Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE
Let’s pretend that Christian Reconstructionism is going
to go away soon. Let’s pretend that someone else will
write a book that answers them, and that it will be
published early next year.” This strategy is backfiring all
over the country. The Christian Reconstructionists
own the mailing lists that prove it. When seminary
professors play a giant game of “let’s pretend,” it is only
a matter of time.
Frankly, it is highly doubtful that the average faculty
member of the typical Bible-believing seminary is ready
to assign my short paperback book aimed at teenagers:
75 Bible Questions Your Instructors Pray You Won’t Ask
(1984). 16 This is why I am confident that the prevailing
theological conservatism is about to be uprooted.
Seminary faculties that need to be on the offensive
against a humanist civilization are incapable of even
defending their own positions from cheap paperback
Christian books, let alone replace an entrenched
humanist order.
I will put it as bluntly as I can: Our eschatological
opponents will not attack us in print, except on rare
occasions. They know that we will respond in print,
and that at that point they will be stuck. They want to
avoid this embarrassment at any price – even the price
of seeing their brightest young men join the Christian
Reconstructionist movement. And, quite frankly, that
suits us just fine. Heads, we win; tails, we win.
Defenseless Traditionalists
If any movement finds that it is being confronted by
dedicated opponents who are mounting a full-scale
campaign, it is suicidal to sit and do nothing. It is
almost equally suicidal to do something stupid. What
generally happens is that the leaders of comfortable,
complacent, and intellectually flabby movements do
nothing for too long, and then in a panic they rush out
and do a whole series of stupid things, beginning with
the publication of articles or books that are visibly
ineffectual in the eyes of the younger men who would
otherwise become the movement’s future leaders.
The most important tactic that the existing leadership
can adopt is a program of convincing the movement’s
future leaders that the movement has the vision, the
program, and the first principles to defeat all enemies.
To be convincing, this tactic requires evidence for such
superiority. Such evidence is presently lacking within
traditional pessimillennial groups. They begin with the
presupposition that God has not given His church the
vision, program, and first principles to defeat God’s
enemies, even with Christ’s victory over Satan at
Calvary as the foundation of the Church’s ministry.
The traditional pessimillennialists have issued a clarion
call: “Come join us; we’re historical losers.” They have
built their institutions by attracting people who are
content to remain historical (pre-second coming)
losers.
Understand that I am discussing traditional pessimillennialism.
As the climate of Christian opinion shifts,
we find that younger, energetic, and social actionoriented
premillennialists and amillennialists are now
appearing. This will continue. They insist that they can
be kingdom optimists and social activists, too. They
insist on being called members of the dominion
theology movement. I do not see any evidence that
they have been willing to go into print on how their
eschatologies are conformable to earthly, “Church
Age” optimism, but I am happy to see them coming
aboard the Good Ship Dominion. What I need to point
out, however, is that in all the seminaries and in the
large publishing houses, no such social optimism is
visible yet. Traditional pessimists still run these
institutions. This is going to change eventually, but it
will probably take decades.
Eschatological optimism is the first step in many
people’s journey into dominion theology. This is why
the leaders with more traditional outlooks are so upset.
They recognize that first step for what it is: the end of
the road for pessimillennialism.
Dispensationalism
What most people do not understand is that there has
not been a major dispensational commentary on the
Book of Revelation since John Walvoord’s The
Revelation of Jesus Christ, published back in 1966 by
Moody Press and reprinted repeatedly.
Even more significantly, there had not been a major
dispensational commentary on Revelation before
Walvoord’s book. Understand, Walvoord’s commentary
appeared 96 years after W. E. B.’s Jesus Is Coming, the
book that launched dispensationalism’s popular phase
in the United States. It appeared over half a century
after the Scofield Reference Bible (1909). In short, the
exegesis that supposedly proves the case for
dispensationalism came at the tail end of the
dispensational movement’s history, just about the time
that R. J. Rushdoony had his initial social and laworiented
books published. The dispensationalists could
point to only a handful of books with titles such as
Lectures on Revelation or Notes on Revelation. In short,
bits and pieces on Revelation, but nothing definitive –
not after over a century of premillennial dispensationalism.
The bibliography in Walvoord’s book lists a small
number of explicitly dispensational commentaries on
this book of the Bible, above all others, that we would
expect the dispensationalists to have mastered, verse by
verse.
Whatever we conclude about the history of
dispensationalism, its wide popularity had very little to
do with any systematic exposition of the book that
dispensationalists assert is the most prophecy-filled
book in the Bible. In fact, the average dispensationalist
probably does not own, has not read, and has never
heard of a single dispensational commentary on the
Book of Revelation. It is doubtful that his pastor knows
of one, either, other than Walvoord’s which is about
half the size of Chilton’s.
16. Published by Spurgeon Press, P.O. Box 7999, Tyler, Texas 75711.
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