Posted on 10/26/2007 9:00:59 PM PDT by topcat54
Replacement theology has become dispensationalism's latest prophetic boogeyman. If you want to end a debate over eschatology, just charge your opponent with holding to replacement theology. What is “replacement theology,” sometimes called “supersessionism,” and why do dispensationalists accuse non-dispensationalists of holding it? Here’s a typical dispensational definition:
Replacement Theology: a theological perspective that teaches that the Jews have been rejected by God and are no longer God’s Chosen People. Those who hold to this view disavow any ethnic future for the Jewish people in connection with the biblical covenants, believing that their spiritual destiny is either to perish or become a part of the new religion that superseded Judaism (whether Christianity or Islam).1
“Replacement theology” is dispensationalism’s trump card in any debate over eschatology because it implies anti-semitism. Hal Lindsey attempted to use this card in his poorly researched and argued The Road to Holocaust.2 He wove an innovative tale implying that anyone who is not a dispensationalist carries the seeds of anti-semitism within his or her prophetic system. This would mean that every Christian prior to 1830 would have been theologically anti-semitic although not personally anti-semtic.
As Peter Leithart and I point out in The Legacy of Hatred Continues,3 it’s dispensationalists who hold to a form of replacement theology since they believe that Israel does not have any prophetic significance this side of the rapture! Prior to the rapture, in terms of dispensational logic, the Church has replaced Israel. This is unquestionably true since God’s prophetic plan for Israel has been postponed until the prophetic time clock starts ticking again at the beginning of Daniel’s 70th week which starts only after the Church is taken to heaven in the so-called rapture. Until then, God is dealing redemptively with the Church. Am I making this up? Consider the following by dispensationalist E. Schuyler English:
An intercalary4 period of history, after Christ’s death and resurrection and the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, has intervened. This is the present age, the Church age. . . . During this time God has not been dealing with Israel nationally, for they have been blinded concerning God’s mercy in Christ. . . . However, God will again deal with Israel as a nation. This will be in Daniel’s seventieth week, a seven-year period yet to come.5
According to English and every other dispensationalist, the Church has replaced Israel until the rapture. The unfulfilled promises made to Israel are not fulfilled until after the Church is taken off the earth. Thomas Ice, one of dispensationalism’s rising stars, admits that the Church replaces Israel this side of the rapture: “We dispensationalists believe that the church has superseded Israel during the current church age, but God has a future time in which He will restore national Israel ‘as the institution for the administration of divine blessings to the world.’”6
Dispensationalists claim that their particular brand of eschatology is the only prophetic system that gives Israel her proper place in redemptive history. This is an odd thing to argue since two-thirds of the Jews will be slaughtered during the post-rapture tribulation, and the world will be nearly destroyed. Charles Ryrie writes in his book The Best is Yet to Come that during this post-rapture period Israel will undergo “the worst bloodbath in Jewish history.”7 The book’s title doesn’t seem to very appropriate considering that during this period of time most of the Jews will die! John Walvoord follows a similar line of argument: “Israel is destined to have a particular time of suffering which will eclipse any thing that it has known in the past. . . . [T]he people of Israel . . . are placing themselves within the vortex of this future whirlwind which will destroy the majority of those living in the land of Palestine.”8 Arnold Fruchtenbaum states that during the Great Tribulation “Israel will suffer tremendous persecution (Matthew 24:15–28; Revelation 12:1–17). As a result of this persecution of the Jewish people, two-thirds are going to be killed.”9
During the time when Israel seems to be at peace with the world, she is really under the domination of the antichrist who will turn on her at the mid-point in the seven-year period. Israel waits more than 2000 years for the promises finally to be fulfilled, and before it happens, two-thirds of them are wiped out. Those who are charged with holding a “replacement theology viewpoint” believe in no inevitable future Jewish bloodbath. In fact, we believe that the Jews will inevitably embrace Jesus as the Messiah this side of the Second Coming. The fulfillment of Zechariah 13:8 is a past event. It may have had its fulfillment in the events leading up to and including the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. Contrary to dispensationalism’s interpretation of the Olivet Discourse, Jesus' disciples warned the Jewish nation for nearly forty years about the impending judgment (Matt. 3:7; 21:42–46; 22:1–14; 24:15–22). Those who believed Jesus’ words of warning were delivered “from the wrath to come” (1 Thess. 1:10). Those who continued to reject Jesus as the promised Messiah, even though they had been warned for a generation (Matt. 24:34), “wrath has come upon them to the utmost” (1 Thess. 2:16; cf. 1 Thess. 5:1–11; 2 Pet. 3:10–13).
