Rapture Fever

160 RAPTURE FEVER
edited, Theonony An Informed Response in Decembe~ We replied
three books to one within 14 months. I said in print that if the
Westminster faculty replied to any of these books, I would publish
at least one volume in response, and I would keep replying,
volume for volume, until I had the last word. We theonomists
have not heard from Westminster Seminary again.
You must also launch an attack on your attackers; defense is
never sufficient to win a war for ideas. This is what the defense
of the faith requires: a victory. But dispensationalists refise to
acknowledge this fact, because they behkve ihat the Church’s failure
in this dh~ensation is predestined. They are consistent with their
theology. They pretend that by their silence they can defer
major problems until the Rapture solves them. They preach a
theology of deferral, of intellectual disengagement. They practice
whut they preadz. This is suicidal. One by one, their faculty members
quietly abandon the original position; one by one, their
brightest graduates defect. Eventually the seminary itself defects,
and the existing faculty is fired. This has happened at
both Tdbot and Grace. Tommy Ice thinks something like this
will happen at Dallas by the year 2000.
The fact is, a failure to respond in print is symptomatic of a
position that cannot be successfully defended. This is indicative
of a dying theology. It is only a mutter of time before the defectwns
erode the future of the movement. When a seminary’s faculty members
refuse to defend the school’s theology in print, it is only a
matter of time before that seminary will depart from the received
tradition. A theology that is not worth risking one’s
reputation to defend is not worth defending when the climate
of theological opinion shifts against the older belief
A paradigm shift is now in progress in dispensationalism. Its
systematic cultural irrelevance has become an embarrassment to
hundreds of thousands of Christian activists, who, unlike tenured
faculty members, are willing to take a public stand against
abortion or the public schools. Dallas Seminary’s continued
silence on Roe v. Wzde after two decades has condemned the