Imperishable Inheritance

Vern Poythress has done the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity a great ser­vice by out­lin­ing Dis­pen­sa­tional ten­den­cies in his work Under­stand­ing Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists. The work is not a defense of covenant the­ol­ogy or nec­es­sar­ily a polemic against Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism; he focuses on expos­ing Dis­pen­sa­tional the­o­log­i­cal ten­den­cies. While he cov­ers areas such as the his­tory of Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists, typol­ogy, and the covenant the­ol­ogy idea of the “ulti­mate rem­nant” in Christ (the ful­fill­ment of Israel in Christ), his great­est con­tri­bu­tion is in exam­in­ing the hermeneu­tics of Dispensationalism.

The Dis­pen­sa­tional Hermeneutic

In dia­logue with Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists, they fall privy to a “lit­eral” hermeneu­tic although often times it is nei­ther defined or sub­stan­ti­ated. “Lit­eral” is seen as the only way to inter­pret the text. Poythress talks about what “lit­eral” is meant in the Dis­pen­sa­tional vocab­u­lary and how it is hard to define.

“One major aspect of the prob­lem of defin­ing ‘lit­eral’ is that in many instances words, but not sen­tences, have a lit­eral or nor­mal mean­ing. More­over, for both words and sen­tences con­text is an all-important in deter­min­ing mean­ing at any given point in an act of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. What con­texts are to be looked at, and how they are to be looked at, in the deter­mi­na­tion of mean­ing is very impor­tant. Because ques­tions of con­text are too often begged in clas­sic dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ist dis­cus­sion of lit­er­al­ness, we need to deal with the ques­tions more pre­cisely.” (pg. 79)

Poythress talks about “first-thought” read­ings which is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of Dis­pen­sa­tional the­ol­ogy. He uses the exam­ple of “bat­tle,” and by itself would con­vey mil­i­tary action; but it could, with a lit­tle con­text, refer to a per­sonal strug­gle. Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists, I believe, take the grammatico-historical to mean that what the text mean to an ancient Israelite is what it is meant to con­vey to all peo­ple at all time. Clearly, the New Tes­ta­ment writ­ers take up sev­eral con­cepts and “spir­i­tu­al­ize” them (Mat 2, 4; Rom 2:28–29; Acts 2; Gal 3:29, 6:16). Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists are also noto­ri­ous for pick­ing and choos­ing which text they want to inter­pret as lit­eral and fig­u­ra­tive, and Poythress exam­ines this in his chap­ter: “The Near Impos­si­bil­ity of Sim­ple Refu­ta­tion” (pg. 52–62).

“Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists have in fact left them­selves some con­ve­nient maneu­ver­ing room. It is pos­si­ble that some­times they have decided what is fig­u­ra­tive and what is non­fig­u­ra­tive after the fact. That is, they may have con­ve­niently arranged their deci­sions about what is fig­u­ra­tive after their basic sys­tem is in place telling them what can and what can­not be fit­ted into the sys­tem. The deci­sions as to what is fig­u­ra­tive and what way it is fig­u­ra­tive may be a prod­uct of the sys­tem as a whole rather than the induc­tive basis of it.” (pg. 53, empha­sis original)

Most Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists think that covenant the­olo­gians only inter­pret events in the Old Tes­ta­ment as alle­gor­i­cal, but this couldn’t be far­ther from the truth. The covenant the­olo­gian doesn’t alle­go­rize texts, but strives to under­stand the text in its cur­rent redemptive-historical sit­u­a­tion (the redemptive-historical hermeneu­tic). The covenant the­olo­gian also does per­form grammatico-historical method (inter­pret­ing both the gram­mar and his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tion as giv­ing the text a mean­ing), but the covenant the­olo­gian real­izes that the New Tes­ta­ment has the final word on every­thing in the Old Tes­ta­ment. I find that most Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists have already con­structed their entire the­o­log­i­cal sys­tem by the time they get to Matthew.

Con­clu­sion

Poythress’ work is poignant and a good addi­tion to the dis­cus­sions between Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ists and covenant the­olo­gians. I believe that, and rightly so, that clas­si­cal Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism is falling out of vogue; but Pro­gres­sive Dis­pen­sa­tion­al­ism, while a great improve­ment, con­tin­ues to per­pet­u­ate the error of dis­tin­guish­ing the Church and Israel in the plan of God. It seems like Pret­ribu­la­tional Pre­mil­len­ni­al­ism will be some­thing to con­tent with for years to come (after all, where does it say in the New Tes­ta­ment that Chris­tians will be removed from tribulation?).