Lee N. Field
Since Mar 2, 2000
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Lee N. Field
Since Mar 2, 2000
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Personal email can go to lee.n.field1@gmail.com.
I am a Christian, specifically of the "reformed" protestant variety. Yes, I'm one of those horrible people who believes in "total depravity". You think we "Calvinists" are a dark, glowering and cold people? Think again. I draw your attention to a beautiful question and answer that begins the Heidelberg Catechism:
Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death?Answer. That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.
The ancient ecumenical creeds: the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed.
These can serve as a diagnostic filter. Heretics hate 'em. If, for instance, someone you're interacting with launches into a screed about Constantine and the Nicene council, chances are real good they're not trinitarian.
Since it's a subject that comes up frequently (and contentiously) on FR, my eschatology is mostly "amillenial". "Amillenialism" is a misnomer. Amillenialists do believe in the millennium, just not the same kind of millennium as the chiliasts do.
Positively, amillenialism holds that the "thousand years" of Revelation 20 represents the period between Christ's ascension to heaven (to the right hand of God, there to rule) and his return in glory at the end of this age. For an exposition of this, and the nature and parallelism between the first and second deaths and first and second resurrections, I point you to Meredith Kline's short article "The First Resurrection".
If you want to read up on it, forget LaHaye and Missler and those guys. I suggest you read Anthony Hoekema's The Bible and the Future and Kim Riddelbarger's A Case for Amillenialism, and the materials on Rev. Riddelbarger's website. That, and get your Bible out. Amillenialism is
Oh, yeah. Contra Jan Markell, holding to amillenial eschatology does not make one part of the great end-times apostasy. (Can't you just feel the love.)
I can coexist with most everybody's eschatological opinions except Hymenaen preterists and dispensationalists. Both, if consistent, run the risk of getting the gospel wrong.
Full preterists (who hold that all prophecy is fulfilled, and thus have (among other problems) an unorthodox doctrine of the resurrection of the body) are scarce. Dispensationalists, unfortunately, are not. The more I read and listen to advocates of dispensationalism, the wackier I find it. As an eschatological system it combines in one system woodenly literalist interpretation, a tin ear for metaphor and the wildest speculation. It's an eschatological kludge.
If dispensationalism was limited to end times speculation, I could just let it go. (Let them have their Larkin charts, it's "mostly harmless"). It is not limited so. Dispensationalism has as an axiom, an unquestionable root assumption, that Israel and the church are separate peoples of God with separate destinies. The end times speculation is almost incidental to that. The two peoples of God notion leads to all kinds of weird conclusions, and can (if the dispensationalist is consistent) lead to getting the gospel wrong.
How so? If you hold that Jews are under a different set of rules, and have benefits not available to Gentiles, you deny the universality of the gospel. We are no longer "one new man". Jesus is no longer the only name by which one may be saved. Substance gives way for the return of shadow.
We no longer have two categories (saved and lost), but many more -- saved Jew and saved Gentile (sundering the church along ethnic lines, exactly contrary to Paul), unsaved Gentile ("without hope and without God in the world") and unsaved Jew (somehow not "without hope and without God in the world" by virtue of descent from Abraham, yet without saving faith in God's Christ), Jew by heredity (John McArthur's "jewish DNA") and Jew by conversion. Moving from one category to another does what, exactly? Does a Jew who becomes Christian have a claim on the land "between the river and the sea" and still get raptured out in the nick of Tribulation? Best of both worlds, hey! A Christian might be tempted to become a Jew to get the benefits, or as a matter of devotion -- what would St. Paul have to say about that? This is not a theoretical matter -- there are people right now who advocate that Christians get spiritual benefit from observing old covenant feasts. There are "Christians" right now, who think they can convert to Judaism and remain believers in Jesus.
Still think there's no problem? Check out this guy's chart. Note carefully the salvation plan for the millennium. I've seen this brought up on FR. I've brought it up on FR. So far I've only seen one dispensationalist repudiate it.Others will baldly state this. "Works, no faith." Tell me there's not a gospel problem with that!
