What is the Church, Part 4 – Dispensationalism vs. Covenant Theology

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One, two, three.

The Church as a Gathered People and the Meaning of Ecclesia

Welcome to The Wrap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, I am your host. I am Andrew Rappaport. Welcome to another edition of The Wrap Report. I hope you enjoy the new intro that was provided for us by Robert Solberg, the author of Torahism. That's an excellent book and actually the only book that I know that addresses Hebrew.

Roots.

If you're not familiar with it, go back to previous episodes on The Wrap Report. I had Robert on.

R .L.

Solberg goes by as another author, but we had him on both on my Wrap Report podcast and on Apologetics Live. So he was on both of those. Great discussion. Apologetics Live.

Wow.

That was a recent one. I think it's the most recent one that dropped from when you're going to listen to this. And that was great. We got someone that believes in Hebrew roots coming in. You got to hear the discussion.

And wow, did that guy make some pet arguments. But you'll want to go and listen to Apologetics Live to hear that. The thing is I do appreciate Robert for providing that. He's got a background in music and just has that great radio voice.

So he was able to put something together, and we appreciate it. I should also, at the beginning, giving some announcements, announce the winner. We've been telling you about the Christian podcast community having a contest, and we had $1 ,000 worth of theological resources that were given away, and Philip Lexlow was the winner of that.

So Philip got a 30-pound box, and I'm going to wonder how long it's going to take him to get through all the materials he got, but he got a lot. And actually, we were going to open with you saying this is the Bud Report, weren't we?

Yeah.

Welcome to the Bud Report. Andrew, I'm glad you could be here today, but I think that was some sort of dream or something I had. I don't know what I was thinking. So it's the Bud Brief.

It's the Bud Brief, there we go.

So Bud, this time I can actually say I am back from Shepherds Conference now that we're recording after that, and I can say it was a lot of good fellowship, and next episode we're going to deal with one of the messages that we heard from there that fits perfectly in line with what we've been doing in this series on the Church.

Very good, on the Church.

Yeah, the Church is an important thing, although right now many of those who may be listening to us are sitting at home and they're saying, I couldn't go to church today, because many churches are closing.

Now my church, as you and I were talking before we went live, the church that I'm attending, we have a, it's a church plant, so we rent a senior center. And so basically the state or the town shut down all public buildings, and so we thought we'd be open for rentals, still be open, but they closed for the senior citizens, and the answer was no, they are closed.

So we've been, it's been an interesting couple days as we scribble.

It's progressed rapidly, and it is in the last couple of days where you see a lot of these things happening. It's happening in our area, mainly with a number of churches, smaller churches that meet in public schools, and the school boards have come out and said, you know what, we're shutting down all extracurricular use of the buildings, and it has affected some church gatherings that have either had to cancel Sunday services or make some other accommodations.

So I was, I'm sure you saw it, I enjoyed reading the response from the elders at Grace and L .A. as to how they were handling this, because that governor had, I guess, indicated gatherings of 250 or more were forbidden, he had mandated against that, and in a Romans 13 spirit of obedience to the governing authorities, Grace, you know, determined that they would abide by that.

I thought that was helpful, because we are to do that. This is not a matter of targeted persecution against the church. This is a much broader issue that society at large is having to deal with.

And this is what, before we get into our topic for today, this is what I wanted to address, because there are some, not many that I've seen, but there are some who are challenging this, some pastors who are implying that somehow the state asking them to not allow gatherings on a Sunday is something that should be responded with disobedience.

In other words, there's some people who are trying to say this is a law that should be ignored because of the fact that we're commanded to gather together and to worship God, and this is somehow a violation of Christian law.

And my perspective, and you mentioned the article from the elders there at Grace Community Church in California, and I think it was well written, I think that what we have to look at is, is this a Romans 13 issue or is this Christian persecution?

And I think for those who may be struggling with this, maybe people have been influenced by some pastor who is saying, no, we are going to worship because, you know, we're Christians and we go to church.

