Born-Again Preterist - Part Three

...continued from Part Two!

Part Three – The Future of Preterism

"The archangel totally blew it." - Vernon Klingman

Vernon: This brings me to what I feel is the greatest stake of all regarding the subject of prophecy, and it relates to the credibility of the Word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. I should add that I find this veracity threatened not only by dispensationlism, but by all views that would place the coming of Christ in the future.

I'm sure you've heard of C.S. Lewis. Many in the Church consider him to be the one of the greatest Christian-thinkers of all time. While I also appreciate much of his work, I feel he didn't have a clue about how to defend the prophecies Jesus made concerning His return.

Notice what he said about Matthew 24:34, where Jesus promised to return before His generation passed away:

"It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. Yet how teasing, also, that within fourteen words of it should come the statement 'But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.' The one exhibition of error and the one confession of ignorance grow side by side."

So, C.S. Lewis is saying that Jesus made an embarrassing prophecy, but we should forgive Him for His error, because He was ignorant.

This is ridiculous.

SM: Next you’ll be telling me there’s no such place as Narnia.

Vernon: If Jesus made an error concerning when He would return, then He is a false prophet. And if He is a false prophet, my faith is in vain. And if my faith is in vain, I have no eternal life. This is the greatest stake of all, as I see it: the hope of eternal life.

Not all futurists share the opinion of C.S. Lewis regarding this matter. Many instead redefine the time-statements Christ made to avoid charging Him with error, so they can feel comfortable about a worldview they've already decided is true.

So, you might wonder, if preterism has led me to believe that Christ is a true prophet, then why would I care if other people don't understand His prophecies, so long as they're following Him?

The reason I remain passionate about this issue is that while Christians are playing around with Christ's words - or ignoring them because they think things will all just pan out in the end, or suggesting that the Church was actually anticipating two second comings, separated by thousands of years - their children are growing up. And they're encountering worldviews that challenge all this nonsense, and being exposed to higher scholarship that makes their understanding of Scripture look, well, silly.

SM: Christians looking silly? I don’t believe it.

Vernon: I’m afraid they’ll abandon their hope of eternal life. This is my chief concern. This is why I have dedicated myself to promoting a proper understanding of eschatology. I want everyone to see how the words of Christ were fulfilled so they will continue holding on to His promise of eternal life and pass this hope on to many generations to come. Because, while I believe that striving to make this world a better place is extremely important, I also believe that God wants us to continue walking with Him in the world beyond.

SM: Speaking of the generations to come, you have a few dozen children yourself. Have you ever had to have 'the talk' with them when they come home wondering why little Jimmy thinks Obama is the Anti-Christ, or when Johnny tries to get them to read the Left Behind novels because 'everyone else is doing it?'

Vernon: I figured since it was proving so difficult to convert people to preterism, I'd advance the cause through adopting and breeding.

We certainly have a full house. After my wife and I had four biological daughters, we adopted a little girl from Ghana, and then a little boy from there as well.

My kids really don’t have too much interaction with mainstream Christianity. We’ve hosted a church in our home for a few years now, and none of my kids have ever attended a Christian school. They have attended some Christian youth groups, but I don’t believe the subject has ever come up there.

So far, my oldest daughter has been the only one of my kids to have a conversation with a friend who didn’t like the idea of preterism, and this didn’t happen till she was in high school. I remember her being very upset that her friend so quickly dismissed the idea. I just told her to ask her friend questions about what she believes and why, and to do the same with me, so she could make up her own mind about the subject.

SM: What kind of feedback have you been getting from the facebook page?

Vernon: Overall, I've enjoyed administering a public page on preterism. I've found it very rewarding to help people find answers to the same questions that bothered me. I've also been very encouraged by all the likes and positive comments. It’s been great to see that I’m not alone in my convictions.

But there certainly has been pushback. I've been called a heretic, told my doctrine isn't Christian, charged with having no understanding, and outright mocked for my beliefs. Most of these attacks, however, come from people I don't know that well, or don't know at all, so I try not to take these things too personally.

