November 10, 2015 Show with Sam Frost on “Hyper-Preterism: One Man’s Journey In & Out!

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Tuesday on this 10th day of November 2015 and I'm very honored to have another first time guest on Iron Sharpens Iron on a very important issue.

This issue is hyperpreterism. It's also known as full preterism.

Obviously those who adhere to it simply call it preterism. They also call it realized eschatology, covenant eschatology and I'm sure there are a number of other names for it.

We are calling it hyperpreterism because we want to make sure you are aware we are identifying it as an aberrant teaching, even a heresy, a very dangerous heresy at that.

And there is no one better to speak on that issue than someone who he himself was involved very heavily in this movement.

In fact, he was one of the leaders in this movement and had a book published while still in the movement by Don Preston who is readily recognized worldwide as probably the preeminent full preterist.

And since his exodus out of hyperpreterism, our guest

Sam Frost has written a book, Why I Left Full Preterism and it's currently out of print but we're waiting with bated breath for it to be back out hot off the press again,

God willing in the near future. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Sam Frost.

Chris, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Well, I think it would be a good idea for our listeners to understand the basic tenets of preterism and then you can also define what would be considered hyperpreterism and then obviously partial preterism which is something that many orthodox

Bible -believing Christians adhere to. Well, preterism as a term has been around for a long time and that's just basically the events of 70

A .D. with the catastrophe surrounding the war with the

Jews in and of that time with the Romans mainly. You know, figured into a good deal of prophecy and that even goes back to the

Old Testament with Daniel and the prophecy of the 70 weeks and the fall of the temples there and the rise of Emperor Titus.

That's not a new view that's been around for many centuries and even in the reformed circles you can find certainly

Luther, Calvin, you know, executing that where A .D.

70 comes into play to some degree and that's readily recognized across the board today in academia, biblical scholarship, whether it be liberal or conservative.

Back in the late 1960s there was a fellow, Max King, who

I think still is the more articulate as far as the literary output and that's this mammoth book that he published over 700 pages called

The Cross and the Paraclete of Christ and in that book he delineates the view that not only many aspects of prophecy was fulfilled in A .D.

70 with the destruction of Jerusalem but sought to exhaust all prophecy, every single strand, anything that could be named prophecy in the

Old Testament was completely fulfilled by A .D.

70 so that after A .D. 70 there is no strain or strand of prophecy being currently fulfilled, to be fulfilled, or fulfilled after that particular date and that view has had a hard time gaining traction in evangelical circles whether it be popular circles and or also academic circles.

There are many academians who have wrestled with it who know Max King, Don Preston, have read their works and from all that I can see from Bloach, from N .P.

Wright, several other well -known scholars today, popular scholars today, they do reject it.

They see how one could come to that conclusion but it's hard to say that this exhausts all prophecy and the particular issue we run into is the idea of resurrection of the dead, the bodily resurrection of the dead which is specifically denied by hyper -preterism obviously.

There was no resurrection of the dead bodily in A .D. 70 so you know that's one big elephant in the room they have to get around and we did certainly try to get around it.

So basically you're saying that the hyper -preterists who call themselves simply preterists or realized eschatology advocates or covenant eschatology advocates, they say that there is nothing left in the scriptures from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation, there is nothing that has been prophesied in that massive book we call the

Bible that is not already fulfilled and that has not already occurred by A .D.

70 at the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. Yeah correct and we were trying when

I was in it we were trying to see some aspect of what we would call ongoing fulfillment so that we could relate some sort of ongoing aspect in terms of prophecy that this idea was coming to be rejected too and that all prophecy was fulfilled.

There's nothing being fulfilled today presently, nothing to be fulfilled and you know that just you know

I was in it for years and as you stated before I mean I was one of the main leaders in it with Don Preston, Ed Stephens, John Noe, I mean

I go way back into 2002 -2003. I pastored a church for four years and had several conferences with Don Preston hosted there and that was you know as I continued through the years

I'd already had a theological groundwork laid before I became a full preterist and there was just things there that got, there were strings there, evangelical theology

I wasn't willing to cut because I knew if I cut those strings then the whole thing goes up. That's you know we're having to reinvent

Christianity at this point. When you say that the full preterists or hyper preterists believe that there is nothing left to be fulfilled, would that include the scriptures that commonly orthodox believers view as depicting heaven and hell?

Well yeah there's a lot of debate there that heaven and hell are you know metaphors.

We don't really know what they are and you'll hear often among hyper preterists that the bible really doesn't speak a whole lot about that.

Well go ahead. Well do the main figures like Don Preston believe there is a heaven awaiting them?

They do. Yeah he does. He sees it as some sort of an ethereal you know eternal life of course.

What that exactly is and in terms of our existence that's where they kind of draw a blank.

Whereas some of the hyper preterists and these are the ones with the hyper preterists, hyper preterists, they're not all together.

They just say that everything was fulfilled in 80, 70 and basically we don't have anything really going for us.

We just die, we're extinguished and that's it. The covenant promises were made exclusively for the nation of Israel, covenant nation

Israel. That's Israel according to the flesh. Those were fulfilled by 80, 70 and that's that.

That's the end of that. I'm going to give our email address if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own regarding this topic.

My email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com c h r i s a r n z e n at gmail .com

and please give us your first name, your city and state of residence and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. We eagerly urge you to email us with a question whether you agree with Sam, whether you are radically opposed to what

Sam is saying or whether you just don't know. A lot of people may be totally unaware of anything called preterism and so you may ask questions as well.

Again it's chrisarnsen at gmail .com c h r i s a r n z e n at gmail .com.

So tell us something about your upbringing, how you became a

Christian and eventually how you discovered and entered into hyperpreterism.

Well I was baptized at a very early age, seven years old.

More or less I was raised in the four square gospel church which was an offshoot of the holiness movement back in the 50s.

Amy Semple McPherson began the four square gospel church. Probably one of the main speakers today is

Jack Hayford. So I've been in that and then we went through the charismatic movement.

My parents and I went through the charismatic movement in the late 70s. In the 80s

I was at a Christian college, Liberty Christian College in Pensacola Florida and that was interdenominational.

It wasn't around my junior year that I earned my bachelor of theology that I got into understanding the works of Calvin and the reformed faith.

Up until that time I had only really seen eschatology through the eyes of a

Hal Lindsey -esque type dispensationalism. That's pretty much what was just there.

It's popular. It's what was read. You took it for granted. It was just what was taught. Of course you go through your dates and your

Schofield Bibles and all of that which I had one of those and the reformed faith challenged that with ideas of amillennialism and postmillennialism.

Find both of those strands in the reformed faith. Being a theological student

I continued to read into that and that's where I came across David Chilton, James Jordan, Gary Norris, Gary DeVore and these reformed brothers and started reading their stuff.

They were saying some things that I'd never heard before and I found it intriguing.

I thought that they had a lot of historical footnotes and academic footnotes to back up what they were saying about the subject of AD 70.

The more I looked at AD 70 the more I saw that does seem to figure into a lot of what

Jesus was saying particularly in Matthew 24. I guess I became what

I call a preterist, a historic preterist. I guess we have to use the word orthodox preterist to distinguish ourselves.

Yeah, these men that you just listed are all within the camp of postmillennial partial preterists which is considered by most

Christians to be orthodox. Obviously, there are dispensationalists and even amillennialists who would not consider it orthodox but most

Christians who understand that eschatology is not something that we should necessarily start a war over or divide over as long as it contains the main tenets of the faith which some of those things are denied by the hyper preterists.

Some of the very important tenets which we could get into in a moment but these are postmillennial partial preterists who first started to get you thinking about the early date of the writing of the

Bible and other things. Yeah, definitely. Dr. Ken Gentry and I were doing some postgraduate work at Whitfield Theological Seminary and Gentry had done some work there.

His thesis was before Jerusalem fell and that's one of the more documented works on the early date of revelation.

I was reading these guys, David Chilton particularly, and got to talk to him a couple of times and it was in a footnote in his commentary,

Days of Vengeance, that he mentioned to Max King in Warren, Ohio and I found his book and read it.

I read it again. That's the 700 page cross from the parrhesia and I read it again and I thought, well, there's something going on here.

It was there in the school where I said to myself, I'm a full preterist.

