The Issue of Dispensational Thinking

My heart has been stirred lately on the issue of dispensationalism.  Proponents of dispensationalism would argue that it has been taught in the Scriptures since the New Testament.  For the sake of clarification, what we need to examine is more what we might call the effects of the dispensational theology that was initially formalized in the 19th century.  Now many might wonder why it is significant to examine this issue.  Others might point out that more recent dispensationalists seem to have moderated their position and perhaps corrected the errors of earlier dispensationalists.  While that may be true, that is not the fundamental issue.

One of the crisises that may well be brewing in the church in America is that the average churchgoer has little appetite for theology.  Now, lest you think I am promoting intellectually driven seminaries (some would call them “cemeteries”) or large, dusty books written by well educated men debating nuances of doctrine let me explain myself.  Theology is simply the study of God.  It is what we believe about God.  Now, the core essence of God is perceived by the Spirit and transcends human understanding.  It is important that we understand that, or we will be given to boxing God into human models of understanding.  With that being said, God gave us a capacity to think and to know.  This capacity is modeled after His capacity because we are made in His image and yet it is far beneath His capacity.

While this capacity must necessarily operate below the revelation of God’s Spirit to man’s spirit, it is still a vital part of our makeup.  Because of this it is vitally important how and what we think about God.  When we do not think rightly about God, it causes great loss to the believer and ultimately the church.  We must become very jealous for the issue of theology.  We must always be careful not to reduce God to diagrams and systems of theology that man can comprehend, and we must remain ever vigilant of a concept of God that is man derived and man comprehended.  With those proper guardians watching over our heart, we must then make every effort to allow God to reveal Himself to us that we might think great thoughts about Him.  We must also be ruthless in discerning and rejecting thoughts and ideas about God that are untrue.  These ideas can taint the lens through which we view the world causing us to miss God’s revelation and fall into error.

Now with that being said, let me set a few caveats in place.  Dispensationalism, like any other movement or doctrine, does exist across a wide spectrum.  An examination of every particular flavor of it is certainly beyond the scope of a blog post, so let it suffice to say that we will examine specific effects of the results of dispensationalism thinking rather than examining every individual dispensational tenet.  I am not attempting to paint all dispensationalists as heretics with a single broad stroke, but rather want to examine specific ideas that have been associated with or have come as a result of various streams of dispensational thought.

I also acknowledge up front that I am not an expert in dispensational theology, so theologians of that persuasion may have addressed some of the issues that I raise; however my primary concern over specific tenets of doctrine is the effect of this way of thinking on believers at large.  So, again, I am dealing with the effects of ideas and ways of thinking over specific beliefs and have no desire to paint a broad stroke of “heresy” on anyone.  In that spirit, just because we see some dangerous ideas, let us not label everyone from here on that uses the word “dispensation” as a heretic.  Let’s continue in Christian love and charity contending for proper ideas and thoughts about God, but not allowing ourselves to execute improper judgment on individuals simply because of the use of a single word or phrase.  With these warnings and caveats out of the way, let’s now examine the effects of dispensational thinking.

One great tragedy is that most believers, especially in America, really do not know what they believe in terms of theology.  Compounding that issue is that fact that Americans tend to take a little from here and a little from there and often have more of a buffet style of spirituality than saints did in time past.   This is to be expected as America is the “melting pot” of the world. This is both good and bad.  It is good because often two competing ideas in Christianity (assuming both are under the umbrella of orthodox Christianity) are merely two sides of the same coin even if they seem to conflict on some level.  This is what we would call the paradoxes of the faith.  Sadly, groups in time past, and in time present, have split up and persecuted each other over these issues.  So, it is good to see the honorable parts of theology from various groups and assimilate that into our understanding.  However, it is also bad in the sense that it can create believers that really do not know the origins or the implications of what they believe, randomly combining various ideas simply because they heard them from a prominent minister or read them in a book. Combining various streams of theology without regard for the implications of such a combination can be damaging.