This was a question that I received in email, and my response was, when we look at this, this is the government asking all gatherings, not just Christian gatherings, I mean, this is affecting, as you mentioned, the schools, public buildings, mosques, synagogues, everyone.

So it isn't a targeted thing against Christians. It's not Christians can't meet. It's nobody should meet. I mean, sporting events are being canceled. I mean, hello, they're putting a two-month pause on cruise ships.

You look at this, this is not the government trying to infringe on Christian rights. This is the thing where the government is trying to say, everyone needs to, we need to put a stop to this. Now, do I think this is a pandemic?

Yes, I think it's a pandemic of insanity, stupidity. I mean, let's call it the stupidity virus. I mean, I'm sorry. There's one of two things, bud, that I've realized with this. Either there's a lot of government officials who know something and they're just not going to let us know the details.

Not that governments ever do things like that.

Conspiracy kind of thing.

Yeah. And that becomes the problem is how would so many governments, I mean, around the world, no one is saying what really is going on. Because you look at the reaction to this, you have a three percent death rate.

And I put some things up on my Facebook that show that out of all the diseases, there's diseases that have a much higher death rate. There's ones that are much more contagious. And yet this one is getting a reaction worldwide.

So it's like, is there something that all the countries are saying? We just we can't tell people because there really be panic. And I'm going, well, there is panic. I mean, you can't even find toilet paper, which of all things, of all things.

But help me understand why toilet paper. I mean, hand sanitizer.

I can understand food.

I can understand toilet paper.

Yeah, I'd be buying soup or something. But I walk through our public store yesterday after work and took a picture and sent it to my wife of there's no toilet paper. There was one roll of Charmin and it was like eighteen dollars, one little pack of a.

Four or four rolls.

I'm like, what's going on? I don't get this.

Yeah, of all things. I mean, like I can understand a run on food. You want to make sure you have food. I can understand things like that. But I was like the toilet paper. Like there was someone who I saw online that someone sent a picture.

And someone had like one hundred and forty four rolls of toilet paper.

Like and I thought it was really funny.

The response was, if you need one hundred and forty four rolls of toilet paper for a two week, you know, thing of, you know, this coronavirus, you should have seen a doctor.

A long ago because you got different problems.

Yeah, no problem. It's not the virus right now.

Yeah, 144 rolls of toilet paper.

Something else is going on with your body that you go through that in two weeks or even.

A month, even two months.

No kidding.

So I do I do think that there's there's something I mean, either this is either way. It's almost like conspiracy theory either way. Either all the governments are going, this is really bad. We can't let people know we got to lie to everyone or and they're lying about the numbers or somehow like worldwide.

Everyone is using this to create mass hysteria over what to me seems like very little. I mean, so far you have a fifty five percent recovery rate in the total number of people that have gotten it, you know, from the start of this.

It just it's like something isn't adding up. I don't know. Now, here's an interesting thought and we won't have time to get into this, but an interesting thought for the evolutionists out there. Why exactly would they have an issue with this virus?

Wouldn't this be natural selection? Those who are fit to survive, this can continue on. I mean, the children, the healthy and those who are elderly and unhealthy, they die off. Isn't that evolution? I mean, shouldn't they do nothing to stop this?

Just let nature run its course. Isn't doesn't nature have the intelligence they always tell us to know the right things to do? Almost makes it seem like they don't believe their own teachings.

Yeah, well, that's that's perfect. I had a conversation yesterday with some guys at work who are absolutely panicked by this. You could get this and you could die. I mean, it could take two or three days and you're dead.

And and I thought, you know, I'm not worried about the natural selection side of this because I don't buy into that. I'm thinking divine sovereignty and Lord, you are forcing these people to look at their own mortality.

And I told them, you know, the life you need to worry about is not this one. It's eternal life. And those who don't believe are condemned already. You need to repent and believe. So from that standpoint of divine sovereignty, I cherish the fact that people are looking at their own mortality.

And and if one effect of the fear is is that may the gospel go forth in the midst of it.