Before critics of replacement theology throw stones, they need to take a look at their own prophetic system and see its many lapses in theology and logic.
Read Part Two of this article...
2. Hal Lindsey, The Road to Holocaust (New York: Bantam Books, 1989). The address for Bantam Books is 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York.
3. Gary DeMar and Peter J. Leithart, The Legacy of Hatred Continues: A Response to Hal Lindsey’s The Road to Holocaust (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision, 1989).
4. Inserted into the calendar.
5. E. Schuyler English, A Companion to the New Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 135.
6. Thomas Ice, “The Israel of God,” The Thomas Ice Collection: www.raptureready.com/featured/TheIsraelOfGod.html#_edn3
7. Charles C. Ryrie, The Best is Yet to Come (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1981), 86.
8. John F. Walvoord, Israel in Prophecy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1962), 107, 113. Emphasis added.
9. Arnold G. Fruchtenbaum, “The Little Apocalypse of Zechariah,” The End Times Controversy: The Second Coming Under Attack, eds. Tim LaHaye and Thomas Ice (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 2003), 262.
So, what you are telling me is that anything else that a man ever writes on any subject is not to be considered????
You just wrote, "...all of the Christians who were guided by the Holy Spirit were all so completely wrong."
I don't care about anything else you've ever written. I only care about the line above.
Sorry, but you are so completely wrong... :>)
(Besides it is true that "legal obedience was the condition for salvation." under the law. Paul says as much when he says that the man who lives by it will live. Does Paul not say, "it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous?" (Rom 2:13)
“You just wrote, ‘...all of the Christians who were guided by the Holy Spirit were all so completely wrong.’”
So, then, I take it you agree with me that all those Christians for 1800 years must have been right. Good for you to admit that.
So then you must now admit that dispensationalism is wrong because nobody believed it before Darby came up with the idea in the 19th Century.
You see, you cannot have it both ways. They cannot both be right.
Galatians 3:21: Is the law, therefore, opposed to the promises of God? Absolutely not! For if a law had been given that could impart life, then righteousness would certainly have come by the law.
Enoch is an example. It was known to the disciples, quoted in Scripture, beloved for 300 years and then not just rejected but discarded and remained lost until approximately 1775 when surviving manuscripts were discovered in Ethiopia. The true antiquity was confirmed by fragments of copies found in the Dead Sea Scrolls which carbon date to 200 B.C.
The works of Tertullian are another example. From the Papacy of Damasus (circa 366:)
V. The remaining writings which have been compiled or been recognised by heretics or schismatics the Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church does not in any way receive; of these we have thought it right to cite below a few which have been handed down and which are to be avoided by catholics:...
the works of Tertullian...
These and those similar ones, which Simon Magus, Nicolaus, Cerinthus, Marcion, Basilides, Ebion, Paul of Samosata, Photinus and Bonosus, who suffered from similar error, also Montanus with his obscene followers, Apollinaris, Valentinus the Manichaean, Faustus the African, Sabellius, Arius, Macedonius, Eunomius, Novatus, Sabbatius, Calistus, Donatus, Eustasius, Jovianus, Pelagius, Julian of Eclanum, Caelestius, Maximian, Priscillian from Spain, Nestorius of Constantinople, Maximus the Cynic, Lampetius, Dioscorus, Eutyches, Peter and the other Peter, of whom one disgraced Alexandria and the other Antioch, Acacius of Constantinople with his associates, and what also all disciples of heresy and of the heretics and schismatics, whose names we have scarcely preserved, have taught or compiled, we acknowledge is to be not merely rejected but eliminated from the whole Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church and with their authors and the followers of its authors to be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever.
