Kevin,
I resonate with your comments more than your may realize. Permit a few late night autobiographical notes.
The re-kindling of faith during my teen years was at the hands of dispensationalsits who presented me with a Scofield Bible on my 16th birthday. Since then, I have had a positive appreciation for dispensational teachers I have known (long after leaving their ranks), gratitude for the blessing they were to two of my children who attended a dispensational college and came out even stronger disciples of Jesus Christ, and tactical satisfaction with the times they have stood with other evangelical brethren against liberalism in the church. My own private peace with dispensationalists was also continued since, as an historic premil, I shared with them a "literal" interpretation of Rev. 20. And, the fact that some of them (e.g., Johnny Mac) are strong proponents of the Doctrines of Grace didn't hurt either. Letting John MacArthur run your interferance makes for a very strong front line.
Frankly, my tolerance also comes because of my bitter experience with the struggle between evangelicals and mainline liberals. When my group of churches left the mainline ABCUSA, no other region joined us. The "conservative evangelicals" in the ABC (a plurality if not a majority) were either buried in their denial or fearful of losing the financial perks of the generous ABC retirement program.
Looking at the last half century, I have come to the conclusion that Carl Henry's grand experiment in "evangelicalism" has been a miserable failure. It has seen the charismatization, seeker-sensitization, and Willowcreeking of conservative Protestantism. His flagship seminary (i.e., Fuller) now promotes Emergent Church events as the last best thing since sliced bread, makes peace with Islam, and apologizes to Mormons when not demanding complete egalitarianism and revisionist interpretations of the Bible! What is left of evangelicalism cannot seem capable of drawing lines between truth and error. Believing in nothing firmly, they seem to fall for everything. As a subscriber to Christianity Today for almost 40 years (39 actually), I sorrow at how far it has fallen from its original vision, even during my lifetime!
In the face of all of this, just about the only two groups that seem to have "kept the faith" are the confessionally Reformed and the dispensationalists.
Grudem presciently predicts that evangelical feminism inevitably leads to tolerance of homosexuality. This tallies with my experience at FTS (e.g. Jewett came out on that side before his death). "Evangelical egalitarian" David Scholar's memorial service was last Saturday. He was a kind and gentle man and a brilliant NT scholar who blessed me greatly when I was the interim pastor at his church. Yet, he had begun to equivocate on homosexuality and I remember his wife, still a FTS administrator, as one who defended the church having a gay minister of music!
Here in SoCal, only Talbot, Masters, and WS-Cal resist the encroachments of evangelical feminism. And, of the three, one is Reformed and the other two are dispi havens! Time and again, the confesionally Reformed, the dispensationalists, and the relative handful of Reformed Baptists are about the only ones who seem to retain a commitment to the Bible, to the exclusivity of Christ, and to a belief in the efficacy of the Gospel.
Now that my eschatology has become more Reformationally mainstream (i.e., leaning so far to the amil side, I may fall over), more of the errors of dispensationalsim stand out to me in stark relief. Even though progressive dispensationalists seem to have eliminated most of the more odious features of their former system, the classical Reformed view is neater, tighter, and easier to defend as "biblical" (in my opinion).
But, still licking my wounds from the denominational wars, reeling at the dizzying spin of evangelicals trying to defend everything from the Lakeland "Revival" to revisionist views of traditional biblical teaching, to the drift (and in some cases pellmell run) to the left leaves me more than a little appreciative of my faithful and orthodox dispensational friends in places like Masters and Talbot.
Bless their pointed heads, our dispensational brethren are wrong on some very important things. But, they are just about the only allies we have in America during this time of secularization. Who else will stand with us on issues of historical-grammatical hermeneutics? Who else still believes that Jesus meant what he said in John 14:6? Who else will stand up and disagree with majoritarian thinking in a secular world? The mainline is just a few years behind the cultural leading indicators in places like Berkeley and Harvard.
Yes, you are correct. I'm soft on dispensatinalism. The evangelical ship is sinking and the confessionally Reformed and (non fundy) dispensational brethren have all of the life rafts. I don't agree with their system. But, there are so few of us without them. And, lately, their leading voices are becoming more Calvinistic. Give it a few years. Progressive dispensationalism will collapse into Reformed (or at least Calvinistic) thinking. It is an intrinsically unbalanced system that cannot sustain itself independently.
) My point simply is and always has been that to believe that God has saved people differently in different dispensations is dangerously wrong. 
to Bill! Last night I was so caught up in what I was writing that I never got back to it. But I do remember thinking that Joseph must feel left out of his own thread. I'm so sorry Joseph! 
OK. Well, it must be rare indeed (thank goodness) because I've never come in contact with it. That's why I wondered if you meant Premil. No insult to your intelligence intended
