What is Mid Acts Dispensationalism?

Today, we're going to be talking about dispensational theology, and actually, we're going to be talking about a listener question on the subject of mid-acts or hyper-dispensationalism.

You don't want to miss today's program.

It starts right now.

Welcome back to Conversations with a Calvinist.

My name is Keith Foskey, and I am a Calvinist, and I am very excited today to be joined by my guest.

My guest today is Ben Hatch.

He is a pastor at Redeemer Bible Church in Sugar Land, Texas, and I want to give a little bit of a bio before I bring him in.

He is not only a pastor, but he is also a lawyer, so we're going to have to be careful trusting anything that he says.

He also is a graduate.

He's a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, and also he has a Juris Doctorate from Emory University School of Law, and he also used to be, as I said, a lawyer.

He was in solo practice in the Houston area, and one of the coolest facts that I've ever had of any guest on this program, he was a contestant on Jeopardy.

From Houston, Texas, Ben Hatch.

And now ...

You first.

It wasn't your day.

You wound up on the plus side, though.

That's good news.

You're here.

You had 200.

What is Sarah Queen of Hotlands? That's my wife.

And that, to me, is more impressive than anything.

Ben Hatch.

How are you doing today, brother? Hey.

Thanks for having me on.

I really appreciate the invite.

Yes, sir.

And I'm excited to have you.

Now, I will say this.

Ben and I met through a mutual Facebook group that we're in.

It was the ...

Progressive Covenantalism.

Yeah, Progressive Covenantalism.

And so he and I, that's how we met, and I had gone looking for someone to help me answer a question from a listener, and Ben messaged me.

He told me that it was something that he had dealt with in his own church and some folks that he had talked to.

And so we got together and worked together on today's program.

And so we're going to be talking, as I said, about the subject of Mid-Acts Dispensationalism.

But before we even get there, I know that for some of you, when I say the word dispensationalism, that may be a foreign term.

That may be something that you're unfamiliar with, but I'm almost certain that you're familiar with parts of it, because when you hear things like pre-tribulation rapture or seven-year tribulation or things like that, that tends to be part of the dispensational framework.

And so even though you may not have ever heard of the word dispensational, you've probably at least heard of the constituent parts.

And so one of the things I want to ask Ben, because you are a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, and I know that Dallas is a dispensational school, in fact, a lot of people call it dispensational theological seminary.

So you've been exposed to what has to be the best teaching in that area.

Now, did you know, like Dr.

Ryrie, was he still teaching when you were there? No, he he was not.

And he deceased during my time when I was there.

Oh, OK.

Yeah.

But he was one who was who was huge, right? He wrote the book Dispensational Truth and all those things.

Yeah.

So dispensationalism, it really arose in the 1840s as a response to covenantal theology or covenant theology, which historically is the main way that people thought about the way that Israel related to the church.

Dispensational theology has gone through a number of revisions across the last 180 years.

So the seminary was founded on what was called classical dispensationalism.

I can talk about what that means in just a minute.

But the seminary professors now, by and large, don't really affirm classical dispensationalism.

A few of them do that are in the Bible exposition department.

But like in my theology classes, dispensationalism was really kind of played down.

It was seen more as one of two views, along with covenantalism.

And they were both kind of said to have have benefits and problems.

And it wasn't really like a strong advocacy for dispensationalism like I expected when I entered the seminary a few years before that.

Okay.

And so when you describe classical versus what you think is being taught now, well, first of all, explain to us just the basics of classical dispensationalism.

Yeah.

Okay.

So classical dispensationalism basically comes from a guy named Darby.

And Darby was writing around 1840.

And Darby's views became very popularized through a fellow named Schofield, who wrote the Schofield Reference Bible that really was a major event in the early 20th century, particularly in America.

And so, yeah, I remember.

My hope is built on nothing less than Schofield's notes and Moody Press.

Yeah.

I've never heard that, but I like that.

Yeah.

So Darby basically was advocating three ideas, I think.

The first and broadest idea in dispensationalism is that God has interacted with people differently as time has gone on.

And so the idea was that at various points in history, God would reveal a new disclosure of himself to humanity.

He would tell people, here's a standard that you need to live by.

God tested people to see whether they would live up to that standard.

And they always failed.

And then judgment would fall, and eventually a new dispensation would arise.

And Darby held that there were seven of these, or at least Schofield published that there were seven of these dispensations that would mark human history.

So it was like the first issue was that there were these dispensations marked by a standard testing and failure.

The second and probably the most famous thing that distinguishes dispensational thought is the idea that Israel is and always will be distinct from the church, that there are two peoples of God, that the Old Testament makes promises to Israel that only run to Israel.

They don't really in any direct way run to the church.

And that these promises will come to pass in a future millennial earthly kingdom when there will be a reborn state of Israel in the land of Canaan, where Jesus himself will reign from a new temple in Jerusalem.

Classical dispensationalists held that the church was nowhere directly prophesied at all in the Old Testament, and that the idea of Gentile involvement in the plan of God was totally obscured in the Old Testament.

And Schofield went so far as to say that the church was just a parenthesis in God's plan.

God's plan is really all about Israel, and what's going on with the church is sort of an odd digression that wasn't really the major idea of what God was trying to do in this world was not the church.

He'll say that the church and classical dispensationalists will say the church is not the heir to any of the promises God made to Israel.

The church will one day be bodily removed from the world in advance of a seven-year Great Tribulational Period.

And then God's going to deal with Israel again, first in judgment through the tribulation and then in restoration with the millennial kingdom.

And ultimately, many classical dispensationalists held that Israel and the church would have perpetually distinct futures, so that even after the millennial kingdom ends, that Israel would inherit the new earth and that the church would inherit the new heavens.

Oh, wow, I hadn't heard that one.

Yeah.

Now, that may be mischaracterizing some people, but I have heard that advocated from a few sources, so that the two peoples of God remain forever separate.

Okay, so the third hallmark of classical dispensationalism says that we alone interpret the Bible literally.

