Rapture Fever

148 RAPTURE FEVER
arguments - insisting on a radical discontinuity, Church vs.
Israel - against Allis. This theological juggling act was not a
successful intellectual defense of traditional dispensationalism;
it was nothing less than abject surrender Ryrie in effect picked
up a white flag and identified it as dispensationalism’s regimental
colors. He publicly gave away the farm.
Theologians inside the dispensational camp apparently recognized
what Ryrie had done in the name of defending the
traditional system. I think this is the reason why there was no
subsequent attempted academic defense of dispensationalism
until House and Ice, a generation later, wrote Donzinion Theology.
But they no longer defend original Scofieldism. Neither do
their published colleagues at Dallas Seminary. (Professor Robert
Lightner still carries the old white flag in the classroom at Dallas,
but the Christian book-buying public has never heard of
him.)
A “New, Improved” tipemationalism
Quite frankly, no one is sure just what the “new, improved”
dispensational theology looks like. There has been no public
presentation of the final version of this revised system, although
a book by Robert Saucy of Talbot Seminary is about to be released
by Zondervan. The old theological system is bleeding to
death, drop by drop, by a thousand qualifications, but nothing
has taken its place. There has been an embarrassed silence
about this mo~bund condition for at least two decades. House
and Ice have therefore opened a very dangerous can of worms.
House and Ice appeared to be on the offensive in their book,
but in fact they were on the defensive. Like a duck gliding
rapidly across a lake, everything appears calm on top of the
gentiles as fellow-heirs with the Jews in salvation - was not a radically new idea, but
only comparatively new, i.e., no radicat discontinuity Ryrie, Dispsrssationulism Toduy
(Chicagm Moody Press, 1965), p. 201. This is of course Allis’ argument against all
dispensationalism: Prophecy and the Church (Philadelphia: Presbyterian & Reformed,
1945), pp. 91-102.