I knew what that meant. Being grounded in the faith as a child and growing up and having a groundwork already laid,

I was wanting to make full preterism and something that would be the next step in advance for Christian theology.

This is a breakthrough here. This is going to help Christian theology. This is going to help the

Christian Orthodox faith. This is going to help 2 ,000 centuries of Christianity and we need to see this.

If we just put all the pieces of the puzzle together, this is what the church needs to be saying and we've been saying it here and there.

Going back to Irenaeus and Justin Marger, they say it in both bits and pieces, but now we're going to say it fully.

We're not taking anything away from the church, the power of the church, the power of Jesus Christ, any of those types of things from the gospel at all.

We're just enhancing it is what we're doing. No, when you are saying this in your mind, you're still...

It's in my mind. Is this when you are still at this point a partial preterist? Well, this is when

I made the decision to become a full preterist. Oh, okay. I didn't see all of the ramifications of it, just following it through.

It's exciting. You get excited. You found something here. Of course, you're reacting to, at this time, the sensationalism and the self -predictions of Hal Lindsey and Jack Van Impey and all the stuff that you hear in Tim LaHaye and your battle and that stuff all the time.

You really feel like you're fighting for the faith. It's exciting.

It's exciting times. Well, the thing that's interesting is you say this is exciting, and is it really just exciting because you believe you have discovered secret knowledge of some kind that nobody else has discovered?

Because there's nothing really exciting innately about hyper -preterism. It's a very depressing eschatology, and that's why it's amazing that some people leap from a very optimistic eschatology like post -millennialism, which is the most optimistic eschatology, obviously.

Then you leap immediately into the most pessimistic eschatology there can possibly be.

Yeah. Well, and again, my mindset was preserving the historic faith, and I thought that this was a route to do so.

And again, this was very early on into not seeing the full theological ramifications, which obviously took several years, just continuing to push the envelope.

And then, and I go through this in the book, and I believe American Vision that published the book

Why I Left Full Preterism, that will be out here in a couple of months. They're going to republish that.

But you know, you really think you're defending the faith, you're defending the cause.

You're not wanting to leave Christianity, you're wanting to defend it. But the more years

I got into it, the more I saw that, man, this is, I'm having to leave several key doctrines that I wasn't prepared to leave.

Well, still with eschatology, but now I'm into societariology, I mean,

I'm starting to go into all kinds of stuff. That's where, you know, the red flags came up.

Well, before we even go into your leaving the hyperpreterism, while you just joined it and are getting immersed into it, in fact, becoming a rising star in the group, what happened with those who were your

Christian brothers and sisters and friends who were not full preterists when this occurred?

Did you get alienated or shunned or what was happening? Yeah, a few of them did. And this, again, was about my senior year.

And I worked on campus for the distance education. I worked on campus there, so it was maybe a couple of years after my graduation.

And yeah, there was some alienation. A lot of people were definitely. Because keep in mind, I'm in Pensacola, Florida, which is the belt of the

Bible Belt. So, distance education wasn't definitely there. Were you affiliated with the

Orthodox Baptist Church in Pensacola at all? Oh, I know who you're talking about. No, I was not.

But yeah, I know who they are. They, at least at one time. Many times. Yeah, they were at one time hyperpreterists, correct?

I don't know. There was a group there of Baptists that were real dehemmant dissensationalists.

If you weren't dissensationalist, you weren't Christian. Well, I'm speaking of actually a church years ago when

I first started to discover hyperpreterism. There was a church called the Orthodox Baptist Church in Pensacola, and they were hyperpreterists.

Obviously, they didn't call themselves hyperpreterists, but they were full preterists. Oh, no.

No, I'm not of them. Okay. Well, my apologies to any other church called the

Orthodox Baptist Church that is not full preterist in Pensacola, but I distinctly remember there was one there, and I don't know if it still is full preterist or not.

So, who were the people that really got you moving up the ladder there?

For instance, how did Don Preston discover who you are, and why would he be so excited about you that he published your work?

Well, again, reading Max King, and then I contacted Max, and I started talking over the phone, and his son

Tim King and his brother Doug King.

So, we all started talking, and I did a few conferences there in Warren, Ohio, and I met them.

This all came on the hub of R .C. Spool's book, 1999,

Last Days According to Jesus. He was mentioning Max King, and that's what piqued my interest because I was kind of in my own business at the time.

I had my own business going in Iraq. So, I was kind of out of the play a little bit.

What am I going to do here? Am I going to go into the business world, or do I want to go here? And then that book came out, and then they had in Orlando.

I went to that conference, and there Max King and Tim King were, and we met and talked, and there

I met Ed Stevens, John Bowie, and there was

Randall Otto, I think was there, and a few others that had a full preterist conference after R .C.

Spool's conference. So, I went to that and started talking with them.

It was just still talking, but then I read a book by Jonathan Soraya.

I see Jonathan Soraya called The End of All Things, and that particular book,

I was doing my work at Hebrew at Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando under Bruce Waltke, and that book just caught my eye, and he was dealing with hyper -preterism.

And so, putting this all together, I'm like, wow, Max King's really making some headway here.

He's getting into these guys. But there was something about Soraya's book about Sola Scriptura and the way that he handled the argument of Sola Scriptura that I still disagree with, and that's why

I wrote a manuscript called Misplaced Hope, which was just the origins of this.

Yeah, we're starting to break up a little bit with your cell phone. Hopefully, we could remain in one place where it remains a strong signal.

Is this better now? Yes, it is. Well, first of all, obviously, we have to distinguish between R .C.

Sproul and hyper -preterist. When you say he mentioned Max King, was he doing that?

Not endorsing him. Right, right. Because I know R .C. Sproul had become a partial preterist, but he was never one to endorse the full preterism.

In fact, someone on staff there at Ligonier edited a book, very critical of hyper -preterism, co -authored by a number of different people who are not in that camp and who believe it is a dangerous heresy.

I believe the book is titled When Shall These Things Be? Is that the title? That was

Keith Mason. He mentioned me. They come after me and Don Preston, Ned Stevens, Chuck Hill, Dr.

Charles Hill, takes on the book that I wrote, Misplaced Hope. When I wrote that book,

Tim King picked it up, and they published it. That was 2002. That book is what launched.

I had no idea. I just wrote this thing. They took it and published it. The next thing I know, I am being invited to speak at these conferences.

Then a year after that, I am being asked to pastor a church. I was like, wow.

Again, at the time, I believed in what I was saying. There we started the church.

Of course, we hosted a few conferences. That is where I really met Don Preston. We were traveling to several conferences.

He had me speak at his conferences and so forth and so on. That is where I really got in close with Don.

There was a falling out with Max King, Tim King, and Don Preston. Preston's eschatology is his version of hyper -preterism.

There is a difference between Ned Stevens' version of hyper -preterism and Max King's and Tim King's version of hyper -preterism.

What is that? Explain that. What is the difference? We have two hours, so that is fine.

Max King basically went the universalist route. One can see why he would do that because salvation has been brought to all men in AD 70 with the coming of Christ, the full coming of Christ, and the presence of God of now with us as described in Revelation 21 and 22.

You have to see this not in earthly terms. You have to see this in spiritual terms. If that is the case, then all souls are saved.

God saved all humankind. He saved all of humanity. So there you have that universalism.

You can continue, but we have to go to a break very shortly. Sure. Well, in Don's view, now

Don is still hanging on to their son who are eternally damned and their son who are eternally granted life, and so he still maintains that aspect.

Ed Stevens does as well. It's just that Ed Stevens says that there was a literal bodily rapture in AD 70, and Don Preston says no, there was not a literal bodily resurrection in AD 70.

Preston's view is that the resurrection of the body is a spiritual resurrection of the spiritual body of Christ, and Ed Stevens comes along and says no, we get glorified bodies upon the point of physical death or immediately closed with brand new glorified substantial bodies.

Preston would disagree with that. So would King. King goes universal, Preston is in between, and Stevens is still hanging on to some aspect of the passage of 1

Thessalonians 4, of course, talking about their being caught up and all of that.

How seriously do the hyper -preterists take these differences amongst themselves? Do they no longer cooperate on events, and do they call each other brothers?

I mean, what is the extent of this difference on eschatology with them?

For the most part, again, as in everything, you have those ones that won't have anything to do with each other because of particular types of things, and the biggest accusation is that you're still trying to hang on to traditionalism.