The thing is, though, classical dispensationalists weren't always consistent with that, particularly when they would start talking about the church and the Old Testament, they really were given to a lot of typology, really to the point of allegory.

So, I don't think that literal hermeneutic was consistently held by classical dispensationalists, but it was at least on the idea that they thought that when God made a promise to Israel, that we should expect that that will have a literal fulfillment at the end of history.

Yeah, I remember talking to a dispensationalist and he was saying, we are very literal in our interpretation.

And then we got to discussing revelation and he said, well, these locusts, they're Apache helicopters.

So, wait a minute, you're not literal anymore.

You just stopped being, if they're not locusts, they're not locusts.

That's not literal.

And he goes, well, you see this beast, this is a man.

Okay, well, then it's not literal.

And so, it's like we're literal when we want to be.

And I don't mean to immediately start pushing back, but I think that's, yeah, to say we're the literalists, which I know is one of the claims, I think is somewhat of a stretch.

I think almost everybody claims they're the literalists.

There was a really helpful book by, again, I think his name was Merkel, about two years ago, and it was a really fair presentation on sort of on where this debate stands right now.

And he makes the point in there that the issue isn't really literality, it's the priority of the Testament.

Dispensationalists, really of all stripes, are going to say that the Old Testament prophecies have to be interpreted on their own terms.

And the covenant side is going to say, well, the primary way we need to interact with these promises and prophecies is through the New Testament and how the apostles work with them.

And that's how everybody who's claiming they're literal winds up with a whole bunch of different views.

Yeah, that's a good point.

And priority of the Testament, that's good.

I had a very close friend, and he was a missionary, and we had several good conversations.

He was a graduate of Master's Seminary, so he was taught dispensationalism.

I don't know if it's classical dispensationalism or what we might call progressive dispensationalism, but he was a dispensationalist by his own definition, and he knew that I was more covenantal.

And so we would have that conversation, and he would oftentimes say that his view of the Old Testament was much different than mine because I saw Christ everywhere, and he didn't.

In the sense that the whole Christocentric, Christotelic distinction, which is the dispensationalist would say Christ is the purpose, but he's not in every...

He's not the fulfillment.

Yeah, that these texts stand on their own.

Yeah, exactly.

Let me just say quickly, yeah, dispensationalism has changed.

Really, guys like Ryrie and Wolver did change it a bit and moved it more in the direction of covenantalism, although there were still some really significant differences.

And I would imagine that's where MacArthur is, what's called revised dispensationalism, more than what has been advocated in the last 30 years, which is really a new branch that has come quite close to covenantalism, which is called progressive dispensationalism.

My own views are fairly close to that, and this view of what's called progressive covenantalism that was articulated in the last 10 years by, I think, the fellows that articulated that came from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, but I could be wrong on that.

No, you're right.

It's, yeah, well, yeah, I can't say it again.

Gentry and Wellam? Yeah, Wellam, yep, yep.

Their kingdom through covenant was the seminal work, and then after that, but a lot of that is really, and you could go back further than that to New Covenant Theology, and then that were part of that earlier, but a lot of those guys did come out of Southern, and they were trying to, I think, sort of find a middle ground between dispensationalism and covenant theology.

I think that classical dispensationalism really did help in some big ways.

It renewed interest in prophecy.

It told us we should take the Old Testament promises seriously.

I think that those are strengths, and let me just hit a few reasons that, especially some of my friends who may know that I came from a Plymouth Brethren assembly, which is the denomination that dispensationalism really came out of.

Let me just say there are a few reasons.

I've deported from the classical dispensational view.

I really don't think that the arguments for there being seven dispensations are very strong, and that's really a key element of the original framework.

Many people who hold to the original framework say that the kingdom of heaven is the same as the kingdom of, or is not the same as the kingdom of God when those terms are used in the Gospels, and that's just, that's false.

The kingdom of heaven is the same as the kingdom of God.

That can be shown in many places in the Gospels.

If I can interrupt you just for a second, that was actually taught.

I went to a dispensational seminary, even though it wasn't Dallas.

I went to Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary, which was a small school.

The men who were there were wonderful, godly.

They taught me many, many good things, but they were very committed to dispensational theology, and there was an actual seminar we all had to take, and it was on the difference between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven, and I remember having to write a paper, and it was one of the only bad grades that I got, but I just couldn't understand it.

I couldn't understand what they were saying.

It didn't make sense to me, and I wrote the paper basically trying to say, this doesn't make sense, and the guy who was grading it didn't like that, so I got a bad grade.

But that's one of the problems, right? We get so enamored with our system that we stop interpreting what the text actually says, and it's really dangerous.

I also think classical dispensationalism has a big problem because it's never been able to really adequately explain why the new covenant, which Jeremiah 31 says is made with the house of Israel, why its benefits run to the church.

I've asked this question over and over to my dispensational friends, and I never really get a satisfactory answer.

The church and Israel are perpetually separate.

Why is a covenant made with Israel running to the church in any respect? That's a problem.

You know, a lot of classic dispensationalists and even revised dispensationalists deny that the Sermon on the Mount has any application to Christians today.

Yes, I remember being taught very similar to that.

One of my professors, when we were going through the Sermon on the Mount, he said, well, much of this doesn't really apply to us.

This was for Israel, and some even argue that it was for Israel in the millennium, that it's for the coming restored Israel in the new kingdom.

And I've even heard that the new covenant doesn't belong to the church, but rather that the new covenant is what is going to happen in the millennium.

And therefore, because we're not the house of Israel, according to dispensationalists, we are not really part of the new covenant.

Therefore, when we talk about things like new covenant baptism and stuff like that, they would say, no, that's not us.

That's for them.

Yeah, exactly.

I think I'll just summarize a few more of these.

I think that you have a big problem when you say Jesus is not reigning presently.

If all authority in heaven and earth has been given to Jesus, how is he not reigning? I mean, I've gotten into some very intense debates with fellows that got angry when I would talk about Jesus being a king or exercising authority.

