Rapture Fever

220 RAPTURE FEVER
book refuting the books I have financed since 1984. If he had
been able to do this, he would have done it long before now.
This is why dispensationalism is paralyzed: its theologians are
intellectually unable to defend it. This is not because they are
stupid; it is because the dispensational system is incoherent. It
is now visibly fidling apart. Its official revisors are succeeding
only in speeding up the disintegration process. Its time is short.
In 1988, Dallas Seminary allowed the full eight-volume set of
Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systenzatic 2%eo10gy to go out of print. The
seminary allowed Scripture Press to print an abridged, twovolume
version in 1988. In January, 1993, the fill set was
reprinted by Kregel, an independent publisher that specializes
in reprints of out-of-print books. That the seminary did not
bother to keep in print the only comprehensive dispensational
systematic theology ever written indicates that a quiet shift is in
progress there. This shift will eventually be felt in the churches
that depend on Dallas Seminary to supply both their present
intellectual leadership and their fhture pastors.
A movement needs a long-term offensive strategy and a
contemporary defensive strategy in order to win. First, it needs
a strategy of replacement: leaven. It must have a strategy to replace
the dominant anti-Christian culture, plus all anti-Christian
rivals and all those within Christianity who preach a different
theology. Dispensationalism has never had a strategy of replacement
because it preaches a theology of departure from history.
Dispensationalism preaches that the Church, not anti-Christianity,
will be replaced at the end of the Church Age. Its strategy
has therefore been defensive: “Form a circle with the wagons!”
This defensive strategy is institutional, not intellectual. This
leads us to the second weakness of dispensationalism. Dispensationalism
has never produced a theologian who has been
willing to serve as a critic of the critics, a defender against all
attackers. The strategy of sibzce has always been the preferred
strategy. Either the movement’s theologians have not been
confident about their ability to defend the system (which is