My friends and family have been much more gracious toward me, even if they don’t really get where I’m coming from. I think it's because they can see my heart, and when we talk face-to-face, they can tell I've spent a lot of time studying the issue and they respect that.

SM: Is it fair to say that preterism is by-and-large more accepted by politically-liberal Christians?

Vernon: I’m noticing my page not only drawing politically-liberal Christians, but also libertarians and Ron Paul advocates. I think this is because the view appeals to people who question mainstream movements, people who don't just accept a leader and join a team, but actually think through various issues, though they apparently arrive at different conclusions.

I might also mention, the preterist hermeneutic is also quite appealing to liberal scholars and atheists. In fact, most liberal scholars and atheists agree with the preterist that Christ clearly believed He would return to establish His kingdom in the first century. The only difference is that the liberal scholar (such as Albert Schweitzer) and the atheist (such as Bertrand Russell) see His prophecies failing, whereas I see them being fulfilled.

SM: What's the next step for you?

Vernon: I don’t often think of that, as a preterist.

Currently, I’m working on a commentary on Matthew 24 that I hope to complete this year. This will be the fourth commentary I’ve written on a chapter in the Bible that concerns eschatology  (the other three are posted under the Notes tab of my facebook page). When I finish this commentary, I plan on polishing up all four of them and publishing them as an eBook. I've also considered producing an audio series based on these works.

Other than that, I don’t really have any big plans. I just want to maintain a presence on Facebook to encourage other preterists and help the futurists see the glory of all that God has done, so I can encourage them to have hope for this world and also for the world beyond.

SM: Is it possible you’re wrong about all of this?

Vernon: I believe we can't help but employ faith, regardless of the worldview we embrace. I define “faith” as a conclusion about something we cannot see, and since none of us can see beyond this life, it seems we have no choice but to exercise faith about what might follow, even if we believe that what follows is nothing at all.

Born-Again Preterist - Part One

The end is perpetually nigh!

Or so I've been told.

Growing up rather fundamentalist, I'd always assumed that the standard end-of-days narrative (Anti-Christ, rapture, mark of the beast, eating our babies for breakfast) was just part-and-parcel with a belief in God and Jesus and singing hymns, it all just went together. At some moment, people will just start vanishing before your eyes, and then immediately afterward, the president will announce that its high time we all get barcodes tattooed to our foreheads.

It's an easy belief to mock, and I was doing just that one day a couple of years ago, with a friend who is also a pastor, and he just said very matter-of-factly, "Oh, don't you know? Revelation actually refers to the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD."

What? No, I didn't know that. How could I have grown up completely ensconced within the Christian subculture and never even heard of such a thing?

Not long afterward, a friend from facebook suggested that I 'like' a page done by a friend of hers, Preterism. Looking through the posts, I realized, aha, this was what my pastor-friend had been talking about.

I can’t say that I'm sold on it, but it at least opened me up to seeing that one could be a Christian who believes in the book of Revelation without necessarily constructing a bunker in their backyard.

The founder of the page is Vernon C. Klingman. He agreed to be my guinea pig.

Part One  - What Do You Believe and Why?

"When it comes to viewing eschatology, hindsight is 20/20.”

-Vernon Klingman

Vernon: Preterism is the belief that the second coming of Christ and its attendant events took place by the time of the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The term “preterism” comes from the Latin word "praeter,” which simply denotes something is past. Those who hold this view of Bible prophecy are called “preterists.”

The preterist sees Jesus teaching that He would return before His apostles could personally preach to all the cities in Israel (Mat. 10:23), that He would arrive in His kingdom before some standing beside Him would die (Mat. 16:27-28), and that His coming would  coincide with the destruction of the Jewish temple that would take place before the passing of His generation (Mat. 24:34).

The preterist also sees Jesus teaching that His kingdom is not of this physical world (John 18:36), and that it would not come with observation, nor with people pointing at it, but that it would nevertheless be in our midst (Luke 17:20-21).