That's very biblical language, I think.

Yeah, there are a number of other issues.

I think dispensationalism has been helpful, but I really think that we can't be married to a system.

We've got to let the Bible speak for itself.

We need to work text by text.

I think as we do that, we'll see that there are some distinctions between the church and Israel, and yet there is a lot of commonality and there's a lot of continuity.

We can't just talk about discontinuity.

We've got to talk about continuity.

I think that's kind of where I'm at with these issues.

Gotcha.

And that was one of the questions that we talked about beforehand.

I was going to ask you if you consider yourself a dispensationalist.

Let's say this, and I'm just curious how you would answer this question, because I know how I would, and you may not have ever thought about it.

Forgive me if this is out of left field, but let's say you as pastor, and you have elders, right? So you share your pastorate with those other men.

Let's say somebody comes into the church and they say, I'm coming out of a Presbyterian church.

I've been a covenant theologian my whole life.

Would you consider this church to teach covenantalism or dispensationalism, or would you say we're somewhere in the middle? What we've done is in our doctrinal statement, we have positions that we deny to the first order and to the second order.

And we've denied pretty much extreme positions on both covenantalism and classical dispensationalism to the second order.

And if you're in the middle, then there's no issue.

And our members can hold different views.

We have members that hold to sort of a Ryrie-style dispensationalism.

We've got members who hold to much more of a covenantal structure.

And thank God we have unity in the church because we want to have unity about the gospel.

And we recognize that these are important issues for understanding our Bible, and yet reasonable Christians can disagree about them.

Okay.

I have to ask another question because it's something you just said.

It just strikes me.

It intrigues me.

All right.

And I know we haven't gotten to the listener question yet, but I'm interested.

I'm enjoying talking to you.

I think the listeners are enjoying this as well.

So you said you got to be careful of the extremes.

So I think I know what the extremes would be of both views, but let's say, because you said you have some things listed.

What are some things that you would say are the extremes of covenantal theology? What would be the concern? Oh, sure.

Christian reconstruction.

Let's see.

Dominionism, stuff like that.

The law continues just as it did in ancient Israel as binding on people today civilly that we should.

I mean, that is totally inconsistent with my understanding of the New Testament.

Yeah.

And we talked a little before, actually, in our text messages back and forth about dominionism, reconstructionism.

And you said you're seeing some issues of that in your home state where people are saying America is the new Israel kind of thing.

Oh, yeah.

The new apostolic reformation is very influential, even in some corners of Texas politics.

And then the dominionistic movement.

I mean, they'll take helicopters over cities and spray holy water out of the helicopter and say, we've recaptured this city for Christ.

I mean, it's really odd stuff.

Wow.

That's wild.

Okay.

I did see a picture one time of a person who it was a person standing on the side of the road and a car had gone by and they had splashed him.

And they said that was a drive by baptism.

So maybe that was the inspiration for.

Yeah, I remember this.

It was like 10 or 15 years ago this happened, but I just read this thing.

This is the wildest thing I've ever heard.

Yeah.

All right.

So let's get to the questions.

We are going to the question from the listener.

Now, this question came in from a fellow minister.

This is a young man who I've had the opportunity to meet in the past.

And we correspond through Facebook.

And he is a wonderful preacher of the gospel.

And in his church, he said, there are some questions have come up about this mid-acts perspective.

He didn't call it mid-acts dispensationalism.

But once he began to describe it, that's when I realized what it was he was talking about.

And this is what he writes.

He says, I recently sought more clarity on some of the differences between the gospel of grace given to Paul and the kingdom gospel as described by Peter and Jesus.

A position called the mid-acts perspective attempts to answer and explain the differences by asserting that they are, in fact, different gospels.

But the kingdom gospel under Peter was rejected during the mid-acts events and is no longer available.

Now, only the gospel of grace given to Paul remains, which apparently challenges traditional views on baptism and the partaking of communion as well.

Have you ever heard of anything like that before? Do you see any distinctions in the details of the gospel between Peter and Paul? Now, that's the end of his question.

I want to add a thought here.

After I received that question, I began to research this.

And I found out that this is actually correct.

There are groups out there that teach a mid-acts dispensationalism, which their argument, and I'm going to get Ben to chime in here in just a second, but their argument is that the dispensation of the church age began not in Acts 2, which a lot of dispensationalists would say that's when the church was born.

They would say, no, it was born with the ministry of Paul, that after the church was born through the ministry of Paul, that things like baptism were no longer commanded because that was commanded under the previous dispensation.

And now that we are under the dispensation of grace, the gospels and the writings of Peter and James, all are part of a dispensation that we are no longer in.

And therefore, those books, while they can speak wisdom to us, don't really provide us any marching orders.

They don't really provide us any positive commands.

And so that's how I understand it.

Ben, when I reached out to you, I asked you because you said you had gone through this before.

Did I describe that correctly? And what else would you add to that? Yeah, so I've had a number of contacts with this movement really out of left field the last few years among friends and kind of through some family connections.

You described it pretty well.

This viewpoint is alternatively called mid-Acts dispensationalism or hyper dispensationalism.

And sometimes it's even called ultra dispensationalism.

Although some of the folks that are in this movement would reject some of those titles.

I want to say two things before I kind of get into anything else here.

I want to say, number one, this is outside the bounds of normal dispensationalism.

So this is not mainstream dispensational thinking of any variety.

Second is that this group of ideas, it's not monolithic.

So there are a lot of different groups that hold to some form of mid-Acts dispensationalism, but they're not all exactly the same.

And so it's possible that you might encounter some mid-Acts groups that aren't going to hold to some of the things we talk about today.

But on the whole, most of them will.

So these guys argue that, yeah, that the church is distinct from Israel, just like most Pentecostals.

But they're going to argue that the church begins at some point in the Book of Acts after Pentecost.

Now, when they think the church age begins, they don't all agree.

