Why I Am No Longer a Dispensationalist

© 2002 Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw
(PLEASE WATCH OUR WEB SITE FOR THE REPRINT OF THE BOOK and for audio files on “The Middle East, the Jews, the Land, and Biblical Prophecy” by Dr Crenshaw: http://www.footstoolpublications.com/ )

(This is a personal letter to one of my past dispensational Bible college professors who wanted to know why I had left dispensationalism. I have rewritten some of the letter for broader distribution. In particular, some of the harder hitting points, such as the section on repentance, were not in the original letter, though they were in the book (Dispensationalism Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow) I wrote that I sent him.)

Dear Dr. . . . ,

You asked me about my ecclesiology (doctrine of the Church); you have asked me about it previously. I have deliberately not pursued it with you as I do not want that to come between us. I did not want to debate you about it at lunch recently but to enjoy the fellowship in the Gospel. Indeed, the ecclesiology issue is an “in house” debate among evangelicals. The basic theology I learned at Mid-South Bible College (MSBC, now Crichton College) and from my mother and grandmother (2 Tim. 1:5 applies to me) I have never laid aside but adhere to it tenaciously. The Trinity, hypostatic union, Virgin Birth (actually virgin conception, as Dr. Crichton rightly stated)—in short, the Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed, Chalcedon on the Person of Christ, are what the Church has defined as evangelical orthodoxy for centuries, with justification by faith alone in Christ alone added during the Reformation as a necessary implication of the Apostolic faith. Cranmer quotes the early fathers who held to “faith alone,” even using those very words. Our doctrinal statement here at Cranmer Theological House is the Thirty-Nine Articles, which you would find quite satisfying in most points.

But regarding my ecclesiology, I have enclosed my part of a book that Grover Gunn and I wrote in 1984, Dispensationalism Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow. (This was not in the original letter: It sold well for 15 years but is now out of print. Many are asking for it so it needs to be brought back into print. A photographic copy of the latest edition can be purchased from Cranmer House for $15.00 postage paid.) I graduated from DTS; and Gunn finished all the courses, but they would not allow him to graduate, which seems to me both illegal and immoral. Most of your questions regarding my ecclesiology will be answered in the pages from the book you now have. But I shall give you my personal history.

When I went to Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) in 1972 (as the first MSBC student with an accredited degree), I was convinced of dispensationalism. The first year there I had no doubts, but mid-way through the second year I was in rapid Greek reading when a professor (Dr. Ed. Blum) stated that there were two views of sanctification on campus. (The question was raised from the passage we were “Greeking,” as we used to say.) We were told that there was the Walvoord/Ryrie/Pentecost view, which was Arminian, carnal Christian, and higher life without perseverance, and then there was the perseverance or Calvinistic view. Naturally, I told myself that I was of the former view since I had been taught that at MSBC. But the seed Blum planted stayed with me, causing me later to question my assumptions regarding grace and later the assumptions of dispensationalism itself.

Later that year I took an elective in apologetics from the same professor, and we read thousands of pages. We read many of the rationalists and Arminian apologists, and finished the course by reading Van Til’s Defense of the Faith. As you may recall, for many years he taught apologetics at Westminster in Philadelphia. Van Til’s book stirred my thinking, not only in apologetics, but also to challenge my own theological presuppositions. As time went on, I read Warfield, Calvin’s Institutes, Luther’s Bondage of the Will, The Westminster Confession of Faith, John Owen, and many other Reformed works. I had many personal conversations with Charles Ryrie, and I discovered to my utter shock that he was basically ignorant of the Reformation and Reformed writings, often incorrectly quoting them or misrepresenting their beliefs. I had placed the big three (Walvoord/Ryrie/Pente-cost) on such a pedestal that it took me two years at DTS to accept their fallibility. For example, in one class when Ryrie was promoting his unlimited atonement view, he said that even the great John Owen had not discussed 2 Peter 2:1 in his volume on the atonement. I went to the library, opened volume ten of Owen’s works, looked in the index, and then read Owen’s careful explanation of it. It took me all of three minutes to find it, and another five minutes to read it. Either Ryrie had not looked it up, or he had forgotten about it. This was typical of the big three dispensational men regarding the Reformed writings. If they were wrong here, were they also wrong in other areas?

