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covenants, believing that their spiritual destiny is either to perish or become a part of the new religion that superseded Judaism (whether Christianity or Islam).1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.
“I enjoy learning by looking at the results of a particular belief. A belief in dispensational dual tracks to salvation ultimately preaches a real futility of the Gospel”
What are the “dual tracks” of dispensational belief, I must have missed them? There is only one way and that through the finished work of Jesus. Because God deals with different people in different ways does not change the fact that all salvation is through faith in the finished work. From Adam to now God has always provided the Lamb, but he dealt with Adam different than with Noah, and Abraham different than Noah, and Jacob different than Abraham, and Moses different than Jacob, and Joshua different than Moses and the gibeonites different tha Israel and the Rachabites different than Israel and on and on. He even ministered to the Grecian converts different than the Jewish converts, yet always through Christ. So what is the big problem in understanding that God will once again deal with Israel according to his mercy and grace. Romans 11:25-29, ....”that blindness in part is happened to Israel, until the fulness of the Gentiles be come in. And so all Israel shall be saved: as it is written, There shall come out of Sion the Deliverer, and shall turn away ungodliness from Jacob: For this is my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins. As concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sakes: but as touching the election, they are beloved for the fathers’ sakes. For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.”
All who have been chosen will come, “Some thro’ the waters, some thro’ the flood, Some thro’ the fire, but all thro’ the blood; Some thro’ great sorrow, but God gives a song,
In the night season and all the day long. ......
Sometimes in the valley, in darkest of night, God leads His dear children along. Though sorrows befall us and Satan oppose, God leads His dear children along;”
Hebrews 1:1-2, “God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;” So why can’t he deal with Israel in sundry ways and divers manners? He dealt with the Jewish church in a differnt manner than he dealt with the Gentile church, yet all came through the blood of Jesus.
If God chooses to use the actual sacrifice of a lamb or a goat to point to the real sacrifice of Jesus or as a symbol of the Lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world, much like the symbols of wine and bread in order to connect with Irsrael’s liturgical past, why is that a problem? We have that symbol on banners and in pictures in the church to point to Jesus. We have crosses to remind us and focus on the finished work. What is the difference?
There is only one way, but he deals with us in differnt ways to point us to the one way.
So was that supposed preterist coming of Christ in 70 AD a physical in the flesh coming oooooorrrrrrrrrr an ethereal not in the flesh coming ?????????????????
You can't have it both ways, and John calls it clearly what it is.
What specific thing in the lower right?
Where the guy says "Works, no faith."
Being Biblical and Reasonable again.
Admirable.
. . .
Well said.
Ahhhh.
That’s the chart’s author’s conjecture . . .
I think anyone who presumes to have that much clarity about the MIllenium
. . . may be a little high on sacramental wine . . .
God has left a lot of puzzle pieces quite mysterious or only partially clarified.
There’s not much but silence to base guesses about the Millenium on.
imho.
There are a few snippets about the end and a lot of stuff leading up to it . . . a very few about during it . . .
that’s about it, imho.
John says nothing about it, and you know it. A sign of desperation when your emperor has no clothes.
We clearly affirm two physical comings of Christ in conformity to all the creeds of the Church.
It’s the same coming in clouds pictured in Daniel 7:13. Tell us what sort of a coming you see that as being?
Because the same book of Hebrews says that animal sacrifices have ended once for all. And wouldn’t you think the writer of Hebrews was familiar with Ezekiel 40-48? One would think that if future animals sacrifices were still a possibility that there would be some hint of it in Hebrews or somewhere else in the NT. But there is not. We see the opposite being taught quite forcefully. In fact you can search long and hard in the NT for any hint of all the futurists’ millennial imaginations and you will not find them.
Obviously the NT writers did not interpret the OT prophecies as the futurists do.
“And that His second “coming” [or subsequent “coming”, or however one wants to try to dance around the plain meaning of that word] would also be “in the flesh”, or they wouldn’t be Christians, would they???”
Maybe you’re not really being intellectually dishonest after all. Maybe you’re just really that ignorant of Scripture.
“Because the same book of Hebrews says that animal sacrifices have ended once for all.”
The writers were talking about the sacrifice for sin had ceased, not memorial. By the way, when did the sacrifices for sin under the old covenant cease, when Jesus died or when the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D.?
The “clouds” mentioned in Daniel 7 are masculine gender and Daniel says “with” the clouds of heaven. Matthew uses the feminine gender for clouds and says “coming in the clouds of heaven”. The Hebrews reference to surrounded by “clouds” of witness is the neuter gender. The feminine “clouds” is the Old Testament cloud that led Israel.
You still haven’t answered the question, were the two covenants overlapping for forty years?
”Luk 21:27 And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.
Now that is the plain truth of the scripture...”