Some hyper-dispensationalists say it begins with Paul's conversion in Acts 9.

Some think it begins with the first missionary journey to the Gentiles in Acts 13.

The very first hyper-dispensationalist, who was a guy named Ethel Bollinger, he held that it actually, the church didn't begin until the very end of the Book of Acts.

And the implications of this argument are that if you move the start of the church age into the Book of Acts, and even to the end of the Book of Acts, then what you're saying is everything that came before in the New Testament belongs to some other dispensation, some other way that God is dealing with people.

It's not through the gospel as we understand it, that there is another gospel that was applied to earlier groups that's not applied today.

Exactly how many dispensations or how many alternative gospels there are depends on who you ask.

Bollinger thought there were two dispensations between the start of the New Testament and the church age.

Other writers have posited as many as four.

So these guys would say that the gospel preached by Paul is not the same gospel preached by Jesus or preached by Peter in the Book of Acts.

And yeah, like you say, that they'll say that the gospels basically hold the same effect for us that the Old Testament does.

It's not authoritative in a direct way.

And right then, just that very statement is to me, it causes me to bristle, and maybe you do as well.

When someone says the gospel that was preached by Jesus is not the gospel that was preached by Paul, it seems as if that position is really giving way to those who would say things like the Bible contradicts itself.

Or go ahead.

Yeah, well, they won't say it's a contradiction.

They'll just say this is progressive revelation.

And so what God was saying through Jesus was effective for the folks in that day.

And then after the ascension, well, then God has a different message for the folks in the first few chapters of the Book of Acts.

And then that message has been supplanted.

So I don't think they would argue that the Bible is contradicting itself, but they're creating so many additional dispensations, to use their term, here in the gospels and Acts, that none of them seem to last very long, that God's plan for humanity and how people should be interacting with God changes as you read the Book of Acts in their model.

Yeah, and certainly I agree.

I'm not saying they would say the Bible contradicts itself.

What I guess I'm saying is they would say, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think they would say that the things that Jesus said are not the same as what Paul said, because they're saying he said them to a different group.

And so, for instance, one of the great arguments that we often deal with, at least I do, I'm sure you do as well, is when people want to pit James and Paul against each other.

They say, you know, James 2 says you're justified by works and not by faith alone.

Then you go to Paul, and Paul says you're justified not by works of the law, but by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

And they say, see, these are two contradictory ideas.

And someone like me, who is committed to sola fide, who's committed to the teaching that the whole Bible teaches that we're justified by faith alone from beginning to end, that they would say, well, yes, that's the way it is now, but that's not the way it's always been.

Yeah, that's exactly what they would say.

They're going to argue that the Gospels are applicable only to the people in Jesus' day and the people that live in a future millennial kingdom.

Then the same thing for Peter, the same thing for James.

In fact, one of these guys who has thousands of followers on YouTube, he goes so far as to say that the only books that are applicable for believers today are the epistles of Paul, and the general epistles are all pointing forward only to the millennium.

Heaven knows why God saw fit to give us those books, since they have no applicable value to us whatsoever in this scheme.

Some of these guys go further and say the only books that are directly applicable to believers are the prison epistles.

So Galatians and, sorry, Ephesians and Colossians and Philippians, that's it.

And the rest of it is, yeah, oh, yeah.

So you almost become a Marcionite at that point.

We're going to only, we're only going to take the portions that we think apply to us, and we're going to throw, not throw it away.

I did take the opportunity today as I was driving home from my, I taught a lesson this morning and I was on my way home, and I listened to a sermon from one of these guys because I wanted to be as fair as I could and listen to what he had to say.

And it was, the name of the sermon was Straw Men Arguments Against Their Position.

And the arguments he was mentioning are not even arguments I would even, you know, because he was dealing with people who would argue that the church preexisted Paul and that, you know, that Paul mentions the church before his conversion.

And he said, these are straw man arguments because we believe the church existed.

We just don't believe it was the body of Christ.

It was the church as it was prior to the body of Christ.

And therefore he says there's multiple churches.

Have you heard this where they'll say there's, there's the Old Testament? Yeah, there's an Old Testament body.

There's the body Jesus is dealing with.

There's the church, the Jerusalem church, the first few chapters of Acts.

And all of this is distinct from the body of Christ, which is revealed by Paul.

They'll say that even though the term ecclesia is used in all of these passages that, that this word suddenly is taking on new meaning as you read across the scripture, even though there's never any kind of internal signal proving that.

And in fact, there are some really good arguments that show that whatever happened at Acts 2 is the same thing that happens in Acts 11.

And it's the same thing that happens that Paul's describing in 1 Corinthians 12, when he says we're all baptized into one body in one spirit.

There is whatever happened at Pentecost is what has happened throughout the church age subsequent to that.

A lot of their arguments are very weak on this point, lexically and grammatically.

Yeah.

And, and again, what you said earlier, some people see two, some people see four, it really is how many churches are there, you know, yeah.

And, and I would say and I hope you would agree, but we'll, we'll see if we maybe, maybe have a different take on this.

I would say that when someone says that's that, that Jesus has a different gospel than Paul, then that would seem to me to run headlong into Galatians 1, because Paul says, if there is any other gospel, let that person be anathematized, let that person be accursed.

And so I don't know how they would deal with that verse.

I'm assuming they would simply say, that's Paul saying for this time, there's only one gospel, but there have been other gospels at other times.

Yeah, that's, that's what they would argue.

Exactly.

And, and I think that one, one thing I think is important to remember here is, is that these guys, by and large, hold to a very free grace theology.

And I think that's one of the reasons that this is appealing to them.

They think that by disposing of the Sermon on the Mount, that they can, or the warning passages in Hebrews, that they can get to a gospel that is devoid of repentance.

But, but the problem is, Jesus preached the same gospel that Paul preached.

I mean, Paul tells us that.

So, so in 1 Timothy chapter 6, verse 4, I mean, this, this verse is directly on point.

Listen to what Paul says.