I think, you know, our friend and pastor, Justin Pierce, put this very well. He says his numbers were off. He says one percent. It's actually three percent. He says the the odds of dying from coronavirus is less than one percent.

The odds of facing Jesus as judge of the universe are one hundred percent.

Yeah, I think he got the important statistic, right?

Yeah, he got the important statistic, right? Is correct. Yes. So what we want to talk about is the church, we've been talking about this, if you have been here listening to us in the past couple of episodes, we have been going through this because we think this is an important topic.

Now, to give you guys a resource that you can use, we're getting a lot of what we're going over from a book that I wrote called What Do We Believe? You can get that at the Striving for Eternity website.

Just go to strivingforeternity .org, go to the store. You could pick it up there. Now, the reason we're going through this is because of the fact that what we see in this is much confusion. And as we've been laying this out, as we have been trying to develop this more and more, I think what we end up seeing with people is that there's many people who are arguing over the issue of what the church is.

And we hope that today as we try to conclude what's really been four different parts of us building up to this, this is really the conclusion where there's been much debate. We started off by talking about these terms dispensational and covenant theology.

We're going to bring that to a head. And hopefully what we want to be able to do is we want to be able to provide for you really some clarity on this issue, because I believe that these things that are being debated are not that big of a difference.

There's a lot more similarity than people think about or realize. And we want to show where there is the differences, where there's not the differences, and a lot of the strongman arguments that get made to attack the other side.

So with that, what I want to start off, though, is bring us where we've been in the last three episodes of the rap report, three parts of the we've been discussing the church, so that we can bring this all together in the modern church.

Now, as we've been going through this, we started off by saying, what is the word ecclesia, the word for church? And we were explaining that in the first century, that was really a term before Christ.

It was a term that just meant a gathering specifically for voting purposes. As we gather soon for an election, that would be an ecclesia, when everyone would gather, although those gatherings are not allowed anymore around the world because we're supposed to stop these public public gatherings, so we should stop public ecclesia.

But the word, this word ecclesia that we think of from the Greek, that is the idea we have the word church, it was a regularly summoned legislative body or assembly, and it was it was gathered for a purpose.

Now, what we ended up seeing is after Christ, and even Christ started to use it as in a different way, he had a more specific way. And then after Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, we see that more specific idea of a gathering specifically for the worship of God.

And that change ended up being something that was a more specific usage of the word. It's what we think of when we speak of church nowadays, we don't think of it as a general gathering of all people for a purpose of even voting.

No, we think of it as the gathering for the worship of God. And that was how in the early church it started to be more specific. We then talked about how in the Middle Ages or the Dark Ages, we saw that this term started to morph again to be a little bit more specific because after Constantine just declared that they were a Christian nation, there was confusion.

When there was persecution, no one wanted to be in the church, so people that claim they were part of the church, well, there was a risk in doing so, something called like death, being fed to lions. So there were things that made it where people didn't want to claim they were Christian unless they actually were Christian.

And as we look at that, we end up seeing that when you just declare everybody a Christian by fiat, by the emperor just declaring such, well, there's many who are not Christian. How do we distinguish between those that are genuinely Christians, let's call them the elect, those that are chosen by God, and those that are in church, but they're not really the elect, they're the non-elect, they're not really believing, they're just declared to be Christian because of a governor or because they're born in a Christian family or the church just baptized them and that makes them Christian.

How do we distinguish those two? And during the Middle Ages, they started to develop this idea of the visible and universal church. I prefer the terms because I think it's clearer when we talk about the universal and local church.

So the invisible or universal church was the idea that those that are the elect of God, those that are going to be with him in eternity, have eternal life, that transcend time. It doesn't matter Old Testament, New Testament, you have the elect body of Christ, those that have been redeemed by the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

That's one group. Then you have this universal or local body that's also called a church, but they gather and they meet and in there you have believers and unbelievers, elect and non-elect. So you see that in the local gathering.

This is very important to what we're going to talk about with the modern church and these issues is understanding the fact that you have an elect body called the church and you have an elect non-elect body that's called the church.

