Covenant and Dispensational Theology Part 4
Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.
Well, thanks again for coming and giving up a Friday night. As most of you probably know, Izumi and I are taking off tomorrow morning for Spokane, so it's nice to be able to spend one more evening with everybody. And hopefully, as we bring this big topic that we've been swimming around in for, seems like months now, to a conclusion, it'll help tie up any loose strings. So if you have questions, tonight's the night to ask, because otherwise I'm out of here. Then you can pester Dave and he'll fill in any holes that I leave. But as we begin, let me go ahead and open up with a word of prayer and then we'll dive in. Lord, we do want to think of you and acknowledge you as we begin tonight again.
We thank you for how you have been good to us today. That you have continued to keep us in your grace. that you have continued to lead us towards fulfillment of the living hope into which we have been born. And we thank you for those things, Lord. We thank you for how you have conducted yourself towards us with love and with kindness, and that you have plucked us from the fire as it were. And Lord, we ask that you would help us to worship you with thankful hearts tonight, even as we study this topic. I pray that you would give us understanding of these difficult issues, and that it would would be something that would help us to be better able to explain what we believe, and better able to appreciate who you are, and Lord that it would drive us to love you, not to argue with one another.
And so we pray these things in Christ's name, amen. All right, well we have two sections that we're going to try to tackle tonight, and the second section is broken up into two parts. The first thing we're trying to look at is the historical development of covenantalism and dispensationalism. Where do these views come from? Obviously if you do a quick concordant search through your Bible, you will not find covenantalism and dispensationalism. These have been systems developed since then. So we're going to look at how that came to be. And then we're going to actually then finally look at the Bible itself and say, how do dispensationalists and covenantalists go about studying some of the key doctrines that these issues deal with?
and we're going to look at God's land and God's people as two test cases, if you will. We're going to say how do covenantalists understand God's land and God's people, and how do dispensationalists understand God's land and God's people. And hopefully that'll be instructive just to see what does this practically mean when we start studying our Bible, depending on which view you're in. So that's where we're going to try to go tonight, and we'll begin by diving into the development or the historical development of this topic. So if you guys have your notes, you can follow along. I wanted you to get a quick sweeping history.
You can see briefly that covenantalism really began to take off around the 1300s. That's really where you begin to see it show up. We'll talk about what this little blip is here in a moment. But just in one big picture, you can notice that it began on the 1300s and then just really took off in a bunch of different people's thinking. So let's zoom in and actually talk a little bit about who these people were. We'll begin by the Pelagian controversy. This is the only pre-medieval development, you can see, of covenantalism. And in reality it's not an actual statement of covenantal thought, but it's what covenantal thought would later grow out of.
The Pelagian or semi-Pelagian controversy was this discussion about what is man's will, or what role does man's will play in my salvation? To what degree am I responsible for choosing God? That was the discussion that was taking place with a man named Pelagius, and it became a Pelagian controversy. And it began to drive people to want to refine their understanding of salvation. Because we read the Bible that we've become saved, we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we read about God choosing us, how does this all What does that mean exactly? That was one of the early things the church turned its attention to. And so the Pelagian controversy really is what covenantal thought would later come out of.
As we talked about, covenantal theology sees soteriology or sees salvation as being that unifying theme of scripture to which the covenants apply. So that's going to be where they'll find their background. Now let's fast forward. Now we're up to about 1300, as you can see, remember the initial chart. And we've got this guy named William of Occam, and he suggests that we are not justified, as you see in your notes, because we become just, but we are considered to have met the terms of the covenant to cooperate with God. It's also called the Franciscan Pactum, or if you want to be Latin Franciscan Pactum, theology, to the one who does what he can, God will not deny grace. And you can see what that phrase became later. God helps those who helped themselves. You didn't know that was covenantal theology, did you?
I thought it came from Ben Franklin.
Yeah. But that's where you trace the beginning of that line of thought. And if you're paying close attention here you'll notice something very interesting. At this stage, covenantal theology, the idea, the doctrine of the covenants was not used to prove how God unilaterally saved us, but it was used to prove that we have to participate in our salvation. It was actually used to argue against Calvinism to say that God made this covenant and we have to meet the terms of the covenant before we will be determined just. Now the covenant theologians will later say that's not a bilateral covenant, that's a unilateral covenant where God not only sets up this covenant but he is the one who fulfills it. But that's not till later. So it's very interesting the covenant theology actually came out against Calvinism even though later it would become the primary view of Calvinism. It is clearly identified at this point in time as covenantalism very well they would at this point they're just still stating the covenants they're just we're gonna see now that they're gonna start saying
oh we see a covenant works in a covenant of grace so you're not gonna find systematic covenantalism at this stage but this is where the thinking began this this is the first time in history where you really see them referring to covenants in the Bible as explaining our salvation so yeah so we're just looking at the seeds we'll see soon though it'll develop fairly quickly. So then you can see down there I have another bullet point talking about how it was used that the idea the covenant was used to support the role of man's cooperation in salvation and would eventually start really irritating a certain monk named Martin Luther. Some of what he wrote was against this idea that our cooperation with God in meeting the terms of the covenant is what produced our salvation and that leads us then to the period of the Reformation. Robert Lightner, quoting Charles Ryrie, said, the first proponents of the Covenant view were reformers who were opposed to the strict predestin... excuse me, strict predestinarianism of the reformers of
Switzerland and France. And that's very important to remember, just where this came from. Sometimes we think that these ideas have been fixed forever, but they've done a 180 in their understanding of the Covenants as they've developed. And you can bring that up with all your covenantal friends and ask them about that, but probably not know what you're talking about. But then that brings us to the Reformation period. So now we're at about 1500, and we see Mr. Zwingli, who taught a covenant of works before the fall and a covenant of grace after the fall. So now you can see we're starting to really talk about terms that we're seeing in fully developed covenant theology.
So he had covenant of works and covenant of grace defined at this point. In 1531, I had to just put this guy on here because his name is so fun to say, you have Johann Eucharist, and he taught a view of the covenants complete with the doctrines of all three major covenants. He had works, grace, and redemption, all defined in his works all the way back at 1531. His view of the covenant of redemption, or the Pactum Salutis, or the Consilium Pachis, was particularly ahead of his time. He is considered by some to be the first reformed covenant theologian, though he had only limited exposure during his day. So his deal was he had this whole idea of covenantalism all defined, but nobody had heard of him. He needed the internet. He was undiscovered. And so you're going to see as we move down a lot of these things that he's already discussed are going to be rediscovered and rewritten.
But in many ways, covenant theology was fairly well formed already in his mind back at 1531. And he was the one who started to discuss what the unconditional versus conditional side of God's covenants are. You'll notice that he says the covenant of grace is unconditional and that we do not prepare for it and we do not cooperate with it. We only believe the gospel promise, but it is conditional in its administration and the life of the church. So we are obligated, because of the covenant of grace, to attend to the preaching of the Gospel, and we are obligated to perform the sacraments. So he's going to say that's not just what we do out of obedience to church life and following Christ, that's the terms of the covenant of grace.
If you receive the covenant of grace, you are obligated by that covenant to do these things. Around 1509 to 1564, you have the life of John Calvin. And I bring him up because he is one of those guys both sides fight over. He's claimed by both positions. The covenantalists in particular say that he was a covenantalist. But I bring this to your attention. In the Calvin's Institutes, he discusses a five-fold dissimilarity between the Old Testament and New Testament. First, the spiritual blessings of the Mosaic Covenant are typified by temporal conditions and regulations. Second, he says truth is communicated in the Mosaic economy by numerous symbols and ceremonies to befine Christ.
Third, whereas the Old Testament is literal of the letter, the New Testament is spiritual of the Spirit. Fourth, there is bondage under the old order, freedom under the new. And fifth, covenant administration is restricted to one nation under the old economy, whereas it extends to all nations under the new. These five differences Calvin explains stem from the freedom and sovereignty of God in ordering the affairs of his people. Now that language sounds like witch camp, the dispensationalist side. So I'm not going to be confident throwing him as a card carrying dispensationalist because he also did discuss the covenants.
The point I'm trying to make is John Calvin was not trying to be a dispensationalist or a covenantalist. was not his focus. And I don't think either side can clearly claim him as much as they would like to, because if you got John Calvin on your side, I mean, you're almost there. So that's what we'll call him a toss-up, John Calvin. Fast forwarding a little bit more, 1534, we have Heinrich Bullinger published a key treatise explaining the covenant.
He was also significant in that he used the covenant of grace as a summary of biblical theology. That's critical. He's saying now this covenant of grace is how we can start to understand the Bible. So he's starting to move from just using the covenants as an explanation for the Bible to putting those glasses on and using the covenants as a way to understand or interpret the Bible. So that's where you begin to see this shift that we've been talking about last week in a hermeneutic section. Then in 1550 you have Zacharias or Sinus. He taught in several important seminaries and universities, so that expanded his influence widely. He further developed the idea of the covenant and helped to also expand the understanding of a Christian covenant community into which children could enter and receive partial covenant blessings. Infant baptism? Yes, that's where you're going to see him start to heavily emphasize that. We have a covenant community and we need to bring our children into this covenant community and he would do that
through baptism. Full covenant blessings, i.e. salvation, or as he would call it the substance of the covenant were only appropriated when the individual accepted the gospel by grace alone, through faith alone. So he's going to say being part of the covenant community is not the same as being saved, but it does place you underneath the blessings and obligations of the covenant of grace. and we talked a little bit about that last week. We're being elect and being part of the Covenant community are two different things. So that's going to start rising up with Mr. Zacharias. Then we get down to Casper Olivia Annas in 1585 and you can see these dates are all pretty close. A lot of these guys are contemporaries and a lot of them we'll see pretty soon, lived pretty close together. And so these guys are mingling in the same social circles. They're writing their little treatises and they're exchanging them among themselves. So it's a bit of a group effort generating all these ideas.