You're still trying to hang on to futurism. That's the charge. If you're a hyper -preterist, you don't want to be charged with being a futurist.

That's like the word heresy in their vocabulary is being labeled a futurist.

Anything that happens to you in the future, so in Ed Stevens' view, when you die, you get a glorified body.

Well, that's still future. That's not wholly past. There's still something left in the future.

Well, now he's a futurist. It really gets into that kind of stuff. Okay, well, let's take a break right now, and if you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Sam Frost, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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Thrive in Difference. Welcome back.

This is Chris Orens, and if you just tuned us in for the last half hour, we've had as our guest Sam Frost, who is a former hyper -preterist, and he has written a book,

Why I Left Full Preterism. He's also written other books while he was a hyper -preterist, but obviously

I have no interest in promoting those books. And we are discussing what this eschatology is and why

Sam believed he needed to leave it. And if you would like to join the conversation with a question, whether you agree with Sam's departure of hyper -preterism, whether you yourself are a full preterist or a defender of realized eschatology or covenant eschatology or whatever you choose to call it, our email address is chrisorensen at gmail .com.

And of course, even if you don't know what we're talking about, feel free to ask a question so you can have things better clarified in your mind.

So basically, this full preterism that we are calling hyper -preterism, it is a denial of a future visible return of Christ, because Christ already finally returned once and for all in AD 70.

That's the primary thing. But along with that, there will be no future bodily resurrection of the dead.

And what else would be denied as a future event, according to the full preterist or hyper -preterist?

Sam, what else would be denied by the hyper -preterist, other than the future return of Christ?

You know, obviously, new heaven to new earth is seen as just heaven only.

Basically, the goal of the saint is to continue with God in heaven forever.

There is no transformation of earth. Um, this even gets to such a point now where what you have called covenant theology, um, which is a phrase that's used among hyper -preterists.

This is what we call covenant creationism. Okay. And covenant creationism gets down to the genesis.

It is not referring to the creation of planet earth, not referring to the creation of the first human pair,

Adam, and his wife Eve. Um, it's basically metaphorical.

Some go as far as saying it's the creation of Israel. These are the first covenant people that were taken out of humanity,

Adam and Eve were taken out of humanity. And these are God's first covenant people. Um, because obviously you can't have a literal view of genesis, um, in any way, shape or form and maintain a spiritual view of the cosmos in terms of new heavens and new earth and the transformation that all

Christians, pre -millennial, all Christians do believe in a eventual new heavens and a new earth.

Um, this is denied by the full preterist. It's just heaven only. That's it. And that's the goal.

Earth, historically, um, some will say they don't know whether or not it'll burn out eventually.

Some say that it will go on for infinity. The way that the present state of earth is as we know it will go on for infinity, for forever.

And God will continue to save an infinite amount of souls.

And of course that runs into immediate problems, which God knowing all his people, no, not one of them shall be plucked from the hand of the sun.

If it's an infinite number to which you can always add one, you know, that, that runs into problems.

You know, in the, in the Westminster confession, it states that God knows the number of those whom he's called and the number of such cannot be diminished nor added to.

Um, so yeah, you start, like I said in the beginning, it's a, it's like you discover this doctrine of AD 70 and that Jesus comes back.

This generation shall not pass. The end is at hand. And you see scholars in past and present that are saying this refers to AD 70.

And that's, that's, that's the hook because you do have your MP rights. You do have your scholars,

C .H. Dodd, Albert Schweitzer. You can go back through church history and find, uh, Eusebius and Justin Margaret referring to AD 70.

You start looking at Daniel's prophecy that's fulfilled in AD 70, Daniel chapter nine particularly. Um, and so you really think that, you know, if you're coming out of dispensationalism and you've never seen any of this before and you see so many great voices, uh,

C .H. Spurgeon being one of them, John Calvin, go back and they're mentioning this destruction of Jerusalem and you've never heard this before as a

Christian. Um, yeah, that's where the, that's where that exciting. It's like, well, yeah, at the end of that hand, this generation shall not pass.

Yeah. That's, that's, you know, Jesus. And then you see the liberal scholars saying, well, Jesus believed this was going to happen and then it didn't.

Well, you believe in the Bible. So you can't, Jesus can't be wrong. And this was

R .C. Sproul's entire premise for, um, Last Days According to Jesus in that book, that Jesus can't be wrong.

I can, I can take a bunch of scholars being wrong and I can't take when Jesus says this generation shall not pass until these things happen.

He can't be wrong. There's no way he could be wrong. So again, that's where you're, you feel like you're defending the scriptures, the integrity of the scriptures, and that Jesus was correct in what he said, that all these things took place in AD 70.

And once you accept that, then you have to go into the other areas of doctrine as one doctrine affects all other areas of doctrine.

You can't have one area of doctrine that doesn't touch upon another area. Um, that's, you know, that's where you start getting into covenant creationism, universalism, um, you know, denial of hell, denial of the eternal existence in heaven.

You start getting into all this stuff. That's where you're really, really pushing the envelope. That's for full preterism or hyper -preterism.

Um, that's where they're at today. It's a very fragmented group. It's not one mammoth monolithic kind of group.

It's a, they, it's, it's very fragmented. For being such a small group movement, it's fragmented real quick.

Right. Well, that, that's a good sign actually, because there's a little likelihood that it will thrive, uh, for much longer into the future if it's so fragmented and that small.

I mean, let me ask you, do you believe that it will, will, uh, have some kind of upswing and become a real dominant thing for people to have more concern over?

It, I think it's upswing occurred with Spools and the publication of his book in 1999.

Um, in the early 2000s, you know, it did, it, it had an upswing.

You had Jay Adams, you had a lot of people talking about it, but normally wouldn't talk about it. Um, and people mentioning it, even

N .T. Wright mentioned, you know, that there were Christians that believed that, you know, everything was fulfilled, that he calls the view bizarre.

He says that's rather bizarre, but that's about it. That's about all he says. But how do you, we haven't seen anything recently that, that says that it's on any kind of,

I think it enjoyed. And I think, I think more people have heard the message of hyper -platterism and have, have rejected it.

It has been heard. It's been around for a couple of decades as far as being on the internet in full force in your face.

People have heard of it. I'm running across more people who have heard of Christian brothers and sisters who have heard of it, even some of the names that teach it and think it's just bizarre.

They, they just like, how could anyone ever go that far? You know, I, yeah, I can understand 80, 70.

Sure. I get that some of the prophecy was definitely, you know, that, but all of it.

So it's, it's, it's been heard. It's out there and I don't see any, I see a continuing fragmentation, you know, the hangers on the diehards.

They're not going to change for nothing. You know, those are the ones

I'm concerned about, but it, you know, without the internet, without Facebook, would it be here?

Well, you have church of Christ, Max King in the seventies. And prior to that, I never heard of him.

I'd never heard of anybody ever spouting anything like this. You know, that, that's my opinion on it.

Well, it's interesting also that this, this eschatology comes out of two unlikely bedfellows.

You have those who are adherents of Campbellism and then you have Calvinists. It seemed to be very, and it seems to be interesting that they have a weightier importance placed upon the eschatology than they do on anything else that they disagree over.

Am I wrong on that? It just seems that way. Oh, you're, you're right. I mean, I was, again, trying to maintain a staunch

Calvinism while I was a hyper -preterist. And of course, among my church of Christ brethren in that movement at the time,

Don Preston being one of them, you know, their adamant free will. I would,

I would say going back to like Pelagius views of free will, that, that kind of free will.

And yeah, there was conflict over that. But again, that was internal.

Those were internal conflicts that were going on. Now, I recall in a previous conversation, you had mentioned that some of those who were believers in baptismal regeneration and other things like that, they've abandoned baptism altogether now, some of them.

I've heard some of them have abandoned it altogether saying that was purely a Jewish ritual that was in that generation, particularly the book of Acts.

And after 80, 70, both the Lord's table and baptism were, are more or less moot points.

There's no real significance to them other than, you know, your own personal salvation history.

You know, you get a little certificate that says you were baptized by Reverend so -and -so. Other than that, it really doesn't take on any significance to it.

And would, would this group also deny the existence of the church much like Harold Camping did?

I'm not saying that Harold Camping was a hyper -preterist, but he, but he believed that Christ was through with the church.

