Yesterday I referred to my dispensational eschatology, but then realized a note about it might be helpful. The following modifies a post from 2020.
I was not always dispensationally conscious, or even worldview-conscious. Becoming so required me to reorient and regiment my thinking, to trade in (or up) the pretension of human autonomy in philosophy for “heteronomy,” the “hetero” ( “other”) being God as He is revealed 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 who sees things very differently. We must stake out our positions knowing that others will contradict them, ever asking ourselves, “What could be said against what I believe?”
According my interpretation of Scripture, which I summarize tendentiously hereunder (but have defended in many other posts), Christian believers who have lived since the time marked by Acts 28:28 occupy the “parenthesis” between the “ear” stage of the Kingdom and its “full grain in the ear” stage (Mark 4:26-29), a regnum interruptum, if you will.
Bernard Lonergan thought that when we’re linked to each other by shared meaning, but opposed in our interpretations, our societies (families, churches, civil societies, parties) develop, not genetically, but dialectically. The goal of the dialectician, Lonergan writes, 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.[1]
For example, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian communions are linked by a common faith in Christ but are opposed—schismatically—over ecclesiology (among other things). Linkages and fissures also characterize the relationship between Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans and Calvinists. And there are factions within those communions. Even dispensationalists find themselves linked to each other by their “one fundamental” of the sole authority of Scripture and opposed to each other over other things (e.g. the Plymouth Brethren‘s Open and Exclusive branches).
Otis Q. Sellers’s “ultradispensationalism” (which he defined tongue-in-cheek as admitting at least one more dispensation than the average dispensationalist is willing to) is dialectically related to virtually every organized body of believers. Linked, but opposed.
For example, 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 biblically grounded historical consciousness, one that finds its global positioning system in the Bible and the 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. Whether or not they thought they were, human actors in the Revolution or the War were related to those divine interventions. The events are intelligible only in the terms of the latter.
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 (however imperfectly) Biblical anthropology, ecclesiology, soteriology, and eschatology 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 one side of it or the other.
That will involve trying to understand 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 possibility of theory.
Dispensationalists believe that the lives of Christians in this dispensation are “hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). The lives of Christians in the Acts period weren’t hidden, and neither will they be in the Kingdom. We endure dialectic in this dispensation, but one day God will dispel the fog of dialectical strife. “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it” (Isaiah 40:5).
Note
[1] 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. But Lonergan’s discourse (indeed, his 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.D