He developed a system of covenant or federal theology in his best-known work on the substance of grace between God and the elect. This book set a standard for covenant theologians to build upon. The system started and spread in the churches of Switzerland and Germany and that's really where you're going to see on the map the concentration of covenant theology began and it was passed from there to the Netherlands, then Scotland, and then England, where the Westminster Confession of Faith was the first such confession to refer to covenant theology. So it's going to move west and north from Switzerland and France and Germany in that area. It's going to eventually reach England and it's going to become part of an actual church creed in the Westminster Confession. 1650, you have Johann Cossius. In the Netherlands, he had definite part and spreading the covenant theology idea. He was a German who had been significantly influenced by the reformer Malengthen. He was one of his pupils and proteges. He did not hold to a rigid view of predestination. So here's
another guy who's a bit of a throwback to the people at the beginning of the covenantal theology who were trying to show man's participation in salvation. But he was deeply concerned with the weaknesses in Arminianism. So So he doesn't believe in full-blown predestination, but he also sees weaknesses in the Arminian thought and theology. So he set forth his view of the covenants of works in grace in a work he published in 1687 to try to balance out against strict predestination and also try to address some of the weaknesses he saw in Arminian theology. With this contribution, covenant theology was given great impetus.
He faced significant opposition, however, because of his strong support for the ideas of philosopher René Descartes and belief in the relative freedom of man's will. And around this time, it becomes very apparent the mixing of the covenant theologians and the intellectual elite of their day. And that association is going to continue right down to the present day. I've joked around a few times that the Covenant theologians are all the smart people in Christendom, and that's not entirely a joke. There's something about Covenant theology that is very appealing to the intellectual elite, to those who are fascinated by philosophy and by logic.
And I think it's a dangerous attraction in some cases, like in this case, where you are very preoccupied and view pagan philosophers very favorably. And you pull some of their logical structures and some of their worldview as you're fashioning the framework of your theology. So they're starting to flirt a little bit on dangerous ground there. And that's going to be one of the criticisms that we will have of the movement as well. It's a little bit too intellectual. Enjoys all of those cogitations. And it doesn't take God's word as simply and straightforwardly as God has presented it to us. So you're going to see that beginning with Him.
Let's fast forward a little bit more. In 1680 you're going to have Francis Turritin published his great work, Institutes of Elynctic Theology, which became the theology textbook for Princeton Seminary. All the way up until Charles Hodge wrote his famous systematic theology. He firmly believed in predestination and frequently defended his ideas publicly against the Socinians, Armenians, and Amoraldians. So this guy, he had a center stage. He wrote the theology textbook for some of the major seminaries in America. He was one of the first guys to start hopping the pond with his ideas. We're going to get there in a minute and see how it rushed into America.
He was also a very gifted debater. He was out there with all these different groups of Sicinians, Armillians, and Armenians. He would debate them on these issues of man's will and things like that and use the covenants to argue his point. That brings us to Herman Witsius and now we're up to 1680. He is another important name in the early history of covenantism. His main contribution was to extend the covenant of grace idea into eternity past. He held to extreme form of predestination, thus an opponent of Cossius' view. Remember him? The guy we just talked about who was Raynay Descartes' friend and he was a big, Cossius and Witsius were big rivals.
They were going right at each other, because Witsias was a very staunch defender of predestination. And so they talked quite a bit. He would try to build bridges between the various divergent forms of covenant theology at the time. And during this period, the issue of Israel's connection to the covenant of works became a key point of debate. So he went to go shut down Cossias, but then he also wanted to look at the other different kind of fracturing views of covenant theology and bring those all together if you could. So that was his influence. And like you read there at the end, the issue of Israel becomes front and center.
And the issue of Israel has been front and center in the debate ever since this time. If you wanna get right to it with a covenant or a dispensational theologian, ask them, what is your view of Israel? And you will be right down to brass tacks immediately. So that's gonna be where we're gonna be left off with the post-Reformation guys all the way up until it crosses the pond and you start to see covenantalism infiltrating America. So I know that was kind of fast and furious there, but you hopefully have all those things in your notes. I'll have some references at the end that I'll have up on the screen that you can go to for further research.
But you can see how this developed from a view that was supporting man's free will to a view then that was arguing against man's free will, to then a view that was becoming more and more associated with the intellectual elite of the day, and then finally becoming a view that was predominant in the seminaries. It was spread that way into the creeds of the Westminster Confession, and now as it begins to hop the pond to America, you're starting to see the issue of Israel becoming the central issue around which the theologians will group themselves. Does that make sense so far? All right, I'm seeing some vertical. That's good.
The rest of you, if you're just so bewildered, there's no hope. I really apologize. Now let's talk about crossing the ocean, how covenant theology got here to this wonderful little country. And it began at the beginning through John Cotton and the Puritans. theology was introduced to America. The point to be made here is that it is definitely a post-Reformation development which started as a reaction to extreme Calvinism, but before long became part and parcel of Calvinism. So it came over from Europe with the pilgrims, and if you recall, when they came to America, this new world was going to become the Kingdom. They were going to build a city set on a hill, they were going to build not just churches in which to worship, but communities where all the civil as well as the religious structure would be the kingdom of Christ.
And they were hoping that by doing this in this new land, they would be able to create a pure society and that Christ would be able to eventually come back and reign. And that eschatology was connected to their covenant theology. Those often go together. And so Covenant Theology came through strongly with the Pilgrims. In 1850 to 1950, over that 100 year period, almost all the major seminaries in America, especially Princeton, pioneered the development of Covenant Theology under the intellectual minds of men like Charles Hodge, B.B. Warfield, G. Voss, and J.G. Machen. These are some of the guys that we actually don't frown upon too much.
some good stuff from these guys, but they were all strong covenant theologians. Beginning in 1950 to 1975, Louis Berkhoff and John Murray, you may have seen those names on some systematic theologies, they rejected the ideas of the German theologian Karl Burt and refined the essence of covenant theology. At this time covenant theology in America is mostly in its final form. You can still see, while they're not as infatuated with some of the European intellectual elitism now, they're still interacting at that level. There's kind of a constant dialogue between the American Princeton type theologians and the European Karl Barth, more of the liberal theologians over there. So they're still talking at this very philosophical level and they're arguing back and forth in all these philosophical, logical, theological terms.
And they love it. And they feel shelf after shelf with this stuff. So if any of you are wired that way, this would be your time period. You will have fun digging through this stuff. Seminaries affiliated with mainline denominations such as the Presbyterians, Reformed Church of America, the Lutherans, and the American Baptists all embraced covenantism coming out of those seminaries. There are some independent groups formed out of these which may not hold all of the parent denomination's viewpoints. Southern Baptist seminaries generally promote the covenant view as well, not all of them. However, there are often individuals in all of these churches and seminaries who hold variant views from the official position.
And lastly, this is very interesting, all the major classic systematic theologies, Hodge, Birkoff, Shedd, and Strong have covenantism as the basis for their entire theology. The glaring exception is Louis Barry Shafer's systematic theology, which is rooted in dispensationalism. Why is there so much covenant theology in America? Because the people that came over first and founded the seminaries were all covenant theologians. And they wrote all of the systematic theologies that became THE textbooks for all the other seminaries in America for a long time. And that has then become the dominant theological view in much of America.
We're going to see how dispensationalism took root in one seminary in particular, that was Dallas, and it has begun to spread from there. But other than that, America was pretty strongly and staunchly a covenant country. Now I want to take a look at a slide here. This is good old earth. And we'll zoom in here, and I've numbered these chronologically. So you can see the Phlegian controversy was down here in Italy. But when you actually see the explosion of covenant theology itself, it starts with William O'Laucomie, remember, but then it immediately jumps to all these guys right in the same area. They're all within this one intellectual community, writing and reading each other's stuff and debating and discussing.
It develops in a very tight, orderly fashion there. And then as we talked about it began to spread west and north, and eventually jumped back to England. But right here in Switzerland, in France, and Germany, you're going to see almost all the early covenant theology become developed. Then it crosses the pond with the pilgrims, and resides in the coast, and then begins to move inland. And so you're going to see all the major Ivy League colleges now, which were the seminaries at the time, begin to adopt this, and from there then it spreads to the entire country. So that's kind of how covenant theology developed and spread geographically.
So if you're like me and someone's singing it helps, that's sort of where thou came from. Now let's talk about the history of dispensationalism. You guys doing okay so far? I know I blew a fuse more than once trying to get through all this stuff just preparing it so if you're feeling your eyes start to roll back in your heads just let me know and we'll take a break. I do have one question. Yes. So when somebody says they're a Calvinist, my typical thinking is to look good and there's five points of Calvinist and believe not necessarily that they're a pageant view engine.
Is that along you or is that, I'm just seeing that maybe you become more proud of the the people who call themselves Calvinists that aren't necessarily kind of mental emojis. Right. In fact, Dave Light used to joke around with people down in Southern California that it was the land of the Reformed Dispensationalist because they kept a lot of the Reformed theology like the Tulip, but they rejected the Covenant theology that usually came with it and they embraced Dispensational theology. So, as it's used used prevalently today, Calvinism or Reformed theology doesn't necessarily come with the connotation of covenant theology. But they're trying to change that. And if you remember last week I quoted from an article titled Reformed theology is covenant theology. And so the covenant guys are saying, whoa, we're losing ground here. All these guys are putting our label on them, but they're not covenantal. So we've got to go out there and make a big push and straighten it out.
If you're reformed, you better be covenantal or call yourself something else. Yeah, but as it's commonly used, Calvinism does not equal covenantalism in America. Yeah, good question. Anything else? All right, well then, off to dispensationalism. And you'll notice something different about this chart. One is the major spike doesn't begin until after 1600. So guess what the covenant guys like to throw at us? We were here first. However, we're going to talk about what this is all about. Because we like to say, well, not entirely. So let's dive into these early guys. We'll begin with Justin Martyr all the way back in 103.
So now we're just, I mean we're just a little over a decade after John, the Apostle, is dead. So we're right back at Early Church history. Justin Martyr identified the following periods of God's administration. Enoch to Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ, and the Millennium. In his writings he distinguished between those periods. Yeah. Let's see. I'll go ahead and read this quote here. Larry Crutchfield, I was going to read it after we discussed him, but... The fathers distinguished between the church and national Israel. They recognized distinctions among the differing peoples of God throughout biblical history. And they believed in the literal fulfillment of covenant promises in the earthly kingdom.
The contemporary dispensational position on Israel on the church is primarily a refinement and not a contradiction of the position of the anti-Nicene church. So what Larry Crutchfield is trying to argue is that Far from being a very recent view, the early church fathers essentially held to the basic tenets of dispensationalism, that God had dealt with his people in different ways throughout history and that God would literally fulfill his promises to national Israel. That was the position of the church fathers. And so we have continued to refine and develop that view, not contradict it, which is what the covenant guys will try to claim.