In light of these teachings, the preterist believes that the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 signaled the return of Christ to establish a spiritual kingdom in the unseen realm that is in our midst. The preterist also holds that anyone who believes that Jesus died for their sins and rose again, manifests this kingdom on earth, and will enter the fullness of it upon their passing from this life.

SM: Growing up, I was always attracted to The Book of Revelation and the end times myself. Everything about it sounded so fantastic: people vanishing in the blink of an eye, the mark of the beast... This was years before the Left Behind series, but I'm sure I would have eaten them up if they'd been around. I even wrote stories about superheroes dealing with the rise of the Anti-Christ!

I recall vividly our church having a meeting concerning the book, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be In 1988, and I remember we had a speaker who had this whole system worked out wherein he added up the numeric value of the letters of Sadam Hussein's name…

When I grew older, though, I realized, wait… do I really believe all this stuff? It just seemed so crazy. It made for good fantasy - clearly - but was just too insane for me to take seriously anymore.

When I learned about preterism through your facebook page, it made the insanity of Revelation seem somewhat more grounded in reality, relatively speaking. I wonder how I would have reacted to it if I'd known about it at a young age.

Vernon: It is certainly not the view I was raised with either.

I grew up in a church like yours, that taught pre-millennial dispensationalism - the theology of the Left Behind series. This view asserts, among other things, that the coming of Christ is yet future, and that His kingdom will in fact come with observation and have its capital in modern-day Israel. So it's about as far from preterism as you can get.

I can remember staring out the car window as a child - I'm not exactly sure how old I was, but I know I was in elementary school - wondering if the prophet Daniel or John might be standing on the sidewalk in the spiritual realm, watching our family drive by, since I thought that some of their visions spoke of modern transportation. I can also remember sitting in a pew during "grown-up" church - I must have been about the same age - reading the Book of Revelation and praying to God that I would one day understand it.

As I got older, I continued studying prophecy from a dispensational perspective. I spent countless hours reading books and listening to sermons on the last days by teachers such as John MacArthur, David Jeremiah, and J. Vernon McGee. I had their system down.

However, as I entered my twenties, I found myself being increasingly bothered by the time-statements regarding the return of Christ.

As a dispensationalist, I knew how to pick them apart one by one, and explain how they didn't really mean what they seemed to say. However, as I continued encountering these statements, they began striking me as too numerous and too varied in their expression not to mean exactly what they clearly seemed to say: that the return of Christ had, in fact, been near: in the first century.

So I decided to explore other views of eschatology, that is, the study of last things. That's when I picked up Revelation: Four Views, by Steve Gregg. This book presented four parallel commentaries on the book of Revelation, all from different theological perspectives, including the preterist view. As I read the commentary from the preterist perspective, it so resonated with me that I found it difficult to keep reading the commentaries from the other views.

I think what impressed me most about preterism is how consistently it applied reasonable and logical principles of interpretation to the Scriptures. I knew that to properly interpret a book of the Bible, I had to consider its original audience, their culture, and the events of their day. However, it seemed that dispensationalism required me to abandon these principles when interpreting passages relating to last things. The preterist view, however, insisted that applying these principles to passages relating to eschatology was the key to understanding them as well.

After reading Gregg's book, I began reading the authors he cited in it, such as David Chilton, Kenneth Gentry and James Russell. While I certainly gained Biblical insight from these authors, and others, I feel it was the preterist view itself that truly opened up God's Word to my understanding. I believe it did this by motivating me to consistently apply proper interpretive methods to the Bible, and by encouraging me to just believe what Christ said concerning the timing and nature of His kingdom.

SM: It sounds like you're describing a born-again experience.

Vernon: I suppose, in a sense, it was. It certainly felt as though I had been blind, but could now see.

It's hard for me to imagine what my life would have been like had I not arrived at this position, but knowing my disdain for the ignorance and hypocrisy of the institutionalized Church, and my conviction to place my faith only in what is sound and reasonable, I'm not completely sure I would have continued in the Christian faith otherwise.

Next: Partial Preterists, beware!