This is rampant throughout modern Christianity.  While we certainly do not want to become too narrow minded or label and categorize believers, it is important to understand the origin of specific ideas, doctrines, and systems of theology.  The reason is that often a deception starts with a mixture of truth and error.  This mixture maybe mostly truth with just a little bit of error or visa versa.  However, if it goes “mainstream” it ends up being adopted by the “non theologians” in the church with little thought or hesitation.  Generations of believers then are taught certain doctrines as facts and come to adopt them as orthodox Christianity when in fact they may ultimately be spurious, contain spurious ideas, or lead to spurious effects.  Not to belabor the point, let’s continue on with understanding dispensationalism that we might see what effect it has upon our view of God and the Scriptures.

The Issue of Dispensationalism

In the case of dispensationalism, it has been widely spread because a few authors adopted it in their study Bibles.  Very popular study Bibles such as Darby and Scofield taught dispensationalism and so many in the church adopted it because it was the framework they were given in their study of the Scriptures.   In this way, the beliefs of a few men have massively influenced the church (To be fair, I am quite sure those men also contributed valuable things in their various study aids as well).

As its core, dispensationalism splits time into various dispensations.  During these times God dealt with man in different ways (typically with man failing to respond to God properly during each dispensation).  You may have seen various Bible teachers categorize these things.  While at first glance this may seem quite logical, the problem is that we then begin to logically split up the Scriptures and ultimately God Himself.  We begin thinking, “God acts and responds this way in this time and this way in another time.”  The problem is that this is a half truth that has led to all sorts of ills and has had a real negative impact on the way we perceive and think about God.

When we begin to see God a certain way in a certain time and another way in another time, it adds a certain incongruity to the Scriptures and the story of redemption.  We then begin to look at God nature as expressing itself differently in different seasons of time while God affirms, “I change not.”  What this leads us to is a single minded focus on the dispensation we believe ourselves to be living in and an inability to comprehend a more complete revelation of God.  A complete revelation of God from the Scriptures requires us to begin at Genesis 1:1 and finish at Revelation 22:21.  However, when we are thinking dispensationally, we look more to what we believe to be our present dispensation for our revelation of God.  We begin to think, “God acts this way now” and then “God used to be that way then.”  This leads to a very distorted view of God that exaggerates certain attributes while minimizing or totally neglecting other attributes.  Let’s look at several areas where this has had a deep impact.

The Scriptures

This is the fundamental issue of dispensationalism and I believe we are unaware how deeply this has crept into our Christianity.  This is revealed in the great chasm in most believers’ minds between the New and Old Testaments.  Whether we acknowledge it or not, we tend to see them as two totally different books that are at odds with each other in many points.  Many believers almost totally neglect the study of the Old Testament, or at best see the Old Testament only as something figurative and almost allegorical that is no longer relevant to us outside of it’s figurative and allegorical qualities.  What is especially ironic is that in the midst of this, somehow we are missing the fact that the first century church used the Old Testament exclusively for their text for practice and preaching while turning the world upside down.

Now to be clear, I am not saying that the things of the Old Testament have no symbolic value.  I am not saying that many things were not prophetic, looking forward to their fulfillment in Christ.  What I am saying is that we must see the Scriptures as a single cohesive unit.  Yes, there are things in Scripture that are figurative.  Yes, there are things in Scripture that have been fulfilled.  However, the Old Testament has massive depth that we do not plumb.  The critical issue here is that there is an incredible revelation of God contained within it that we have tended to ignore thinking the New Testament wiped out and superseded the revelation of Himself that God gave us in the Old Testament.

Until we see the Scriptures as one cohesive book, with both the Old and the New Testament still speaking authoritatively to our hearts, we will not receive the full revelation that God desires to give of Himself through the Scriptures.  We must see that the primary issue of both the Old and New Testament is the revelation of God and of His Son and we will not have the depth of that revelation without knowing the full text.

The Revelation of the Nature of God

The pre-eminent burden on Paul’s heart, and what should be the apostolic burden of our day, is the revelation of the mystery of Jesus.  There are mysteries in God and in His purposes and plans and these mysteries reach their zenith in the person of Jesus.  Again, this is where our dispensational thinking can cause many to go astray.

