Perhaps the flames will be not so intense when you guys start posting articles from Saucy, Blaising and Boch, rather than Tommy Ice. They clearly represent the future of dispensational thinking. The "old school" guys are a dying breed. You could tell they were feeling the heat when they decide to play the "race card", i.e., traditional supersessionism == anti-Semitism.
How long can Ice, LaHaye, and Linday keep up this mantra of "1948 is eschatologically significant" and non-dispensationalists are racists line? It's getting very old, and dispensationalists of all stripes are coming to realize that fact.
I'm not holding my breath, but it would be refreshing.
It is historically true that as a rule antisemitism did not come out of churches that accepted a future national Israel.
Martin Luther became rabidly antisemitic, but I'm not sure of his eschatology. If he was a typical amillennialist, then replacing "Israel" with "church" was not something that would have BLOCKED this very negative direction of his later years.
Now, there are shoes for both feet. One can play the "replacemetarian/antisemitism" card or one can play the "dispensationalism can only rely on its antisemitic bias" card.
Or we can say that the Christians need to look at each passage and make a decision from grammar, context, and history whether it refers to "national Israel" or "spiritual Israel."
The Bible and its proper interpretation is the issue.
Matthew 24:34 reads "Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till ALL these things be fulfilled." Which generation? Hal Lindsey had us believe it was our generation!
Back when Hal Lindsay wrote The Late Great Planet Earth, Israel's foundation (1948) was still recent history. Lindsey wrote that a "biblical generation" at that time was forty years in length. Thus, with the reestablishment of the Nation of Israel, the expectation was that the Tribulation and Christ's Return would occur within a biblical generation, IE within Lindsey's readers' lifetimes (1988 occurring forty years - one generation - after the reestablishment of Israel). Now two more decades have passed, the EU has grown beyond 10 members, the Soviet Bear has fallen, and last time I looked, I don't have a UPC bar-code tattooed on my forehead (or a techno-ID chip implanted in hand) and every car I see on the highway still has a driver. Either someone forgot to set the alarm on that prophetic clock, or Lindsey, LaHaye & co. just kept hitting the snooze button, hoping we'd forget about 1988 coming and going.
Fast forward to 2006. It's been almost sixty years since the foundation of Israel. Assuming the Rapture hits tomorrow, and the dispensational eschatology holds up, you still need to tack on an additional seven years to account for the Tribulation period before a pretrib Second Coming. Thus, either the biblical length of a "generation" is greater than 58 years and growing (assuming pretrib rapture, 65+ years if posttrib), or the old-school dispensationalists have badly misjudged which prophetic time period we're living in, and thus badly misunderstood Matthew 24:34.
In case nobody was looking, Lindsey's already spinning his failures into (future) successes by changing the way he calculates the Second Coming. Rather than begin calculations from the (formerly significant) 1948 (re)founding of Israel, Lindsey now starts with a young earth scenario, with the Earth being formed around 4000 b.c. His new math system now tells us a day is a thousand years, and thus he'd have us believe we're somewhere between 992 years away ("eight years into") and 1004 years away ("four years before") from the Second Coming (yes, his math is that precise). By date-setting the "Second Coming" date to about 1000 years in the future, it's now far ahead enough for Lindsey to avoid dying of embarrassment, should he miscalculate the date again.
In other words, Lindsey knows he was wrong about the 1988 date, but doesn't want to admit it in print. I wonder if Tommy Ice got the memo?
How long can Ice, LaHaye, and Linday keep up this mantra of "1948 is eschatologically significant" and non-dispensationalists are racists line? It's getting very old, and dispensationalists of all stripes are coming to realize that fact.
= = = =
I suspect it will be around as long as it describes objective reality so well.
Of course, The Great Tribulation and Armageddon will overtake a lot of other priorities quite soon enough.
Probably for as long as you Antidispensationalreconstructionalreplacementarianists continue to claim that AD70 is eschatologically significant.
I wasn't aware of that, but as I haven't found the 'heresy' which is attributed to dispensationalism by supposed reformed denominations, I can only say I respect Lindsay and Ice more from your assessment.