Dispensationalists, like conservatives, come in different varieties. Also like conservatives, they are used to intense debate among themselves regarding their beliefs—including who has a right to the label.
One thing all dispensationalists have in common is that we are almost universally misunderstood—and sometimes even maligned—by evangelical Christians who are not dispensationalists. For those reasons I wanted to rebut a characterization of dispensationalism that appeared recently in Dispatch Faith.
But first, some background information: Dispensationalism begins with the idea that God says what He means and means what He says. To put it another way, whatever is written in Scripture should be understood according to the author’s intent and interpreted the way the original readers would have understood it. We are originalists in that way.
My fingers kept wanting to type that dispensationalism begins with the assumption that God says what He means and means what He says. But that isn’t quite right. We believe that God tells us plainly how we are to interpret Scripture—especially in prophetic or predictive Scripture, which is where most of the debate lies. Isaiah writes that the ability to predict the future is what separates the true God from all of the false ones (see Isaiah 41:21-23 and 46:9-11).
Additionally, Moses tells the nation of Israel (Deuteronomy 18:15-22) that what distinguishes a true prophet from a false one is that everything the true prophet predicts has to happen. If he predicts something and it doesn’t happen, he is to be rejected and even stoned. But if it does come to pass, they must listen to him on pain of death. In fact, this was one of Jesus’ arguments to the nation of Israel (John 5:31-37). This presupposes that the prophecy is clear and specific enough to be understood and verified—not the vague words of some Nostradamus-like oracle.
Yes, we do get called “woodenly literalistic.” However, we do understand that Scripture uses figures of speech and different genres of literature, all of which need to be factored in when arriving at the proper interpretation of any text. On the other hand, we don’t believe that the bread and the wine in the Lord’s Supper literally become the body and the blood of Jesus. We’re not that literalistic.
The Old Testament is full of prophecies concerning the children of Israel. To reference just one, in Jeremiah 31, God promises that He will make a new Covenant with “the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah,” (Jeremiah 31:31). We believe that, whoever else benefits from this covenant (dispensationalists disagree among themselves), the covenant must be fulfilled with the remnants of both the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel. And when the prophet goes on to promise that these same Israelites will no longer teach their neighbor or brother to know the Lord “for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them” (verse 34), we believe that the entire nation will one day be converted. He even says that as long as the sun comes up during the day, the moon and stars at night, and as long as the waves keep crashing on the beach, Israel is guaranteed future existence (Jeremiah 31:35-36).
Dispensationalists believe that when Jeremiah says, “the seed of Israel,” he means the physical descendants of Israel (another name for Jacob) and not the church, in which there is no distinction between Jew and Gentile. We believe the church came into existence on the Day of Pentecost in Acts 2 and is different from Israel, although both are peoples of God. Since the sun, moon, stars, and waves are still functioning properly, God is bound by his own word to keep Israel in existence as a people and fulfill all of his unfulfilled promises—including that of a future, earthly kingdom centered in Jerusalem.
With that out of the way, let me respond to four of Brian Mattson’s arguments in the aforementioned Dispatch Faith essay. First, he claims that dispensationalists use the founding of modern Israel in 1948 to predict the date of Christ’s return. Well, some popular dispensationalists do, but the more careful dispensationalists believe that, since Christ could return at any moment, there will be no advanced warning; believers should be ready for Christ’s imminent return, but they should avoid looking for signs because there won’t be any.
Second, Mattson asserts that dispensationalism “is essentially unhappy with the settlement” of the second-century debate over Marcion. This is preposterous, as two seconds of reflection will show. Marcion despised Jews, wanted to expunge the Old Testament from the Bible and thought the Old Testament god was evil. Dispensationalists love Jews, study and teach from the Old Testament, and think that there is only one God behind all of Scripture. They believe that all Scripture (including the Old Testament) is inspired by God and profitable so that a godly person can be fully equipped to do every kind of good work (2 Timothy 3:16-17).
Third, Mattson writes: “The Hebrew Bible is Christian Scripture. Not just occasionally or incidentally, as if its Christian content is a few scattered Messianic prophecies. Rather, it is Christian Scripture in toto.” He then goes on to show how Jesus literally fulfilled the messianic prophecies regarding his death and resurrection—to which all dispensationalists would respond, “Okay … So, what’s the point?” Of course, the Old Testament is Christian Scripture and proves that Jesus had to die and be raised from the dead. We are Christians, after all. We would only insist that, just as Jesus literally fulfilled the Old Testament promises Mattson mentioned, He must also literally fulfill the promises regarding a future, earthly reign (see, for example, Amos 9:11-15; Psalm 110; and Isaiah 2.1-5).
Finally, let me deal with the 500-pound gorilla: that dispensationalism is a fairly recent innovation. Dispensationalists find this a bit rich coming from covenant theologians (the dominant theological system of the Reformed side of the Reformation) because Covenant Theology really did not become a fully-formed system until the 17th century. This is kind of like a 4-year-old girl telling her 2-year-old sister that she is too little.
More seriously, Mattson is wrong when he attributes the system entirely to John Nelson Darby. and also when he states, “Dispensationalism is profoundly out of step with apostolic teaching and the early church witness.” While Darby may have systematized and popularized dispensationalism, key components of dispensationalism have been around since the earliest days of the church. This is all thoroughly documented by William Watson in Dispensationalism Before Darby. Although Watson focuses primarily on the 17th and 18th centuries in England (precisely the timeframe in which Covenant Theology became systematized), he does show that some key tenets of dispensationalism were the majority opinion among the church fathers before Augustine in the late fourth and early fifth centuries. For example, Watson writes:
When Justin Martyr was asked, around a.d 150, whether he believed that “Jerusalem . . . shall be rebuilt; and [whether he expected his people] to be gathered together, and made joyful with Christ and the patriarchs,” he responded, “I and many others are of this opinion.”
Dispensationalists, like conservatives, welcome vigorous debate. What we object to is being caricatured and falsely maligned by public theologians who have not read our more scholarly and careful theologians.
