Rapture Fever

154 RAPTURE FEVER
It is worth noting that no Church historian on a dispensational
seminary campus has been willing to write a documented,
official history of the dispensational movement, for this
would involve confronting the embarrassing fact of at least
three generations of what had passed for official history before,
and what in Stalin’s day was called “agitprop.” We have in our
midst an influential theological and ecclesiastical movement
which is now a hundred and sixty years old, yet we still do not
have a single, footnoted, carefully researched history of the
movement by any professor teaching in a dispensational seminary.
What this means is that only anti-dispensationalists and
non-dispensationalists have bothered to write the history of the
movement. This, to put it mildly, is most peculiar.
I will put it bluntly: any centzny-old intellectual-ideological-imtitutional
movement which is incapable of producing its own oficial
htito~ is eqzuzlij incapable of maintaining itse~. It has lost the war
in advance.
I will put it even more bluntly: the reason why dispensationalism
has not produced a detailed, documented, publicly
accessible history is that its adherents do not believe that they have a
future. A record of the past, they believe, is hardly worth preserving
because the earthly future for Christians will soon be
cut short. Premillennialism strikes again!
Unrevised Lecture Notes
Dispensational seminary and Bible college professors (those
not teaching Church history) read their worn-out lecture notes
to their students – notes copied from their own professors years
ago. The myths and outright lies get repeated, incoming class
after class. The charade of academic integrity can go on for
only as long as these students and graduates refuse to read
serious works of scholarship. Understand, most graduates of
most seminaries are perfectly content to avoid reading works of
scholarship. Those dispensationalists who do read serious
books, however, risk experiencing a trauma. They may discover