So the universal church, which is that invisible church, and then you have that local body that's the visible church that is made up of believers and non-believers. So if you understand that, we get into the Reformation.

During the Reformation, they clarified it even more because the Roman Catholic Church basically put the church up as having authority over scripture. Why over scripture? Because the Catholic Church said that only the Catholic Church can interpret scripture and by default then the Catholic Church is greater than the scriptures because they're the only ones that can interpret it.

Once they did that, the Reformation had to clarify these things. How do we clarify them? Well, they started to say, what is the function of the church? So not only do you declare what's a true church, a local gathering, you declare that as true and false churches.

So there wasn't the debate over the universal invisible church, the elect, that's very clear. But in the Reformation, they started to say there needs to be a distinguishing between the true church and false church, referring to the local gathering, the local church, the visible church.

And the way they did that is by function. And they said there were three functions that a local church has to be doing. The proclamation of God's word, the practices of ordinances, meaning baptism and communion, and then the keeping the church pure by church discipline.

So if you like literation and you want some peas there, you have proclamation, practice.

And purity. I just noticed that looking at the book, I just noticed that. And I would point out just to support what you've said, when the reformers came to this conclusion, it was in indefinite distinction against what Rome had done with the elevation of church authority alongside scripture, which technically is over scripture.

The reformers emphasize sola scriptura. So these these three categories, the proclamation, the practice and the purity, these are drawn from the word of God. It is the authority scripture alone. So that supports and enforced and and really exposed what is a biblical church and the reformers you see in the progression of this understanding of what the church is.

The reformers put those things together and those come strictly from scripture.

And what we end up seeing here is we bring all this together. For what we want to look at now, because we want to look at here is the fact that we bring this into the modern church. And as we look at the modern church, the rise of this age, about early 1900s, there became some, and let's be clear when we talk about this as a new theological system.

This this is a thing where a lot of people say, oh, if it's new, it's bad. Covenant theology was new at a time. Reform theology was new at a time. Dispensational theology is new at a time. For those who want to reform and keep reforming, well, keep reforming.

But the thing is, through every generation, we see that there are times that we are going to have more and more study. We're going to see error, heresy that comes in, and answering that gives more clarity.

This has been throughout history. So the argument that this is new, is bad, would say that Luther was wrong for bringing up his arguments against the Catholic church, because that was new at a time. So I just want to deal with the real arguments at hand.

Let's deal with the fact that dispensationalism, as a systematic theology, is a relatively new system of theology. It's not the newest. We actually have something newer, new covenant theology, which comes out of more of the reformed and is really what I think is a lot of those that hold to covenant theology that see some valid arguments made in dispensationalism, and it's really a bringing of them together.

Now, when we talk dispensationalism, understand there's differences there. You have classic dispensationalism. You have Ryrie's dispensationalism. You have dispensationalism, progressive dispensationalism.

There's differences within that system, just like there are with covenant theology, new covenant theology, and you have some variations even within that. So when we say covenant theology or dispensational theology, it's not one monolithic thing.

We did this in the first part of this series. I want to quickly, Bud, just give a very, very high level view of dispensationalism and covenant theology, reformed theology. And in the next episode, we're going to play John MacArthur explaining things that I've said for years, and boy, some of the things I've said, I get a lot of heat.

It was interesting, because while MacArthur was preaching, we'll talk about it next week, people were saying, well, I guess if John says this, it's okay. When you say it, it's bad. So I feel like when John MacArthur repeats what I say, then I guess I'm in better ground.

Well, you know, there's another P you can add to your alliteration, platform.

Yeah.

Well, with the run on toilet paper, we shouldn't talk about peeing, right? So here's the thing. When we talk about dispensationalism, dispensationalism is not, I want to be really clear with this, because this is the straw man argument that people make.

Dispensationalism is not an end times system. The view of pre-millennial, pre-tribulational views, if you understand those terms, that is a byproduct of the hermeneutic. Now, hermeneutics is the science of interpretation.

These are the rules we would follow. So what dispensationalism is, and what Reformed theology proper is, is a system of interpretation, the rules you follow. As we look at this, we look at these rules, we see that there are rules for language.

