like, yeah, I think, you know, we always like look back as if there that all this was certain and they were just moving toward one thing, but there was actually some fiery debate about where it looked like they were going to be going to, you know, around Kenya, uh, in Africa at first, and then like some things shifted and then they wound up being in, in Israel.

50:51

So, you know, a lot of times people just forget the details on that. But I would say with regard to dispensationalism's, uh, effect, uh, or maybe lack of effect, one of the things that becomes fascinating very quickly is that the

51:04

American support for Israel actually was, it dropped off rather quickly at the, at the founding of the modern state of Israel after 1948.

51:15

And, you know, the development there, America stopped supporting Israel, uh, as much as we do now.

51:22

I mean, we support Israel like crazy now, but, but America actually sold arms to Egypt.

51:28

And Israel couldn't buy anything from America. They refused because they thought Israel would lose. And so, uh,

51:35

Israel ended up having to buy their, their arm shipments from France of all places. And so it's like one of those things where,

51:40

I mean, what, I can't imagine arms coming out of France ever, but it's like one of those things where, uh, you know, that, that, but people don't realize that those are the details that America actually kind of turned their back on Israel for a little while, like not supporting them in many ways.

51:55

And yet Israel emerged victorious out of all these, uh, even, you know, you imagine just Egypt using

52:01

American weapons to attack Israel, but then Israel actually emerging victorious. And then, you know, America, I think realized,

52:07

Hey, this is, this could be really good for us if we support them. Yeah. Yeah. No, go ahead. I don't want to cut you off.

52:13

Well, I was just going to say to summarize then, like, I think the main factor that, that ends up being, if you look at the

52:19

American political scene, especially kind of behind the scenes, the main reason America ends up supporting

52:24

Israel, uh, throughout the ages is, is purely political influence in the, in the region.

52:31

Like, I don't think if you look at like presidents and cabinet members and things like that, they're not dispensationalists people might argue.

52:38

Oh, they're influenced by dispensationalism. Well, maybe, but realistically, can you imagine like Donald Trump saying, well,

52:44

I'm a dispensationalist. So I mean, like, that's just not how he rolls. And so they're going to do what they want to do for whatever reason they want to do.

52:52

And I think that ends up being what happens is politically. It makes a lot more sense. It does seem that like,

52:58

I learned this during 2020, especially that during the social justice debates, all of a sudden, uh, love your neighbor and these ethical principles that Christianity promotes become the justification for a political agenda.

53:10

And that is often how it works is that, uh, there's a retooling of certain theologies to, to get

53:15

Christians to support something. And so maybe it, it is good to at least acknowledge that I, I've seen this more in charismatic circles, but there certainly is this, um, uh, sort of fusion of a dispensational eschatology with the story of Israel's Genesis and defeats of their enemies in 1967 and 1973.

53:36

And you can't deny there are some, it's hard to deny miracles happens because you can't, especially in the

53:43

Yom Kippur war. It's like, uh, why, why weren't they toast Israel kick butt though?

53:49

They, they did completely destroyed everyone that was coming after them. And it's like, it doesn't seem possible from a military angle.

53:58

Like there's stories of, um, I was, I was, there was a history channel did this thing of, uh, it was like, I think it was like seven or eight

54:04

MIGs against this one out of date Israeli fighter jet. And the Israeli beat them all.

54:10

It's like stuff like that. It is easily fused with the stories of God's, um, miraculous providence to the

54:18

Jewish people in the old Testament. And, and this could be seen as like the restoration is taking place. Like, look, and, and I understand that, that sentiment.

54:27

Um, I, and I don't think we should discount that this stuff is happening. God is always at work. We live in that world, but at the same time to definitively say, well, we just have to, our policies must support this country now.

54:41

Uh, there's really no obligation coming theologically, um, from dispensationalism to say that.