(Once when I was teaching with you at MSBC in 1977 after graduating from DTS, Walvoord came to Memphis, and I’m sure that he had me in mind when at a luncheon he made comments about the Calvinistic doctrine of “limited” atonement. His ignorance on the topic was typical, especially when he thought he was making significant statements against the Reformed view, but did not even understand them, engaging in straw men.)

But one conversation in particular I had with Ryrie was a turning point in my thinking; it took place not long before I graduated in 1976. I went to his office and asked him to prove dispensationalism, that I would be the devil’s advocate for covenantal theology. He was glad to oblige. (Three other students were with me, only one of whom is still dispensational and that only mildly.) He went to Matthew 16:18 where Jesus said “I shall build My Church,” which was a future tense Greek verb, implying to Ryrie that it did not exist at the time. My response was that such an inference on a future tense was very tenuous, that it was not necessarily supported by the Greek grammars, and that the Church was mentioned in Matthew 18 anyway, only two chapters later. Thus it did exist, as Jesus Himself stated. Of course, Ryrie stated that Matthew 16 had the “technical” use of the word “church” while Matthew 18 had the “non-technical” use. That was a point I was not willing to concede but seemed to me to be assuming what he wanted to prove.

Next he invoked Ephesians 2:20 where the Church is built on the foundation of apostles and prophets, meaning that it did not exist before the apostles. He reasoned that since apostles were mentioned first that the prophets must have been limited to NT ones. But I rejoined that the context spoke of OT Israel and the NT Church as being in one body (see my notes) thus favoring OT prophets. Even further, in the context Jesus Himself was the chief cornerstone, and was He not also such for the OT saints or were they saved without Jesus? Did they have some other foundation, contrary to 1 Corinthians 3:11?

Next he used the argument from Acts 2 that the Church was formed on the Day of Pentecost by the baptism of the Spirit, making reference to 1 Corinthians 12:13, meaning that it did not exist prior to Pentecost. My response was that if the OT saints were not included in the Church, then how were they saved? Was not the Lord’s death retroactive to them, which he admitted to some extent (whatever that meant), but then excluded them from the Church! And did not Peter quote Joel in this Acts passage, stating that this was what the OT had predicted? If His death was retroactive, why would not the Church also be retroactive, or better, progressive (OT bud to NT flower)? How could His death be retroactive for them if Christ did not legally represent them? And if He legally represented them, they were part of His body, in His Church. I agreed that Acts is a new phase of the one people of God.

Then I asked him about Ephesians 1:4 where Paul says that we were predestined before the world to be in Christ; did not that include all the elect of all ages? He unhesitatingly stated that such was true. Then I observed: “That included Moses, which means Moses is in Christ, and therefore he is in the Church.” Ryrie just about dropped his teeth on the desk. He said that he had never heard a covenant theologian use that argument, and stammered for an answer. That in turn caused me to drop my teeth since it was such a standard covenantal argument. It indicated that Mr. Dispensationalism himself had not read the Reformed writings to miss such a basic argument. This caused me to have doubts about dispensationalism, for if Ryrie had misrepresented and misunderstood the Reformed so badly, could it be that his own system was flawed? Though I did not change my theology immediately, the conversation stayed with me over the years. (And obviously it is still with me vividly.)

Furthermore, I argued, there is one new covenant made with Israel and the Church (Jer. 31:31ff; Heb. 8), which speaks of one people of God. It used to be common for dispensationalists to speak of two new covenants (Ryrie did at one time), but they have been challenged so much by scholars all over the world for such strained exegesis that I know of no dispensational scholar today who still maintains such. Perhaps some popular preacher would, but there is just no excuse for it. It is not only exegetically impossible, but it necessarily implies two kinds of salvation, which the Church has always seen to be completely erroneous. It strongly implies two brides for Christ.