So that's, in a nutshell, what we're going to be talking about as we look through each of these guys one by one. So that was Justin Martyr. Irenaeus, he identified several periods of dispensational history, including Noah to Moses, to Christ, to eternity. Clement of Alexandria wrote very similarly, and then Tertullian distinguished between the ages of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Christ, and the millennium. So that's quite a few little dispensations that these guys were identifying. That's significant. That means that this idea that God has worked differently through different periods of time is not new, but it's in fact very old.
Now, of course, we would like to back up and say, well, it's right there in the Bible at the very beginning, but in the interest of not being unkind to our covenant friends, avoid taking that cheap shot. But you can at least see it in the writing of the early church fathers. You'll notice the next slide is the Reformation. What happened to the Middle Ages? Well, nothing. Pre-millennialism, literal interpretation, dispensations, the Israel church distinctions are almost completely absent from the theological discussion during in the Middle Ages. That's why they call it the Dark Ages. Under the heavy influence of Catholic theologians, these topics were not popular because of their view of the Pope and who he was on earth, the vicar of Christ. So these ideas of dispensations and literal fulfillments and things like that, and God's promises being in the future, those were unpopular. Yes?
They were anti-Semitic. And they were anti-Semitic, yes. Did you discover in your study that that middle age of the dark ages, they tried to suppress this theology or eradicate this view? Typically the people that would have held this view during that time would also have held views that would get them branded as a heretic. So if you fell into these categories, typically because of other views that you had, you you were going to be hunted down by the Catholic Church, but it wasn't dispensational thought as it were that put a bull's eye on you at this time. It was usually a secondary cause. It was more just that this view had no audience.
Now, if you were developing any of the covenants and things like that, then you were more than welcome to share those from different prominent public places. And so that began to circulate and develop, but if you didn't hold that view, you better to keep your mouth shut. Yeah, but I didn't find a lot of evidence of persecution of this idea in particular. That would be an interesting thing to research further though. But that does bring us up then to the reformation, to the return to the Bible. And it's always interesting that when people go back to the Bible, you start to see sound doctrines show up again.
And so in 1646 to 1719, you see a guy named Pierre Poiret, and I have no idea, no offense to him or his descendants for butchering his French name, but he, I have no idea how to pronounce that properly, he wrote a six volume work entitled The Divine Economy, which outlines seven different dispensations, infancy, creation to the flood, childhood from the flood to Moses, adolescence from Moses to the prophets, youth from the prophets to the coming of Christ, manhood from the coming of Christ to some time after that, and old Age, from manhood to the time of man's decay, and renovation of all things, the millennium.
So he had a very well-developed system of administrations. He had, in essence, a dispensational theology. Isaac Watts, in 1674-48, the famous theologian and hymn writer, penned a forty-page essay called, The Harmony of All the Religions Which God Ever Prescribed to Men and All all his dispensations towards them. So there you go. Huh? That would be a fantastic thing to do. So maybe for the next concert you guys can orchestrate something there. But in addition to writing hymns, he was busy writing dispensational theology. And then you had Emil Güers. He published La Futur de Israel in 1856, which presented the core, or as they call in theological circles is sine qua non, without which nothing, meaning the most important or essential part of dispensational theology, over a hundred years before Ryrie restated it in his book Dispensationalism Today.
That sine qua non, that essential core of dispensational theology is simply this, the church is not Israel. And that brings us then to America. Here's the Reformation, here's America. That's immediately obvious. Dispensationalists like America that took off here. It took off here in a special way. We'll begin down at the bottom there. In 1800, you had John Nelson Darby. He developed systematic dispensationalism from within the Brethren movement. His thinking was heavily influenced by his mentor at Trinity College, Richard Graves. Richard Graves had a very big impact on Darby. His understanding of God's dispensations led him to a number of significant conclusions, including a belief in a pre-tribulational rapture and a separation of the Church not only from national Israel, but from the state as well.
Remember, in America there's still bat around this idea of building a kingdom. And the concept of dispensationalism with its literal fulfillment of promises to national Israel means that it's not our job to build God's kingdom on earth, that Christ will come back and establish his kingdom. So it's not my job to make sure that the government, the civil government is enforcing the Bible on the populace, that the church should not be the state. About Darby's. That yeah, that was Darby's one of his developments, which obviously would not have been entirely popular in his day, but it's critical. Because whenever you see that the church has become the state, that's always a precursor to abuse.
Those were not meant to be together unless Christ is sitting at the top of that organizational structure. So he begins to develop this idea. His seven visits to America, a lot of people don't realize he came to America that much, that Darby came to America seven times during the period of 1862 to 1877 and had a profound effect on two preachers, James Hall Brooks and Adoniram Judson Gordon, not the missionary, but named after the missionary, Adoniram Judson Gordon, whose ministry spread dispensational thought throughout the country. So that brings us to that first of those men, James Hall Brooks in 1870.
often called the father of American Dispensationalism. Among his many influential activities he wrote the book Maranatha, on literal interpretation of prophecy. Again you see at the very beginning of dispensational thought are convictions on your hermeneutics, how you interpret scripture. So the father of American Dispensationalists begins writing first that we've got to interpret prophecy literally. That's at the very core. He edited the truth which was a dispensational magazine, chaired the Niagara Bible Conference and mentored C.I. Scofield shortly after his conversion. This guy had a massive effect. The Niagara Bible Conferences were a series of conferences that took place, you might imagine, up in Niagara, and they really began to pull together dispensational thought, pre-millennial eschatology, all these things that essentially form the basis of what this church believes, and then flung those around the country. So that was a very big part in why we believe what we believe at this church today, by God's grace. And also C. I. Schofield, who we'll see in a little
bit, wrote what really was, up until very recently, the definitive work in dispensationalism. But we'll get to him in a minute. First, we want to talk about Adam, Aaron, Judson, Gordon. Around the same time, he's the guy that Gordon College and Gordon Connell Seminary are named after. He was influential in spreading dispensationalism across the East Coast. He was a leader in the popular Prophecy Conferences movement, and he edited a dispensational publication called The Watchword. He is also responsible for convincing D.L. Moody to accept dispensationalism. So we saw this young upstart evangelist and said, that guy needs to be dispensational.
So he chased him down and pestered him until he convinced him. So that's how D.L. Moody joined the club. And that brings us then to Cyrus Ingersin Scofield. You can see why he just went by C.I. Scofield. That's around 1843 to 1921. A converted Kansas attorney, he publishes the Scofield Reference Bible in 1909. This Bible, which systematized dispensational doctrine, became what many consider to be the most effective tool for the dissemination of dispensationalism in America. So he took that exacting attorney's mind and applied it to the dispensations of the Bible and put extensive footnotes throughout showing how God worked towards different people in different ways.
Now, he would be even stronger on the division side, on the discontinuity side than he would be today. But he's the real, he really popularized the view in the same way that the MacArthur Study Bible has been very helpful to a lot of people. It's a Bible, you can read it, the notes are right there, you can spread it around, and everybody can be doing their devotions and absorbing dispensational theology at the same time. So that spread it through America more effectively than any other tool in America's history. In 1876-1897, you have the summer Bible conferences like the Niagara Conference, the Northfield and Winona Conferences, and they spread dispensational thought around American churches.
The first converts to dispensation of premillennialism after the Civil War were pietistic evangelicals who were attracted to its biblicism, its concern for evangelism, and missions, and its view of history, which seemed more realistic than that of the prevailing post-millennialism. Most of the new premillennialists came from Baptists, new school presbyterian and congregational ranks, which gave the movement a definite reformed flavor. and evangelicals who oppose pre-millennialism use this apparent connection to Calvinism to discredit it among Methodist and Holiness people. So that's a mouthful. But essentially what you've got going on is after the Civil War, people are starting to listen to the theology of post-millennialism, which is everything is getting better, and they're saying we just blew our country apart.
Everything is not getting better. And when they looked at the dispensational viewpoint, which said that everything will get worse until God comes back and literally fulfills his promises to Israel. He said that seems to describe what we're seeing in the world. And so you're going to see a resurgence of dispensationalism in this line of thinking after World War I, after World War II. Because those have been massive movements intellectually which have shown even secular scholars men is not basically good. And so that's always been one thing that's worked in the dispensational favor is the world is a rough place. And dispensationalism explains that better.
You're going to also see how it becomes associated with the Calvinistic movement. So it's going to be opposed by all the Armenian Wesleyan movements, but it's going to have this reformed flair. Like you mentioned, is Calvinism the same thing as being covenantal? Beginning at this point, you saw a lot of people that were holding close to Calvinistic theology, but were dispensational. That's where you begin to see that change. So those conferences 1876-1897 were very important. And that brings us down to Louis Sperry Shafer. You remember he was the guy that wrote, The only dispensational systematic theology up to this time.
That must have been tough. I mean, can you imagine trying to get this thing approved by your peers when you're the only one who's writing this stuff. He studied under Scofield, became a very prominent advocate of dispensational theology, and then wrote his systematic theology, which is eight volumes. It stands out as one of the few great dispensational theologies. He also founded Dallas Theological Seminary. So we mentioned Dallas Theological Seminary was dispensational, because it comes from this guy who wrote an eight-volume dispensational systematic theology. So that was their textbook. Now we're in the Roaring Twenties, squarely in them, And you have the rise of liberalism, which caused a change in focus from personal soteriological issues, how I got saved personally, to the reality of the supernatural.
As those who viewed scripture as inspired and inerrant began to defend the truthfulness of God's activities in scripture, more time and study was put into the larger plans and purposes of God in exercising His sovereignty. So you began to see in the 20s people not just saying how do I get saved, but starting to be interested in supernatural things. And that was as a culture. So you began to see some of the eastern garbage starting to filter in as well. But in Christian circles people began to say how has God shown off his supernatural power in history? So they began to zoom back from what does the Bible mean to me to what is God doing at the big scale, at the grand scale, and that makes them start studying, is it all explained by covenants? Is it all explained by dispensations? What does all this mean?
So the 20s really fostered an attitude of study on these topics that caused dispensationalism to be developed as it was. From 1924 to the present, Dallas Theological Seminary has been the largest seminary with dispensationalism in its doctrinal statement. In 1944, the was ruled as incompatible with the Westminster Confession and thereby with the Southern Presbyterian Church. Graduates began to move into the new Bible Church movement. So it used to be they'd pump out all these Presbyterian preachers. And then one of them said, wait a minute, as Presbyterians we adhere to the Westminster Confession, which as you recall was the first confession to contain covenant theology. They said that is not compatible. This isn't two different perspectives on the same issue, this is two different incompatible views.
