Rapture Fever

Revising Dispen.nationalism to Death 155
that they had spent three or four years in seminary getting a
pack of lies taught to them in the name of historical classroom
continuity. Their professors had been equally misinformed by
their professors, and so on, right back to the founding of the
seminary. Nobody bothers to check the primary source documents,
since this might require an updating of his lecture notes.
Dispensational theology is like a large stable that never gets
swept out. Nobody wants to go in there with a shovel and
broom to remove the accumulated filth, so it just gets deeper
and riper It becomes more obvious to their brighter students
that they risk stepping in bad stuff every time they go into a
classroom to hear the familiar Party Line. The brighter graduates
very often depart from the Party Line. But still the classroom
charade goes on. The facts of Church history get dumped
down the equivalent of the memory hole in Orwell’s 1984.
This academic practice identifies a dying movement. You
cannot legitimately expect to move forward if your students are
deliberately misinformed. This is the same crisis facing the
Soviet Union and Red China today: ill-informed people make
ill-informed decisions. Only those Christian leaders who believe
that there is no future, that Jesus is coming again shortly to
Rapture them out of their troubles – especially the Augean
stables of dispensationalism’s unpublished official history -
would be so foolish as to refuse to cut their losses, admit the
past lies, and do serious historical scholarship in terms of the
movement’s official theology. Once again, bad eschatology has
produced suicidal results.
Black-Outs and Flame-Outs
This is why dispensationalist seminary professors – that is,
professors on dispensational seminary campuses who still actually
take dispensationalism seriously in their classrooms (a rapidly
declining number) – work so hard to keep their students
from reading anything that is not on the required reading lists.
They know what will happen to the best and the brightest of