Some, many of them. And again, when I was leaving the movement, um, back in 2008, 2009, um, that was a growing alarm because more and more were, um, you know, church, when

I say church, um, you know, Sunday attendance, being a part of the church, you know, that kind of stuff was not really important, not necessary.

Um, forget about, you know, the idea of pastoral or presbyterial authority, um, the deaconate, you know, anything like that, um, was, was basically, you know, kind of looked down upon.

But then you had, like, again, Don Preston, uh, who was a pastor for many, many years, while he was, and still is, a hyper -preterist, who still wanted to maintain the importance of Sunday meeting,

Sunday church membership, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah. How can you possibly, how can you possibly maintain discipline if the church,

I'm sorry, if the world, as many of them believe, will go on forever and ever and ever, and there'll be more and more millions and billions and trillions of people born, how on earth, uh, is, uh, any semblance of godliness going to be maintained throughout all future history without a church to discipline individuals?

Yeah, yeah. You're breaking up now, brother. Ramifications. I'm sorry,

I better, um, you know, the ramifications.

Yeah, I mean, do they have any answer to that? No, I don't. That's one of the reasons why there wasn't any answer to it other than just, um, you know, just living your own life without any, um, being under anyone in any way, shape, or form to be accountable to.

You know, you just basically go your own way. You know, it's you and Jesus, you know, that's about it.

That's the, uh, I guess their favorite hymn would be the famous Fleetwood Mac song, you can go your own way.

Yeah, you can go your own way. Um, uh, yeah, I could still remember vividly when

I first discovered hyper -preterism, it was actually when John Noe was invited on the

Larry King show to debate Harold Camping, who, when he first came out with his book 1994, predicting that the end of the world would come in 1994.

And John Noe kept repeating ad nauseum infinitum, Ephesians 321, world without end, amen, world without end, amen, world without end, amen.

And he obviously believed that the planet earth will continue and, uh, forever and ever and ever.

So that's, that's a frightening thought. I don't know how anybody can get enthusiastic about that at all.

Um, right. Uh, we do have a listener from, uh, winter

Haven, Florida, uh, Ricky. Okay. Ricky asks, how do you, how did you feel when the

Orthodox light came back on and you realized how erroneous full preterism was?

Oh, it was, uh, it was me and my, my dear brother in Christ, uh, Jason Bradfield.

And he, he actually, and we weren't talking about this, but he was coming to many of the conclusions. I wasn't, we just got together when, um, at some circumstance, brother, you're breaking up.

I can't hear you. I cannot hear you. Are you able to hear me now? Yeah. I would suggest trying not to move at all when, when

I can hear you because you break up quite frequently. Um, yeah, you're really, you're really breaking up a brother.

I'm going to, I'm going to go to a station break and hopefully you can get to a place where you can, well, your, your, your signal seems to be good now.

You want to continue your thought? Oh yeah. Okay. Um, yeah, it was, it was hard because I've put so much into, you know, the movement as a speaker, a publisher, an author, also as a pastor,

I put, you know, a lot into it. So from that aspect, I knew that, you know,

I was, I stood to lose a lot, but then there was a, and now I can say this is a hand of God that had, um, more or less, you know, called, you know, of course there, you begin to rejoice, um, the error.

And when you really begin to see the error of it, you're, and what it does to a person's soul.

Um, there, it was a great sense of relief when I said, you know what, I, I'm, I can't,

I cannot no longer endorse full preterism anymore. There's just too many, too many problems.

I mean, I, I understand there's problems with every theological view. No theological view can answer every question that's asked, but this one has a lot of problems that when they're answered, they're coming out in 60 different answers.

And, you know, they're, they're, they're, I began to see that hyper -preterism is actually undermining the

Christian faith. You've already touched upon that a couple of times with just the pessimism. It began to undermine actually what

Christ did accomplish, is accomplishing, and shall accomplish. And it doesn't have any shall accomplish to it.

There's no shall accomplish. So, it, that undermines the whole point of Christianity and the

Church, and for us, being here is salt and light of the world. Well, especially since those things are the most important reason why we should even be discussing this.

Tell us more in depth about that. Why does it deny those things? Why does it have the, what, the undermining of it?

Yes, yes. Yeah, well, you're, you feel like you're just in limbo.

History has no future. You don't know where it's going.

There's no, you know, the great benefit of early

Christianity was Saint Augustine who really tore apart this notion of a cyclical view of history.

It just, it just defeated itself. It really didn't have any chaos or goal or aim.

And it was Christianity that introduced that history is linear, it's heading towards some place, and the goal is glorious.

It's wonderful. It's a new heaven and a new earth. So, history then has meaning to it.

Every event of history is God's eternal purpose that is unfolding, that is heading towards its accomplishment.

And in full preterism, you don't have that. That's gone. It's already been accomplished. To which you ask, well, what are we doing here?

Where are we going? And that question can't, you're going to heaven. Well, that's nice, but the

Bible talks a lot about, you know, the here and now and earth and what we're supposed to do about these things.

And they would say, yeah, well, you're supposed to do those things, but it's heading towards an eternal purpose. And that purpose is gone.

You know, that aspect, purpose is, it's not there. And that leaves you a little empty.

That left me a little empty anyway. I just thought, well, what's all this for? It seems to rob the very notion of a final consummated victorious and triumphant conclusion of all things on earth by Christ.

It seems to rip that right out of our hearts that we who are

Christians are looking forward to with great anticipation. And of course, you know, the hyper preterist response would be like, oh no, it's made my life of, you know,

Christianity greater. It's made my, that's all fine, but when you begin to go to the scriptures and seek these answers to the question of, you know, where is this all going?

That's where they run into problems. Now, they're going to say, oh no, my life's been greatly enhanced since I've been a hyper preterist.

You know, I'm out preaching to people and doing it. Well, that's, that's good. But what is that involved with in terms of where is that going?

What, what goals does that have? Is it just you're saving souls for heaven? Fantastic. Or is that playing into a larger purpose of God, the overarching purpose and plan of God, which according to you is fulfilled in 8070.

So if that's fulfilled in 8070, then what you're doing right now is not, you're not contributing to the purpose and plan of God because that's already been fulfilled.

I don't, you can talk about it all you want to and how happy you are, but you're not fulfilling anything. You're not involved in his plan because there is no plan because his plan ended in 8070 according to you.

And that's where you begin to get the double speak. And I began to see that too. And I'm like, double speak, you know?

Right. And when I was speaking of the victorious, triumphant consummation of all things by Christ, I was speaking about more than just a feeling that we have looking forward to it.

Those actual things are ripped out of history by the hyper -preterist.

Well, what was the nail in the coffin lid for you regarding hyper -preterism?

You spoke in general terms about very important orthodox biblical things that you knew were being taken out of your theological makeup by being a hyper -preterist.

What was the final nail in the coffin lid for you? Well, it's kind of interesting because it started with the whole idea, as I've already mentioned, on the idea of infinity.

You know, an infinite universe, infinite world, is infinite procreation.

Procreation would go on for infinity. And being in the reformed faith, you know,

God has a number of elect, and that number can neither be increased nor diminished.

That obviously ran into a problem. So I just brought this problem up, threw it out there to the hyper -preterists.

I was still hyper -preterist at the time, so I'd be like, what do you do with this problem? The answers I began to get back.

That's what began the unraveling. Because the answers were, well, it's a paradox.

It's contradictory, but God understands it all, even though we don't. I'm like, well,

I can't accept that. That's not a good answer. You know, I've read too much Calvin and Gordon Clark to accept anything like that, so that's not going to happen.

You know, what do you do with this problem if we have infinite procreation and God knows the number of His all?

And here's that word in John 6. So I started, I went back to John 6, reading

John 6, and at the last day, all lives called, and I'm like, oh, the last day.

All those whom I had called, I shall raise at the last day, and I'm like, oh, all.

Still saving us today, how does, is this all, and I threw that out there.

Well, all he's talking about is the covenant of Israel. He's not talking about all the people he's going to save, he's just talking about Israel there, and I'm like, that doesn't work.

And it was John 6, like Jesus saying, all that the

Father has given to me, none shall be plucked out of the Son's hand. You know, these are logical terms, all.

Well, all of it embraces number. That's a whole number. That's not an infinite number.