When I graduated from DTS in 1976, I was still a dispensationalist, and the first church I had was such. During my first pastorate, I taught with you at Mid-South Bible College for a couple of courses. I pursued the Reformed writings after my first pastorate and after teaching at MSBC, which eventually led me into Presbyterianism and covenant theology, and now into Anglicanism. Since those days, the early fathers and the Reformers, none of whom were dispensational, have only confirmed my position, but all were covenantal in their view, every one of them holding to infant baptism, which is necessarily built on the unity of the Old Testament with the New Testament and on the unity of the people of God in both testaments. Indeed, infant baptism was not challenged until the Reformation and then only by a few Anabaptists. The basis for infant baptism is covenantal unity between the Testaments (see Col. 2:11-12; 1 Cor 10:1ff for a NT infant baptism!).

Then the historical argument greatly disturbed me. (This was and still is a hurdle that I cannot imagine one overcoming.) I had been taught both at Mid-South Bible College and at Dallas Theological Seminary to have little respect for the history of the Church in the area of eschatology (read dispensationalism) and the doctrines of grace. Dispensationalism is not found in the Church before 1870 or so and not developed until the early 20th century. While I was attending DTS, Dr. Walvoord (the president of the seminary at the time) commissioned one of the church history professors to study the early church for signs of dispensationalism. When the professor reported that there were no signs, Walvoord stated that it did not matter since it was biblical. This autonomous spirit, disconnecting oneself from the history of the Church, still permeates dispensationalism. By Sola Scriptura the Reformers did not mean “just the Bible and me.” In other words, the Bible was the ultimate authority, not the only authority. Even the great Presbyterian protestant Charles Hodge stated: “If the Bible be the only infallible rule of faith and practice; and if . . . the Spirit guides the people of God . . . into the knowledge of the truth, then the presumption is invincible that what all true Christians believe to be the sense of Scripture is its sense” (Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:437).

But the historical argument bothered me greatly. Something as novel as dispensationalism, first appearing in the history of the Church in the late 1800s, taught against by the whole history of the Church by maintaining covenant unity between the Testaments, has the 99.999% presumption of being wrong. Indeed, the early fathers opposed dispensationalism in principle when they opposed Marcion who rejected the OT as having anything to do with the Church and when they proclaimed the Bible was one book for one people of God. Likewise, every Reformation confession written states the same, not the least of which is our own Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. This theology of one Bible, one people of God, continued unchallenged for almost 1900 years until Darby, being unheard of in the Creeds and in the Reformation confessions. How could the best theologians in the history of the early fathers and the Reformation and post-Reformation miss something allegedly so important? Was everyone wrong for 2,000 years except the modern dispensationalists, who are today still a small minority when we consider Christendom as a whole, and are primarily a USA phenomenon? (Our isolationism here from the rest of the Christian world is astonishing. There is a strong group of Christians in southern India who claim to go back to the Apostle Thomas. I was in seminary with one of them. We know for sure they were there in the third century. They were for the most part cut off from the West and the rest of Christendom. But what is their theology? They hold to the creeds, to Chalcedon, have bishops, and have had little to no contact with dispensationalism. We think American Christianity is all there is.)

Then there was the ever-present “literal” hermeneutic, which allegedly gave rise to the whole dispensational system. I took a course my senior year at DTS entitled “The NT’s use of the OT,” taught by S. Lewis Johnson, one of the finest scholars that DTS ever produced. He had been head of the OT department at one time, was head of the NT department for many years, and was being groomed to be head of the theology department when DTS fired him for his Calvinism. (DTS considered the “rapture” more important than the doctrines of salvation, which also bothered me tremendously.) He virtually sight read both Hebrew and Greek, not to mention French, German, and Latin. A dictum repeated at DTS ad nauseam was that since the OT prophecies of Christ were all fulfilled literally, so the NT prophecies of His Second Coming would be so fulfilled. The problem was that no one seemed to have checked out the OT prophecies as fulfilled in the NT. I did so check on the whole NT, and only 35% were fulfilled “literally” (whatever that may mean), the balance being anti-types, analogies, eschatological Yahweh fulfillment, and so forth (see my book). This course more than any other course at DTS raised doubts about the so-called literal hermeneutic in my mind.

