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 Huttness?

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 were 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 was not, and he deceased during my time when I was

there.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

But he was one 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 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, what are,

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.

Oh, 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.

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

tribulation 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.

Wow.

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, and 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, you know,

well, these locusts, they're Apache helicopters.

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

You just stopped being, you know, 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'm not being, 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 Testaments.

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 Testaments, 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, dispensationalism has changed.

Really, guys like Ryrie and Walford 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, in

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 Wellham?

Yeah, Wellham, 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 the 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, 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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Some even argue that it was for Israel in the millennium, that it's for the coming

restored Israel in the new kingdom.

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'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'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.

Look, 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 and 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 like covenantal theology?

What would be the concern?

Oh, sure.

Christian reconstruction.

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 you're saying

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, a car had gone by and they had splashed him.

And they said that was a drive -by baptism.

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, 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 -axe 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 -axe

dispensationalism, but they're not all exactly the same, and so it's possible that you might

encounter some mid -axe 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 what this, 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 was 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.

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, 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 and 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, 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 gonna 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.

Well, 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 only going to take the portions that we think apply to us and we're gonna 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.

Cause 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, cause he was dealing with

people who would argue that the church pre -existed 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 the Old Testament.

Yeah, there's all 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 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.

That a lot of their arguments are very weak on this point lexically and grammatically.

Yeah, and again, what you said earlier some people see two, some people see four.

It really is.

How many churches are there?

How many gospels are there?

Yeah, and I would say, and I hope you would

agree but we'll see if we maybe have a different take on this.

I would say that when someone says 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 what they would argue.

Exactly, and I think that one

thing I think is important to remember here 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 the problem is Jesus preached the same gospel that Paul preached.

I mean, Paul tells us that.

So in 1 Timothy 6, verse 4 I mean, 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.

I thought if you had one, you could have dropped it.

Yeah.

Let me read you one more here before we come back to some of these other issues.

But I mean, here's another one.

Hebrews 2, verse 3.

How 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, 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.

Like I can build a chain of disconnected verses wrenched from their context.

Sometimes, you know, 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 exaggerate.

And again, I don't wanna 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 gonna build his church.

They'll say that's not the same church Paul proclaimed, that Paul established.

Wow, wow.

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 I'm, you know, we're Baptists by confession, and I assume you guys are believers,

that Baptist.

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 sign, 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, and you may use this, 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, it's 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?

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 or.

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.

Oh, 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 3.

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 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 that's 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.

And so they don't practice that at all, then they don't.

Wow, OK, because the way the way the guy I was listening to today and I think it was Hope Bible Church was the name of

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 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 First 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 First 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 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 formed, 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 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 the justification is by grace alone,

through faith alone, in 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,.

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.

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 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 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 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 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, and think about what's being taught.

If we are jettisoning the commands of the gospels, we're 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 could be

considered to be the free grace of Paul.

But even Paul gives warnings.

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

being a castaway.

There are these realities of the concern.

And yet, and like I said, this is, this to me is

fearful because 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 Paul doesn't say exactly what

some of these folks think he says.

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 idols to serve the living and true God.

There's a turning.

I mean, 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 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 build an easy believism that really avoids

a lot of what Paul's saying alongside the rest of the New Testament.

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

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

And this was the question I was sort of saving.

Do you think that these guys have the true

gospel?

And let me clarify how I'm asking this because we have both said that we

don't believe there are multiple gospels.

We would say there's one gospel.

It was promised in the Old Testament, proclaimed by Christ and preached by the apostles as well.

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 of Abraham when he said that all the nations will be blessed through him.

So I believe the gospel was given 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 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 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.

We're calling something false because we think that they've misread the Bible, but they've

misread it in a way that 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 heretical.

And I have a number of reasons for that.

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

One of the essential arguments of this movement, it comes from 1 Timothy

chapter two, verse 15, which in the King James says, 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 key to biblical interpretation.

One of them says that this word dividing is like cutting a cake.

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

The problem is that number one, that's not exactly what divide

means there.

The cut is not the partition of a cake.

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

Number two, the word of truth is the gospel.