And so they said, you can't be Presbyterians anymore. And so they started the Bible Church movement. And guess what we are? We're a Bible Church. I'm going to Spokane. I'm going to another Bible Church. The Bible Church movement, or these different Bible churches you'll see around the country, are largely characterized by dispensational theology, many of them founded or taught by people from Dallas. So that's where you see those. Not every church that's Bible something or other is a Bible church, but many of them are. Jay Vernon McGee is the classic example. It's Presbyterian ministry. Yeah, very good. Yeah, for the sake of the record, that was Jay Vernon McGee, who was kind of the quintessential example of that shift.
So I was a little concerned for a minute because I saw Dave getting animated and I was like, you got something up there? Is he going to correct me? Oh dear. That brings us up to 1935 to the present with Charles Ryrie, who was a former dean of doctoral studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and president of Philadelphia College of Bible. He wrote the book, Dispensationalism Today in 1965, and pioneered, revised, or modified, dispensationalism. Because remember we talked about the spectrum of dispensationalism. There's hyper-dispensationalism, which is relatively recent, and that's the most extreme, and there is a lot of heresy at the fringes of that movement.
Then there is classical dispensationalism. That was C.I. Scofield. Then there was modified or revised dispensationalism. That's Ryrie. And then we're about to get to progressive dispensationalism in the next couple of guys that we talk about. And we've been discussing a little bit why is there this movement, why are there all these different flavors? Well, it's because the more we study God's Word, the more we change our system, as opposed to reinterpreting the Bible to fit the framework. And so we're going to see our framework constantly in development the more we study. That's a good thing. That brings us up to 1930.
Robert Elsasi, he's a professor of systematic theology at the Talbot School of Theology and a translator for both versions of the New American Standard Bible. So if you hold an NAS, you've got some of his handiwork in your hands. He helped form and promote progressive dispensationalism. He did it with his buddy Craig Blazing. And you see here the executive vice president at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and former president of the Evangelical Theological Society, also called ETS. And they have a conference every year, so you'll hear about guys going to ETS to present a paper. That's the Evangelical Theological Society.
He is one of the foremost proponents and developers of progressive dispensationalism. And you usually see his name with this next guy. They work together a lot. You'll see Bach and Blaisey, Bach and Blaisey, Bach and Blaisey, and they always go together. Darryl Bach, a research professor of New Testament studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and a fellow graduate of Aberdeen University in Scotland along with Greg Blaisey. So they're old school buddies. And they like to work together. is also a key figure in the development of progressive dispensationalism. So you can see there not only the movement from early church history through Europe to America but also the progression from classic dispensationalism to progressive dispensationalism primarily in America.
And here is the development on the map again. Now one thing I want you to notice is the dispersion of all these guys. Remember, covenant theology almost entirely developed in this tiny little area right here. All the guys talking to each other and reading papers and passing them to each other. However, dispensational theology developed all over the place, and in many cases almost all at the same time. A lot of guys just reading their Bible for themselves were beginning to come to these convictions about how God dealt with man. And so you're going to see it being developed more widely. And then there's Darby, who kept coming across the ocean.
And there's Gordon, one of the guys that he worked with. There's where the conferences took place. And you can see Brooks here as well. Now, this was back before you had your interstate. It's amazing how far inland Darby came. In his seven visits, most of them he got this far in visiting Brooks. And that's one of the reasons why dispensationalism penetrated past the coasts where all the seminaries were guarding it. So he jumped over the head to the covenant, guys, to get it, sneak it in, to the back door. And that's the reason why you see Gordon's here, and there's nothing. But here's Brooks, and right down the spine of America you see dispensationalism taking place.
And Dallas, as you can see, is a hot spot. All those guys were working out of there. And moving out to California. So that's dispensationalism in America. Any questions so far on that? There's a little more in here that the race and race and the age of Manon the Light is a huge part of that and then talent also. Yes. Versus the group. Right. Yeah. So talent as those guys from their move to the masters take that same classical or spare progressive. It's progressive. I wouldn't want to be in a great old man's class. Thomas. You've got to be real careful. Well progressive today tends to have a negative connotation. Does it in this regard in association with dispensationalism?
Well, we would fall in the progressive dispensational camp. So we would tend to think of it rather positively. Yeah. It's progressive in that it is, well, see actually, when we get to that, whoops, there we go, that slide, what we mean by progressive. But yeah, we would see it as being positive because we're progressing towards biblical accuracy. That's what we would claim. Not so true. But here is just where you can see the two histories combined. So you can see in the early church history there seems to be more evidence for dispensational thought and then later on you see covenant theology becoming systematized faster than dispensational theology and for both users there is this huge gap missing.
And for some people that's very disconcerting. Why is there this huge gap? The same thing when you talk about eschatology. Why is it that only more recently do you see these systems well defined? Well, the simple answer is the Church has had a tendency to take major theological issues one at a time. And so the Church, in these years, was not addressing what is the role of the covenants in God's economy. They were addressing issues like, who was Jesus Christ? Exactly. How does salvation work? Exactly. What is justification about? Exactly.
Those were the issues that carried us all the way up from the early Church Fathers to the Reformation. Covenant theology, because of its friendliness with Catholic theology, was able to get an early voice. Dispensational theology was hot on its heels, but they both came around similar time periods as the Church turned its attention to personal issues of personal salvation to God's larger themes and larger purposes in Scripture. And so that's why if we study other issues like who is Christ, you would see this spike here. You'd wonder why there hasn't been a lot of development since then. It's because the church has wrestled through that issue now. And we're still in the middle of the church wrestling on this issue.
What do you think the church councils held during that Dark Age period? In here? Yeah, like for example the Nicene Council would have been during here and a number of other important ones as... Where they're deciding... Right. ...dopple issues of heresy. Exactly. Athanasius was a big part with those councils as well, trying to settle who who was Jesus Christ, and that's where you get to the two natures in one being, or two beings in one nature, or how do you understand this idea of fully God and fully man, or is he fully God and fully man, or is he 50-50? All those questions were being debated in the dark space. Yeah, good question.
So Chris, just sort of practical thing that I came across when I was homeschooling your is that a lot of the homeschool movement was driven by the covenantal theology because it was to make the America a better place. And I did not know that going in, but it became evident that more years ago that that was driving a lot of immigrants. And that was really interesting. Was it originally hoping for a theocracy in America? Eventually, yeah, the idea is we would make this place where Christ could then just come right on in and set up shop as the king, but we would have built it up to being essentially a theocratic society just waiting for God to actually appear and take over the reigns.
And you can find those writings on the web. They're there. And also, that is one of the things a lot of times you see the homeschoolers so involved and politics, and then preparing their children to be politicians in a lot of ways so that they can get into those inferential... I'm sure you can tell them. Right, right. Yeah, definitely. Very strong influence there. And as we're going to see, at the end, one of the things I think us as dispensationalists can learn from the covenantal side is a better understanding of community, and of the family unit and of the role of church members within a community. They're good at that in many ways. Now we would say that trying to make America a Christian nation is not going to happen because human nature being what it is, it's just not going to happen. However, it doesn't mean you have to be a bunch of individualistic, self-absorbed, modern Americans.
We can still understand what community and loving each other and discipling and being each other's lives is all about. Yeah, was there a question in the back? Retracted? I don't want to be named. Did we ever name any place in the ghetto or olive or anything? What's that? Did we ever name any place here? We like the founders of the country. Do we actually have a ghetto or a mountain ball? Oh here? No. So that's the advantage of having non-literal prophecy view. So yeah. So a lot of what you were describing in the early development of the covenantal people sounded, we were saying, real similar with the emergent train of thought.
Kind of really grabbing onto philosophical ideas of the day and kind of smearing them in. Do they tend to go one way or the other theologically? I I mean, I know they're going into their own thoughts, but do they tend to be more covenantal versus? The emergent movement, you're saying? Definitely not covenantal. And you're right in that they did adopt a lot of the ideas of their day, but the ideas of their day were very ordered and heavy on doctrine. And so coming into the modernistic period, the idea was that there were rules that govern the universe and we can't understand them. And truth is stated propositionally.
This is a tree. It doesn't matter what you think or what you say, it is a tree. And that the Bible should be understood that way. And they're going to hold two truths being propositional in that way today. And so the covenantal guys don't get along well with the emerging guys. There is a...where they would have some affinity is the idea of community. Because the emergent movement is all about a group dialogue. But it's a dialogue devoid of specific doctrines. And that's not going to fly in the covenant community. because they're really big on the framework, being clear and very well defined. But yeah, that's a good observation.
But yeah, they would not like being grouped in that category at all. Yeah. All right. Different explanations for the apparently contradictory data in scripture, descriptive of the Mosaic Covenant, have led to two distinct schools of interpretation within evangelicalism, namely, dispensationalism and covenant theology. where we've been at for the last long time. Fortunately, the current theological scene evidences remarkable change, particularly a growing reproachment between modern dispensationalism and covenant theology. Not reproachment, but reproachment, meaning that we're seeing a coming together. A rapport.
A rapport, if you will, being developed. I'm a little French for this. Yeah, thank you. Whenever I get to a French word on my slide, I'll just... and you can throw it out there for us. So here's the basic dispensational and covenantal continuum. This is continuity. The farther out you are here, the more you are hardline covenantal. This is discontinuity. The farther you are out here, the more you are towards hyper-dispensationalism. And you'll notice some of these names were the names that we saw at the beginning of our list. And over here, the names are the names that are at the beginning of the list. But the names that were showing up at the end of our lists are all grouping up around here.
So the views are beginning to move together. Now this is not to scale. This should be about 3 millimeters wide, and this should be about 3 miles wide. because dispensationalists have moved a lot farther than the covenant guys have. And so you saw in the 1970s there was still this progression towards more and more classical or even towards a hyper dispensationalist era, but right around the 1980s, getting ready for me to be born, we began to come back this direction. And that's where you see these guys, the Saucy, the Feinbergs, all those Those guys began to modify than progressive dispensationalists. So the question is, are we becoming covenantal?