After seven consecutive years of formal studying in dispensational institutions, it became my contention that the so-called literal hermeneutic was not the basis for dispensationalism but the result of it. They had not understood their own presupposition, that their distinction between Israel and the Church had actually produced the hermeneutic, and they forced prophecies to be fulfilled according to their humanistic understanding of literal. Now I have been vindicated as the new or progressive dispensationalists have abandoned the literal hermeneutic with a vengeance, essentially stating what I’ve been saying for 25 years. (See the book edited by Craig Blaising, Progressive Dispensationalism who was a fellow student when I was at DTS; see also Three Central Issues in Contemporary Dispensationalism.) Indeed, scholars all over the world have taken them to task for their “literal” hermeneutic, which, in my opinion, virtually has no definition, at least by them (see my chapter on it enclosed).

But the greatest weakness of dispensationalism was what they considered their greatest strength and the essence of their system: two peoples of God, two bodies, an OT people and a NT people, Israel versus the Church, however we want to state it. And this is what drove me out of dispensationalism as the last straw. I agree that the two peoples doctrine is what makes dispensationalism what it is. But if there is a danger to dispensationalism, it is precisely with the two peoples of God doctrine, which necessarily implies two ways of salvation, even though they try to deny this. There is no salvation except in union with Christ, and how could another body of people be saved apart from union with Him? If they are saved by Him, how is it done? Can He legally represent them without being their Head and they His body, His people? Is Christ a bigamist, having two brides, an OT bride and a NT one? There is no way to have salvation except in union with Christ. The first Adam was the head of all humanity, and the Last Adam was the head of the elect of God, Israel, the body, the Church (see Gal. 6:16; Heb. 2:9ff; Eph. 2:11ff). There are no other options. Christ is the head of one body, not two, which is what the Church has said for 2,000 years. There is one Lord, one faith, one circumcision/baptism (Eph. 4:5; Col. 2:11-12).

You stated at our luncheon recently that Dr. Crichton (the president of MSBC) would commonly state that the Old Testament saints were headless, having no covenantal head. If so, they have no salvation. If Christ is their savior, He must be their head. If He is not their covenantal Head, He is not their savior. But if the OT and NT saints are saved by the same grace, the same salvation, by the same covenant Head, Christ, what is the point of two peoples of God? What does one body have that the other does not have? I have never seen this dilemma solved by dispensationalists. The progressive dispensationalists are still struggling with it, which is why dispensationalism is now in its third major redefinition and why they are saying that Christ is now reigning on David’s throne. As you may recall, Walvoord/Pentecost /Ryrie have taught that David’s throne is a literal seat in Jerusalem to be occupied by the Lord after the Second Coming in the so-called millennium. Now this is being challenged by Dallas Theological Seminary professors themselves, so where is the literal hermeneutic?

The relationship of Old Testament to New Testament is bud to flower, as every scholar has seen for 2,000 years, from St. Augustine to Calvin to the vast majority of Christians today. If one does not see this, he maintains at least two ways of salvation, an OT way and a NT way, Christ related one way to the OT saints and another way to the NT saints, necessarily implying two brides. And that is just another reason dispensationalism will never avoid the charge of two ways of salvation until they drop this two peoples of God idea, which would mean they would no longer be dispensationalists. Again, there is one Lord, one faith, and one circumcision/baptism (Eph. 4:5, which in context includes both OT and NT saints, see Eph. 2:12ff and my notes on it in the material I’ve sent you). This two peoples of God idea is the major reason I left dispensationalism.