Now, when we look at this, dispensationalism is going to lean on three principles. And this is the sine qua non, the things that you cannot have without, that define dispensationalism. And there's three.

The first is what would be, they would often refer to it as a literal interpretation. Let me redefine that, because I think people have said, oh, well, if you say it's literal, everything has to be literal.

What is meant by that, it's a normal interpretation. In other words, you're not looking for some hidden or spiritual meaning. You look at the text and you take it for what, following the rules of interpretation, looking at what it meant to the original writers, the original audience, at that time, their culture, their history, what was the authorial intent, understanding that to understand the.

Meaning.

If someone meant an idiom, it's an idiom. If I say I'm so hungry, I can eat a cow, and you think I can't really eat a cow, it's because you haven't seen me eat. But for most people, they can't really eat a cow.

But you understand that it's a figure of speech. It's not meant to be taken literal. That is, when we say a literal hermeneutic, we're saying that you take it in the normal.

Sense.

In other words, the point of it is that you're not looking for some deeper spiritual meaning. You're not looking at allegorically. So right there, you can see where we have the difference. The fact that dispensationalism is pointing these out, each of these points is going to be a point of difference between Reformed Theology.

I'll get to why I say Reformed Theology in a moment, because people confuse that term with Covenant Theology, Reformed Theology. So I want to give that history as well. But the second point, and really a key differential point with dispensationalism, and what many call Covenant Theology, I'll call Reformed Theology, is this idea of a separation or discontinuity between Israel and the Church.

We're going to get into that this episode. So I'm going to put that one on hold. The other thing, the third point, is that dispensationalism would see that the purpose of Scripture, every verse of Scripture, all of Scripture is for the glory of God, doxological, versus Christological, where every verse is focused on Christ.

How does that make a difference? Well, if all the passages of Scripture is to point to Christ, you get things that say the book of Song of Solomon or Song of Songs, and what do you do? You end up having to find Christ in that.

So that's talking about Christ and the Church. See, as a dispensationalist, I can look at this and say, ah, that's dealing with God being glorified in a godly marriage. When you have a marriage where you can have, in a culture where love was not part of the marriage, here's a couple that's in love with each other, it glorifies God.

So that would be a totally different way of viewing a book like that. So those are the things. Now, why do I make a differentiation between Covenant Theology, Reformed Theology? Covenant Theology, historically, please, do not throw tomatoes at me, but this is just a historical statement.

It is not me trying to say that people that don't hold to dispensationalism are Roman Catholic, but Covenant Theology is Roman Catholic in its history. The Roman Catholic Church had developed what we would think of as Covenant Theology, where it was very allegorical because they were, much of the Catholic Church, their leadership were not believers.

They didn't want to see what the Bible actually said, but they used the Bible to see how they can control people and how they could use it to create doctrines that were not in the.

Bible.

So they started to use the Bible as a figurative book. They were very allegorical with things. What believers believe that are not dispensational, that often call themselves Covenant Theologians, are actually called Reformed Theology.

Now, many people, when they hear Reformed, they're thinking Calvinistic, meaning how we get saved, do you believe that God's sovereign or we chose? Again, bad terminology. Historically, Reformed Theology was the theology of the Reformers that basically, coming out of the Catholic Church, had looked at this and developed a hermeneutic that got back to Scripture, said, no, we don't sit here and take all this other stuff that the Catholic Church has created.

We look at Scripture and we see that Christ, not the Church, is the center of Scripture. And so they started to develop a more literal hermeneutic than the Catholic Church had, but not as far as dispensational.

You see them still having some allegory and sometimes looking for deeper spiritual means, but not in every passage, though some people still do that. The thing that you also see in the Reformers is you end up seeing that they saw, they carried over from Covenant Theology, this idea that the Church is Israel and Israel is the Church.

That was necessary for the Catholic Church to claim the authority that they claimed. Mormons do that. Lots of people want to claim they're Israel. There's a sense that that's true and there's a sense that's wrong.

