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God's reason for creating Adam was His desire to reproduce Himself...He was not a little like God. He was not almost like God. He was not subordinate to God even.
-- Kenneth Copeland, "Following the Faith of Abraham," tape 01-3001, n.d.
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News: Answering the "Replacement Theology" Critics (Part 3)
Posted on Wednesday, October 19 @ 08:01:45 PDT by John |
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by Gary DeMar
Now that we’ve gotten some preliminaries out of the way, what is the truth behind the charge that non-dispensationalists believe in “replacement theology,” that the Church replaces ethnic Israel and her promises and that God is through with Israel forever? As I will show, the Gospels and Acts demonstrate that the first New Covenant believers were Jews who were defined as the Church by Jesus and Stephen. The use of the word Church in a Jewish context demonstrates the truth that the Church is not a “mystery parenthesis.”
One of the arguments that dispensationalists use to prove the pre-rib rapture is that after Revelation 3, the word “church” no longer appears.1 This must mean, according to a basic tenet of dispensationalism, that the church will be “raptured” so God once again can deal covenantally with ethnic Israel. The age of the church parenthesis is over when the rapture occurs. Dispensational logic is clear: The presence of the word “church” means the church is a present reality, while the absence of the word “church” means the church is absent from the earth.
Dispensationalists believe the church is a parenthesis in God’s plan with Israel because she rejected Jesus’ offer of the kingdom. The majority of classic dispensationalists are “Acts 2 Dispensationalists.” They believe the church began at Pentecost. Other dispensationalists believe the church started when Paul is told to “bear [Jesus’] name to the Gentiles” (Acts 9:15), when Paul started his mission to the Gentiles (13:2), or with Israel’s rejection of the kingdom of God and the sending of God’s salvation to the Gentiles (28:26–28), a view made popular by E. W. Bullinger (1837–1913). Some also see the transition from Israel to the Church taking place in Acts 8 or 11. For our discussion, it’s only important to know that all the dispensational systems claim the Church does not begin until after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus.
Click here to read the entire article
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Re: Answering the (Score: 1)
 by chrisliv on Wednesday, October 19 @ 11:50:39 PDT
(User Info | Send a Message) | Yeah,
The Dispensationalists are probably more Zionist than the Zionists.
The O.T. is rich with references and imagery of an evolutionary change that was coming for Israel and Jerusalem. In Jeremiah, Psalms, Isaiah, etc., there's probably more about the Church and the Gospel than there is in the N.T. writings, e.g., "In that day... the house of Israel and Jerusalem... the Remnant... written on their hearts... learn war no more," etc.
The Jews actually accused Christ of "Replacement Theology," too. But He told them not to think that He came to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but that He came to fulfill all that was written in the O.T.
And so He did.
The Church was there all the time, in a pre-adolesent form. It was the flower that had its root in old Israel, and was the long-foretold agent through which Christ and His spiritual offspring would be a blessing to all families of the Earth.
Christ made it clear, repeatedly, that the O.T. was being fulfilled in the 1st Century AD. A quick check with a concordance of the many times where the word "Isaiah" the prophet is found in the four Gospel accounts will often be coupled with the word "fulfilled".
So, Dispensationalists are accusing Preterists of the very same thing that the Jews accused Christ of. And both the Jews and the Dispensationalists were/are wrong for the very same reason: because they are afraid of liberty in Christ's Kingdom and think the old ways and covenant are somehow superior, so they resist change, even when, in the case of the Dispensationalists, it involves their wild futuristic speculations about reality.
Peace to you all,
C. Livingstone
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