Many individuals, both believers and not believers, almost see the Father and the Son as two different deities.  They may acknowledge the trinity so as to have orthodox theology, or recite the creeds properly, but they have a fundamental tension between the Father and the Son and that tension is a cancer that prohibits the proper revelation of God.  The vast majority of people see the Son one way and the Father in another way.  They find Jesus as kind and forgiving in a way that relates more to Gandhi than it does to the Son of God, while at the same time seeing the Father as harsh and demanding in such as way that he seems more of a tyrant than the God revealed in the Scriptures.  This is not to say God has not revealed unique aspects of who He is as the Father or the Son, but rather to say that the revelation of the Father and the Son is one of total harmony.

While forgetting that Jesus was very clear that He was revealing the Father, and likewise that Father was revealing Himself in a deeper way in the person of Jesus, this stubborn view that sees the Father and Jesus through two different lenses persists.  Again, this tension is exacerbated, I might even argue encouraged, by the dispensational way of thinking.  Since we create separate redemption strategies and assign them to two totally different time periods, we necessarily position the Father and the Son distinctly into those two differing time periods and ascribe to them the attributes that we believe to be most fitting to those time periods.

If we would see the entire redemptive history as a single, increasing revelation punctuated by significant events such as the giving of the Mosaic Law, the incarnation, the redemption, and the resurrection we would have a more complete revelation of God.  For example, when we consider a complete picture of Jesus in the New Testament and join to it the complete prophetic description of Him in the Old Testament, including both the fulfilled and the unfulfilled prophecies, we find that Jesus, while demonstrating the love of the Father and the mercies of God, is also going to administer terrible judgment on the earth.  We find that He is terrible and majestic as well as merciful and loving ultimately demonstrating not only God love, but also administering His ultimate wrath on the earth.

Likewise, when we consider the Father fully, we will see that the love Jesus expressed is the love of the Father and, far from being a new revelation that is at odds with the previous era of wrath, Jesus expresses the love that was always in the heart of the Father. In fact, if you carefully read the Old Testament, even in the most intense prophetic passages, you will find that God is rarely able to announce His judgment very long before He begins giving promises of ultimate redemption and mercy.  The kindness of God in the face of His people’s apostasy is so amazingly present in the Old Testament that it is a scandal that we miss it.  Our view of the Old Testament is so tainted, and not merely by dispensational thinking, that we are losing much of the revelation of God that it is intended to reveal.

The Issue of Israel

While I acknowledge that I have heard more modern “progressive dispensationalists” have attempted to remedy this fatal error, the fact is that dispensationalists have lost promoted a distorted view of Israel and an improper understanding of Israel can have profound implications for the church.  This distorted view basically falls into one of two errors.  The first is to create a dualism where the church exists separate from Israel.  In this view the church is God’s spiritual plan and Israel is God’s earthly plan.  The glaring error here is that Jesus Christ was God’s ultimate statement of God’s desire to unify both the spiritual and earthly realities into one.  However, dispensationalists have promoted the idea that Israel and the church continue with two distinct purposes and places in the plan of redemption.   As this viewpoint of Israel was foundational to dispensational theology, you can easily see how this sort of dualism has crept into the church in the other ways we have mentioned with regard to the Scriptures and the very nature of God.  Hopefully, we are beginning to see that this kind of dualism is incredibly damaging to the revelation of God.

The second error would be replacement theology.  Now, the astute reader would point out that replacement theology precedes dispensationalism and that the two are typically pitted against each other as differing systems of theology.  While that is all true, I believe the promotion of dispensational thinking to have a distinct role in the promotion of replacement theology.  While the original dispensationalism promoted the dualism of the church and Israel that we already noted, the issue is not just “orthodox dispensationalism” but the effects of dispensational thinking upon the people.

Thus, while replacement theology as a system would normally be considered to be at odds with dispensationalism, when the believer in the pew begins looking a the world in a dispensational way, he then becomes very open to the error of replacement theology because once the believer begins to see redemptive history in distinct dispensations then it becomes easy to adopt the idea that Israel belongs only to a particular dispensation and the church to another.  Thus, though dispensationalism does not promote the idea of replacement theology, it opens the door, or at least reinforces one already opened, to the two primary errors with regard to the issue of Israel.