It's not the canon.

Every time it's used that way in the New Testament.

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 heretical to teach otherwise, that this

is denigrating the notion that all scriptures God breathed and is profitable for teaching, reproof, correction,

training and righteousness.

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

But once you start partitioning sections of the Bible and into those that we deem to

be applicable by some nebulous criterion and others that we can, you know,

just basically shrug off, we're really divesting the scriptures of their authority.

Second, I think that this holds to a soteriological heresy for the reasons I've discussed, basically

denying that repentance is prerequisite to salvation.

And by basically eliminating the morning passages.

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

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.

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

that the church age was basically not God's plan A.

When you actually see some of these movements, they run with annihilationism

and soul sleep, which are at least, we would say, eschatological errors, even if we're not

going.

To call them flawed heresy.

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

So they hold to soul sleep and annihilationism, huh?

Bollinger certainly held to 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 interacted with on this last week, he put out a sermon talking about

how the lake of fire is basically purgatory.

Oh, OK.

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

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

Wow.

It's interesting.

I recently did a lesson 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, even the Adventist movements.

Not all of them are heretical, but a lot of the Adventist movements are at least, you know, heterodoxical

in a lot of their views.

And they almost always hold to that view.

The soul and the body, you know, die together or sleep together.

And it just, wow, I didn't realize that.

I think many, many who listen 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 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 from one of the most famous dispensational speakers denouncing this

movement.

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

perversion of dispensation.

This isn't a brand.

Of dispensationalism.

This is a perversion of dispensationalism.

Yes, absolutely.

Let me say of the movements that I've known about directly that

dealt with 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 was a church that was founded in this doctrine.

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 because they would not succumb to this

error.

And so this was a church that was founded in this and propagated this secretly.

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 with the truth.

Speak the truth.

Expose the unfruitful works of darkness, as Paul says, because people can come out of this.

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 heresy, it's dangerous.

But it's also more than that.

It's what you just said.

It's sometimes a hidden danger, like Jude talks about the hidden reefs 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 or somebody, even a longtime member.

That was trying to promote something like this in your church, how would you handle it?

Yeah, so let me say this.

I think 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 propagate this doctrine.

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

And so I think this has to be opposed.

Let me say this.

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

And so if you have somebody that comes into the church that wants to spread this, that is who is an active

deceiver, we have to deal with them in only one way, which is we've got to turf them out.

Second, John 10 says, if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him 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 those who create obstacles contrary to the doctrine you've been taught, avoid them.

So 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 not welcome here anymore.

If somebody comes in and is propagating this as a member, I think that they need to be put under the discipline of the church

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.

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 in this, go after them and try and bring them back to the truth of the

gospel.

We don't want to lose anybody to false teaching.

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.

There are many, many gospels.

We're not going to baptize.

At that point, I mean, what choice do we have for the purity of the body?

We must excommunicate them.

All right.

Yeah, and that would be true of any heresy.

If there was a person within the church who was teaching that the Trinity was

not true or they were teaching that justification was not by grace alone, through faith alone or any of those things that we

would say are essential to the truth and essential to the faith,

that same thing would happen.

And we would treat them 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, you know, excommunicate them.

But that would certainly be the end result if they continued in unrepentance and

continued in that heretical direction.

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 let's all believe what we

want.

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've really enjoyed our conversation.

I'm hoping that perhaps 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 something that just slipped by that we didn't get to say?

Let me just throw this one out there.

One of the main arguments people will hold to is that hold to this.

Is Ephesians chapter three, where Paul talks about that there is a mystery that has been revealed in his

teaching.

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

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, oh, see, Paul, Paul's the beginning of the gospel.

It was revealed to Paul.

But, you know, 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.

Always, always, always 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 if somebody is listening to this, maybe from that side, they may say, well,

they didn't deal with our strongest argument.

And our strongest argument is that Paul was the one who received this mystery

of the gospel, and that was delivered to him only.

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

And 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.

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 because 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 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.

I do the 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 Calvinistpodcast at gmail

.com.

Again, that's Calvinistpodcast at gmail .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 a Calvinist.

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

May God bless you.