The claim is easy to make. The hard part is backing it up with actual quotes from these folks that can reasonably be read "dispensationally". No one has successfully done that yet to my knowledge.
Crutchfield's article was published in Bibliotheca Sacra, the mouth organ of Dallas Seminary.
If you look at Crutchfield's criteria for defining "dispensationalism":
Perhaps the best recent definition of dispensationalism which incorporates the essential features of 1) the distinction between Israel and the church, 2) the hermeneutical principle of literal or normal interpretation, and 3) the purpose of God in history as the glorification of Himself, is that formulated by Robert P. Lightner.You will see that only 2 of the 3 are distinctive to dispensationalism. Item (3) is non-controversial as far as anyone can tell.
So how does Crutchfield go about trying to prove his point?
What about "literalism" and Israel vs. the church? One need not go very far in church history to see the fathers view of "literal" is very different from what is supposed by modern dispensationalists. The most telling case of this is that they almost universally viewed the church as the fulfillment of OT Israel. They came to this conclusion by spiritualzing many of the OT prophecies and applying them to Christ and His church.
Even Crutchfield admits:
The prevailing view among the millenarian fathers was that Israel as a nation had been set aside by God because of her idolatry and unfaithfulness in Old Testament times and her rejection and crucifixion of Christ in the New Testament. Consequently, according to these early fathers, God’s favor was transferred to those among the Gentiles who believed in Christ. Thus as the “new Israel,” the church inherited the promises made to the old Israel.Crutchfield attempts to minimize this fact with the following:
Lest covenant amillennialists claim premature support for their system from these fathers, we hasten to point out the following. In the first place, though not systematically presented, the early fathers recognized three categories of the seed of Abraham in Scripture: 1) the physical seed (descendants) of Abraham, particularly through Jacob; 2) the physical/spiritual seed of Abraham, i.e., those among the physical seed who like Abraham were justified by faith; and 3) the spiritual seed of Abraham who are not of his physical seed, i.e., Gentile believers also justified by faith like, Abraham. With these distinctions in view, the fathers nowhere made Israel the church or the church national Israel.But unfortunately his support for this three fold distinction in the early church fathers is very slim. In reality the language used by the early fathers to describe physical Israel and God's promises is very much in line with later Augustinian and covenant theology. The carnal expectation of national Israel found in modern dispensationalism is nowhere to be found in the fathers. As Schaff has said:
The Jewish chiliasm rested on a carnal misapprehension of the Messianic kingdom, a literal interpretation of prophetic figures, and an overestimate of the importance of the Jewish people and the holy city as the centre of that kingdom. It was developed shortly before and after Christ in the apocalyptic literature, as the Book of Enoch, the Apocalypse of Baruch, 4th Esdras, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Sibylline Books. It was adopted by the heretical sect of the Ebionites, and the Gnostic Cerinthus.It's apparent that "Jewish chiliasm" is much closer to modern dispensationalism than what was common with the orthodox fathers.
The claim is easy to make. The hard part is backing it up with actual quotes from these folks that can reasonably be read "dispensationally". No one has successfully done that yet to my knowledge.
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To the best of my memory, Alamo-Girl has done that 2-3 times on FR.
I think Holland is well aware of that but for some reason seems to live in denial of that fact.