All of us, that's a known number from beginning to end. And I went back to Isaiah, and in Isaiah, I know the beginning from the end, from generation, from the first generation to the last generation.

And I thought, oh, well, who is He going to raise up at the last day? All, and that's where John 6, and I put this in the book as well, but John 6 was the one that really, it just,

I, with my head, just reading John 6, I thought, we haven't answered this question, and that's really where, that's where it all started, and I thought, last day, that's the last day.

And John seems to distinguish between, he's the only one that uses this phrase, last day.

Well, the Preterites wanted to say, well, that's part of the last days, and the last day is in AD 70, so the last day would have to be

AD 70. Well, then, we're all raised from the dead. Well, how can that be? Well, God's no longer raising the dead anymore, but yet you say that He's still saving us, which is regeneration, which is a spiritual idea of being raised from the dead.

So how did He raise me in AD 70 if that was the last day? Who's He raising now? Well, the answers that I was getting were astronomical.

I was like, wow, you know, we've got a problem. We've got a serious problem here, and from then on out, it was a few months after that that I was, and then

I made the announcement that I'm no longer what I consider a hyper -Preterist. I've made a serious error.

I had to, you know, I can't preach this anymore. I can't teach this anymore. I've got to go back to the drawing board, and I've, you know,

I've, God forgive me. You know, I've been preaching error, and that was a hard time.

I mean, it was hard, but I did it. Okay, we're going to pick up right where you left off there when we return from the station break, and I repeat our email address.

If you'd like to join us on the air, whether you agree with Sam Frost, whether you vehemently disagree with what he's saying, or whether you just don't know, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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USA. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Sam Frost and our conversation on hyper -preterism.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Zarnes, and if you've just tuned us in for the last hour, we have been interviewing

Sam Frost. He is formerly a hyper -preterist. In fact, he was one of the movers and shakers and leaders in that group and, by God's grace, was enlightened to the fact that this was indeed dangerous heresy that he had entered into and began to heavily promote.

Thankfully, he is back on solid ground and has returned to a solid understanding of eschatology and the

Bible itself. Sam, would you call yourself today a partial preterist?

Yeah, an orthodox preterist, a historic preterist. So you haven't thrown it all out?

No. As I say, one of the hooks that it has that lures you in is the fact that you can go back in Christian history and many of the stalwarts of faith would mention the significance of the 70

AD event and the role that that plays in exegeting Scripture. In academia today, what is referred to as studying the life of Christ, Second Temple Judaism, and all of that,

Dead Sea Scrolls, the Apocrypha, or rather the

Pseudepigraphal studies, studies in Josephus. Josephus is certainly a significant part of our exegetical aspects.

And just the things that have been unearthed in the last 150 years certainly play a role in scholarship today where Jesus certainly had in mind the fall of the

Temple. And that was going to happen in his generation and he did warn people about it and he told a few parables about it.

Obviously, as the prophets did, like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, they spoke of that Jerusalem was going to be sacked by the

Babylonians. And a lot of the language that they use about this destruction, whether it be 589

BC or 70 AD, this is very similar. They would use that kind of language, what we call apocalyptic language.

This is what they would use. And many, many very well orthodox scholars understand and say that and I think that's where I'm at.

I still see that and that's significant. How this all plays out in terms of an overall biblical eschatology

I think the eschatology is of such a nature that that's a question God wants us always kind of asking.

There's something to even the message of he is at hand. There's something there that's kernel to the gospel.

That is a message that Jesus taught. You can talk about your Hal Lindsey's and your Tim LaHaye's, but there is an aspect where the end is at hand.

Get right with God. The end is at hand. Now that could be a personal eschatology. You could have a car crash tomorrow.

Get right with God. The Lord is near. Get right with him. Draw near because you don't know the day or the hour.

That kind of language of eschatology, I think it's a more broad way that can be used.

And it is interesting that the generations of the church up to our present generations, you know that there have been many generations thinking that they're the last generation.

Because that language and the events going on, the wars going on around them, the dictatorships, the bloodshed and carnage going on around them, nations are raging.

It looks like apocalypse. It looks like that. And that began to make me wonder theologically that this is a gospel message.

The end is at hand. The nations are raging against God. The wrath of God is being revealed against all ungodliness.

These are the last days. And I see those in more general, broader terms that should be still part of the

Christian message. How that is, I'm working on all of that. I don't think that can be exhausted in 80 -70.

I think it can apply to it, but not exhausted. It's more than that.

But that's my take on where I'm at right now. Okay. We have

Ricky again from Winter Haven, Florida asking, Sam, a full preterist

Mike Sullivan claims to have successfully refuted your infinity argument.

Any thoughts? Yeah. I wrote a book with Mike Sullivan called

House Divided in response to Keith Mason's book we already talked about, When Shall These Things Be?

And no, I've read Mike's argument and he's not even, again, this is my reading of Mike.

He's not even close. He wasn't even touching the issue that I was dealing with.

When I got into the issue of infinity, I dug into that for several months and found out that this issue of infinity is a big issue, particularly with the

Greeks and how the Christian church handled this word infinity. When the Greeks used the word infinity, they mean endlessness.

When the Christians used and began to call God infinite, they didn't have that definition.

It meant exhaustive. God is infinite, meaning he is exhaustive. Not that the world spends on its axis for endlessness, infinity.

They called God knows all things. They carried into theology God knows from beginning to end.

Well, you can't tell Mike Sullivan that because what is the end? AD 70. You're carrying in presuppositions into the argument, but I don't think

Sullivan refuted it. We can get into all of that, but that's a whole other show, probably.

If you could, even if it means repeating yourself, lay out the key primary texts that full preterists use to dismiss any sort of futurism, and then you could get into those texts that you think that are the death knell to hyper -preterism.

With the preterists, all these things shall be fulfilled. All these things shall be fulfilled.

Now, see, all theirs is not taking in an infinite sense. It's taking as a whole sense in that there's a number of things, and once those number of things have been fulfilled, then that's it.

But when it says God shall raise up all those whom have been given to Christ, that's an infinite number to which you can always add one.

So they play around with this word all, depending on how they want to use it. But anyway, that was one of the, you know, when you hear all these things shall be fulfilled, this generation shall not pass.

And then you see AD 70, and you think, well, what has to be included in that is the resurrection of the dead.

And that's where you get Max King's thing. It's a corporate bodily resurrection of the church.

The body of Christ was raised from oldness of life to newness of life, from old covenant to new covenant.

The body of Christ, the church, was raised from the dead. That's the resurrection of the dead.

And I certainly toyed with that idea for quite some time.

You're breaking up. Samuel, you were breaking up there for a minute. Yeah, I'm sorry about that.

I'm, like I said, moving in a house and not on a landline. The verse,

I think, that ultimately refutes this slip -ins where Paul says he's professing our body, likened to his glorious body, which means he has a body.

Jesus currently has a glorified body. When I started questioning that,

I began to find out that hyperpetrists believe that Jesus doesn't have his current glorified body that he had on earth.

That's gone. His resurrected body, you're saying. He doesn't have the resurrected body. Not as a human being, no.

That's gone. And I thought, well, so I went into the theology volumes and started looking at how the

Christian church tackled that problem. The man, Christ Jesus, who was raised from the dead bodily.

The man, Christ Jesus, who was glorified, who bodily ascended. What happened to that man's body?

Well, the church roundly, soundly maintained that that body continues.

And this is a doctrine called the continuing incarnate body of Christ. This is denied by hyperpreterists.

It's denied by all of them? It's denied by all the major speakers within the hyperpreterist movement?

Don Preston was at a conference at Criswell Theological Seminary. He was there on a panel discussing eschatology.

And they brought this subject up. And one of the panelists that was there said, well, you know,

Mr. Preston, regardless of your eschatology, just on that issue alone, it's heresy.

Forget the eschatology. Jesus is not a continuing incarnate bodily man.

Yeah. Well, no, I believe in human nature. I believe Jesus still has a human nature. He just doesn't have a human body.

That right there, he was like, that right there, just that. And yeah, it got into all of that.

If we have one mediator between us and God. Exactly. And it's the man,

Christ Jesus. Exactly. What happens to that mediator? Right. And when you dig into that theology, historically and presently, and there's a great deal of material there about the importance of the continuing incarnate body of Christ, and that affects his priesthood.