54:46

But yet it is retooled, I think, to, to fit the political, um, the liberal order that the

54:53

United States has with its interests in the Middle East. Yeah. So follow up on that. I would say the way

54:59

I typically explain those kinds of things is that in the book of Esther, you have like a completely rebellious exile generation, you know, maybe as Esther herself is godly, although I take a pretty negative view of her, but, um, maybe she's godly, maybe

55:16

Mordecai is, but by and large, the Jews that are there are the ones that had refused to go back under Cyrus.

55:23

And so do they deserve to be protected by God? I mean, they're in rebellion.

55:29

They didn't go back to Jerusalem when Cyrus said, you can all go back and help rebuild the temple and whatever. And so I think that there are a lot of Esther -like moments where God preserves the people of Israel, even though they're still in rebellion.

55:41

And I think that those are examples of that. And we don't need to say that it's fulfillment of a specific prophecy.

55:48

That's where I think people do get in trouble. And, and I, you know, I can't answer for every single dispensationalist or whatever, but I know that there are a lot of people that make a lot of money off these kinds of things, right?

55:57

They get the, the crazy viral videos. They, they launched the bestselling books about how, you know, this particular time period is a fulfillment of this prophecy.

56:07

And it's so ironic because the dispensational pre -mill movement was actually founded and popularized as a, people don't know this, but it was actually popularized as an alternative to date setting.

56:20

So like there were the Millerites and people like that who had been setting all these dates saying, this is when

56:26

Jesus is going to come back, and the dispensationalists said, no, you can't know when Jesus is going to come back.

56:31

We just need to always be ready. And so that was the typical, but now you have people who claim to be dispensationalists that go ahead and set dates or they say, we know that this is fulfilling of this, but that was never like the, the intent behind trying to think through scripture this way.

56:45

And that is the, yeah. I see that straw man brought up all the time, the blood moons and lunar eclipses and all these kinds of things.

56:52

And there are big pastors who promote all this and a lot of money there. Yeah. Yeah.

56:58

Uh, and it's, you know, people look around, they see the changes. It seems unstable. There's AI. There's, you know, world war three could be, and you start thinking like you, you want to find answers.

57:09

And if a preacher comes and says, here's the spiritual answer, it's all outlined in the Bible. I think that's going to attract a certain segment of the population.

57:16

Um, I think though, one of the things I wanted to get to this is, uh, this, and I think this is an easy thing to dispel, but I just want to hear your thought on it, this idea that if you believe in a rapture, you're just going to let everything go to pot.

57:28

Like you don't actually, uh, you need, you don't take care of your finances. You don't take care of your country.

57:34

You just are waiting for God to do something. And I, and I've certainly met people like that who have been careless because they think they're not going to have to answer for any of their decisions.

57:44

Um, what do you say about that? Is that the effect of dispensationalism, uh, is dispensationalism just being used as an excuse in that case?

57:53

Or what is that? So let, let, well, let's start off by saying this. There are people that do use that as an excuse and they are lazy and don't do what they ought to do.

58:05

And you know, the, what ought to be done in those situations is you bring second Thessalonians three to bear.

58:10

And you say, listen, Paul himself, ironically in these epistles that deal with the day of the

58:15

Lord and you know, what to expect, uh, he admonishes those who are, who have been lazy, who aren't doing what they ought to be doing.

58:23

And so, yeah, there are people that do that. Uh, taking, taking a belief maybe and putting that as a foundation and acting in disobedience to God's clear commands.

58:33

And so they ought to be admonished, discipled, taught that this is not how to, how to roll.

58:39

But we also need to acknowledge that even though there are people who do that, I think we've all met people who do that, every movement has the outliers or the people that, that are disobedient in some regard to scripture.

58:54

And the question is whether or not that is essential to the system itself, is that a necessary outcome?

59:01

And this has often been an argument, you know, from the very early days of the systematization of dispensationalism.

59:08

It's been something the detractors have brought toward dispensationalism saying, you know, this is inevitable.

59:14

But it's so, I was just reading, um, a history of the revival of premillennialism.

59:22

I think, I can't remember what it was called, like in the, in the shadow of the second coming or something.