Sixty years ago the Presbyterians looked into Dispensationalism, and saw problems. Short (four pages) and too the point, read the 1944 PCUS Report on Dispensationalism. The report's main heads are thus:
THIS FUNDAMENTAL DIVERGENCE OF DISPENSATIONALISM FROM THE COVENANT THEOLOGY OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH MANIFESTS ITSELF IN MANY WAYS, SOME OF WHICH ARE THE FOLLOWING:
A. The Rejection of the Unity of God’s people.
B. The Rejection of One Way of Salvation.
C. The Rejection of One Destiny for All of God’s People.
D. The Rejection of the Bible as God’s one Revelation to His One People.
For a little more in depth critique of classic dispensationalism, I recommend Oswald Allis's Prophecy and the Church. (I keep hearing that the saner "progressive dispensationalism" is all the rage now, but from what I've seen, the classic dispensationalism that Allis wrote about 60 years ago is alive and well out in the evangelical churches.)
Also of interest: M. Kline, Har Magedon: the End of the Millenium and The Covenant of the Seventieth Week
(*"Where's the gap?". For the dispensational chronology to work, the "prophetic clock stops" between the 69th and 70th weeks of Daniel's prophecy of "seventy sevens" in Daniel 9. There's no hint of it in the text. You can't find it in the text unless your system requires you to find it there.)
Boo hoo.
If you want to argue, it would be most helpful if you would:
The old guys tended not to fit modern eschatological categories neatly. Just because there were literalist millenarians among the ante-Nicene Fathers (as well as those that held that the "thousand years" in Rev. 20 was figurative) that doesn't mean they were dispensationalists. They weren't. They had views about the intermediate state that we would find quirky. See Charles Hill's Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity for the scoop on that.
If you're not into reading, you can listen to an interview with Jeff Jue, on his doctoral research into The Eschatological Views of the Westminster Divines. Yes, there were millenarians there. They were not dispensationalists. They did not fit any modern categories.
Those who do not remember history are condemned to repeat it.
If you can't state someone else's position in a way they recognize, what's the point? You're just posturing for your side. Show some familiarity with the people you're arguing against. Read some of their works. See above -- Hoekema's Bible and the Future is an easy read. Geerhardus Vos is not. Vern Poythress put his Understanding Dispensationalists for free, to read, on his web site.
We got your guys on our bookshelves. No excuse.You can do it.
Read, read, read.
Rant mode off.
From The Teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews, by Geerhardus Vos, Eerdman’s, 1956, p 51-52
“The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews has a special motive in his representation, however, being less doctrinal than Paul, and more practical. He sought to cure the readers of their religious externalism, and this externalism was attached to their distorted eschatology. They were dissatisfied because they did not as yet possess the external things, and therefore they were intensely interested in eschatology. The writer shows them that the eschatology is present for the most part, only certain features of it being reserved for the future. The internal, spiritual part is the important part, and this we have now.”
Politically I am a pessimist with libertarian sympathies. Fallen human beings being what they are, I am pessimistic about human utopias. This opinion comes in part from my religious convictions ("total depravity", see above under Calvinism).
From historical observation we all know the path a Marxist state will go: gulags and gray concrete apartment blocks, public schools and general ugliness. A boring gray dullness broken by episodes of terror. Thuggish rulers, starvation, poverty, blood, despair, death and ruin. The cradle to grave Eurosocialist style welfare state is a slow motion death cult whose subjects don't even care enough to reproduce themselves.
I suspect Libertopia would have it's own set of problems. A disproportionate number of libertarians I have interacted with have been, well, "extreme" personalities.
Chucking it all for an anarchy (good as it looks in theory and from the numbers (see Joe Sobran, The Reluctant Anarchist)), I suspect it would end up like tribal Darkest Africa, in need of a (sigh!) government to restrain evil. A government that will itself most likely be evil. Many humans are predators who will happily prey upon everyone else around them (which is why, children, I own guns.). And so it goes.
I am also an optimist (see above under eschatology). "This age" will end, "the age to come" will arrive. God's triumph will be manifest in the end. Every knee shall bow.
