Rapture Fever

Revising Dtipensationaltim to Death 151
mustard seed or the leaven. Today his focus is on the growth of
the kingdom of Christ in history - the postmillennial focus:
“The parable of the mustard and the leaven in meal, then,
stress the growth of the new form of the kingdom” (p. 148).
If Christ’s kingdom is not being corrupted in our dispensation,
then it is either ethically neutral (the kingdom of Christ
as ethically neutral?!?) or positive. Pentecost’s theological problem
is obvious: there can be no ethical neutrality. If the necessarily
expanding khgdom of Christ is not being steadily undermined
by theological and moral perversion, then it must be growing in
righteousness. This interpretation is the postmillennial view of
the kingdom of God: expansion over time. Matthew 13 is not
discussing Satan’s kingdom; it is discussing Christ’s. Dr. Pentecost
has very quietly overthrown the heart and soul of the
traditional dispensational system’s account of the inevitable
progress of evil in this, the “Church Age.”g Yet no one inside
the dispensational camp has been willing to discuss in public
the implications of this radical alteration by Pentecost, or explain
exactly why it has not, if correct, overthrown the dispensational
system. The dispensational system is in transition. 10
The Dispensational Memory Hole
Decade after decade, dispensational theologians cling to a
version of Church history which even their own students know
is a series of preposterous falsehoods strung together with
classroom polemics. Take, for example, a myth repeated by
House and Ice, that the major promoter of postmillennialism
was the early eighteenth-century Anglican theologian, Daniel
Whitby. Dr. Gentry deals with this in House Dizided.ll Now,
9. Gary DeMar spotted this shift in early 1992. He looked up Pentecost’s section
on leaven in the 1987 edition. He found that it was not what Gentry had quoted. He
called Gentry who looked it up in the 1958 edition. The two versions differed.
10. Dr. Gentry writes a monthly newsletter, Dt.sjxwsdiorzali.sm in Transition, published
by the Institute for Christian Economics: F! O. Box 8000, Tyler, TX 75711.
11. Greg L. Bahnsen and Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr., Howe Diuided: The Brea~ Up of