Rapture Fever

Revising Dispensationaltim to Death 157
unless accompanied by a full-scale book-publishing program, is
that it affects only those few people who are directly under
your control. Also, it cannot defend itself against hiring men
who sign a statement which they no longer care to defend in
public. This eventually produces a faculty full of time-servers
who dabble in biblical scholarship, if at all, only in areas that
are academically peripheral to the doubtful distinctive of the
institution’s mandatory statement of faith. These people bide
their time until a quiet transformation of the school becomes
institutionally possible. That day came for Talbot. It seems to
have come for Grace. It is coming for Dallas. Dispensationalism’s
torch is burning low. The flame-out approaches.
When it comes, no one who is holding that once-bright torch
will admit in public that the original oil is gone. That way, the
seminary’s naive donors will continue to send in money, despite
the fact that they are no longer getting their money’s worth.
Such is the price of Rapture fever. It eventually blinds all those
whom it afflicts.
The Terrible Price of Evasion
Donors who finance a seminary believe they are buying
several things. First, they think they are buying a supply of
future ministers who will meet the needs of churches. Second,
they hope they are financing academic specialists who will promote
and defend the particular theological system that the
seminary was established to promote and defend. Third, they
think they are buying a supply of future scholars who can and
will promote and defend the theology.
When a seminary faculty takes money on any other basis, the
school should publicly announce any exceptions to these three
tasks. Seminaries never do, but they should. Thus, if they are
no longer willing to promote the seminary’s theology openly
and forcefully, they should say so. If they decide that their
personal intellectual reputations will be sacrificed if they public-