Rapture Fever

Revising Dispensationali.sm to Dea!h 153
Another example: the statement that the early Church fathers
were all premillennialists. House and Ice really compound
the problem. They say that Daniel Whitby said that the first
Nicene council was premillennial.*3 Whitby said exactly the
opposite, as Dr. Gentry shows in his chapter in House Divided on
“The Exposition of the Kingdom.” A Th.M. thesis written by a
Dallas Seminary student in 1977 took to task Charles Ryrie’s
statement that the early Church fathers were premillennialists.
Not so, the student concluded; there were many amillennialists
among them. * 4
But do you think any dispensational author is
ready to go into print and admit that Ryrie’s account is mythical?
Not on your life! Yet it was not just Ryrie’s accoun~ this
myth has been taught by virtually all dispensationalists except
those professionally trained in early Church history.
A Movement Without an O@ial Histo~
What has happened is this: each incoming class of eager
seminary students is treated to a rehash of classroom lecture
notes - notes that suppress the history of the Church whenever
this history comes into conflict with the “received truths” of the
dispensationalism of the 1920’s through the 1950’s. The students
are not told of Dave MacPherson’s thesis that Margaret
Macdonald, a girl about 20 years old, went into trances in 1830
and announced the pre-tribulation doctrine. We are still waiting
for Professor John Hannah, a competent and talented Church
historian, to go into print and show from original source documents
that MacPherson’s thesis is nothing but a sham. Strangely,
he has decided to remain silent. Or not so strangely as the
case may be.
13. House and Ice, Dominion Theology, p. 206.
14. Alan Patrick Boyd, A Dispensational PremillennialAnaly sis of the Eschatology
of the Post-Apostolic Fathers (Until the Death ofJustin Martyr), unpublished Master’s
Thesis, Dallas Theological Seminary, May, 1977.