And covenant guys will tease dispensation about that. Well, just give it another 10 years and you'll be covenantal. We have begun to be better at articulating that God's plan of salvation is one. We've begun to be better at articulating that we do share in some of the blessings given to Israel. We've begun to be better articulating the role that Christ has right now in bringing citizens into his kingdom, one salvation at a time. What we have never given up though is our literal hermeneutic, which leads us to conclude that the church is not Israel. Those are two things that make this still a disconnected line. So I So I think that we are doing well in reading our Bibles carefully.
We're correcting the pendulum swing, but we're not losing, I think, what is the heart of dispensationalism and what I believe makes it, in my opinion, a superior view, which is literal, consistent hermeneutics, even when you're dealing with prophecy. And the issue of the two different systems of salvation, the only one on the chart that I know of that I can quote will be scoping. But not signed on to what? Two systems of salvation. Right, gotcha. Yeah. He is the most hyper-out there. And the problem is, it's probably bad rap money because he wrote the notes of the first edition of the Scopio I have about three different versions of them, by the last one. And remember he was a...
Right. Which just goes to show you, there's the old maxim, you're the master of what you think, you're the servant of what you say, and you're the slave of what you write. Which means after all of these slides and all this talking, I am in bondage. You're the master of what you think, you're the servant of what you say, and you're the slave of what you write. So be careful what you put in ink. Alright, and that brings us to the end of the historical development. Congratulations, you all should give yourselves a hand for surviving that. Thank you very much. We're going to take a break, we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about God's land and God's people.
We'll dive right in. So we're going to start tonight by talking about The land from a covenantal perspective. And that is the arts. Hebrew for the land. And you'll see that all throughout the Old Testament. God promising his people a land. What did that mean? What was that talking about? And you can already see where I'm going to go, because you'll notice behind the word, you'll see the entire planet. All of earth. And so from the covenantal perspective, we're going to see how they understand this doctrine. To begin to understand the covenant perspective, we've talked about this a little bit, you've got to get into your mind the whole mode of shadow substance, shadow substance.
Seed blossom, this idea of progression and growth from promise to reality. So the animal sacrifices of the Passover were the shadows fulfilled by the substance of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The priesthood in the Old Testament was the shadow fulfilled by the substance of the of Christ. The mobile tabernacle that they moved about was the shadow of the abiding presence of Christ. Now, I should just put as a footnote, the entire argument for the land of God that I'm presenting is not just me putting words in their mouths, it's taken straight from O.P. Robertson's book that you'll see in the bibliography. So this is the covenantal presentation of this argument, and this is where he starts. He says, before Before we begin, you need to understand shadow and substance.
These are the examples that he gives. From there then, he talks about, we'll give a couple quotes. It says, in speaking of Israel's land under the Old Covenant, it is necessary to think in categories of shadow, type, and prophecy, in contrast to reality, substance, and fulfillment under the New Covenant. So remember, when we go to the Old Testament, we don't expect to find reality. We need to go to the Old Testament expecting to find shadow, type, and prophecy. In the New Testament, that's where we will expect to find reality, substance, and fulfillment, which will then help us to know what the Old Testament was really talking about.
So that's where you have to start. This principle has great significance when it is applied to the idea of land as experienced by Israel under the administration of the old covenant. They, in that paragraph he was talking about Abraham and the patriarchs, understood though only dimly that the land promised to them actually had its origins in the heavenly, eternal reality that yet remained before them. And he's going to go to Hebrews and take the verse that talks about Abraham looking for a city whose builder and architect was God. And he's going to say, based off of that verse, We can assume that Abraham and the patriarchs knew that all this land talk God was giving them wasn't actually about the land he was talking about, it was connected to the idea of some eternal spiritual reality.
So that's how they're going to use the New Testament to reinterpret what Abraham must have been thinking when he heard the literal words of the Old Testament. Throughout its history, Israel's experience with the land had the effect of placing the promise of it in the category of an old covenant shadow that would have to await for the arrival of new covenant realities for its fulfillment. So he's going to say, well look, Israel never did see the promises for its land fulfilled, literally, in the Old Testament. So it's obvious that God didn't mean it, literally, in that way, but it was some kind of a shadowy prophecy that is awaiting a New Testament reality.
Of course our response is, it is a New Testament reality that the Old Testament promises will be literally fulfilled. But not yet. So this is their paradigm. As they look at the Bible, they're going to say, in Genesis, you have the Garden of Eden, which is going to set the theological framework, in their mind, against an important word, a land promise, the idea of paradise, which was lost. That idea and that longing for paradise is going to be seen later at the time of the Patriarchs and the Prophets as the Promised Land. But that's not the fulfillment of the land either. It's really the New Covenant reality of a new heavens and new earth. It's the inheritance and dominance of a whole new cosmos that is what God meant by the land promises all the way through.
So when God promised Israel land from here to here and here to here, he actually meant you're going to inherit the cosmos one day. This was just shadow. So we're going to see how they developed that. We're going to look at the dispensational argument for that very shortly. Yes? Right. Yeah, as Israel just get with the program, you're done. and as a hangover of the anti-Semitism in our original U- that we should be fighting against Israel easier because God promised to bless those who bless them and curse those who curse them. I know them a while back and then talk all over again without Christian persecution going on.
Right. They're very happy with conservative evangelical Christians who are not Jewish. In fact, a very important article was written not too long ago in the Jerusalem Post. I do the Jerusalem Post for Jerusalem Times. I can't remember the name, but it's the major Jerusalem newspaper publication saying that Israel needs to recognize their greatest friend has always been conservative evangelical Christians. Because we have launched a lot of the efforts to give them aid and support them in various periods in their history. But if you're a Jew and you become a conservative evangelical Christian, you are a traitor to your nation.
And so yeah, there's a lot of hostility to Jewish converts, though they're quite friendly to those of us Gentiles running around. around. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, Opie Robertson begins his land discussion by saying the concept of a land that belongs to God's people originated in paradise. Now, is there anywhere in Genesis where it said that the Garden of Eden is what God had promised to all of his descendants? No, but they're gonna say that this shadow, this idea of Eden is going to begin a theological understanding of the land that is important to be able to see when the reality comes.
I'm not sure I quite follow the question. Well, you know, they were promised the land. If they obeyed, if they would have things good, and if they didn't obey, all these bad things would happen to them. And all the bad things would happen to them. So what did they do with that? Yeah, the blessings and the cursings you're speaking of, they're going to tie directly to the covenant. In the case of Moses, that's appropriate, because it was the Mosaic covenant that for Israel came with those specific blessings and cursings. It's connection to the land, they will say, does have a place in that God did move his people in and out of the land.
But that land isn't to be understood as what God meant when he promised his people a land. It was just where they currently happen to occupy in their shadowy glimpse of this future reality. I probably came out confusing. No. Okay. Yes. It just strikes me though that by doing shadow versus substance, doesn't that lead to a very early on, to a very slippery slope of allowing your intellectualism then to start tainting your view of God. I mean, is then the six day creation a shadow of what God can do? I mean, where do you stop looking for shadow or seeing shadow when it really is a quite stark? Right, they'll try to keep themselves safe by saying that this idea of shadow substance, it should be relegated primarily just to prophecy. And so they're going to say for example the Genesis account of the creation is narrative not prophecy therefore we should take that literally.
But when we see prophetic promises of the land now we're in the territory of prophecy now we should be thinking shadow substance. Does that make sense? It doesn't accept Eden as the promise of the universe. I'm confused as to how do they define the line that we're now going to go in from narrative to imagery. Right. So they're not going to say that Eden wasn't a literal place. It was a literal place, but it gives us a theological concept of paradise that we should think of as the backdrop. backdrop. So yeah, Eden was literal, created literally, but it also serves as a theological background. Yeah, and they're gonna say that way smarter than I just said it, but that's, well, as you were reading, you can see exactly how they're saying it. Yeah, one question.
Is it a covenantal idea then that Eden or paradise is where we're headed? I'm going to talk about Heaven. Just take the definition of the word Paradise. There's no question that the new heavens and the new earth is a paradise. So there's nothing wrong with saying that we're headed to Paradise. But to see Heaven strictly as the reality of the theological idea of Eden, that would be more covenantal. It is a nice picture. Yeah Say and He told that man And the apostles because they spiritualized all the time and then he used the last supper to say that that was spiritually talking about the kingdom that we're living in now and that we're spiritually eating the bread and drinking wine with Christ now in this spiritual kingdom.
And the dispensationalist answer back to that was, wasn't Christ literally eating and drinking then when he said those words, why wouldn't that be literally fulfilled in the future? And so that was interesting to me just to catch. There's keys of an argument there for what we're talking about right now. Yeah, that's a great example. And we would respond very similarly. Christ was not having some kind of a spiritual celebration of the kingdom here and now. He said, I'm eating and drinking with you, and I'm not going to do this again until I do it in my kingdom. So we would say that in fact he was being very clear that this wasn't the kingdom.
But yeah, that's a great, great example. He was saying that's happening right now. Sure. Yeah, and I, it's refreshing to hear him actually use the term, we spiritualize them. Because they'll usually avoid spiritualize or allegorize because, well that's the darts we usually throw at them. So anyway, as Robertson says, you got to start with this concept of a land originating in paradise. The idea of restoration to paradise provides the proper biblical context for understanding God's promise to give land to Abraham. This promise of the patriarch becomes the basis for all subsequent understandings of the role of the land in the unfolding history of redemption.
So he's going to say, I understand almost everything we're going to see about the land promises is going to be tied to the Abrahamic covenant, to what God promised Abraham. But you have to let Eden be your theological background to understanding Abraham. So he's going to try to pull it out of what God actually said to Abraham and set the whole discussion in a theological background of a restoration to paradise. That's where they're going to start. Then they're going to move from that Eden as a starting point to the Promised Land. Throughout its history, Israel's experience with the land had the effect of placing the promise of it in the category of an Old Covenant shadow.
was the one we read just a little bit ago, that would have to wait for the arrival of New Covenant realities for its fulfillment. The possession of the land under the Old Covenant was not an end in itself, but fit instead among the shadows, types, and prophecies that were characteristic of the Old Covenant in its presentation of redemptive truth. So he's going to say, when God said to Abraham, someday I'm going to give you this land. That didn't mean that, Abraham, what I want you to do some day is occupy this land. It meant that I'm going to give you a land. Me defining a specific land is just a shadow of a greater reality I'm going to give you some day.