The Issue of the Prophet

As the issue of the prophet and prophetic ministry is dear to my heart, I must give this last example of the effect of dispensational thinking.  One of the great conflicts in the church now, unnoticed by most, is the issue of the “New Testament prophet” and the “Old Testament prophet.”  First, let me give a few caveats.  There is the issue of the office of the prophet compared with the gift of the prophet.  These are two different things.  There is also the increase of prophetic ministry and the prophetic gift made possible by the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  Paul affirms this in Corinthians (I Corinthians 14:1), though we should be careful to note that this is nothing new as Moses declared his desire that all of Israel would prophesy (Numbers 11:29).  So we do have new expressions of prophesy and prophetic ministry in the church.

These things being acknowledged, we tend to focus on what we consider a “New Testament” expression of the prophet and in that process assign the “Old Testament” prophet to another time and another dispensation.  I believe one of the critical needs of the church in this hour that may very well be hindering the full expression of the church is the lack of prophets after the manner of the “Old Testament” prophets.  Now, this is not merely an issue of their prophecy or the nature of their prophetic words, but rather it has everything to do with the core nature of the man that God would call “prophet.”

Thousands of pages could be written on the essence of what makes a prophet and the need of the prophet so I will refrain from doing that here.  However, we desperately need men that look more like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Daniel, and Amos than they do our current understanding of the prophet.  Our current expression of the prophet and prophetic ministry certainly has some blessing, and I do not mean to criticize or tear down anyone with these comments, but we desperately need again men like the prophets recorded in the Old Testament.

The issue is not to destroy the valid prophetic ministry that may presently exist, but rather than we need the addition of this manner of prophet.  Without these men, the church is missing a foundational element (Ephesians 2:20) and will not be the complete expression of God.  We must see the prophet as a foundational gift and office that transcends both the Old and New Testaments and again see men of the caliber and message of those men that exist from Genesis through to Revelation.  We need the full revelation of the prophetic, not merely part of it.

Conclusion

I intentionally did not deal with dispensationalism point by point as a system of theology.  What I want to address specifically is the effects dispensational thinking has upon our theology, whether or not that effect was an intentional distinctive of dispensationalism.  Hopefully these few examples illustrated this point.  The point is not to attack or discredit any person that uses the word “dispensation” but rather for us to remove the harmful effects of this way of thinking so that our hearts might be enlightened to see God as He is and not as we might have been taught that He is.  Again, it is critical how we think about God and so our theology is vital.  This does not mean that our miniscule minds can comprehend the fullness of God, nor does it mean that we have to understand things in our minds before we can respond to God in the Spirit.  It merely means that what we do think about God is critical and affects us tremendously.

This post was primarily written to make a point of the cohesive nature of the story of redemption.  It is critical that we begin to see God’s story of redemption as one cohesive story where each part of the story is revealing a critical facet of God as He in fact is, and not merely as He “was” at some point of time in history.  As the mystery of redemption has been unveiled, we do see that God dealt with us first after the law and now deals with us in Christ.  I have no intention of muddying those waters or taking away from the glory, majesty, and mystery that is Christ.  That being said, we must see the story of redemption as one fluid unveiling which reveals God at each point.

If you believe in dispensationalism, you could perhaps argue that I have not really invalidated the system of theology and that that many parts of it are valid.  To that argument, I would respond that you very well may be correct as my intention in this work is not necessarily to tear down the tenets of dispensationalism, but to deal with the negative effects of dispensational thinking upon believers.  Perhaps more academic believers can ascribe to systems like dispensationalism and not fall into the errors I have noted here, but I am looking at the average believer and see how the effect of teaching such concepts can bring confusion into their hearts.

As I noted in the example above, this concern has been clearly validated by present beliefs among many in the church, whether or not the origins of these beliefs come from a study of dispensational theology or from another root.   These believers in the pew may or may not know the tenets of dispensationalism and may or may not even know what the word means, but their thought process has been tainted by concept arising from viewing God in a dispensational way.  This is the thing I take aim because of the criticality of how we think about God.  We must think about Him rightly that our hearts, minds, and spirits are open the full revelation of God as He in fact is.  This is the thing I ultimately contend for.