Rapture Fever
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Rapture Fever

by Gary North by Gary North

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12.07.2013 Views

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is coming again shortly to Rapture them out of their troubles – especially the Augean stables of dispensationalism’s unpublished official history - would be so foolish as to refuse to cut their losses, admit the past lies, and do serious historical scholarship in terms of the movement’s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

156 RAPTURE FEVER their students if the students start reading “off campus” books. The familiar defensive measure against this probability (i.e., near certainty) of “corruption” is the creation of a systematic academic black-out, especially the prohibition of debates on campus between the faculty and outside scholars. They know what will happen. When Dr. Ray Sutton was a student at Dallas Theological Seminary in the mid-1970’s, he was told again and again by his professors: “Don’t read that book.” Almost without exception, the forbidden books were written by Calvinistic authors. (The one major exception: William Everett Bell’s 1967 Ph.D. dissertation, “A Critical Examination of the Pretribulation Rapture Doctrine in Christian Eschatology.”) Predictably he went to the library and read these forbidden books. The brighter students always did. By the time he was a senior, Sutton was a Calvinist. So were a lot of his fellow students. When the best response that a movement-oriented faculty member can offer to his movement’s academic critics is “Don’t read that book,” that movement is close to death. The inability of the Dallas Seminary faculty to provide answers more sophisticated than “Don’t read that book!” resulted in 198’7 in Sutton’s monumental study, Thut Yw May Pnmper: Dominion By Covenant. This book shows that the same biblical covenant model extends from the Old Testament into the New Testament - the ultimate challenge to dispensational theology. That a graduate of Dallas Seminary could produce such a challenge is indicative of the problem facing Dallas Seminary as the last surviving member of what in 1960 were the Big Three dispensational seminaries. And what is Dallas Seminary’s public response? Silence. On campus, I suppose it is the old refrain, “Don’t read that book.” Dallas Seminary is willing to defend dispensationalism only through threat of dismissal. A student who loses his ftith in the system and who admits this publicly is told to leave. So is any faculty member. But the problem with this sort of defense,

156 RAPTURE FEVER<br />

their students if the students start reading “off campus” books.<br />

The familiar defensive measure against this probability (i.e.,<br />

near certainty) of “corruption” is the creation of a systematic<br />

academic black-out, especially the prohibition of debates on<br />

campus between the faculty and outside scholars. They know<br />

what will happen.<br />

When Dr. Ray Sutton was a student at Dallas Theological<br />

Seminary in the mid-1970’s, he was told again and again by his<br />

professors: “Don’t read that book.” Almost without exception,<br />

the forbidden books were written by Calvinistic authors. (The<br />

one major exception: William Everett Bell’s 1967 Ph.D. dissertation,<br />

“A Critical Examination of the Pretribulation <strong>Rapture</strong><br />

Doctrine in Christian Eschatology.”) Predictably he went to the<br />

library and read these forbidden books. The brighter students<br />

always did. By the time he was a senior, Sutton was a Calvinist.<br />

So were a lot of his fellow students. When the best response<br />

that a movement-oriented faculty member can offer to his<br />

movement’s academic critics is “Don’t read that book,” that<br />

movement is close to death.<br />

The inability of the Dallas Seminary faculty to provide answers<br />

more sophisticated than “Don’t read that book!” resulted<br />

in 198’7 in Sutton’s monumental study, Thut Yw May Pnmper:<br />

Dominion By Covenant. This book shows that the same biblical<br />

covenant model extends from the Old Testament into the New<br />

Testament - the ultimate challenge to dispensational theology.<br />

That a graduate of Dallas Seminary could produce such a challenge<br />

is indicative of the problem facing Dallas Seminary as the<br />

last surviving member of what in 1960 were the Big Three<br />

dispensational seminaries. And what is Dallas Seminary’s public<br />

response? Silence. On campus, I suppose it is the old refrain,<br />

“Don’t read that book.”<br />

Dallas Seminary is willing to defend dispensationalism only<br />

through threat of dismissal. A student who loses his ftith in the<br />

system and who admits this publicly is told to leave. So is any<br />

faculty member. But the problem with this sort of defense,

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