The cosmic end game prospect of the double (divine and human) pleroma bound together in the theanthropic Christ is presented to us in gospel mode. It comes as an invitation to an eschatological banquet on Har Magedon. In Isaiah's words, on that day when Yahweh of hosts reigns on (Isa24:2I-23), he "will make on this Mount Zion in his Glory-parousia mountain a feast for all peoples"(Isa 25:6). And the herald of this messianic good news is exhorted to get up to a high mountain and shout, "Behold your God. Behold the Lord Yahweh comes with might . . . He will feed his flock like a shepherd"(Isa40:9-1 l; cf. 52:7).The Har Magedon banquet is the marriage supper of the Lamb and those who are invited to come and enjoy without price (Rev 22:17) are pronounced blessed(Rev 19:9).
Referring to this banquet in a kingdom parable (Luke 14:16ff,) Jesus tells us that in the face of the rejection of his invitation by many, the householder persists in gathering guests, determined that his house be filled (v.23). The harvest-gathering to which Jesus commissioned the church will be completed. The eternal good pleasure of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will (Eph 1: 1 1) will be fulfilled: Christ will be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom 8:29). The Son will receive his request that all whom the Father had given him be with him where he is to behold his glory, the glory the Father gave him in love before the foundation of the world (John 17:24). The predestined pleroma in Christ will be assembled fullness of joy before his parousia-Presence on consummated Har Magedon, Mount of Gathering.
7And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations.
8 He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.
IS 26:1 In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. AMEN
Current GRPL:
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taglines
"He will tread the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God the Almighty."
I am not a navi, nor do I ramble on pretending to be one on teh Interwebz.
"I for one welcome our new Chicago overlords."
In five years noone will admit to voting for Obama.
Dispensational exegesis not supported by an a-, post- or historic pre-mil scholar will be ignored.
"I've studied bible prophecy 30 years." usually means "I've never hear of Geerhardus Vos."
"I've studied prophecy 30 years" usually means "I had Larkin's chart tattooed for reference."
"I've studied prophecy 30 years" usually means "I have everything Hal Lindsay ever wrote."
"How can there be peace when the sorceries and whordoms of your mother Rome are so many?"
http://obamaclock.org/ -- "A time, two times and half a time"
"I'm so thankful for the active obedience of Christ. No hope without it." -- J. Gresham Machen
Gnosticism and anti-trinitarian heresy, like beans and cabbage, makes for a powerful combo.
"What is your only comfort, in life and death?" "That I an not my own, but belong, body and soul..."
2)How many things are necessary for thee to know,..? the first, how great my sins and miseries are;
"How can there be peace when the sorceries and whordoms of your mother TBN are so many?"
Come, behold the works of the LORD, how he has brought desolations on the earth.
It doesn't take much to be a false prophet these days beyond a WebTV and a blogspot account.
It doesn't take much to be a false prophet now beyond a WebTV and a Freerepublic.com account.
"Dispensationalists say the darndest things!"
It doesn't take much to be a false prophet now beyond a WebTV and a Freerepublic.com account.
"The stupid. It burns!"
"How can there be peace when the sorceries and whordoms of your mother TBN/Rome are so many?"
"Not at the towers! Aim for the trolls, kill the trolls!" --Gandalf
"Take, drink. Remember and believe that the blood of Jesus was shed for a complete remission ..."
There’s been an explosion down at the HTML factory! Run for your lives!
An armed society is a polite society. So keep your soi-disant "prophets" off my lawn.
"They wouldn't know a Christological heresey if it beat them up and stole their wallet."
it ain't us "preterist, amil, 'replacementarian'" types that have eschatological beliefs nearly lock step with heretic religions.... I'm just saying.
that walking with God necessarily involved a sporadic flow of low-octane semi-revelation
Without exception each has been an incoherent ramble, ... third order monkey typing.
"Are you just eating instant coffee right from the jar now?"
"like a weasel on a triple espresso and crystal meth cocktail"
You Scored as Amillenialist
Amillenialism believes that the 1000 year reign is not literal but figurative, and that Christ began to reign at his ascension. People take some prophetic scripture far too literally in your view.
Amillenialist 95%
Moltmannian Eschatology 65% (Whatever that is)
Preterist 55%
Premillenialist 50%
Postmillenialist 50%
Dispensationalist 15%
Left Behind 10%
Another link to the same glock image.
What it's supposed to look like (animated, with controls).
Internet Troll Personality Disorder
Michael Horton's definition of heresy
Q. What is heresy?A. Heresy is any teaching that directly contradicts the clear and direct witness of the Scriptures on a point of salvific importance.
