CharlieJ
Puritan Board Junior
This was a lighthearted note I wrote on facebook, where I have many nominally Dispensational friends.
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Sometimes believers articulate views of themselves, the church, and the world that are not only incorrect, but that are actually self-contradictory. What follows is an imaginary conversation between two people. Two friends, Rick the Reformed Baptist (or Presbyterian or Anglican, if you like) and Bob the Bible church guy (a generic non-confessional dispensationalist) are talking about life, when Rick thinks of something.
R: Say, Bob, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or maybe just about the same?
B: Oh, that’s easy, Rick. It’s getting worse and worse all the time. I mean, the President is a democrat, homosexuals are all over the place, the economy is in the tubes, and now TV is digital.
R: But what about the big picture, Bob. I mean, not focusing just on this year or this decade, but what do you think about the whole scope of history?
B: Same thing. The politics are all moving toward one world government, and the church is getting more and more apostate. We’re just hanging on until the Rapture.
R: How about you explain to me how you view church history? Start at the beginning.
B: Ok. After the apostles died, the church tanked. Judaizers and Gnostics and all kinds of superstition crept in, and they started believing in things like baptismal regeneration and infant baptism and bishops. Then when Constantine took over, it got even worse. He organized the state church and inserted all kinds of paganism. In that whole early church period, there is hardly any Christianity.
R: What about Augustine, Bob? I’ve always appreciated him.
B: Oh, he was one of the worst. He was an allegorizer and his theology formed the basis of the Catholic church. For the next thousand years there was hardly any Christianity, except for a few Baptists that kept getting burned or drowned.
R: What about the Reformation, Bob? What about guys like Luther and Calvin?
B: Well, Luther got the gospel right. Not sure about Calvin, because he believed in predestination and burned people. But anyway, they still didn’t get rid of all the problems in Catholicism. That’s why they persecuted Baptists and had oppressive church governments. Really, until America there was no freedom of religion for Bible-believers, and even then it was a while before the church recovered an authentic method of reading the Scriptures without using allegory.
R: You mean Dispensationalism?
B: You can call it that, but it’s just reading the Bible plainly and taking God at his word.
R: So, you mean to say that 1,000 years ago there was just about no Christianity, 500 years ago there was a still-mostly-Catholic kind of Christianity, 200 years ago there was freedom for “Bible-believing” Christians, and only since Dallas Seminary has the church interpreted the Bible correctly?
B: More or less, yeah.
R: Then how can the world be getting worse and worse?
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Sometimes believers articulate views of themselves, the church, and the world that are not only incorrect, but that are actually self-contradictory. What follows is an imaginary conversation between two people. Two friends, Rick the Reformed Baptist (or Presbyterian or Anglican, if you like) and Bob the Bible church guy (a generic non-confessional dispensationalist) are talking about life, when Rick thinks of something.
R: Say, Bob, do you think the world is getting better or worse, or maybe just about the same?
B: Oh, that’s easy, Rick. It’s getting worse and worse all the time. I mean, the President is a democrat, homosexuals are all over the place, the economy is in the tubes, and now TV is digital.
R: But what about the big picture, Bob. I mean, not focusing just on this year or this decade, but what do you think about the whole scope of history?
B: Same thing. The politics are all moving toward one world government, and the church is getting more and more apostate. We’re just hanging on until the Rapture.
R: How about you explain to me how you view church history? Start at the beginning.
B: Ok. After the apostles died, the church tanked. Judaizers and Gnostics and all kinds of superstition crept in, and they started believing in things like baptismal regeneration and infant baptism and bishops. Then when Constantine took over, it got even worse. He organized the state church and inserted all kinds of paganism. In that whole early church period, there is hardly any Christianity.
R: What about Augustine, Bob? I’ve always appreciated him.
B: Oh, he was one of the worst. He was an allegorizer and his theology formed the basis of the Catholic church. For the next thousand years there was hardly any Christianity, except for a few Baptists that kept getting burned or drowned.
R: What about the Reformation, Bob? What about guys like Luther and Calvin?
B: Well, Luther got the gospel right. Not sure about Calvin, because he believed in predestination and burned people. But anyway, they still didn’t get rid of all the problems in Catholicism. That’s why they persecuted Baptists and had oppressive church governments. Really, until America there was no freedom of religion for Bible-believers, and even then it was a while before the church recovered an authentic method of reading the Scriptures without using allegory.
R: You mean Dispensationalism?
B: You can call it that, but it’s just reading the Bible plainly and taking God at his word.
R: So, you mean to say that 1,000 years ago there was just about no Christianity, 500 years ago there was a still-mostly-Catholic kind of Christianity, 200 years ago there was freedom for “Bible-believing” Christians, and only since Dallas Seminary has the church interpreted the Bible correctly?
B: More or less, yeah.
R: Then how can the world be getting worse and worse?