So we need to look beyond what God actually promised in the Old Testament and see a New Testament reality. Which leads us then to what they say that New Testament reality is. Once this stage of New Covenant fulfillment has been reached post-Christ, never again will the revelation from God suggest that his people should aspire to the old typological ways of the old covenant? Progression towards consummation, shadow to substance, in the new covenant cannot allow for retrogression to the older shadowy forms. Eden, shadow. Land of Israel, shadow. New Testament promise of a new heavens and new earth, reality. And once we've been given that promise of a new heavens and a new earth, he's saying it's hermeneutically wrong, according to their hermeneutics, to say that God would ever then give to his people a smaller piece of that pie.
Because that would be going backwards from reality to shadow again. And it has to always move from shadow to substance, shadow to substance. So after we read in the New Testament that there will be a new heavens and a new earth, again can the land promise mean that land of Israel because that would be a retrogression back to shadow. I would suggest he read the end of Isaiah where God talked about the new heavens and the new earth already. That really throws a monkey wrench into the how that whole thing's gonna work because now you've got reality before he's finished with shadow. The language is inspired and inspiring speaking of the Old Testament promises of Israel's restoration.
But once more, the reality as experienced under the Old Covenant remain much less impressive. In fact, this extravagant picture of a city without walls with a wall of fire about it, with Gentile nations streaming into its confines, breaks the bonds of all the Old Covenant images. How can images such as these find their fulfillment? Like all Old Covenant shadows, these glorious prospects have been realized in the days of the New Covenant. When people worship neither in Jerusalem nor in Samaria, but wherever in the world the Spirit of God manifests Himself. So in the Old Testament it's all about places and God doing things here and there, but in the New Covenant reality it's all spiritual.
And just like we don't worship in Jerusalem, we worship in Spirit and Truth. We're no longer looking for this promised city, promised land of the Old Testament. we have the spiritual reality of the new heavens and new earth. That doesn't seem better. Exactly. So, I'm just thinking, because I'm not remembering your timeline where it showed, you know, the sensation of rolling, that I couldn't love rolling, how much that coincided with Israel becoming a nation. Again, 1948, right around there. But there was a spurt, there was, after World War II, again, you said there would be a role in it. Yeah, and especially with Israel becoming a nation, everyone was like, oh my goodness, it's all coming true, so.
But yeah. With the major role. Right, there's the post-Civil War where we saw it, we first took off, yeah. Then lastly here, I think this is my last slide on this, the land of the Bible served in a typological role as a model of the consummate realization of the purposes of God for his redeemed people that encompasses the whole of the cosmos. The land of God in the Old Testament equals the cosmos. Because of the inherently limited scope of the land of the Bible, it is not to be regarded as having continuing significance in the realm of redemption other than its function as a teaching models. It's supposed to mean the basis, the scriptural basis for their conclusions is imaginary.
It's covenantal. It's the covenantal framework that reinterprets. So it's very, yeah. And that's where we would go and say, we think you've got some fundamental problems with your framework, chief of which being that you use it to re-understand and reinterpret the Old Testament. Yeah, the things that aren't there. Right, and take away things that are. Well, we can't be able to stand, you know, you have to put on a special glass. Yeah. We know, I know this does sound like me. Right, and what we said is, go ahead. It's hard because I think so literally, to even try to get that kind of fuzzy, oh yeah, I'm not, it's hard for me to even get my life in sync.
Yep. Two years of Aquinas, a couple years of Kierkegaard, and a PhD, and you'll be there. I mean, that's overstating him, but it is a very... What's the G thing doing? Yeah, and they're not going to buy in everything that Aquinas and Kierkegaard said, but it's that level of guys... Well guys, alright so that's the first argument that they will bring is this shadow of substance. This is part of the Old Testament prophecies in Hebrew regarding the coming land of God and I just right after Aritz right here again I stuck in a covenantal parenthesis. Actually I'm talking about the new heavens and new earth but you have to wait until the Greek New Testament.
And why I put that in there is because of this quote we've seen at once. In the nature of things, these writers could only employ images with which they and their hearers were familiar. So they spoke of a return to the geographical land of Israel. But in the context of the realities of the New Covenant, this land must be understood in terms of the newly recreated cosmos about which Paul speaks in Romans. They would like to have talked about the new heavens and new earth, but they couldn't because they could only talk about what their people were familiar with, which raises at least two major problems. Did you want to...
Ezekiel and Isaiah both mentioned new heavens and new earth explicitly. First problem. Second problem, how were the New Testament believers any more able to understand a new heavens and a new earth than the Old Testament believers? It wasn't like the Greeks all of a sudden evolved the ability to think of a new heavens and a new earth. So it's the same problem. So that's going to be the argument they're going to make. The problem of language. But I don't feel it's a legitimate argument. They're not saying that we're experiencing the new heavens and the new earth. No. Spiritually, we're in the kingdom for those that have an Amillennial eschatology, but we will have a new heavens and new earth someday, after the Second Coming.
Yeah. You'll still see that as future. Make sense? But it's substance, my shadow. Yes. All right. Now we're going to look at the land from a dispensational perspective, and as you can see with my little orange highlighting here, we believe it refers to the actual strip of land. What is the Hebrew word, Mark? It's the same word, it's the land. This is the, and this is land. So reading is, every language should be from right to left, for all of us lefties. That way you're not pushing your pen. Yeah. I flunked my first semester of Hebrew but I had the best Hebrew handwriting in the class. Yeah, so what did God say to Abraham? And here's what we want to be looking for.
I think I actually skipped over a slide. There we go. Our key exegetical question. Do we see a progression from local to universal as the Abrahamic covenant is developed? Because when God gave his initial covenant to Abraham, he then re-ratified it a number of times. number of times, and it was restated throughout the Old Testament. We would expect, if we're going shadow to substance, that we would see a progression from this local, specific land promise to a general, broader, cosmic promise. Do we see that progression? We'll begin in Genesis 12. As the Lord said to Abram, go forth from your country and from your relatives and from your father's house to the land, which I will show you.
And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great. And so you shall be a blessing, and I will bless those who will bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed to the land. That's where it starts. So it doesn't start specific, it starts very general. We see in 15, God comes back. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying to your descendants, I have given this land where Abraham was currently sojourning, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. Now he's starting to give some landmarks.
Genesis 17, I will give to you and to your descendants after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan. Now the land has a name. So I have come down to deliver them from the power of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanite and the Hittite and the Amorite and the Parazite and the Hivite and the Jebusite. Now we know what this place looks like, what it's filled with, who lives there.
lives there. Again, Exodus 6, 4, I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land in which they sojourned. We're still talking about Canaan. Now let's fast forward way to the end. Ezekiel 47, 13, all the way through 48, 9, and the key phrase here is, for I swore to give it, the land, to your forefathers, and this land shall fall to you as an inheritance. And here's the key word you're going to see all the way through here. Boundary. All this small print, the entire passage, is God giving the exact border boundaries for every single tribe of Israel and where they will live when He brings them back to the land.
Legal description of the land. So, the question is, did we see a progression from local to universal? We actually saw a promise of a land in Genesis 12, which moves to the land of Canaan in Genesis 17, to very detailed borders in Ezekiel 47. We see increasing specificity in God's Abrahamic covenant. Increasingly more detailed description as he begins to move throughout progressive revelation. So would one come to conclude that we're seeing shadow turn into substance? Or would we be concluding that God is very intentional about this little piece of land? Well actually it was shattered, the substance. It was the land to this land.
In that sense, yeah. I was referring again to some future and soldier. In the future, some say that was his spiritual soldier. Well the initial promise of Genesis 12 was just, you are going to leave here and go to a land. And then it became the land you're walking in, which is called Canaan. And it looks like this and these people live there. And then each tribe is going to live exactly here, here, here, here. I don't know I'd have to remember the hymn it just takes me tomorrow. The references to Caneth and the river were all references to heaven. The metaphors were of crossing the river in Jordan's death, which was heaven.
And the steel on the river was the idea that that was the substance. It is possible. And there's nothing wrong with using the Old Testament as illustration. There's nothing wrong with pulling imagery from the Old Testament. We just want to be very careful that we don't allow our illustrations and our imagery to become what that passage really meant. So one thing to say, in the New Testament we see something that's like what we saw here. It's another thing to say that even though the Old Testament is talking about this, it actually meant something else. Yeah, and so that's our problem. So we would counter what we hear from the covenantalists on this topic by saying, no, we actually see very great detail.
And we could go much more in depth all throughout the minor prophets, because they all begin with God's about to destroy you and they all end with, but He's going to bring you back to this land. And God will do that. Yeah, so that's the land of God. Now we're going to talk about the people of God. This will be the last issue we'll discuss tonight. What did God mean when he talked about his people? Specifically Israel and its relationship to the church. So first we're going to look at the covenantal perspective. As you can see, they're basically going to say Israel equals the church. That it's one reality. How are they going to present this?
And again, I'm taking this from O.P. Robertson's book. They're going to look at a verse that's very, very important in the covenantal theological framework and that is Galatians 6, 16. Can somebody read that for us? This phrase is absolutely critical. And those who will walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them and upon the Israel of violence. The Israel of God. Who is the Israel of God? And there are four main possibilities. First is, it could refer to the Jewish people as a community distinct from the Gentile world. So if the Israel of God could just be all of the ethnic Israelites. The green circle are the Jews, the purple circle is the Gentiles.
Just in case, curious. color preference or anything. It could also refer to elect Jews as distinct from all those who are of Jewish descent. It could be those who are saved that are Jewish. So not any Gentiles, not unbelieving Jews, but just believing Jews. It could also be Jewish believers who hold to Paul's rule as he has just set it down. Because he said those who hold to this rule, peace be to them and to the Israel of God. So maybe it's just referring to believing Jews, so those inside this circle, who believe and hold to the rule Paul just described. That's possible. Or it can refer to any elect individual, whether Jew or Gentile. Those are the four possibilities. Three of these, and then the first three, whichever you draw out of the circle, it's all Jews. The fourth is anybody who is a believer, Jew or Gentile.