59:28

It came out in like 79 or something, 1979, but I had never seen it before. So I was like,

59:33

Oh, I'm going to read this. And he was talking about how people would often, he, I think it was his doctoral dissertation that he had published and he was, he was analyzing the revival of premillennialism.

59:44

And specifically he was talking about how in this issue people said, this is going to make you lazy.

59:50

It's not going to make you do the right things. Uh, maybe you're not even going to vote, those kinds of things. And there've always been, you know, premillennialists who have probably taken that idea as it doesn't matter.

01:00:00

God's going to come back in probably, you know, 10 years, so we don't need to do anything anyway. You know, okay.

01:00:05

But again, considering the outliers, there, there have been so many premillennialists who have believed in a pre -trib rapture that, uh, have been working so hard for the kingdom and for social issues and, you know,

01:00:20

I, I just think, you know, I, in, in that book, I read a quote that I wasn't aware of earlier that Dwight Moody, who had done all these evangelism outreaches, one of the things he regularly said is that believing in, um, the imminent coming of Christ made him work three times harder.

01:00:37

And I love that quote, because that's actually how I feel too, is that knowing that Christ could return any time makes me work harder, not less.

01:00:44

You know, when I, when I think like, oh, I could take today off. I mean, I don't want my master to find me slacking.

01:00:50

Like I gotta be doing what he told me to do, you know? And that's the parable of the talents and things like that too, is that the master's coming at a time you don't know.

01:00:59

So the solution isn't to just wait for him to come, but you better be working at getting, you know, uh, doubling his money or, you know, doing good investment there and the irony to this whole idea is that dispensationalism inevitably leads to decline or laziness or whatever is the reason dispensationalism became so popular in America is because they founded all of these colleges, universities, seminaries, and that's not something that people do if they think that there's not going to be any future generations.

01:01:30

And so that's such a good point. I didn't have that. It's just like, come on. It's like you, you don't, and, and the, the whole

01:01:35

Bible school movement, like, uh, there are so many, um, so many of these, of these schools and, and the missionaries too, like I think, uh, that, that same dissertation

01:01:45

I was reading, he had made the comment that these pre -millennial dispensationalists, uh, probably accounted for over 70 % of the missionaries that were leaving

01:01:54

America during that time. So again, they're not, they're not being lazy. They're, they're going out doing the work and, you know, you had, uh, even

01:02:02

Jerry Falwell, although, you know, you could have, uh, disagreements with how he does things, he actually was instrumental in organizing the moral majority, uh, in, and the basically, well, depending on, people have different opinions, but he had a huge impact in helping get

01:02:18

Reagan elected. We'll just say that. And so, you know, being super instrumental in the political sphere.

01:02:23

And yet, how could you do that if you just believe that Christ was going to return at some point? But the key there is that we don't, well, we don't, uh, a good dispensationalist, a good dispensationalist doesn't date set.

01:02:36

He just believes that Christ could return anytime. It could be tomorrow. It could be a thousand years down the road.

01:02:43

So we need to be faithful and we need to be working hard for those things. So yeah, whenever somebody makes those kinds of accusations,

01:02:49

I don't know. I try to be kind and I try to be understanding, but the reality is, even though you may have met some people who fall into those categories, that's just not true wholesale of the movement.

01:03:00

Yeah. It seems to me that people are looking for explanations for where we went off the rails because things got so bad in 2020 specifically.

01:03:07

And there, and everyone's coming up with different solutions. Like, well, maybe we were on the wrong side of world war two, or maybe the civil war was wrong, or maybe, maybe from our founding, like the founding fathers were just off, or there's all these things that like women voting or, but, um,

01:03:21

I think one of the things is like dispensationalism gets brought up in this is like, well, if the church just believed in post -millennialism, they would be investing in culture and we don't invest in culture and it's because of this theology.

01:03:35

And, uh, it's the funny thing to me though, about this is when I was sitting in seminary in Southeastern, cause

01:03:40

I, I had taken a few courses at masters, but I ended up going to a school that was not convictionally dispensational.