And yeah, again, that undermines all of Christianity. It undermines the atonement. It undermines all of that.

So I was like, you know, we got to deal with this stuff. No one was really seeing the issues.

A lot of them I was bringing up as a hyper -preterist that no one else was seeing. And the answers that they were giving to them were, you know, just, they were bizarre answers.

And that's, again, that was the undermining of my hyper -preterism. It's like these answers are not even remotely

Christian. And here was an area where you can't footnote any scholar.

You can't footnote anybody in history, Christian history. This is where you're on your own now. We're saying stuff here that's never been said before in Christian theology, and yet trying to maintain that we're

Christian Orthodox. And no one has ever said this before. That's scary.

To be at that point, you're like, man, I mean, you're treading water there.

And it just, I guess by the spirit, it just made me, I was uncomfortable. I got more and more uncomfortable.

The more and more I was hearing, I was like, this is, and that's, that's where your eschatology has to go into the issues of anthropology, soteriology, teleology.

You have to go into these areas. For instance, progressive sanctification.

A doctrine that I, that is an encouragement to me. I'm a sinner saved by Christ.

I have faults, flaws in my life, where I know in my heart and in my conscience,

I do not come to the glory of God, that I have fallen short working on these areas.

God, through grace, you know, give me strength to work on these areas. Well, why am I, because I'm being, now here's the wonderful part for progressive sanctification.

Because in all of these areas, whether weaknesses or strengths or whatever,

I'm being conformed to the image of Christ day by day. I'm being, see there's purpose again.

I'm heading somewhere. I'm getting better. That's very encouraging. Gets you out of bed in the morning.

That's all gone in hyper -preterism. You're totally 100 % as sanctified now as you ever will be.

There's no more further sanctification to be done. You're already glorified. You're already sanctified fully, entirely 100%.

So what do I do with the fact that I still fail today?

And there you get interesting answers from hyper -preterists. Some don't even call it sin anymore. Because sin has been done away with, right?

Did away with sin. So it's gone away with, we don't sin anymore. And I'm like, oh great, we don't sin anymore.

Fantastic. You know, eschatology is fun and fine to play with, but when you start pushing it into the other areas of the

Christian encyclopedia, that's where it runs into problems, and serious problems. What does the hyper -preterist, how does the hyper -preterist respond to 2

Peter 3 .9? We who are believers in the doctrines of sovereign grace, as you know, when we read, the

Lord is not slow about his promise, as some count slowness, but is patient towards you, not wishing for any to perish, but for all to come to repentance.

Obviously, the Arminian, I believe, mangles that text to believe that God wants every single person to be saved.

And if that was true, then his desire is going to end in crushed hopes, because most will not.

But the Calvinist, as you and I are, we believe that the Lord is patient in his return, because he wants all of his elect to come to repentance first.

Now, what is the hyper -preterist view as the patience of God in this text?

What do they believe is being spoken of here about the

Lord being slow, or not being slow about his promise? There, again, that's 80 -70, so that's 2

Peter 3 is all 80 -70, all fulfilled in 80 -70. And the elect, they're referring exclusively to Israel, the

Jews, that were being saved in that last generation of the Old Covenant Israel. The Old Covenant ended in 80 -70.

Here, it gets into another. The Old Covenant didn't end at the cross. The Old Covenant ended in 80 -70.

And God was patient with those few elect Jews that he's saving in that generation up until the point of 80 -70.

After that, there's nothing. There's no more Israel. There's nothing in terms of that, because God's patience is done.

That would be the explanation in a nutshell. And, again, where does that lead us today?

Well, there's no answer to that. You don't have any text that you can talk about. Some of you have come so far as saying

God is not concerned with us today at all. You have to repeat that, because you're breaking up again.

God is not concerned about what? There are some hyper -preterists that say that God is not concerned with us at all today.

Is that concerned with us at all? Yeah. Wow. So it's kind of almost like a deist kind of a view?

Yeah, pretty much. In fact, there's a few of them that I've called. And they said, yeah, we're good.

Wow. Talk about pessimism. Oh, yeah.

Now, are you familiar with open theism? Yeah. Boy, no.

Yeah, they believe that God is limited in his knowledge of the future. Well, interestingly enough,

Tim King got into that. Okay, that's what I was going to ask. Tim got into that, open theism.

He saw that, and that just fit right nicely in with his hyper -preterism, and he took that. Yeah, because if you believe in a world without end and an infinite existence of the earth, you would wonder how that fits in with their...

This is like a domino, a game of dominoes hitting against each other, like one heresy after another seems to manifest.

Yeah, that's what happens. Yeah, like I said, you go into different subjects in theology, and it just begins to put the whole house of cards.

Class, it starts out great. AD 70, you can find scholars, you can find church historians, you can find all these people talking about AD 70.

So much to put it on the map. But when you begin to go into the other categories of theology, like the priesthood of Christ, all of those aspects of theology when was atonement accomplished?

It wasn't accomplished at the cross, it was accomplished in AD 70. Really? Oh yeah, it's in all of this.

Wow, AD 70 was when the atonement was... AD 70 becomes the event, yeah, that becomes the event past time for Christians today.

That's when we were raised. We were raised in AD 70. And they try to tie into that as believers being raised with Christ.

When Christ was raised, we were raised with Him. So when Christ returned, we returned with Him, we were with Him.

Whether you're alive or whether you weren't alive. I mean, I certainly wasn't alive when Christ was raised from the dead, but I was counted as alive.

And so that's how they kind of get into that. You know, it's the whole AD 70 thing.

But yeah, the law of the old covenant continued on up into AD 70. The law was in full force.

Yeah, they are very much like, from what you are describing, hyper -Calvinists, like you and I are

Calvinists, but there are hyper -Calvinists that try to mold everything in the scripture according to one side of the coin in regard to the doctrines of grace.

They want to totally remove anything from the scriptures involving man's responsibility, which historic and biblically orthodox

Calvinists uphold. And just like Arminians also want to twist and remove things involved with God's sovereignty and control over the salvation of men.

You know, they want to rip that out of there. These hyper -Praetorists seem to just want to, in order for them to have a peace of mind that they are consistent in some way, they really are jamming things.

They are jamming square pegs and round holes all over the place in the Bible. Yeah, you know, when you run across them today, it's all that they want to, it's just, you know, even at the conferences and stuff, you know, these are issues

I was bringing up again because I had already had a theological groundwork laid before I became a hyper -Praetorist.

There was already, you know, my years in Christian college and being a student, a serious student of that, having, you know, a couple of good professors that took me under their wings and I just basically burned the midnight oil with them.

So at conferences, you know, they just want to prove the point that this text was fulfilled in AD 70 and this text was fulfilled in AD 70 and that's pretty much what drives them.

And they use the time text, you know, the end of the hand and all of that. But they don't, when they start getting into these other areas, that's where it starts, like I said, to unravel and that's where it starts sounding not

Christian. You know, so it's like I said, there's a hook that lures you in and that would be the only danger of hyper -Praetorism from that aspect, is that they do have a hook.

But it's once you get in it and you start pushing these other issues and you start talking, you stop talking about, you know, who are the ten emperors of the

Roman Empire and all of that first century stuff and you start talking about today, that's where hyper -Praetorism really begins to fragment and divide among themselves.

You know, I mean, what do you do? I mean, that's the question that's pertinent. You know, what about us today? What do we do today?

What am I supposed to be doing today? You know, they just want to talk about AD 70.

I mean, it's more AD 70 than the cross. They just want to talk about AD 70. Yes, this seems to be the gospel of these people is their realized eschatology.

That is the gospel, isn't it? There are some. There's a young stalwart of hyper -Praetorism.

He's a pastor of a church there in New York. He's actually, and I debated him, his name is

Michael Miano. And I debated him once. And he's actually come out and said, this is the gospel.

And to deny, you know, what he would call full -Praetorism is to deny the gospel.

And those are strong words there. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

No, that's when you're wrapping an eschatology into your gospel and saying that this is the gospel.

Of course, as you know, Reformed, we say, you know, this justification by faith, this is the gospel.

We say these. But here you're taking an eschatology that roughly wasn't around until 1969 onwards.

No one prior to that time can you document the saying what hyper -Praetorists are saying today, and this is the gospel.

So roughly the last 40 years, we've got the real gospel.