So if you want to boil it down, the view into two groups, it's either they're a Jew or it's anybody who's saved, Jew or Gentile. Those are the possibilities. Q. How does it distinguish between two and three? A. Two and three, yeah. One is, is it just believing Jews or is Paul further within the Believing Jew category, limiting it down to Believing Jews who also obey the rule that he mentions in Galatians 16. He says, to those who live by this rule, peace to them and the Israel of God. So I'm just talking about this group that are following my rule. So that's the other possibility. Yeah. So how do they begin to set up their understanding of Galatians 6 16. Well they're going to start by saying we've got to get into the context. And to get into the context you've got to get into the basic theological framework that's behind what Paul's saying. First of all, when you look back, remember circumcision is no longer a mark of God's people. Galatians 5, they'll go back to there. Circumcision and uncircumcision have given way to a new creation."
You look at the verse 5.15. This principle produces a rule or a canon we are to live by. The idea that the circuit, who's mentioned, I think it should be Galatians 6.15, not 5.15. That's a typo. He would have caught me if I didn't mention that. But I found it first, there we go. This principle produces a rule or a canon that we are to live by, the idea that circumcision and uncircumcision have given way to a new creation. And quoting Robertson, that rule is that no distinction may be made between circumcised and uncircumcised people when identifying the people of God. From Galatians 6 he's going to say that the rule Paul is giving is that you are not allowed to make a distinction between a Jew and a Gentile when you're identifying the people of God.
If that is a background, you also need to understand the identity of Israel of God by looking at your Old Testament. We've got to go back and check our shadows to help us out. Abraham was originally simply another Gentile, right? He just lives in a pagan country and God called him out. He wasn't already a Jew. So just another Gentile. Yet he was the person specifically called by God to be an instrument in the fulfillment of his redemptive purposes. From the beginning, any Gentile could become a full-fledged Jew. So being a Jew didn't necessarily mean you had to be an ethnic Jew, they'll say. Any Gentile could decide to be a Jew at any time.
Yet Abraham's descendants began their life with an identity among God's people. So if you were born to a descendant of Abraham, you were automatically a Jew. But you could become a Jew if you were a Gentile. By the exile, this is huge. By the exile, Abraham's descendants became not my people. Lo Ami in the Hebrew. God promised in Hosea 2.23 to his people, because of your sin, I will make you lo ami, not my people, and I will subject you to judgment. Yet the old covenant made with Israel did not end with the exile. So God has been able to cut off His people from being His people. But His covenant is still running.
So where is His covenant going to land? The election of God could be redirected. That's a phrase that He used, and that phrase scares me. I sure hope my election never gets redirected. The election of God could be redirected, yet the Lord promises that He will not cut off His people altogether. So if the Israelites could become not My people, and God's covenant could be redirected, who is His people? Jesus indicated the kingdom would be taken from Israel, yet God has not cast off His people altogether. The gifts and calling of God are without repentance, yet Christ has made Jew and Gentile into one. Therefore, the Israel of God today includes believing Jews, yet it does not exclude believing Gentiles.
So, the Israel of God is anybody who is a true believer, regardless of where they came from. because God's people, Israelites, that was not necessarily connected to the ethnic descendants of Abraham. God could cut that off and redirect that special title to a new group. And he's redirected that title to the group of those who are truly saved, no matter what ethnicity their background is. Would he find support then from the relations three verses? Which one do you referring to? 3-7 therefore be sure that it is those who are of faith who are the sons of Abraham and 3-29 that he belong with Christ and you are Abraham's descendants.
Yeah. Errors of the promise. Right, and they're also going to go to Romans. 9-6. Yeah, that's another important verse and we'll look at that one in a minute. So boiling it all down and this is what they're going to say. They're going to say that the believing true Israel plus the unbelieving Israel equal visible Israel in the Old Testament. So the nation of Israel was made up of believing Israel and unbelieving Israel. Believing Israel is the exact same thing as believing true Christians. That is the same category. Unbelieving Israel was a type of unbelieving Christians. They represented what unbelieving Christians are today.
So the visible church is the reality of visible Israel. Israel was a type of the visible church. So Israel taught us that you can have a group of believers and unbelievers that are all visibly called the people of God. Today, the people of God is the church, made up of the true believers and people that claim to be but aren't. And so true Israel and true Christians is the exact same category of people and always has been. Shadow substance. Does that make sense? No, because to me then God broke his covenant. And that's... yeah, that's the same. That's where it kind of falls apart from there, because God broke his covenant in Israel.
Right. We just misunderstood... or they misunderstood who God was talking to when he said Israel. Who's they misunderstood? The Israelites. The ethnic Israelites, when they thought God was talking about their nation. So, I'm not recording of that fails to point out that they got it wrong when we needed men centuries later. Aren't we lucky? We just realized God has not. Basically the New Covenant realities allow us to go back and reinterpret the Old Testament shadows for what they really were, which they would not have been able to know without our New Testament perspective. And that you would have thought that Isaiah and the Serbs were part of the true Israel, so why wouldn't they have understood that?
Because they were living in the age of shadow and type. Yeah. So, I want to mention the election of God could be redirected. It's a darnation of them that we talked about when we were living in Israel. I mean, they're back to me, it seems to be linked to this. And if it could be redirected once, why can't it be redirected again? That is a huge question and one that I think is very legitimate. If the people in the Old Testament could be convinced that God was talking to them and giving them a promise, upon what confidence do we in New Testament realities claim to know what God has promised us? Which was the whole point of the Scriptures thing.
I think it's a very serious charge. And they're going to say because we're in New Covenant realities, we now know what the realities are, and therefore we know what the full picture is. But my answer is, what makes us be so sure this is the end of the full revelation? Because Israel is sure. Exactly. And so I think that's a major, major problem. Well, if they're not dumb, they were just unfortunate to live under the cloud of shadow. And we see clearly. I can see clearly now. So the covenant view of the church then looks like this. When we look at the Old Testament, true Israel comprised much of national Israel, plus a few members of the Gentile nations, which had become Jewish by choice.
But true Israel was even then, part Jewish, part Gentile. Moving on to the day of Pentecost, where you saw so many people added, to the church, you now have true Israel equals the church, and it's becoming a higher percentage of Gentiles. Still mostly Israelite, but you're seeing a lot more Gentiles in true Israel, which is the church. At the present time, the church, which is true Israel, is predominantly Gentile with just a few members of National Israel. So they're going to say the essence of Israel and the Church has always been the same, just the demographic makeup, the percentages have shifted over time. Would they have said that back to the Reformation?
Would they have said it, the last one, National Israel and the Church, the True Church, overlapped even a little bit? Was there a time in their thinking where national Israel was not in the true church? It is a good question. I don't, well, there were a few who probably out of their complete anti-Semitism would have said there's no way a Jew could be part of God's plan anymore.
But I think for the most part they would have begrudgingly admitted that there could be such a thing as a believing Jew. Well, he's back in the Bible, you know, so you don't have to worry about him. Same thing. So, yeah. So now, what does the dispensational view say about the Israel of God? That it's not the church in a nutshell. And how do we go about showing that. Well, we see at least six different reasons why we don't think that Israel and the church should be identified together. First of all, the church was born at Pentecost and these arguments almost exclusively come from Fouc-Tinbaum's big huge fat book, Israelology, which is very intimidating read, but it's very good. So if you're interested in all any of this stuff, I I recommend you go bug Dave and let you borrow it.
I've just recently returned it to him so you can see the thumbnail. We will get it in outline form in our section of this report. Okay. That's the whole idea of that section. So you're not going to make a march through all of our dozen pages of your report. I don't understand. Let's take all the text out. Right. So the church was born at Pentecost. And we're going to see that, some evidences of that, or entrance into the church requires Spirit baptism from 1 Corinthians. Spirit baptism had not occurred before the book of Acts. Because in Acts 1.5, the coming of the Spirit who will baptize you is future. So this had not happened until the book of Acts. Spirit baptism first occurred at Pentecost. Peter later in Acts 11 is recalling the Pentecost events and he says that's when the Spirit came upon us.
So it wasn't until this baptism of the Spirit that you even had the birth of this thing called the church. So if that hadn't happened before, then all the people in the Old Testament couldn't have been members of this thing called the church. Because it didn't exist. Secondly, certain events in the life of Christ were prerequisites to the church. He had to die to become the head of the church. He had to rise to become the head of the church. He had to ascend to send the Holy Spirit to begin the church. So all these things in Christ's life had to happen before you could have the birth of the church. So before Christ there is no such thing as a church.
Therefore Israel could not have been it. You also have the mystery character of the church. The mystery mystery being not something you can't figure out but it's a truth revealed which was previously unknown. The Bible is described as such a mystery. The body concept of Jews and Gentiles together was a mystery. The doctrine of Christ's indwelling believers was a mystery. The church as the bride of Christ was a mystery and the rapture was a mystery. All these things which relate to the church were unknown before Christ came. And if all those realities were a mystery, they weren't living in them up until this point.
The Church as the one new man in Ephesians 2.15. If the Church is one new man, then why is the Church thousands of years old and being called one new man if Israel has been the Church all along? We're going to talk about this in the next slide. No exegetical evidence of Israel used in reference to the Church in the New Testament. The continued distinction between Israel, Gentiles and the Church, 1 Corinthians 10.32, mentions all three of these groups. So why doesn't it just say Israel? But don't the covenant tell us, say that Israel became the Church? No, the true Israel has always been the Church. And it has always included some Gentiles.
Yeah, it's very, that's an important distinction. It did not become, it has always been that way. Yeah, so it picked up the title of church. Well, it's a better thing. People of faith have always been true, isn't it? Right. But for example, the debate I mentioned last week with Sproul, he says, talking about infant baptism, When we look at Old Testament believing Israel, and he says, and I will even be so bold as to say, the Old Testament church, because they're going to see it as having always been the church. We just didn't call it that until the New Testament. Yeah. And so if that is the case, why do they keep distinguishing this idea of Israel, Gentile, and church?
Why are those three groups used at the same time if, in fact, they're synonyms? It wouldn't make any sense. Here to me is one of the most punishing slides in my presentation. What you see on the left there is every single place in the New Testament that uses the word Israel. Every green reference is a reference that everybody, dispensational or covenantal alike, will agree refers to national Israel. The ethnic Israel. That includes 70 of the 73 usages. There are two usages, Romans 9.6 and Romans 11.26, that are believed by some covenantal theologians to refer to spiritual Israel, i.e. the church, but also have quite a number of covenantal theologians who will admit that even those refer to ethnic national Israel.