Yes, it is. And it’s interpreted literally through a tunnel only by the dispensationalists. So I’ll repeat the following to you that I’ve sent to someone else:
Isaiah 19
A Prophecy About Egypt
1 An oracle concerning Egypt:
See, the LORD RIDES ON A SWIFT CLOUD
AND IS COMING TO EGYPT.
The idols of Egypt tremble before him,
and the hearts of the Egyptians melt within them.
The above was fulfilled of course. Do you think God literally hopped on a cloud and rode down to Egypt and kicked over their idols? Or maybe the above was apocalyptic hyperbole concerning God’s using the Assyrians to bring His wrath upon Egypt (Is. 20)?
Now, does the following have any similarity to the above:
Mark 14:61-62: Again the high priest asked him, “Are you the Christ, the Son of the Blessed One?”
62”I am,” said Jesus. “And YOU will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and COMING ON THE CLOUDS OF HEAVEN.”
So any similarity between “coming on the clouds” and “rides on a swift cloud and is coming to Egypt?
Also, Jesus told Caiaphas that Caiaphas would see Him. Do you think that Caiaphas is still living today and waiting to “see” Him?
Answer these questions honestly now. Intellectual dishonesty won’t fly.
Discuss the issues all you want, but do NOT make it personal.
“Discuss the issues all you want, but do NOT make it personal.”
I take it that was about my last sentence. You’re right, and I apologize for that sentence.
That's exactly what Ezekiel is talking about, sin atonement sacrifices, at least according to the futurists. Now either you misinterpret Ezekiel, or you are content to ignore the implications.
By the way, when did the sacrifices for sin under the old covenant cease, when Jesus died or when the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D.?
The temple sacrifices were rendered ineffectual once ChristÂ’s sacrifice was completed on the cross, although the Jews in their stubbornness continued until the temple was destroyed by God at the hands of the Roman armies in AD70.
The “clouds” mentioned in Daniel 7 are masculine gender and Daniel says “with” the clouds of heaven. Matthew uses the feminine gender for clouds and says “coming in the clouds of heaven”.
ThatÂ’s funny. Did you get this one from a Hebrew-Greek for dispies book?
It makes absolutely no difference since there is no feminine clouds in Hebrew or masculine clouds in Greek. As you are no doubt aware the Septuagint Greek of Daniel 7 uses the feminine word for clouds; εθεωρουν εν οραματι της νυκτος και ιδου μετα των νεφελων του ουρανου ως υιος ανθρωπου ερχομενος ην και εως του παλαιου των ημερων εφθασεν και ενωπιον αυτου προσηνεχθη
You still havenÂ’t answered the question, were the two covenants overlapping for forty years?
In a sense, yes. As Hebrews 8 declares, the old covenant was fading and about to pass away. That finally happened in AD70.
I would cut it down to 3 Dispensations, since a Dispensation is God dealing with a particular group of men.
Gen 3-12-Dispensation of Gentiles
Gen.12-Acts 2-Dispensation of Jews
Acts 2-Rev.4-Dispensation of Church
Baloney == you preterists have invented a third coming by calling Matthew 24:30 an ethereal "not in the flesh" coming that you claim took place in 70 AD. Preterism is nothing more than the neo-Gnosticism of a bunch of scoffers that Peter warned about.
Amen.
The Millennial reign of Christ sees the removal of the curse from Nature.
A New Heavens and Earth are created after the final rebellion to remove the taint of it.
Amen.
To view the present world through an Amillennialist or PostMillennialist's eyes is incomprehensible.
Oh like this Scripture from II Peter 3:
"1This second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I stir up your pure minds by way of remembrance: That ye may be mindful of the words which were spoken before by the holy prophets, and of the commandment of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour.
[And just how are you preterists doing with those prophets that told of the return of the land of promise to the people of Israel when the Messiah returns]
"Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the new testament.
[Isn't that a perfect description of replacementarians and preterists who do nothing with their daily life but scoff at dispensationalists who look of the Lord's return]
"For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water: Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.
[Wow -- could that have been an earlier "dispensation", you know, one of those things that preterists scoff at and anathematize dispensationalists for believing in]
"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.
[Adam sure found that out when he died physically in year 935 of his life not day one -- but preterists can't count that high, so a Millenium is beyond their understanding]
"The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
[Perhaps that long-suffering is directed toward preterists, replacementarians in hopes that they too will come to repentance for their scoffing and neo-Gnostic fables]
"But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat" [II Peter 3]
How are you doing with that "looking for and hasting" part?????????
Is that a description of the preterist manner of life, or are they too caught up in your scoffing and fables about their 70 AD ethereal coming to face the facts of the real coming just ahead???.
The writers were talking about the sacrifice for sin had ceased, not memorial.
Just where do you-all get this "memorial" thing?
By the way, when did the sacrifices for sin under the old covenant cease, when Jesus died or when the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D.?
After Jesus was crucified, any further animal sacrifice for sin would have been, dare we say it, an abomination.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.