But what did we have before? Wow. Why does the

Holy Spirit mess up so bad? Right. Let me pick up with you where we left off when we return from our final break now.

Sure. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for our guest, Sam Frost on hyper -Praetorism, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

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And please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the USA.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Sam Frost in our last half hour of discussion on hyper -Praetorism.

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Again, 717 -254 -6433. Transcription of interview with Chris Arnzen on December 7, 2012.

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you've just tuned in, this is our last 25 minutes of our interview today.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question for Sam Frost on hyperpreterism, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. C .J. in Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York wants to know how far back can you trace hyperpreterism in history?

I'm already mentioning some of that with Max King, 1969.

He wrote The Spirit of Prophecy, Israel and the Spirit of Prophecy. Hyperpreterists would say this as well.

Most of them would, even though they claim to go back to Milton Terry.

He wrote the book The Turn of the Century called Biblical Hermeneutics, which was a widely celebrated book in evangelical circles.

Of course, you have the Parousia, which was written, again, around 1898, 1896, somewhere around there.

But none of them were full preterists. They were definitely preterists, and a great deal of ritual texts figured into 87, to the point where the

Resurrection of the Dead took place. That was Max King. They don't even arrive on the scene until the latter part of the 20th century, then.

The full preterists. Yeah, the full preterists. Here you'll hear another phrase that's used called consistent preterism.

In other words, the only reason guys at the turn of the century and early on couldn't go the whole route is because they were afraid of church authority or leaving the church.

They would be fired from their positions, so fear, basically.

We're not afraid of the authority of the church anymore, so we can say what it is that we want to say, and fear and prestige is not holding us back anymore.

For instance, they would say things like a lot of church leaders probably know that full preterism is true.

They're just afraid to say it because they'll lose their money. That kind of stuff. Right. You were mentioning before an individual who is a rising star in that movement who says that the full preterist view is the gospel.

Is that a commonly held view among the leaders? Do they actually view us as heretics or even as damned?

Now, you've already said some of them are universalists, so there is nobody that's damned, but those who are not universalists, do they view us as total heretics?

Yeah, and again, because there is no other than Don Preston or John Noe or Ed Stevens, and these guys are not in total agreement with each other.

There's no single guru or Jim Jones kind of heading up this whole thing.

There isn't that. There's a lot of fragmentation. So you do find among hyper -preterists, those that will say that, yes,

I have been accused of leaving the faith. My soul is lost.

I've left Christian faith because I've left hyper -preterism, and again, the reason why I did so was for fame and prestige and selling a lot of books, although I'd love to see the millions of dollars that have been rolling in off the book why

I left full preterism. I don't even, if that's the reason why

I left, that's a pretty bad reason. Christian from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, wants to know, do you believe this is serious enough to be labeled as damning heresy?

I think the doctrine of spouses is what I would, you know,

I'm of the sort where I'm not God, and again, in terms of election, like Paul deals with Israel in terms of election, they are to be loved.

In terms of the gospel, they are enemies. So that's the same way I would approach this.

I was a hyper -preterist, you know, but I believe that the spirit by God's grace has entered into my life in terms of salvation, and I don't think

I ever lost that when I was a hyper -preterist, but I did come out of it. So there were fruits of that.

So I can't say whether or not a person who holds to this will be damned, but I can say of the doctrine that the doctrine is heresy, it is damnable heresy.

It goes against everything the church does and stands for, when it's put on the bottom line.

You're going to have to repeat your last sentence, Sam. Yeah, I can't call those brothers in Christ, to espouse that view,

I can't call them brothers. I don't know their eternal state, but in time, you know, in the present,

I can't call them brothers in Christ, because what they're preaching undermines, I think, what Christ accomplishes.

We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who perhaps you've already answered his question, but he wants to know, do you believe this is a heresy where those who adhere to it without repentance should be excommunicated?

Yeah, interestingly, my book was used to excommunicate to people from a church,

I think in Las Vegas, and I advocate that.

I think if you have people there that are strongly hyper -preterists, they're going to end up disrupting the church, they're going to push their views, they're going to continue to do this, they're not going to be silenced, and that excommunication would be the best thing to do.

Again, that's not stating their eternal state, I don't know that, I'm not God. But if you do keep heteristic members of your church, look for fireworks, because that's what they're going to bring.

You know, their whole point is to convert you to their view. It's not to have a nice dialogue about ethnicology over a cup of coffee.

It is to convert you to 80 -70, and if you can't see it their way, then you are not listening to the scriptures, you're listening to tradition.

You're listening to the authority of your church, you're not listening to the voice of the Spirit in scripture.

That's how serious these guys take this doctrine. If you're not, Hector, I've presented to you the hyper -preterist view, and you still don't believe what it is that I'm saying to you, you are in man -made traditions and the teachings of men, and you need to come out of that.

So that's the approach that we take. We're very evangelistic when it comes to the message of hyper -preterism, and we have little patience after we've explained our views to you and rapidly fired off 100 texts.

You know, the word near means near, going down that rail. After you don't believe us, you're not believing the scriptures.

It's pretty much like that, at least the ones that I have traveled with. You're just stuck in tradition.

We do have another question from Ricky in Winterhaven, Florida, who asks something that I actually have asked before on this program.

In fact, Jeff Durbin, a friend of mine, also shares your journey out of hyper -preterism.

He was once immersed in it and considers it one of the darkest periods in his life.

But I asked him the same question that Ricky is now asking. Would it be fair and accurate to say that hyper -preterism is just all sorts of repackaged

Gnosticism? Interestingly enough, the more

I as a hyper -preterist were looking at the Gnostic texts and what

Gnosticism is, or at least the best way we can describe it with what we have of their texts today, we were flirting with the idea that the

Gnostics probably had a lot of it right, and that the power of the authority church, which more and more became centralized in Rome, ousted them because that would take authority away from the church, which the

Gnostics sought to do. I can't say Gnostics like this was, again, a monolithic movement, but Gnosticism is, again, very fragmented.

There was no single Gnosticism going on. It was just a bunch of various. Then they had things in common, one of them being the resurrection of the spiritual and only spiritual.

And here we thought, well, maybe these were the Christians that had it right, but they got persecuted and tramped down, and we're the ones revamping their message.

So is there a Gnostic tendency there? Yeah, definitely. There can be definite comparisons, and I've used that phrase many times.

The view of hyper -preterism is very Gnostic -like in its approach.

It's very ethereal, spiritually -minded. What's the old pastor say?

So spiritually -minded, you're no earthly good. But it does tend towards a

Gnostic -like tendency. There's no doubt about that. Yeah, you were asked before how far back in history you can trace hyper -preterism.

How about Hymenaeus and Philetus? I mean, they were denying the resurrection.

How is their denial of the resurrection different, other than the obvious timing of it? They were before the destruction of the temple, saying that the resurrection had already occurred, but did we even really know what their version of this?

You know, we don't. I mean, most scholars of that passage, and as a hyper -preterist, we would argue that their issue of the timing was wrong.

We just don't, Paul doesn't elaborate on what they were saying other than that. It's amazing, though, how much hyper -preterist can get out of that text about Hymenaeus and Philetus.

You know, there's a whole wealth of material that can be supposedly gotten out of that. I mean, they use it for their benefit, that text?

Oh, yeah. They use it, you know, how could anyone in that time say that the resurrection was past already?

How would anyone ever get away with that kind of message in that time if, in fact, the resurrection was not something that hyper -preterist was preaching, that it's a spiritual corporate bodily view instead of the traditional orthodox view?

Hymenaeus and Philetus would have never been able to say that that had happened already. So they had to have been preaching a spiritual view or a covenant to a resurrection.

It's just they got the timing wrong, and that's what Paul opposed. It was not what they were saying about the nature of the resurrection.

That was true. It was the issue of the timing, and that's a typical hyper -preterist response to that text, whereas, you know,

I don't truly know what Hymenaeus and Philetus were espousing other than the resurrection had occurred already.

What that meant probably was Gnostic in tendency. Most scholars seem to think that, you know, here you have some pre -runners, pre -Gnostic kind of stuff going on there.

We just don't know enough about them to, you know, come down conclusively as to exactly what they were teaching.

And the Apostle Paul, when he is giving comfort to the church in Thessalonica—I'm really tongue -tied today—about the, you know, the future resurrection of the dead and those being caught up in the air and all that.

