Dispensing with Dispensationalism.

Dispensationalism is a hot topic. It's view of the end times is extremely popular, and many great and sincere Christians affirm it. This is not an attack on them, their theology or salvation, but it is an explanation of why I reject the doctrine. The Left Behind series of book really put the (s)ensationalism into dispensationalism. (ba dum tsssss)

In fairness I won't judge the doctrine by a set of popular speculative fiction novels. I know several dispensationalists who think those books are silly.

Dispensationalism is add odds with the Protestant reformation.
One of the ideas behind the reformation was that of ad fontes, or "to the source"(literally "fountain"). A return to the teaching of the Bible and a disregarding of the doctrinal cruft that had grown over the Roman Catholic Church. The reformation predates Dispensationalism by some 200 years, yet it unwittingly provided the environment for Dispensationalism to grow.

Don't get me wrong here - Dispensationalism is an attempt to return to Biblical teaching. A genuine, sincere and well meaning attempt. Yet it fails.

Me and my Bible vs Ad Fontes
When we approach the Bible, we come with out baggage. Our culture. Our philosophy, and our preconceptions. We can't help it - we are caught in the system and thus we see everything through the lens of the system. We are bubbled in our modern western materialistic and individualistic society. Me and my Bible is never just me and my Bible. It is me, my Bible, my Philosophy, my cosmology, my worldview, my opinions. This is why Atheists(and Christians) often distort the Bible to say things other than it does.

A return to the Bible that does not account for our bubble, is bound to corrupt the text. Thomas Oden's famous saying was he wanted to add nothing new to Christianity, yet dispensationalism is new. And I think that is because dispensationalism doesn't account for the bubble.

So how do we account for the bubble?

The Shoulders of Giants
The only way to account for the Bubble is to become aware of it. We desperately need to realise, as John Walton states: "The Bible is written for but not to us." This matters. 

The Bible was simply not written to our culture and philosophy, though it has immense value to our culture and philosophy. So, the question is, how do we separate the carrier from the signal? The carrier of the signal makes the signal transmission possible, but it itself is not the signal. In radio terms, we use a "demodulator" to perform this operation. We 'filter' the incoming signal through the demodulator, and we get the signal out the other side, carrier removed.

The writings of the Church fathers are of immense help here - if scripture is true, and unchanging, it follows it can never mean what it never meant, it should cause us to pause if, in the first 1800 years of the church, no Christian ever held our doctrine. This is the case with dispensationalism.

A genuine return ad fontes will not be at odds with consensus of the early church. Dispensationalism is.

Now there are a great many biblical arguments for and against dispensationalism, but I find it absent from the thought of the early church, the very people who were closest to the culture and context of the Bible did not see it as dispensationalism does.

Therefore, if I am to respect my Bible (i.e. take it seriously and have it mean what it means not what my culture wants it to mean, I cannot in good conscience be a dispensationalist.

This does not mean I think you're not Christian if you're dispensationalist, or that you're unbiblical or a bad person, just we disagree. In a future post, I may go into my eschatological conclusions, but suffice it to say, there is one thing we all agree on, Jesus is coming back.

As always, I reserve the right to not publish a comment, and comments should be respectful. I thank you kind readers for never having pushed me to the point where I had to remove or not publish any comment.

Why Knowledge is Just Knowledge.

Lets us do a thought experiment. Imagine, if you will you had a pretty sweet computer. Maybe one the size of a couple of solar systems - very powerful, lots of memory. Now, an important figure, say Donald Trump, was in a closed room last week. Imagine we used our computer to simulate everything in the room, down to the last quantum state. Our computer now "knows" everything about the room. Everything is certain.

Now, I don't like Donald Trump. So I log into a console and delete him from the simulated room.

Question time:
Does the real Donald Trump vanish from the room in the past? Why?

Remember, we're absolutely certain about the room, and everything in it. We know precisely and perfectly what will happen in that room for as long as we can run the simulation for.

Now, lets imagine God condescends to help us in our experiment. He comes down and reprograms the computer to show us a similar room, with say, Theresa May in it, this time in the future. I also decide to delete Theresa May. Does Theresa May vanish from the real room? If not why not?

The level of certainty we posses about an event is not causative, so in neither case will a world leader abruptly vanish from a locked room (ah, but for the way knowledge works, we could commit a crime even Sherlock Holmes could not solve!) Absolute certainty about an event does not make the event necessary, else we could manipulate an event by modifying our certainty about it. Knowledge and information are just that, knowledge and information. Nothing magical or mystical about it.

Now, there are two theories about how God's omnipotence and omniscience work. One suggests that God knows because he decrees (read causes), and the other says that God's knowledge is not causative -  He knows all (how, but not what is somewhat mysterious) because he created and sustains the universe. God knows how I will sin tomorrow, not because He caused me to sin (James 1:13), but because I will sin. The source of his knowledge need not be a eternal decree, but can be the event itself.

The common argument by a determinist(or a compatibilist) who does not get the distinction between certainty and necessity is that Arminians face the same conundrum as they do - Arminians affirm God knows the future perfectly -  thus, they think God's certainty about the future renders it necessary. This is an extraordinary claim. As our thought experiment above suggests, knowledge does not operate like this.

I anticipate the objection here - that God's knowledge is not like our (or for that matter our imaginary computer's) knowledge. This is true. But the leap from God's knowledge making all things certain for God, to God's knowledge rendering all things necessary has to be supported, and so far I have not heard a good scriptural(or logical, for that matter) reason for this. It does not come from scripture, it is a philosophical argument, and a rather bad one at that. The burden is on the one who claims that certainty and necessity are always the same thing to prove this. It is an extraordinary claim. And thus we would require some proof  for it. Or at the very least some reasoning, normally it comes out as a pure unsupported assertion.

Feel free to provide yours below, if you have such.

Note, that nowhere here do we deny God's sovereignty, or power. Nothing happens without His knowledge, allowance or plan in it. What we do deny is that God is a causative agent in sin. God certainly is active in creation, causing good things.

As always, I retain the right to decide what comments are posted, and only discussion that is respectful and polite is allowed. Please try to apply the Principle of Charity here.