Then there was the related issue of how OT saints were saved. C. I Scofield and Lewis Sperry Chafer (one of the founders of DTS) taught that Old Testament saints were saved by their own works. In volume seven of Chafer’s Systematic Theology: Doctrinal Summarization under “justification,” Chafer emphatically states that OT saints were “just because of their own works for God, whereas New Testament justification is God’s work for man in answer to faith.” That teaching runs through all seven volumes of his theology as Grover Gunn has documented quite well in his part of our book.

Of course Ryrie tried to avoid the charge of two or more ways of salvation by saying—contrary to Chafer and Scofield—that the Old Testament saints were saved by faith and grace. But even granted Ryrie’s concession, he still had two peoples of God which necessarily means two ways of salvation: Israel without a covenant head as savior and the Church with a covenant Head, the Savior.

Furthermore, he disallowed any saving knowledge to the content of the OT saints’ faith, saying, for example, that Abraham was saved by belief that he would have a large family (“Your seed shall be as the sand”). What does that have to do with his own sins, with a savior, or with the Messiah to come (and he did look to the Messiah: John 8:56)? With each OT saint having a different content to his faith, we have as many ways to be saved as there were OT saints. Indeed, if one has no soteriological content to his faith, he really has no faith in any meaningful sense. If I learned anything at the Bible college where you taught and at DTS, it was that true faith embraces propositions, which is also why the early Church had so many councils to define the correct propositions about the Holy Trinity and Christ. DTS guarantees the dichotomy between OT Israel and the NT Church by denying that any OT saint could have had Messianic content to his/her faith. In the DTS doctrinal statement as recently as several months ago, DTS still said that “it was historically impossible” for the OT saints to have had “as the conscious of their faith the incarnate, crucified Son, the Lamb of God” and that the OT saints “did not comprehend” that “the sacrifices depicted the person and work of Christ.” Incredible. That is clearly two plans of salvation (or more), an OT nebulous faith in God but without any concept of personal sin, repentance, Messiah, etc, and a NT concrete faith in Jesus as Savior who will forgive one’s sins.

Contrast that with Article VII of the Thirty-Nine Articles: “The Old Testament is not contrary to the New: for both in the Old and New Testament everlasting life is offered to mankind by Christ, who is the only Mediator between God and man, being both God and man. Wherefore they are not to be heard, which feign that the old Fathers [the OT saints] did look only for transitory [temporal] promises.” Such statements could be multiplied over hundreds of times from the fathers and the reformers. Therefore, such disunity to the Bible and two peoples of God, stating that the OT saints only looked for temporal promises, is also a major reason why I left dispensationalism.

Indeed, it was never the case that “Israel” or the seed of Abraham was composed only of physical descendents from Abraham, but dispensationalists think so. There was a physical seed, but “not all Israel is Israel.” All the circumcised were in covenant with Yahweh, but then many had fallen from the covenant (John 8:32ff; 1 Cor 10:1ff) and Gentiles were also part of the body of Israel. Dispensationalists consider the physical Jews in Palestine today to be the chosen people of God, in covenant with Him, even though they deny Christ! Even in Abraham’s time, there were many in Abraham’s household who were circumcised and not descendents of Abraham. Others (such as Ishmael) were his seed, but were not part of the covenant. In John 8, the Lord said that the Jewish leaders with whom He was dialoging were the seed of Abraham as physical descendents, but were really of their father the devil (John 8:33-44). Just look at the genealogy of Christ in Matthew chapter one to see that there were Gentile women in His line. Thus, as Paul stated, the true Jew was not the one outwardly circumcised but the one inwardly circumcised of the heart (Rom 2:28-29). We cannot identify the “Jewish” nation with a physical seed but with a covenant seed. Thus to say that the “Jews” in Palestine today are the chosen people of God is to identify them with a physical seed. (Today the Church is the new “nation”, 1 Peter 2:9-10.) The physical seed idea is contrary to all of Scripture from Genesis through the New Testament. It is interesting, by the way, that dispensationalists who so oppose infant baptism because one’s physical relationship to the covenant means nothing promote the same idea with a vengeance when it comes to physical Jews!