If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.

He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

I mean, how do we know what the sound words of Jesus are if they're not the gospels? So if you repudiate the gospels, then you fall right into Paul's critique here.

And he says you are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

Wow.

Yeah.

Right there would have been the mic drop moment.

If you had one, you could have dropped it.

Yeah.

If it's, let me read you one more here before we come back to some of these other issues.

But I shall we escape if we neglect such a great salvation? It was declared at first by the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard.

So Jesus preached the same gospel that the apostles preached collectively.

Think about Galatians 2.

Paul goes and he meets with the pillars of the community in Jerusalem, and they're all preaching the same thing.

I mean, this is, what I find with these guys is they'll find one verse, and they'll say, well, if I take this one verse, usually in the King James, that's sufficient.

I can build a chain of disconnected verses wrenched from their context, sometimes stopping in the middle of a verse and not reading the end of it.

And, oh, here are my proof texts.

Well, the problem is the Bible speaks to these issues with great clarity.

If you actually read the whole New Testament, you'll find Christ preached the gospel, the apostles say so.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And this gets back to the heart of the whole issue.

If we're saying that Jesus preached a different gospel than Paul, and that that gospel no longer applies, are we not saying that Christ is really not the head of the church, but Paul is the head of the church? And maybe that's an exaggeration.

And again, I don't want to make a straw man, but it just seems to me we're saying that Paul is the one who is the pillar and foundation of the truth at that point.

Well, I think that they may not put it in quite those terms, but they will freely say that the church that Jesus says in Matthew 16, that he's going to build his church, they'll say that's not the same church Paul proclaimed, that Paul established.

But that was an earlier body.

That body was what Peter was running with an ax to, but it's not the same church.

Wow.

And I mean, that's why they don't practice water baptism.

Yeah.

And I'm glad you mentioned that because it was one of the questions I wanted to bring up.

And it was mentioned in the sermon that I listened to today, the gentleman did say, we do not practice water baptism because there's only one baptism in this dispensation, and it's the baptism of the spirit.

It's not baptism in water.

And when the listener who sent me this, Zeke, who sent me this question, we ended up having a longer conversation because when he asked me the question, I followed up with some follow-up to him because I wanted to make sure I understood what he was asking.

And I could tell right away that to him, the biggest concern in the question was the question of baptism because he was saying, we know that baptism does not confer salvation upon someone.

And as Baptists, I mean, when I say we're Baptists by confession, and I assume you guys are believers, Baptists.

Yes.

So as those who would hold to a Baptistic view of believers only baptism, we would say that a believer who receives baptism is not receiving salvation, but rather they're receiving the sign of the promises that come through faith in Christ and the promise of being buried with Christ, raised to new life, that this is a picture of repentance, death to sin, rising to a new life, a new walk.

There's all kinds of things that are pictured in baptism.

I don't really care for the term.

A lot of people say it's an outward show and inward change.

I'm not a big fan of that term because even though there may be some truth in it, I like the idea of understanding that this is a sign of God's promise that he gives to us in Christ.

And it's also a sign of our initial entrance into that new covenant community because we would not accept anyone into our church who has not been baptized.

Is that the same for you all? Yes.

Yeah.

And so we would say that while baptism doesn't save, it is a necessary act of obedience to be a part of a church.

Yes.

And they would say that's not true.

They would say if you hold to that, you're demanding some kind of a work.

Yeah.

So what they're going to argue is because the Gospels belong to a dispensation, a different dispensation than the church age, that the Great Commission has no application for the church.

Wow.

Yeah.

And so water baptism, which Christ commands, there has no application to the church.

And the fact that Peter says, you know, repent and be baptized, that has no application for the church because the church is after Pentecost and the baptism is in Acts three.

Well, it doesn't have any application.

And, you know, you go the whole way through the Ethiopian eunuch in chapter eight and that has no application, they'll say.

Yeah, that's, you know, one of my good friends comes from a fairly prominent church here in Houston, and he left them over this doctrine, but they basically were holding to a hyper-dispensational rejection of water baptism, not as a stated position in the church.

And I think this is important.

A lot of times when this is practiced, it's practiced as a higher teaching that's off the books in the church.

So you'll have a lot of people in the church don't know that the leaders hold to this, but the leaders hold to this.

And, you know, we don't practice water baptism here.

You know, that's something that, you know, that's a lower truth that reflects a poor understanding of the Bible.

That's basically what this fellow was told.

So they don't practice that at all then? So they don't.

Wow.

Okay.

Because the way the guy I was listening to today, and I think it was Hope Bible Church was the name of his, the name of the church.

I could be wrong about that.

But I think what he said was basically that you can be baptized, but you don't have to be baptized.

It's like, it's an optional, but not a command.

But like you said, it's not like they're ubiquitous.

They're all the same.

This guy could have his own little.

Yeah, exactly.

So here's another example, the Lord's Supper.

Some hyper-dispensational groups will celebrate the supper.

Some will not, depending on whether you think the church starts in Acts 13 or Acts 28.

Because if you think the church starts in Acts 13, then when Paul talks about communion in 1 Corinthians, he's talking about something that happens for the church.

But if you think that it doesn't happen, the church doesn't start until Paul's in prison, well, then 1 Corinthians is assigned to an earlier dispensation.

And since the prison epistles don't talk about communion, then we shouldn't practice communion.

So they deny not only the sign, well, what I would say the sign of entrance in the New Covenant community, which is baptism, but the sign of that perpetual working of of trusting in the Lord Jesus Christ, trusting in the gospel, the body and the blood.

I don't know, how often does your church do communion? Monthly.

Okay.

See, we are somewhat unique, not unique, but we are a weekly Lord's Supper.

And that's actually just, it's a tradition we've held ever since the church started, even before we were reformed, we did communion every week.

And we still do that today.

And sometimes people feel like we do it too often.

I enjoy doing it weekly, but I can't imagine never doing it.

It just doesn't even.

And remember, some of them do.