01:03:46

And my eschatology class was with a guy who said, uh, he, he didn't even know where he stand, um, Hammett. He was teaching it and he goes, well, you know, half the week

01:03:55

I, uh, I'm an omnilineal guy and then I'm kind of historic pre -millennial on the weekend. And, um, so that, that was the class, my eschatology class is

01:04:03

Southeastern and he, at one time in class, he wanted a show of hands, you know, how many people in here are dispensational or covenantal or whatever, um, uh, post -mill.

01:04:12

And one of the things I noticed, um, it was interesting to me, like a lot of the social justice warrior guys, right?

01:04:20

Like Southeastern kind of became known for that. They were cranking out some, some social justice graduates. They were pretty aggressively all mill and some, some post -mill.

01:04:31

And the reason they gave was the same reason that like our parents just, you know, they had boats and the

01:04:37

American dream and they didn't invest in social causes enough. And so, um, it's because they were dispensationalist.

01:04:43

That was like one of the keys they were using to try to explain this. So they were going to adopt a, an eschatology that they thought prompted them to be part of these social justice causes.

01:04:53

So anyway, um, just pointing out that, um, there's other, uh, you, you can use that for like a right -wing or a conservative cause, but you could also use that for a left -wing cause to say, oh, the problem is all these

01:05:06

Christian conservatives are dispensational. So we need to get away from that. And then we'll be true Christians who are socially minded.

01:05:12

And, um, I've heard that I, that was the first time I heard that argument. And then of course, uh, hearing conservatives later on use the same thing.

01:05:19

Um, so I don't know, maybe I'm psychologizing it, but that's, that is how

01:05:24

I see some of this because I don't know if it's study that's driving this. I don't see people steeped in sources trying to figure this out.

01:05:32

It's more just like it's vibes, it's style. It's, uh, so we have, oh, go ahead.

01:05:40

Well, I was just going to add to what you said. Cause I think, I think you're exactly right. And I wanted to add one more piece of evidence to kind of back up what you're saying is that if you remember like the liberal movement in the mid 1900s, that was coming out of the postmill all mill circles and what ends up happening, you have like Gresham Machen who like creates an alliance with the dispensational premillennialists.

01:06:04

And the reason was because they were, they were so glued to the text.

01:06:09

In fact, one of my mentors, Larry Pettigrew used to have a saying, which he probably got from somewhere else, but premillennialists don't go liberal.

01:06:17

And the reason he said that was because if you take the hermeneutic that I was describing earlier, where you're looking at literally saying, this is what the author said in his context, this is what it meant.

01:06:28

There's no case for development. You can't say, well, I know this is what it said, but now in this context, we can make it mean something else.

01:06:34

You have no pathway to go liberal because you just take what the scriptures say. So, you know, a lot of people, you know, lose sight of this and in, you know, 70, 80 years later down the road, they forget that the premillennialists were so instrumental in fighting against the liberalism during Machen's day because they were the ones saying, no, scripture says this, let's not, let's not, you know, buy into this, you know, social gospel idea and things like that.

01:07:02

So just to back up what you're saying is you could actually pitch the argument both ways in many cases.

01:07:08

Yeah, no, that's great. I feel like, oh, I guess we've gone over an hour. I would love to maybe have another discussion where we talk about, because we never, we didn't even talk about revelation and how these different kind of farfetched, or at least they seem farfetched representations of what's happening on earth, these creatures with wings and teeth and how does that fit on?

01:07:30

Is this literal? What's that? Half the time you can answer it by just saying it's an Apache helicopter. That's, that's an

01:07:35

Apache helicopter. That's right. Yeah. Eight, 88 reasons Christ came back in 88, but, uh, no,

01:07:41

I, I think maybe it would be prudent to some, some point, have a conversation about that and the theology itself.

01:07:48

Um, what does it teach? But I think this was really good because people, even if you're not dispensational, uh, and people who know me know that that's not an area

01:07:56

I focus on a lot as eschatology. It's not, um, something that, uh, I just want

01:08:01

Christians who are trying to fight against social evil that is all around us to be able to band together.