Another reason for my departure is dispensationalism’s tendency to deny the lordship of Christ in salvation. Of course, some dispensationalists, such as John MacArthur and his followers, adamantly deny such gross error, but DTS promotes it with such vehemence that one stands amazed. (I can’t imagine standing before Christ at the Last Day having preached that one could be saved in his sins rather than from them, that it is possible to be a “Judas” and still go to heaven.) DTS has a section entitled Eternal Security in its doctrinal statement, but then denies perseverance of the saints, which means that one can have Christ as Savior while rejecting His Lordship. To use the modern vernacular, that is promoting “once saved always saved” but without perseverance, which means one can have genuine faith without works. I’m not aware of anyone in the history of the Church fossilizing such horrible theology in its institutional and formal statement, published to the world. Ryrie in Balancing the Christian Life even states that anyone who teaches such lordship salvation is teaching another gospel! That means for the past 2,000 years 99.9999% of the Church has perished. Much of dispensationalism is off base, but this one tenet, like the two peoples of God issue and works salvation of OT saints, is outside the bounds of historic orthodoxy. The whole Church for 2,000 years and 95% of Christendom today rises up against such an idea. Never in the history of the Church—and here I include all three branches of Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism—has anyone heard of anything so monstrous as the DTS teaching that repentance, by which is meant a turning from one sins, is not necessary for salvation. According to DTS, NT “repentance” is only a change of mind about Christ, not also a change of mind about one’s sins. One can allegedly have Christ and his sins also. How one could possibly come to Christ for forgiveness of sins and still love his sins is an indomitable mystery. It would be tantamount to raping someone and saying, “Forgive me but I intend to do it again.” (See my chapter on repentance in my book, Lordship Salvation: The Only Kind There Is. There has recently been another dissertation at DTS (Ph.D.!) denying repentance in salvation with the usual plethora of straw men against the Reformed scholars. But this is not just a Reformed issue but an issue in every branch of Christendom since Pentecost.)

And consider the doctrinal statement of DTS. It is greatly imbalanced, having one sentence on the Holy Trinity and several long paragraphs on its view of dispensations and prophecy. This imbalance continues with those who will not allow one to be a member of their church unless their prophecy is “right” while rarely asking questions about the potential member’s view of God. One’s view of antichrist is now more important than one’s view of Christ, at least on a practical level. This produces Christians who can expound long and hard on Israel, antichrist, end time prophecy but who have very little understanding of the most basic teaching of the Church since the Apostles: the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation (these two stand or fall together, as I’m sure you would agree).

Who knows the future of dispensationalism? They themselves do not know where they are going. I have recently talked to professors at DTS who do not want the Ryrie dispensationalism but the progressive dispensationalism, which at least means no literal hermeneutic and no pre-tribulation rapture. I hope it means they will embrace repentance. I have conversed with recent graduates who tell me that the pre-tribulation rapture idea is hardly mentioned at DTS these days, and that while some still harp on the literal hermeneutic yet most deny it. Tommy Ice, a graduate of DTS, sees the implications of the new dispensationalism at DTS, and he, as a dispensationalist, is writing against the professors at DTS! But the weight of scholarship is against him. This is very ironic and has never happened in DTS history that one of its graduates would challenge that DTS is not consistently dispensational! In his latest edition of his landmark book, Dispensationalism (formerly Dispensationalism Today), Ryrie is also challenging DTS!

It will be a relief when DTS drops the pre-tribulation rapture, which in my humble opinion has done tremendous harm to Christianity. It is based on very tenuous inferences, divides the people of God into two peoples, makes “Israel” in the Near East seem to be the people of God even in a state of denying Christ, and puts the USA in a precarious position with other nations when Christian Zionists push us to support them with the erroneous idea that the “land” is theirs. The Jews have so intermarried since the time of Christ that no one even knows who they are anymore. Some are black, some are white, some are olive, and some we don’t know what they are.