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. - 2 Peter 3:8
And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died. – Genesis 5:5
That early Judeo/Christian understanding was discarded by the Catholic Church and was never picked up (AFAIK) by the Reformation. But surely the belief was “dispensational” to coin the modern term.
BTW, the Jewish year is 5768 from Adam’s first moment on earth – so under that calendar, Christ is not due for approximately two centuries and change. Using the Christian calendar, 6000 years more or less have already elapsed. The difference is a dispute over the amount of time the Jews were exiled in Babylon.
However, I strongly aver one should not argue against dispensationalism on the basis of “absence of evidence as evidence of absence” though I find that an excellent argument in the science debates because the geological record is not so easily erased by man.
The bottom line is this:
Dispensationalism existed as an understanding of the different eras in religious history. Justin Martyr clearly believed in a 1000 year reign of Christ on earth. He wrote in ca. 150 AD.
Besides that you have already agreed that Eden was a separate period in religious history.
You wish to argue doctrine, and I wish to look at the facts of what is an is not apparent in the Bible.
BTW, what would you call that period of time we know as Eden?
Excellent points, dear sister in Christ.
Many ignore the fact that “dispensation” is a coined term to describe a phenomenon just as “trinity” is a coined term to describe the phenomenon. The difference is that “dispensation” is a Greek word that does appear in the bible, and it is used in Eph 1:10 in roughly the way that modern dispensationists use it.
“Dispensationalism existed as an understanding of the different eras in religious history. Justin Martyr clearly believed in a 1000 year reign of Christ on earth. He wrote in ca. 150 AD.”
Martyr was a premillennialist, not a dispensationalist.
Again, Dispensationalism began with Darby in the 1830s. Never did any theologians before Darby teach that there were two peoples of God and two plans of salvation or a so-called “pre-tribulation rapture.” In fact, at the time Darby was considered a heretic.
In answer to your argument, please see my post 107.
I’m skeptical it’s worthy the least bit of a meaningful response.
Very well put.
It’s hard to believe the future “Great Tribulation” could be worse than that.
= = =
All we can do is lead the horse to Scriptural waters . . .
we have no power to make them drink understandingly.
Lots of people, including a host of archeologists and anthropologists of the last century or so have said similar things about hyperbole and Scripturaly literal interpretations.
And they have been REPEATEDLY PROVEN WRONG FOR A HUNDRED YEARS OR SO.
“He’s not the man we believed him to be,”
= = =
Sorry my sense of him has been confirmed.
But my initial reading of his off the wall UNBiblical positions and the attitude he asserted them in troubled my spirit exceedingly. I believed that sooner or later, God would deal with him accordingly. Evidently that dealing has begun.
Such should be a warning to all of us . . . particularly those who have a tendency to believe that God does not say what He means nor mean what He says.
There is everything biblical about that concept IF the Bible does demonstrate that there are unique divisions in history that clearly should be viewed as a whole.
As a way of ordering thought and biblical history, who, for example, would argue that The Garden of Eden was not a unique whole?
. . . We must have different eyes. For my part, I cannot deny what my eyes clearly see.
INDEED. THX.
Love the way you present truth.
Never did any theologians before Darby teach that there were two peoples of God and two plans of salvation or a so-called “pre-tribulation rapture
= = =
What a preposterous statement.
Fascinating.
So . . . what was it like to have known personally every theologian of the last 2,000 years?
Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God. - Matthew 22:29
It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. – John 6:63
But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. – Matthew 4:4
For my thoughts [are] not your thoughts, neither [are] your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For [as] the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper [in the thing] whereto I sent it. – Isaiah 55:8-11
But the Comforter, [which is] the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you. – John 14:26
Howbeit we speak wisdom among them that are perfect: yet not the wisdom of this world, nor of the princes of this world, that come to nought: But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, [even] the hidden [wisdom], which God ordained before the world unto our glory: Which none of the princes of this world knew: for had they known [it], they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.
But God hath revealed [them] unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.
Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned.
But he that is spiritual judgeth all things, yet he himself is judged of no man. For who hath known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. II Cor 2:6-16
EXCELLENT SCRIPTURES . . .
OF COURSE.
AS ALL ARE.
And fittingly applied.
Thx.
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