The Fruit of Dispensationalism

In the Portland airport, on my way back home, I read a new book on eschatology by Auburn Avenue’s associate pastor, Duane Garner. Here are a few paragraphs to whet your appetite. In the context, Garner has been talking about Hal Lindsey’s recommendation that Christians retreat from society because things are going to get worse and worse until Jesus returns:

What is most disturbing about Lindsey’s writing here is that he talks about retreating from a culture that he helped create. When he wrote his first book, the abortion issue had not yet gone to the Supreme Court, homosexuality was still taboo, drugs and pornography were nowhere near as prevalent or as accessible as they are today, marriage was still viewed as a sacred union, and outside of a few areas of this country, it was still expected that nearly everyone worshipped in a Christian church on the Lord’s Day. Then Lindsey came onto the scene proclaiming that we are living on what will soon be the late great planet Earth. Christians accepted the hype and retreated into their homes and their splintered churches while the world went to hell.

After thirty years of this end-times hysteria, the church has fallen from her former influential position in society. Without any plan for the future, and hardly a plan for the present, the church has lost every single significant cultural battle that has faced our generation. The church keeps thinking that if she can just hold out a little longer, Jesus will come back and everything will be all better. After all, any effort to make this a better world will only delay the second coming.

What they miss in the midst of all this madness is that Jesus placed his church in a position to succeed at her mission. He fully expected her to complete her work and we should not expect him to return until she is finished. The failure of dispensationalists to see that the world is already under the Kingship of Jesus Christ has led them to accept defeat at the hands of a powerless enemy. Like the Israelite spies who viewed the land of Canaan and shook in fear at the giants they saw there, dispensationalists do not believe their God is mightier than the giants and they do not believe him when he promises to crush the head of the serpent through the means of his triumphant church. — Duane Garner, Why The End Is Not Near: A Refutation of End-Times Hysteria (Monroe: Athanasius Press, 2008), pp. 37-38.

On the one hand, loud-mouthed, offensive Christians might not make unbelievers think, “Gee, I want to be like you.” But on the other, are Christians to woo the world using only the vocab of a Rick Warren calendar? When is it OK to be offensive?

In the Bible the ‘offensive’ language was (mostly) used by God’s attorneys, the prophets, who were speaking to a culture which had already heard the truth and should have known better (whether that be Israel or the nations immediately surrounding her). God reserves such scolding for those who were in high-handed (conscious) sin against the truth, and the prophets concentrate more on the nature of the sins than on ridiculing the sinners. Jesus does the same thing in Matthew 23-24. As mentioned here a few days ago, He even swings Isaiah 13 like a knife and infers that Judah is a new ‘Babylon.’ Now, that is some insult to a nation without a Davidic king since the captivity.

I guess, today, such ‘housekeeping’ would include dealing with those within the church advocating a wholesale sellout. Sarcasm aimed at two-faced liberal theology or theistic evolution would be an example. Richard Dawkins reserves his greatest spite for the latter and he is right on the mark.

Spurgeon was a wooer, and yet he wasn’t above using cutting remarks:

“As for sensible men, and especially the sturdy workmen of our great cities, they utterly abhor foppery in a minister . . . It is a pity that we cannot persuade all ministers to be men, for it is hard to see how otherwise they will be truly men of God . . . A hundred years ago the dressiness of the clergy was about as conspicuous as it is now, but it had no doctrinal meaning, and was mere foppery . . . Molasses and other sugary matters are sickening to me. Jack-a-dandy in the pulpit makes me feel as Jehu did when he saw Jezebel’s decorated head and painted face, and cried in indignation, ‘Fling her down.’” (Charles Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students, pp. 300-301).

Such rudeness exposes the rudeness of the sin. It is self-deprecating rudeness, or ‘rudeness with tears.’ And when we keep our own house as good stewards by showing the world how to repent, some out there might just want to be like us.