Sadly, the pre-tribulation rapture has become part of the non-negotiable faith in many circles—even though the Church did not hear about it until recently—and some think that if you don’t believe it that you are liberal. (Recently when Walvoord died—a godly Christian man, let me add—the DTS alumni newsletter noted that he was a great defender of the faith, defending such critical doctrines as the pre-trib rapture. It is too bad that he spent so much time on such a non-essential issue.) It is sad to see the ancient creeds ignored but the pre-trib rapture doctrine promoted as if it were as important as an ancient creed. These are wrong theological priorities to the extreme. The effect of such wrong priorities can be seen in Tim LaHaye selling 50 million (and counting) copies of the left behind series on the antichrist, but evangelicals will not purchase 10 thousand copies of a book about Christ. All the end time hysterical weirdoes who embarrass the Church with their errant predictions, such as Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Pat Robertson, Paul and Cheryl Crouch on TBN and TBN in general, are dispensationalists. Hal Lindsey was invited to DTS for the 50th anniversary in 1974 while I was studying there, and his hermeneutic was so incompetent with his helicopters in the book of Revelation (“literal”?) that even the DTS professors said he would never be invited back again. To my knowledge, he never has been back. Yet TBN regularly has him on as (and I quote) “the world’s greatest prophecy expert.” He and Jack van Impe are constantly going through the latest news articles to demonstrate that we are in the last days, which is more eisegesis (reading into the text) than exegesis (reading out of the text). The pre-tribulation rapture doctrine with its escape motif and Satan as lord of the world who has predestined the failure of Christ and of the Church (Would God predestined His own failure?) has produced an impotent Church that will not stand against the culture. As dispensationalist J. Vernon McGee once said: “Why polish the brass on a sinking ship?” Such statements have immobilized dispensational churches. Thus as our culture slides ever more into the sins of the Canaanites, it has the blessing of the dispensationalists, for this allegedly means Christ is coming that much sooner to bail us out, for allegedly things must get worse and worse just before He returns. It is to our shame that the Roman Catholic Church has led the way in the opposition to abortion.

Then consider the absurdity of the whole dispensational scheme. When things are really bad, the Lord Jesus comes secretly to “rapture” His Church (a “secret” Second Coming), the man of sin/anti-Christ is manifested, and we have seven years of great tribulation. During the seven years, God again deals with Israel as an Old Testament nation while the Church is in heaven. Incredible. How anyone on earth could be saved without a visible Church and without any other Christians to evangelize them is a serious problem dispensationalists have not worked out except to say some sinners read tracts and the Bible and are converted. Though God could save people however He chooses, He has always chosen to use His visible Church (or His Israel) as His instrument and its sacraments. Such theology makes the visible Church totally irrelevant. What happens to baptism and the Lord’s Supper during this alleged seven years, and what sacraments are available is another enormous corner dispensationalists have painted themselves into. All three branches of the Church have always considered the sacraments (at least baptism and the Lord’s Supper) as non-negotiable, as necessary for salvation, but now they are gone! Apparently, they are not needed. All we need is autonomous individualism—incredible. But all is a complete failure once again, and at the end of the seven years comes the public and non-secret second [sic] Second Coming, at which point Christ establishes His 1,000 year reign from Jerusalem, the animal sacrifices are reestablished, and the temple is rebuilt! Now we are back to the types and shadows of the Old Testament in complete denial of the whole book of Hebrews, and the advancement God made over the animal sacrifices to the once for all sacrifice of Christ and advancement over the land of Israel to the whole world is forfeited to a literal hermeneutic. All this comes from a distinction between Israel and the Church as two separate peoples of God.

I guess I given you more than you asked, but I hope that this will not cause us to break fellowship. I count many dispensationalists as my brothers in Christ and my personal friends, including you. I would like for it to remain so.

In His death and resurrection,
Rev Dr Curtis Crenshaw, ThD

(P.S. This professor’s response was non-engaging, very gracious, stating that he would not break fellowship with me. We continue to email one another.)