I mean, I don't want to overgeneralize here.

It's not a monolithic movement, but how they answer the question of when the church begins, it really drives the rest of the practice of the church.

And so, yeah, so some of them may practice baptism.

Most of the ones I'm familiar with don't, and some actively discourage it.

Okay.

You mentioned earlier about the free grace, and I know this is, we're going a little off script here.

I know we've got a list of questions.

I'm going to save the last two for to the end, but I want to go back to something that you said.

You mentioned you feel like these guys are free grace guys.

And obviously, in one sense, we would be free grace guys, because we believe that justification is by grace and alone through faith alone and Christ alone.

But when you say they're free grace, you're saying that they're antinomian.

Is that maybe the way that you would just, or would you say that? Yeah.

I think that the question is this, everybody that follows the reformation is going to say, we believe that you're saved by grace through faith.

But the question is, what is the faith that saves? What is the content of saving faith? And I think that the answer can be found on the lips of Christ in his first sermon in Mark, where he says, repent and believe the gospel.

Repent and believe the gospel.

So we've got to turn away from what we've been hoping in our life of sin, and we've got to trust in Christ.

Well, these guys are going to say, well, basically, you need to have a much lower standard of what the content of saving faith is.

You only need to sort of believe a set of facts about Jesus that's sufficient.

And then they're going to hold to a notion of eternal security that says, okay, you prayed a prayer.

You prayed the sinner's prayer.

You made a profession of faith.

You're good to go.

You can live however you want.

You've got your golden ticket and nothing can take that from you.

And the problem is, the Bible tells us in no uncertain terms that there are some lifestyles that show that someone has not truly been regenerated.

You look at a passage like 1 Corinthians 6, 9 through 11, do not be deceived.

The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God.

It's there in black and white.

And Paul wrote this, right? This is a warning passage from Paul, but there are other warning passages, and Hebrews has a few of them, right? But, you know, this sort of approach to salvation, this sort of easy believism, you pray a prayer, you get eternal security, and then you can go do whatever you want.

They don't know what to do with the warning passages.

And so it seems to me that the folks in the hyper-dispensational camp have decided, well, if we can get rid of the general epistles, if we can get rid of Hebrews that warns us about these matters, if we can get rid of the authority of 1 John that tells us that believers should walk as he walked, then we won't have to worry about people pointing to those texts and showing that our approach to soteriology is flawed.

I understand.

Wow.

And, oh, that just kind of takes a step back because I know how many times I have said in, whether it's sermons or conversations, how many times I have said that there is a danger in the, you know, raise your hand, walk the aisle, get your ticket to hell punched or ticket, ticket to heaven, get your heaven ticket punched.

And that seems to be exactly what you're talking about.

And I'm sure that there would be some repudiation.

And I want to say right now, if you are a mid-acts dispensational proponent, and you're listening to this, and you feel like there's been from either myself or Ben in any way, misrepresenting you understand, we know that there's not a monolith here.

There's not, there's not one single position.

So this may not, we may not be talking about you directly, but there seem to be within the camp, the idea that we, we think about what's being taught.

If, if, if we are jettisoning the commands of the gospels, we're jettisoning, jettisoning the commands of the general epistles, specifically Hebrews, which gives us these warning passages, we're getting rid of these where we tend to be left with what, what, what could be considered to be the free grace of Paul, but even Paul gives warnings.

Even Paul talks about himself being a castaway, you know, that, that I preached to others and myself being a castaway.

There's these, there are these realities of, of, of the concern.

And yet, and like I said, this is this, this to me is, is, is, is fearful because if we, if we're teaching people that saving faith is nothing but the acquiescence to certain facts about Jesus, that type of easy believism is what has been so damaging within the church.

And it's certainly not limited to this movement.

I think that, you know, Paul doesn't say exactly what some of these folks think he says.

I mean, you know, does Paul preach repentance? Well, what's he say at Mars Hill? God commands all people everywhere to repent.

Or look at how he describes the conversion of the Thessalonians.

And for Thessalonians one, he turned from, from idols to serve the living and true God.

There's a turning.

I mean, that's, that's classic repentance language.

And again, if you want to talk about warning passages that show that our lifestyles give evidence of whether we've not been converted, I mean, you can look again, first Corinthians six, Galatians chapter five has a very similar warning passage.

I think that there is a way of reading Paul that isn't really reading Paul.

It's basically taking a few verses from Romans and saying like, if I chain these verses together in the right way, then I can, I can build a, an easy believism that really avoids a lot of what Paul's saying and alongside the rest of the new Testament.

And I've seen just catastrophic effects of this, uh, in people's lives.

Well, that leads me to, as we begin to draw, draw to the end here.

And, and, and, um, this was the question I was sort of saving.

Do you think that these guys have the true gospel? And let me, let me, let me clarify how I'm asking this because we have, we have both said that we don't believe there are multiple gospels.

We would say there's one gospel that was promised in the old Testament, proclaimed by Christ and preached by the apostles as well.

But, and I, and I believe the same gospel that Abraham had was the gospel that was preached by Christ, because Paul tells us in Galatians that God preached the gospel to Abraham when he said that all the nations will be blessed through him.

So I believe the gospel was given, um, as early as Genesis chapter three, after the fall and the promise of the one who would come and destroy the head of the serpent.

And, uh, that that was the Lord Jesus Christ.

So in that regard, I would say there's one gospel, but these guys are saying there are multiple gospels.

Obviously we, we would disagree with that, but do you think that that position makes them heretical? Let me say this.

I think when we talk about false doctrine, we've really got to be careful.

Are we, are we, we're calling something false because we think that they've misread the Bible, but they've misread it in a way that, you know, many Christians do, or are they teaching something that stands totally contrary to the essentials of the faith? And I would only call the latter category heresy, something that's really against and outside the faith.

And it gives me no joy to say this, but I really think that hyper-dispensationalism is, is heretical.

And I have a number of reasons for that.