Which leaves us with exactly one verse out of the 73 verses in the New Testament that all covenantals agree refers to the church. And that's our passage, Galatians 6, 16. That's why I say this passage is so critical. It's their only verse in the New Testament that they will all agree equates Israel with the church. You pull that pin and they're on very shaky territory. So, what did dispensationalists say when they look at Galatians 6 16? Well, they first start talking about context. What was the theme of Galatians? It was to reject the message of the Judaizers, these Jewish people who were coming and saying, wait, wait, wait, you Gentiles have to convert to Judaism before you can be saved, and you need to start practicing the Mosaic law as you do that.
Reject the message of the Judaizers who called for conversion to Jewish law before salvation, and embrace salvation by faith alone. That's the concept that draws from Paul's lips, you foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you? You've begun by the Spirit, or you're going to now be perfected in the flesh. That's foolish. We also see, right from the beginning in Galatians 2, 7 through 9, a distinction made between Jewish and Gentile believers. Paul addresses both groups. No distinction though between Jewish and Gentile Salvation. Two distinct groups of believers both saved the same way. Their salvation in Christ is the same. Then we would see, Galatians 16, he is pronouncing a blessing for the Gentile and the Jewish believers who reject the message of the Judaizers. If you will live by this rule, to walk by the Spirit, not by the law, then blessings upon them, which in context are the Gentile believers, and on the Israel of God, the Jewish believers, these two groups that we've already discussed.
That's how dispensationalists would see the passage contextually. Grammatically, there's some big words in here, but hang on. There are two options for understanding a very important word. That's the word and in Galatians 16. Grace and peace to them and the Israel of God. There are two possible ways to interpret that word and, which is chi in the Greek. The first is conjunctive and the second is appositional. What? Conjunctive means A plus B. This group and plus this group. I want to address two different groups. The second usage, appositional, means A equals B. I'm renaming it. I'm talking about boy, the tall boy.
Well, if I was going to say, I want to talk to this man, my dad. I wouldn't say I want to talk to this man and my dad. Right? That would be confusing in English. It's also confusing in Greek. And it's extremely rare. When you pick up pretty much any Greek grammar textbook, and you will see that you are only to give chi an oppositional sense if context demands it. In other words, if it's absolutely ridiculous heresy to say it in any other way. That's when you start considering using this usage. It's by far the most common usage in this A plus B sense, which is how we use it in our language. The most common way to state A equals B, this idea, is to remove chi.
Like I did in my first sentence, I want to speak to this man, comma, my dad. No words in between. That tells you I'm talking about the same person. That's exactly what Paul does in Romans 1.1. 7, 1 Corinthians 1.1. 3, 2 Corinthians 1.2, Galatians 1.3, Ephesians 1.2, Philippians 1.2, Colossians 1.2, 1st Esalelian 1.1, and you can go on and on and on. That's how Paul uses the appositional sense, over and over and over and over. So why would he here throw it in, in a confusing, grammatically confusing way? So he would say grammatically it's very weak to say that that chi is functioning as an apposition. Then, we're going to talk about the exegetical arguments, the use of Israel in the Bible.
No instance in biblical literature of the term Israel being used in the sense of the church. We showed that chart. No instance of the phrase the Gentiles being used to mean non-Christians, only non-Jewish peoples. If Israel is going to become synonymous with church, then why doesn't Gentile ever be used to mean non-church? Now always just means non-national Israel. Israel and church are used side by side throughout the book of Acts as contemporary but distinct groups. All throughout Acts you read about Israel, this and this and this, church, this and this and this. They are two different contemporary groups but distinct.
Now your exegetical argument. Then we have a theological argument, the use of Israel in church history. no mention of the term Israel to describe the Church before A.D. 160. And even then, at that period of time, Israel of God was not used to describe the Church. So for more than a century after Paul died, there is no evidence of the Church being identified as Israel in any writing. And if you guys have done a lot of old Church history reading, you'll know that they love to spiritualize everything. But even our spiritualizing early church fathers didn't call the church Israel for over a hundred years. It wasn't in their vocabulary that we have with us today.
So we'll get to this slide here at the end, but I want to just wrap this up. So when we look at this passage, we're going to say the context indicates two groups. The grammar seems to demand two groups. Our exegesis seems to demand two groups. Our theology seems to demand two groups. about this verse points to two groups unless you have a theological framework beforehand that demands you interpret it differently. And that's where we're going to... I would be... I would go so far as to say they're in danger of using their framework now to reinterpret the New Testament as well. And that's getting on very shaky ground, especially with this verse, because they need this verse to build their case.
And it would seem the plain reading of the text would speak of two different groups that can live together in perfect harmony. So where do we want to lead this whole discussion? Well, like I mentioned virtually every time we've gotten together, my goal is not to start a fight. I would love to see the covenantal movement in America and the dispensation movement in America, sit down, drink tall glasses of humility, and start talking through these issues. Because I think there are things that we can learn from each other. I think that we can help the covenantalist movement in America to have a more consistent hermeneutic.
I think that is the biggest advantage to dispensationalism. And I think that we can, through that consistent hermeneutic, help them to further their process of refinement, to say you guys need to go back to your Bibles and work on your framework. Get your hermeneutics in line, start refining, and I think we'll be able to see us both moving in the right direction and hopefully meet each other at the truth someday. That would be the goal. What I think we can really gain from the covenantal view is deep thinking. We want to be careful about infatuation with worldly philosophy, but dispensationalists are often accused of intellectual laziness.
And in some cases it's true. Some of the church movements that are strongly dispensational are the charismatic movements, and other movements which very strongly downplay the mind and upplay the experience. I can read the Bible for myself, I can understand what it means, I don't need anybody else to tell me, to think deeply about this, it's between me and God. So I think dispensationists can foster intellectual laziness. And we can be challenged by our covenant brothers and sisters to think deeply about God. Their understanding of community, we've talked about this already a couple of times. I think our church, our dispensational church, would strongly benefit from a greater sense of community.
That we are a family. We are all participants in the new covenant. We are all adopted children of God. We all are brothers and sisters, and what that should look like in discipleship and in caring for one another and in serving one another, I think that could have a profound impact on us. I think sometimes dispensationalists come across as quite uncaring, and that has given our view a bad name. I think also, covenantalism can give us a sense for the importance of the Old Testament. We may think they totally use it wrong, but at least they know what it says. And sometimes I think we live in a... You know, we somehow have the same idea.
The Old Testament is one big shadow. I don't want to go down in that fuzzy land of Old Testament things. I want to live in my New Testament realities. That's the one talking to us, the Church. And so if that Old Testament is God's dispensation to Israel, why should I bother spending too much time studying that? I need to study what applies to me today. Is that much so many? One reason, I think the biggest reason though, is that like me, they flunk Hebrew. Honestly, I think one of the reasons why Old Testament is neglected in our circles is because guys realize the value of original language work, but they only did well in their Greek.
And it's a lot of work to get your Hebrew into shape, as shown. He was just telling me about that today over lunch. So I think we just need to roll up our sleeves, start right and right to left, and go for it. Because there is one place. Well, part of the Old Testament avoidance has to do somewhat with the abuses of it, even amongst charismatic and dispensational circles where it's used as a springboard sermon. Sure. It's a starting place to make up my own theology. Right. And if we will sit down and take it seriously and do the work, I will find there such a treasure trove. When we think about all the things that Jesus and Paul and the early church leaders taught without the New Testament, it should embarrass us.
They were able to present Christ fully without needing a single page of the New Testament, purely from the Old Testament. And so I think treasures like Isaiah and like Ecclesiastes and like Proverbs need to be recaptured by the church today. And so that would be, I think, a great thing for us to pick up from the covenantal side is an interest in the Old Testament. We'll just study it literally. So I think with that kind of a reproach, again, in humility with the desire to know God better, we will be able to see growth in the Church as a whole, within the Body of Christ as a whole, and it will help to keep us from forming these two different warring groups that keep lobbing insults and cheap sarcastic comments at each other.
And I'll edit all mine out from this tape so I don't disqualify myself. But let me stop doing that and we'll start being able to really see some growth, I think. As we saw in our chart, this is an ongoing discussion. Who is Jesus Christ? That's been settled. Covenantism or dispensationalism, that is still the debate of the church in this age. And it is very cool to think that, potentially in this generation, that debate could come to something of a conclusion, if men will sincerely and humbly pursue it. So any questions before I close this? I know we're over time. I apologize for that. appreciate your patience. But I want to make sure if you have any questions, I don't send you off confused. Yes?
Again, the idea of the covenantal framework and the dis-p santational framework. And I'm especially thinking of how the covenantal frame doesn't change and dis- pantational does. Right. If you're turning your notes to the end of last week, you'll see I had those two pyramids.
I think that's probably the most succinct way to look at it. The covenantal understanding of Scripture is that you do your exegesis, you study what the Bible says, then you run it through your theological framework. We've already determined and settled, in their view, that the entire Bible is dominated by the theme of these overarching covenants. And we need to use those to help us interpret the Bible. So we studied it, we saw what the original authors thought they were saying, then we're We're going to go look and see what is the covenantal reality that they were really talking about. And that's why there's less development because their framework is going to keep reinterpreting difficult verses that they come to.
In the dispensational side, we put what the meaning of Scripture is directly on top of our exegesis. And that leads to our theological framework. And so because the meaning comes right on top of our exegesis, every single time we come to a verse that doesn't fit our framework, we're not going to say, well, that must not be what the verse means. We're going to say, our framework must be wrong. And we're going to break out our exegetical wrenches and start tweaking on our framework. And so you're going to see a lot of development because of that. Because we start understanding what we're reading better. Right. Exactly. Good question, though. Thank you. Anybody else? Going once, Growing twice, there are only lights.
All right, in that case, let me just go to a quick word of prayer, and then if you do have any questions I didn't get to, please come up and see me afterwards, and have a blessed night. Father, I pray that you would now send us on our way with hearts and minds filled with you, and I pray that you would cause us to have more wonder at your handiwork, at your plans. You have said that you have put eternity in men's hearts, yet not so that they will see the end from the beginning, as you know. And may we always bump against the end of our understanding and leap from there, trustingly, into your wisdom, into your hands.
We thank you that we know when we do that we will receive only what is good, that you are a good God. I pray, Lord, for our church here locally. I pray for the church in America. May you cause us to grow to be more like your son through our thinking, through our discussions, that they would not be vain arguments and futile speculations, but that they would be profitable discussions that would lead to truth, and that that truth would lead to godly living, and that godly living would lead to a testimony that would draw men to your son. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.