01:08:09

Um, and, and I think this is one of those things that's like, eschatology shouldn't stand in the way it's, it's a secondary thing, but I'm being told, and I'm, I'm even hearing from others because I attend a church that has a kind of like MacArthurite dispensational theology that like,

01:08:25

I'm, I'm compromised. Like I'm, I can't really be truly conservative or any, like, I kind of want to push back against that.

01:08:32

And I want us to think through, um, the implications of these things and not just buy into smearing a theology, especially a secondary theology like this, cause you heard a podcast or you saw a meme or something like that.

01:08:47

Like really think through it. And, uh, you gave some really good sources, um, Dr. Uh, Gaiman, and I, I would recommend people look those up.

01:08:55

Are there any other books you want to push that would be good for people to read? Yeah, I think

01:09:00

I had mentioned this earlier, discovering dispensationalism really does, uh, address the, the, you know, historical question of are these things completely novel?

01:09:11

And so I just really recommend that if you're open, um, I don't even agree with everything in the book.

01:09:16

Okay. So if that's like all that, that's part of the beauty of reading and doing research is that, you know, the historical sources are given, you can go look and see, yeah, this, this does seem to be what this guy is saying.

01:09:27

But I'd say, you know, like the vast majority of that book is, you know, stuff I would completely endorse myself, you know, just saying, right.

01:09:34

It's a multi -author volume. So each, each author is focusing on different things. So from the historical perspective, that's definitely a place to go.

01:09:42

There's a, uh, my colleague, Mike Vlock has, uh, written a lot on dispensationalism.

01:09:48

And so he, he has a primer on dispensationalism. It's called a dispensational primer. That's, that's just really solid helps kind of alleviate a lot of the misrepresentations of dispensationalism.

01:09:59

So that would be a, like a, I think it's like an 80 page read, just a really good, uh, perspective on that.

01:10:05

And then he has a followup on that called dispensational hermeneutics, which really kind of shows what, why dispensationalism is different versus non -dispensationalism in their hermeneutical commitments and to really show those differences.

01:10:18

Uh, and then I, I also recommended Abner Chow's book. If you really want to get in the weeds on understanding, you know, how to read the

01:10:26

Bible and why it's important to go with authorial intent or originalism. That's the hermeneutics of the biblical writers, which you would really recommend.

01:10:35

So you asked for one, I think, and I gave you four. So there you go. That's great. No, that's good. Um, and if people want to check you out,

01:10:41

I know you mentioned that you have an X. I didn't have that one written down. What's your handle on X? If people want to follow you there. Yeah, so it's just Peter, Peter Gaiman, uh, and then underscore after that.

01:10:48

So it's just, uh, my last name is spelled G -O -E -M -A -N, but it's pronounced Gaiman. And then, uh,

01:10:54

I have a website by the same petergaiman .com. Right. Uh, go to, yeah, go to petergaiman .com.

01:11:00

Also the Bible Sojourner is a, uh, semi -weekly podcast that, um, that, uh,

01:11:07

Peter puts out and you can find that on. I see it on Apple podcasts. I don't know. Is it, it must be, is it video on YouTube, Spotify, Apple.

01:11:17

Yeah. Nowadays I used to ask that question and people would be like on one platform and now everyone's on everything.

01:11:25

So yeah. Even Joe Rogan is on everything now. Yeah. It's the, I don't listen to him really unless it's like a,

01:11:31

I think I listened to the one with him on and Trump. Cause I was like, oh, that's the future of my country. I should probably listen to that. Probably.

01:11:36

Um, probably, but, uh, yeah. Um, anyway, go check that out on YouTube, subscribe, give them a like.

01:11:43

And, uh, thanks. Thanks for being with us. And, oh, and one last thing I forgot to mention, um, you are teaching at Shepherd's Theological Seminary.

01:11:49

So of course, if you want to study under Dr. Peter Gaiman, you can go to Shepherd's Theological Seminary and take courses with them.

01:11:56

So anyway, thank you. Appreciate it, John. It's a privilege to be with you. Thanks for the invite. God bless.