Before launching this site in October 2018, I put a tagline under my name in the masthead. At first, it referred rather boringly to the half-century of retrospective I wanted to set down here. I eventually changed it to “Navigating this dispensation’s last days” and cited a couple of Biblical verses to justify the reference to “dispensation.”
Still boring, perhaps, but at least it suggested the unity of my interests.
My understanding of the current historical phase—the dispensation of the grace of God (Ephesians 3:2)—informs how I evaluate events, arguments, apologetics, liberty and threats thereto, and everything else, and therefore what I write on this blog. Every visitor here should know that. We’re living in this dispensation’s last days with its syndrome of 21 wicked symptoms (2 Timothy 3).
That unity hasn’t always been clear. The hundred-plus posts published so far have struck even me as an aggregate, not an organic whole, a “many” without an obvious “one.” Mixed messaging may have resulted.
For example, if an essay on Brand Blanshard or C. E. M. Joad drew you in, you may have been put off by posts on the metapologetics of Greg Bahnsen (which he learned from Cornelius Van Til).
Or perhaps you appreciated reading about the libertarian Murray Rothbard, but couldn’t care less about Stalinist Herbert Aptheker or Trotskyist George Novack.
(Or vice versa.)
Then there’s my goal, puzzling to some who know me, of producing a life-and-thought study of Otis Q. Sellers, the independent dispensationalist you’ve probably never heard of.
The manuscript is growing, but as I’m challenged to summarize his thought (already clearly expressed, but spread out over many publications and recordings), I’ll be blogging much of the rest of the book into existence.
In turn, visitors who are only interested in Sellers (who had nothing to say about the above-mentioned gents) may find the other stuff bewildering. Apart from his influence, however, I wouldn’t have the dispensational perspective on those writers or on anyone else who has absorbed my interest over the past fifty years. A perspective I find indispensable.
Last week I revised the tagline to Helping you navigate this dispensation’s last days. Now I want to answer the tacit “So what?” possibly lurking in your mind’s background. You value your time. Why spend it on anything I’ve written? How I possibly help you?
My answer is that I’ll either convince you of the truth my perspective or at least its worthiness of consideration or refutation. Or, entertaining what I have to say, you’ll have questions about the worldview you bring to life’s issues.
And maybe this site will appear less like mere online journaling than it has.
If you find yourself better off for having grappled with what you find on this site, then I’ve helped you. Perhaps a few more comments on where I’m coming from are in order.
I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious, at least not radically so. Becoming conscious in that way required me to reorient and regiment my thinking away from the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy in favor of “heteronomy,” the “hetero” (or “other”) being God as He reveals Himself in Scripture.
Dispensationalism helps me situate myself not only historically between divine administrations (i.e., between the charismatic dispensation of which the Book of Acts is the history and God’s future manifest Kingdom on earth), but also dialectically among fellow believers.
We occupy the “parenthesis” between Kingdom phases, the “ear” stage and the “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29). It marks a regnum interruptum, if you will.
Bernard Lonergan taught that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed to each other when we interpret it, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop dialectically, not genetically.[1]
For example, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian communions are linked by a common faith in Christ, but opposed—in schism—over ecclesiology (to name no other difference).
Linkages and fissures also characterize Catholic and Protestant relationships; Lutheran and Calvinist; and there are factions within those communions.
Even dispensationalists find themselves linked to each other by their “one fundamental” of Scripture and opposed to each other over other things (e.g. the Plymouth Brethren‘s Open and Exclusive branches).
Sellers’s “ultradispensationalism” (which he once defined tongue-in-cheek as admitting at least one more dispensation than the garden variety dispensationalist is willing to) is dialectically related to virtually every organized body of believers. Linked, but opposed.
In 1917, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks overthrew Tsarism, but split over revolutionary organization.
In 1924, Stalinists and Trotskyists defended Lenin’s legacy, but split over its meaning for the world communist revolution.
Trotskyists are united in defending Trotsky’s legacy, but over the past 80+ years have famously splintered into myriads of political “tendencies” over . . . you name it. Dialectic can be as irritating (and enervating) as it is inescapable.
Dispensational consciousness is Biblical historical consciousness, one that finds its global positioning system in the Bible and its evidence that God has administered or managed human affairs. Non-Christian worldviews have no adequate counterpart.
Take, for example, the October Revolution or World War II. They owe their significance their relationship to the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of the Son of God and, prospectively, the epiphaneia, the blazing forth of His Kingdom in the future. Consciously or not, human actors in the Revolution or the War were related to those divine interventions. The events are intelligible only in the terms of the interventions.
That is, apart from Biblical anthropology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and eschatology, history is, as Macbeth deemed life, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Those who affirm Biblical anthropology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and eschatology (however imperfectly) are themselves agents of history, as are those who deny those doctrines.
But we will only know what we got right or wrong after we’re resurrected in the Kingdom (unless it comes before we die). Then we’ll know as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12).
As a dispensationalist, I apply the divisions discovered in Scripture to Scripture. We learn to “navigate” this dispensation by (among other things) studying Paul’s epistles. For if a dispensational boundary line is indicated at Acts 28:28, then awareness of it ought to influence how I read New Testament books written on either side of it.
That will involve what Paul’s assumptions and expectations were when he wrote 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, and Romans compared to what he realized when he wrote Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians (that is, after God suspended His Kingdom purposes).
I will work out a dispensationalist theory of churches as post-Acts 28:28 social formations, one that illuminates our Christian diversity, without necessarily interpreting rival confessions as distortions of one’s own.
There is a need to unify Christian theory and practice, an ideal that Marxists are famous for championing, despite their adherence to a materialist worldview that excludes the very possibility of theory.
Dispensationalists believe that the lives of Christian in this dispensation are hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). The lives of Christians weren’t hidden in the Acts period; they won’t be in the Kingdom.
We endure dialectic in this dispensation, but one day God from His absolute standpoint will dispel the fog of dialectical strife. (Every Christian acknowledges the reality of an absolute standpoint, as no Marxist can.)
I must leave it there for now. You now have, I hope, an idea of what I can do for you. Even more, I hope I’ve increased your interest in it.
Your continued interest, or my inability to retain it, will determine whether my hopes are well-founded or misplaced.
Please contribute to the dialectical development of this site by telling me what you think.
Notes
[1] The goal of the dialectician is neither to prove nor refute, but rather
. . . to exhibit diversity and to point to the evidence for its roots. In this manner he will be attractive to those that appreciate full human authenticity and he will convince those that attain it. Indeed, the basic idea of the method we are trying to develop takes its stand on discovering what human authenticity is and showing how to appeal to it. It is not an infallible method, for men easily are unauthentic, but it is a powerful method, for man’s deepest need and most prized achievement is authenticity. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, New York: The Seabury Press, 1972, 253-57.
As for “authenticity,” man achieves it in self-transcendence, first by escaping the egoistic box of infancy and childhood, then by falling in love (with others as well as oneself) and, ultimately, by falling in love with God. Method, 104-105. NB: But . . . Lonergan’s discourse (indeed, his whole project) makes sense only if one presupposes the Bible’s worldview. Please see “Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; Augustus Strong, about right” on this site.
