Rapture Fever

The Strange Disappearance of Dtipensational Institutions 201
repeated. Debt is the lure. Debt is the killer. “I have faith that
God will bless this ministry later if I make a leap of faith now -
with other people’s money.”
Jerry Falwell is a decent man. He just forgot the rule: “Owe
no man any thing but to love one another” (Remans 13:8a). He
was under grace, not biblical law, he thought. Scofield stties
again!
In 1982, I wrote an essay, “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of
the New Christian Right.” It was published in Christianity and
Civilization. There I predicted the break-up of the New Christian
Right. I argued that its politically activist stance could not
be defended by its dispensational theology. One by one, the
leaders of that short-lived phenomenon have faded away. Those
few who remain rarely talk about eschatology. (In Beverly
LaHaye’s case, her husband talks about it; she doesn’t. Not with
400,000 on her activist mailing list!)
Conclusion
I will say it again: Di@ensationalism is dying. The leaders who
write the paperback prophecy books won’t admit it, but it’s
true. One by one, institutions that long maintained the old
position have revised, restructured, and retreated from the
intellectual battlefield.
This doesn’t prove that theonomy is winning. It means that
our most consistently antinomian, anti-victory, anti-activism
opponents are retiring, in every sense. Sensational paperback
books plus a Canadian tabloid newspaper filled with prophecies
that never come true cannot preserve the old theology. Hype is
not a substitute for scholarship.
It is just a matter of time. We have plenty of it. Dispensationalism
doesn’t. As those old travelogues used to end: “And so it’s
time to say, ‘Sayonara, Scofield!’ “