How is that some kind of huge comfort to the

Thessalonicans if this is just something that was spiritual that happened in 80 -70?

I'm lost at that. You know, he's going to come and catch us away, and we're going to be in heaven, and the comfort there is that, you know, those that were lost before this, you know, before 80 -70 you know,

Paul's just encouraging them that, you know, they're going to be in heaven, too. You know, if they don't lose heart, they're going to be in heaven, too.

And I, you know, that text, you have

Don Preston on one side of it saying that this is all apocalyptic language, none of this is literal language, and then you have

Ed Stephens, who's a hyper -preterist, who says, oh, this really did happen in 80 -70, we're caught away.

And Paul's telling them there, don't lose hope, you're going to be caught up with them, they're going to come back with Jesus, and then you're going to be caught up with them.

So, okay, then what about after 80 -70? You know, where, again, there's that question, now that this has already happened,

Thessalonians 4 is still, are we caught away? Are we going to be caught away? Or where does, well, we get a new body when we die.

So that really doesn't have any, it doesn't apply to us.

The Bible doesn't apply to us. And here you'll find a hyper -preterist saying the Bible was not written to us, it was written for us.

And I'm like, huh? Yeah, right, it's written for us, but very little of it has to do with us, or none of it.

And you're really thinking historic, you know, what I call historical exegesis, which, again, is important, you have to know context, the author, the time and place that it was written to, and to the early church, you have to understand the history and all of that kind of stuff, but you can overdo that, too.

And liberal theologians, they do this to a vengeance, where they just explain away the entire scriptures, where it really doesn't apply to us at all today.

You know, Paul was just writing that first century, he had no clue of Christians, but you know, for generations and generations, on up to our own day, he wasn't concerned about that at all, really didn't even think about it.

But that's not true. There's a verse in Ephesians where Paul, for the glory of Jesus Christ, not only to our generation, but to the generations to come, and he says that in Ephesians 3, and I love that verse, because he says not only to our generation, but to generations to come.

Paul's looking into the future, generations into the future, where the message that he's preaching in the first century is going to be the message that's going to be preached in the next century, the century after that, and the century into our own time, and that's that Jesus Christ, the

Lord, is risen from the dead, he is God, he is very man, very God, and he saves us by grace, through faith, in the accomplished work of his cross, and the work of atonement, and he will come again to redeem those, and to collect all of those whom the

Father has given to him, and that this is the purpose that we're all living in right now.

So Paul's message is very much directly related, and does relate to us today, and many of the problems in the churches there are still the same problems that we're facing in Corinth, or problems we're facing today.

One of them being talking about resurrection of the dead, because that text, 1 Corinthians 15,

Paul directly deals with those that were denying, and here's where you run into the problem.

If Paul's doctrine of the resurrection of the dead is a bodily resurrection, and if those were those that among the

Corinthians were denying that very thing that the Preterists are denying today, then

Paul says, in your gospel, Christ was not raised. You can't have it.

You cannot deny the resurrection of the dead, and affirm the resurrection of Jesus. If you deny the resurrection of the dead, you must also logically deny the resurrection of Jesus, because they go hand in hand.

Right. They cannot be separated. So has anybody on record in that movement, has anybody of note in that movement done that, denied the bodily physical resurrection of Christ?

No. Not that I know of. But you're just saying that if they're being logically consistent, that would be the case.

I think that's what Paul's saying. I think among Corinthians, you had some of them that were saying that they affirmed that Jesus was raised from the dead, but that's not going to translate into our physical being raised from the dead.

That's what they were denying. Right. And Paul's saying you can't. If you affirm the resurrection of the man,

Christ Jesus, you must also affirm the resurrection of those that are his. If you deny the resurrection of those that are his, you have to deny his too.

And I think he's making a logical point there. You can't have one and need it two, because they're both connected together.

As the resurrection of Jesus gets us into the very nature of the resurrection. Jesus was raised bodily from the dead.

After three days, he was raised bodily, and he was glorified, and he ascended. And again, this gets into areas with them that whether the parallels between our being formed into the image of Christ and the man,

Christ Jesus, and what he underwent. See, that parallel breaks down. See, we're not going to be physically raised from the dead.

Well, he was. You know, we're not going to receive glorified bodies.

Well, he did. Well, he doesn't have his glorified body anymore. See, they got to break that parallel down.

They have to. Because if you parallel the life of Jesus with the life of the believer, then you're going to be raised again from the dead bodily, and you will be glorified, and you will ascend, and you will glorify

God forever. So, in that respect, they are modern -day

Sadducees, aren't they, in that respect? To that extent, yes. You know, they make fun of the idea of the leg bone being connected to the bone resurrection.

You know, they make fun of that. And they seem very eerily like Justin Martyr's treatise on the resurrection, where he's directly taking it and saying, well, what about people eaten by lions?

How are they going to be raised from the dead? And Justin is defending and saying, well, you know, that's

God. That's a mystery. But if he says they're going to be raised, they're going to be raised. But if he created

Adam out of the dust of the ground, why is it some kind of difficult task for him to bring the dead out of the sea and the earth, as the book of Revelation tells us, and wherever men have died, if they've been burned alive?

I mean, even when we die and are buried in coffins, our bodies deteriorate anyway, eventually.

So... I think that's the question he deals with in 15. You know, well,

Paul, how are the dead raised? Someone asked how are the dead raised. Paul's response to that is an immediate response, and it's fool.

His word is fool. You have to repeat Paul's response because your phone broke up.

Yeah. Well, his response is a single word, and it's fool. And that's the word that we find, for instance, the fool says in his heart, there is no

God. That's the same word there. Um, this is an unbelieving question. How are the dead? How in the world is

God going to raise the dead of people that have been dead for thousands of years? How is he going to do this,

Paul? And Paul's response to that is, you're a fool. How can you doubt God?

How could you doubt? And then he goes into creation. He talks about the sun, the moon, and the stars.

You know, explain to me how he created all that, and you're doubting he can raise the dead? You know, this is

God we're talking about here. Nothing is impossible for him. Amen. Well, thank you so much,

Sam, for being our guest today on Iron, Sharp, and Zion. Let me know when the book is available, and I know that our listeners will eventually be able to get the book through Covenant Valley Bible Book Service, which is one of our sponsors, and their website is cvbbs .com,

C -V for Covenant, Cumberland Valley, bbs for biblebookservice .com,

cvbbs .com. And I want to thank also Providence Baptist Church in Norfolk, Massachusetts, for being a sponsor of our program today.

Their website is providencebaptistchurchma, for massachusetts .org,

providencebaptistchurchma .org. Any final words that you'd like to share with our listeners, Sam, that you want most etched in their hearts and minds before they leave the program?

I would, you know, first appreciate you having me on the show, and then to those that are, you know, flirting with this idea, or maybe you've read some books or saw somebody on Facebook or on the internet,

I just, I issue you a word of caution, and, you know, asking yourself, did the

Holy Spirit get the message that the church has universally preached for 2 ,000 years, did we get that message wrong?

Until some newcomer in the last 40 years came along, and now we have the real thing.

You know, that's what you're playing with. So I would just, if you're looking into something like this, just please proceed very cautiously, and ask your pastor.

Talk to others about it, and get others. There's wealth in many counselors, and it's good to seek out a counselor, and to, you know, tell them what you're going through, rather than just trying to ride this out yourself.

You know, seek out some counsel, because this, you know, you're, as I wrote in my book, you're playing with fire here, when you really, really get into this stuff.

Sounds good from the outset. They all sound good from the outset, but in the end, it does burden you.

And I want to repeat the Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service address, because the book by Keith Matheson, edited by Keith Matheson, When Shall These Things Be, is a book that refutes hyper -preterism, written by a number of authors, and Keith Matheson being the main editor.

That's cvbbs .com, cv, Cumberland Valley, bbs, biblebookservice .com.

You can order that through there. And there's a book, I'm getting an email from Safety Harbor, Florida, Theo Benitez, wants to know what's the best book other than that to get.

Well, I'm assuming your book, when it's in print. Yeah, and again, American Vision made me aware that they're going to be reprinting that.

And I'll send that to you, Chris, when that's done. That way, you can provide that to your listeners, too.

Great. And I want everybody listening to always remember that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.