We're going to explain that. And all of that to say that what many people are, when they say they believe in Covenant Theology, what they actually historically refer to is Reformed Theology. Now, that's a long introduction, but I wanted to give that.

Now, we're going to refer to it as either Reformed Theology or Covenant Theology, but know that we're doing that because we understand the way people are using the terms, we understand the way that's historically been used, and we know there's this confusion.

Understand how we're using the terminology. When we're going to say in this show that we're going to make a distinguishing between either Covenant Theology or Reformed Theology, we're going to group those together so that we use them interchangeably.

Just know that what we are really referring to is the hermeneutic that came out of the.

Reformers.

Okay?

Gotcha.

Okay.

Israel, the Church, and the Question of Continuity

So, as we look at the modern church, we end up seeing that there is a new change that occurred really in the early 1900s with making more of a distinction between Israel and the church, and this is a thing that a lot of people buck against, and there's reasons for.

This.

I think we'll make it—we'll clarify it even more in next week's episode, but as we were talking before we started, we were talking about this whole idea that we understand that Revelation is progressive.

Progressive, right.

God throughout time has given us more and more information, and with each of those he gives a covenant, and for folks who may not be familiar with dispensationalism or have a misunderstanding of it, you'll hear arguments of covenant theology is biblical because there's covenants in the Bible.

That's a bad argument for anybody, okay? I'll tell you why. One, dispensationalism is in the Bible. Dispensationalism refers to a Greek word for economy, and we do see that in the Bible, but see, covenants are not covenant theology.

Covenants are covenants, and covenant theology is a hermeneutical system. Dispensationalism is a hermeneutical system, so the fact that the word's in the Bible doesn't make it biblical just because you take the word and you say, oh, well, here's the word, you know, the Greek word for economy, and here's the usage of it in English for a theological system, well, that has nothing to do with each other.

It's a logical fallacy to equivocate those two together. However, dispensations, if you look at the way dispensationalism is, is that with each period of time, God would give a covenant. That covenant would have new revelation, new responsibilities, and that would be a new economy of God working with His people.

We all believe God has one people, okay, and I think this is where we get confusion, but what it is is that we see God giving more and more revelation, more and more responsibilities, and with each one of those in dispensationalism, we say, okay, this is the rules for Adam and Eve, so when we look at Adam and Eve and we see that they're given information.

So you start with one man, okay, and he's given information, and then we end up seeing that Noah is given more revelation. Now, we don't have all of it listed, what he was told, it wasn't codified, but this one family was now given information.

Then later, we end up seeing one nation, the nation of Israel. Then after that, we see the church come into play, and we see all of the nations are now part of, included in this revelation that's given.

In the future, I would say that all of nature ends up coming into getting this new revelation in a millennial kingdom, and I think there'll be finally a new creation where all of the universe will change.

I think these are the different economies that God deals with. Now, I say this, and I know that there's some confusion with many people, and I want to be really clear, because this is the thing that we have to understand.

We all know, all of us, that God gave more and more revelation. Proof, you have the first five books of Moses, we didn't stop there. You have a New Testament, too, so more revelation is given. In fact, those that would hold to a Reformed theology, many, and we'll get here this next week, many will say that we interpret the Old Testament by the New Testament.

In other words, we have more revelation in the New Testament, so everybody, dispensational, covenantal, whatever you want to say, we all know that revelation was given progressively. With this, as we got more revelation, we have to interpret this with the revelation that we have now.

Dispensationalism is based on covenants. I hope that I've made this clear.

I hope so. I'm under the New Covenant. I was counting on that.

Yeah, me too. I was once under the Old, now I'm under the New. But the thing is, we have to understand that when we're dealing with these issues, we don't want to misrepresent one another. Now, anyone who's listened to this podcast has heard me tell this story, but this story, this event, makes it so clear what we're dealing with, and it's so helpful.

So that's why I tell it so often. When I was taking a class on dispensationalism, Bud, I had to read books on both sides. One of the reasons I love the seminary that I was at is they forced you to read both sides of an issue.