Rapture Fever

198 RAPTURE FEVER
The restructuring we have announced to begin in the fall of
this year [1993] involves both philosophy and method and refii-ms
the primary focus of Grace Theological Seminary on
preparation of ministry leaders.l
But what of the previously crucial task of defending dispensational
theology? What of Grace’s intellectual leadership within
Anerican dispensational churches? Silence. Dead silence.
I conclude that President Davis, like an earlier President
Davis, is leading a secession movement within the Grace Brethren
Church and American dispensationalism. Grace Seminay has
just seceded from htitoric dispensationalism. Will he succeed? Probably.
The younger donors are as embarrassed by traditional
dispensationalism as the younger theologians are. This secession
is visible at the top, but bureaucrats always count the costs of
change well in advance. They think they know what the next
generation will accept, and they have concluded that the seminary’s
donors will follow them into a theologically vague fiture.
Dallas Seminary is next. There is not one man remaining on
that faculty who can or will answer Ken Gentry’s book, He Shall
Have Dominion: A Postmillennial Esch.atology (Institute for Christian
Economics, 1992). We are heating the silence of the Zambs.
They have left the field of intellectual battle, to the extent that
they were ever on it. Their continuing silence regarding O. T
Allis’ refutation of dispensationalism, Prophecy and the Church
(1945), indicates that they have never tried to respond intellectually
to the challenges offered by professional theologians and
scholars. Charles Ryrie’s brief attempt to respond in Di.spensationalism
Today came twenty years too late, and was an ill-fated
effort anyway. Besides, he disappeared from the Dallas faculty
in the early 1980’s under clouded circumstances. Dallas Seminary’s
faculty members have become theological deaf-mutes.
1. President to Pustor ( 1 st quarter 1993), p. 1.