TOM!
The Jesus who questioned if he would find faith when he returned is the same Jesus who told us we would definitely take his gospel to all the ends of the earth.
Paul told us what to expect in Thessalonians - intense trouble followed by His glorious return.
I have found that it is Calvinism that causes men to sit on their hands and wait out the inevitable - especially when the theology is in the hands of someone who really just want’s to be lazy anyway. Get the point?
“The problem with dispisensationalism is that it breeds a generation of passive spectators, convinced that they can’t do a damn thing about that which is ordained to happen”
Tom, your Dad sounds like we was a person with a lot of skills. But I’d be willing to be he’s not the one who taught you to PAINT WITH SUCH A BROAD BRUSH!
It is my personal experience that dispensationalism injects Christians with a sense of Godly urgency - urgency to reach the lost of this world for the hour is late.
“I mean, if God Himself has ordained the failure of the gospel within history, who am I to resist God by proclaiming the power and hope of the gospel?”
More silliness! You are very silly today. What gives??? Surely you don’t really believe your own strawman arguments!
Actually, it is neither Calvinism nor dispensationalism, nor "second blessing" charismatic teaching, nor paedobaptism nor believers baptism nor covenant theology, nor arminianism which "cause" any number of errors. This is not to say that there are not grevious errors of life which flow from errors of thought. The problem is, men's hearts are a sinkful of depravity and evil and we can figure out how to twist even the pure unadulterated truth of the Westminster Confession (smile) into an agency for evil. I know, because I have done it. Also, it is a great mercy of God that he - in the words of Spurgeon - "uses crooked sticks to draw straight lines." Otherwise, we all would have to shut up and sit down, and then where would Free Republic be?