Um, first I think that hyper-dispensationalism holds to bibliological heresy.

Um, one of the essential arguments of this movement, it comes from, um, first Timothy chapter two, verse 15, uh, which in the King James says, uh, study to show thyself approved a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.

And they'll take this phrase, rightly dividing the word of truth.

And they'll say, this is the biblical interpretation.

Uh, one of them says that this word dividing is like cutting a cake.

So we need to cut the cannon into the sections that apply to us and that don't apply to us.

Um, the problem is that number one, that's not exactly, uh, what, what divide means there.

The cut is not the partition of a cake.

Uh, if you look at how the word is used in the Septuagint, it clearly means cutting a path through things.

Um, number two, the word of truth is the gospel.

It's not the cannon.

Uh, every time it's used that way in the New Testament.

Um, and, and number three is the key to biblical interpretation is not segmenting the books of the Bible into those that apply to us and those that don't.

The entire Bible speaks to believers.

And then I would argue the commands of the New Testament uniformly and directly apply to believers.

And I think that frankly, it's, it's heretical, uh, to teach otherwise, uh, that this is denigrating the notion that all scriptures God breathed and is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness.

The man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

Um, once you start partitioning sections of the Bible and, and into those that, that we deem to be applicable by some nebulous criteria and, and others that we can, uh, you know, just basically shrug off, uh, we're really divesting the scriptures of their authority.

Uh, second, I think that this, uh, holds to a soteriological heresy for the reasons I've discussed, basically, uh, denying that repentance is prerequisite to salvation.

Um, and by basically eliminating the warning passages.

Third, I think this holds to a Christological heresy because it denies the Lordship of Christ over the church.

Uh, it holds to ecclesiological heresy because it denies the ordinances that Christ has instituted as perpetually binding upon the church of water baptism and the Lord's supper.

I think that it flirts with anthropological heresy because it's rebuilding the wall of partition that Christ died to tear down, which is the distinction between Israel and the church.

Uh, I think that it flirts with open theism when it talks about the church age being avoidable.

Um, and that the church age was basically not God's plan.

A, uh, when you actually see some of these movements, uh, they, they, they run with annihilationism and, uh, soul sleep, which are at least we would say eschatological errors, even if we're not going to call them for heresy.

So is that, I didn't even realize that.

So, so they, they hold to, um, soul sleep and annihilationism, huh? Bollinger certainly, uh, held a soul sleep, but he was the progenitor of this movement.

And many, many people who hold to this are annihilationistic.

In fact, the number one guy that I've, uh, interacted with on this last week, he put out a sermon talking about how the lake of fire is basically purgatory.

Oh, okay.

I think he's actually a universalist, not even annihilationist.

Many are annihilationist, but I think some he's, he's headed for full-blown universalism.

Wow.

It's interesting.

I recently did a lesson on, on different views of the afterlife.

And I talked about soul sleep and it's funny how that particular view does find itself in so many heretical movements, Jehovah Witnesses, um, even the Adventist movements, not all of them are heretical, but you know, a lot of the Adventist movements are at least, you know, heterodoxical in a lot of their views.

And they, they almost always hold to that, that, that, that view that the soul and the body, you know, die together or sleep together.

And, um, it just, wow.

I didn't realize that.

I think many, many who listened to this that are more familiar with dispensationalism will know the name H.A.

Ironside.

He was a very famous preacher and commentator from the dispensational camp.

And he wrote a book on this and he says, quote, having had most intimate acquaintance with ultra-dispensationalism as taught by many for the last 40 years, I have no hesitancy in saying that its fruits are evil.

It has produced a tremendous crop of heresies throughout the length and breadth of this and other lands.

It has divided Christians and wrecked churches and assemblies without numbers.

It has lifted up its votaries and intellectual and spiritual pride to an appalling extent so that they look upon supreme contempt, they look with supreme contempt upon Christians who do not accept their peculiar views.

It has absolutely throttled gospel efforts at home and sown discord on missionary fields abroad.

So true are these things of this system that I have no hesitancy in saying it is an absolutely satanic perversion of the truth.

I mean, that's, that's, that's from one of the, the, the most famous dispensational, uh, speakers denouncing this movement.

So really this is, if we want to go off of that, then we could say this really is a perversion of dispensate.

This isn't a brand of dispensationalism.

This is a perversion of dispensationalism.

Yes, absolutely.

Let me say of the, of the movements that I've been, I've been, I've known about directly that, that, that dealt with this, this doctrine.

Two of them are, I've known three, basically, I've interacted with three of these.

Two of them are among the most outlandish and destructive false teaching systems I've ever seen.

And the third, um, was a church that was founded in this, this doctrine.

Um, but the doctrine is held secret by the leaders of the church for 35 years.

And they hired 13 different men to come in as pastors who did not know the church held this doctrine and ran each of them off over 35 years.

Um, because they would not succumb to this error.

And so this was a church that was founded in this and propagated this, uh, secretly, uh, and eventually by God's grace, another man came in, dealt with the troublemakers and that church repented and it has healthy gospel ministry today.

So this can be defeated.

And it's important if you see this in your ministry to oppose this, uh, with, with, with the truth, speak the truth, expose the unfruitful works of darkness, as Paul says, because people can come out of this.

Um, but I've seen this, this is a very dangerous doctrine.

It has caused a lot of problems.

Amen.

Well, one of the questions I had that I was going to ask is, do you think this teaching is dangerous? You just answered it.

It is absolutely dangerous.

If it's, if it's heresy, it's dangerous, but it's also more than that.

It's what you just said.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's sometimes a hidden danger.

Like Jude talks about the hidden reefs that are, uh, that are so devastating.

And so if someone did try to bring this into your church, if you knew there was somebody trying to host a Bible study, maybe a new member, somebody, even, even a longtime member that was trying to promote something like this in your church, uh, how would you, how would you handle it? Yeah.

So let me say this.

I think that, that your listeners need to know that some of the main proponents of this view today are on YouTube and they will urge their listeners to go into churches and try to, to propagate this doctrine.

So this is even, even, uh, to try and force out pastors that oppose it.

Um, and so I think this has to be opposed.

Um, let me say this.

I think we always have to remember there's a distinction between deceivers and deceived people.

Um, and so if you have somebody that comes into the church that wants to spread this, that is who is an active deceiver, uh, we, we have to deal with them in only one way, which is we've got to turf them out.

Uh, second John 10 says, if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive them into your house or give him any greeting.

And in Greek, that verb for forgive a greeting is to even say, hello, do not even say hello to them.

Whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works.

Romans 16 says the same thing that, uh, those who create obstacles contrary to the doctrine you've been taught, avoid them.

So I, number one, if somebody comes into the church and is not a member and they're propagating this, any local church has the right to just tell a non member you're, you're not welcome here anymore.

Um, if somebody comes in as propagating this as a member, uh, I think that they need to be put under the discipline of the church, uh, and, and particularly the discipline of excommunication.

Now, if somebody is flirting with this or they're interested in this, I wouldn't drop the hammer on them right away.

Um, I think that the Bible tells us very clearly how to deal with people who are deceived, who are being taken in by false teaching, but who have not yet begun propagating it.

Titus 1.13 says, rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth.

And likewise, Jude ends his book by saying, save others by snatching them out of the fire.

If you see people that are, that are in this, go after them and try and bring them back to the the gospel.

Uh, we don't want to lose anybody to, to, to false teaching.

Um, but once somebody commits to this false teaching, once they say, I don't want to hear what you have to say, you know, my YouTube pastor is telling me the truth.

Uh, there are many, many gospels.

We're not going to baptize at that point.

I mean, we, what choice do we have for the, for the purity of the body? We must excommunicate them.

All right.

Yeah.

And, and that, that would be true of any heresy.

If there was a person within the church who was teaching, uh, that, that the Trinity was not true, or they were teaching that justification was not by grace alone, through faith alone, or, or any of those things that we would say are essential to the, to the, uh, to the truth and essential to the faith, uh, that, that, that same thing would happen.

And we would, we would treat them, uh, with love.

We would go to them in private.

We would call them to repentance.

And then we would maybe take two or three witnesses.

We would go through the process.

We wouldn't just immediately, uh, you know, um, excommunicate them, but there would be, but, but that would certainly be the, uh, the end result if they continued in unrepentance and continued in that heretical direction.

And don't let's, if you love somebody, don't let them go off into error without serious challenge and do whatever you can to try and pull them back.

These are eternal matters, right? I mean, it's just so sad that in our age, people don't care about theology and oh, let's all believe, but no, like there's truth and there is error and we must lovingly pursue those who are wayward.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, brother, I want to thank you for coming on today.

I, I've really enjoyed our conversation.

I'm hoping that perhaps, uh, again, we can have another conversation maybe on another topic, but before we close out today, I do want to ask, is there any additional thing that we didn't cover that you were hoping maybe we would talk about or, or something that, that, that just slipped by that we didn't get to say? Uh, let me just throw this one out there.

Uh, one of the main arguments people will hold to is, uh, that, that hold to this is Ephesians chapter three, uh, where Paul talks about that there was a mystery that has been revealed in his teaching.

And this is one of the main verses that proponents of this view will hold.

Um, Paul says in Ephesians three, verse three, the mystery was made known to me by revelation as I have written briefly.

When you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men and other generations.

And they'll say, well, see, Paul, Paul's the beginning of the gospel.

It was revealed to Paul, but you know, they'll stop reading right in the middle of verse five.

But if you keep reading, he says, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the spirit, and apostles and prophets are plural there.

This was given to all of the apostles, not Paul only.

That's one of the strongest arguments they try to make.

And it's based on just dropping the reading of a verse right in the middle of a sentence.

Uh, always, always, always, uh, read, read your verses in context when you wind up in a debate with anybody about a theological matter and don't let them make that kind of a move.

Absolutely.

And that's important.

I'm glad you brought up that verse because if somebody is listening to this, maybe from that side, they may, they may say, well, they didn't deal with our strongest argument.

And our strongest argument is that, that Paul was the one who received this mystery of, of, of the gospel.

And that was delivered to him only.

But as you just said, that's actually not, not the case.

And a good point, very good point there, Ben.

Well, again, I want to thank you for being on the program today.

Again, coolest person I've ever had.

And I say this without a shame because you are a star.

You were a Jeopardy star.

Now you're a star of coffee with a conversation with a Calvinist.

So you must see, I got to tell you meeting me was probably not the same as meeting Alex Trebek.

I don't know, man, you're both pretty cool.

Well, I will, I'm going to tell you this and I'll close with this cause it's kind of silly, but knowing that you were on Jeopardy is really cool.

I have no chance of ever going on Jeopardy, but my, my family really, really, really wants to go on family feud.

So I'll have to talk to you about how you, how you broke into that and maybe I can figure out how to get on family feud.

Amen.

All right, brother.

Well, again, thank you for being with us and listener.

I want to thank you.

And I do want to say this.

If you are a proponent of this position and you feel like you've been misrepresented, I would encourage you to send an email.

I'm sure that Ben and I would be happy to readdress anything that you bring up.

We, I do this show every week.

Hopefully I can get him back on.

Maybe we could readdress it, but if you'd like to send us a question or a comment, you can do so at calvinistpodcastatgmail.com.

Again, that's calvinistpodcastatgmail.com.

I'll shoot that information over to Ben.

If you send it in with any questions about today's program, we'd be happy to interact with you on that.

And if you are a listener, a listener to the program, maybe you came in today, you never heard of this and you have more questions or you'd like for us to go deeper.

We'd love to hear from you as well.

And as always, if you have show ideas or questions for a future program, you can send us that email as well.

I want to thank you again for listening to conversations with the Calvinist.

My name is Keith Foskey and I've been your Calvinist.

May God bless you.