Lecture 14: The Millennial Map: Systems, Agreements, and the Issues That Divide

The lecture, section by section

1. Three thousand pages on the farm

   The sheer volume of prophecy has summoned massive labors, none more so than George N. H. Peters's three-volume Theocratic Kingdom, which a young Rosscup carried to his father-in-law's farm one summer and pored over by night, watching a pastor of long ago read everything of his era and conclude for the premillennial faith. The lesson beneath the anecdote: let the Savior, not the system, drive the interpretation, and keep studying for life.

2. Every field has its arguments

   Prophecy's controversies can overwhelm, but they are not unique: parables, typology, baptism for the dead, Jephthah's vow, and the witch of Endor all carry competing views. Disagreement flows from human limits, no one knows the whole picture, and from lack of preparation, time, vital interest, and trained logic. The teacher's response to a wild answer in Sunday school is never contempt but kindness: appreciate the suggestion, ask for others, and patiently train a congregation to read context over the years.

3. Misrepresentation runs both ways

   Amillennialists sometimes caricature premillennialists as crass, wooden literalists; premillennialists sometimes dismiss amillennialists as allegorizers who dodge the text. Both caricatures fail the best men: Hendriksen, Kistemaker, and Poythress earnestly seek the literal meaning as they understand it. Represent every position by its own best statement, and do unto others as you would have them do unto you, not as they have done.

4. The broad common ground

   Before the divisions, the agreements: God will triumph; Christ will come bodily; the dead will rise; the intermediate state gives way to the eternal; punishment is eternal and conscious; rewards will be graded equitably, five cities and ten; the book of life stands; the New Jerusalem awaits; service to God runs on forever, the most exhilarating prospect a believer can conceive; and in that city all the redeemed of all ages, Jew and Gentile, Abel to the last convert, dwell unified in the same blessings.

5. Stonehaven: love across the divide

   In Scotland Rosscup found no sweeter believers than the amillennial fellowship at Stonehaven, who lent the poor student family a car, shared their homes, and asked him to teach Romans. He resolved never to make prophecy the battleground, warned by the legacy of an argumentative young man from his own seminary who had come to convert them all and left behind only the memory of an unloving visitor. One day the disagreements melt away; until then, accuracy matters, and so does love.

6. Amillennialism and postmillennialism

   The amillennialist holds that the church age is the millennium, Revelation 20's thousand years a symbol of the long era, with the second advent bringing final judgment and the eternal state; its commentators include Lenski, Hendriksen, Kistemaker, and Poythress. The postmillennialist expects this age to ripen into a golden era before the advent; its recent reconstructionist form, theonomy or dominion theology, expects God's law to permeate society through its doctors, lawyers, and housewives, and its interpreters read Revelation's seals, trumpets, and bowls in the Roman legions of the first century, a reading Rosscup finds impossible to square with the text while urging students to read its ablest advocate fairly.

7. Two premillennialisms

   Premillennialists agree the thousand years follows the second advent, and divide beyond that. The non-dispensational school of George Ladd reads the millennium literally yet makes the church the spiritual Israel today and carries it through the tribulation, a merging Rosscup finds inconsistent with any remaining future distinctive for Israel. The dispensational school holds church and Israel distinct, I will build my church spoken of something future and new, reads Revelation 7's twelve named tribes as the tribes named, and generally holds a pre-tribulational rapture; its standard guides run from Ryrie and McClain to the seminary's own two volumes on Revelation.

8. The family's newer branches

   Progressive dispensationalism, arising in the 1980s, presses greater continuity between Israel and the church; the debate volume where each side answers the other shows even the labels contested, since the normative school is also progressive and the progressive school claims to be normative. The pre-wrath school of Rosenthal and Van Kampen produced one of the lecture's warmest stories: a whole day at Wrightwood, MacArthur, Mayhue, and a violently ill Rosscup at Van Kampen's chalkboard, neither side persuading the other, friendship intact to the end. And the old ultra strict law-grace divide is refuted from within: a monumental dissertation and Ryrie's own book document abundant grace under the Mosaic covenant, for God has always been gracious.

9. The foundational issue: what literal means in practice

   Every system claims a natural hermeneutic; the test is practice. Revelation 7 names the tribes of Israel tribe by tribe: the natural reading takes them as Israel. Ezekiel 36 promises return to the land that I gave to your fathers: the land given to Abraham and Jacob is the same terra firma on the same map, and cannot be traded for the church's spiritual blessings or relocated to heaven, where no hundred-year-old sinner of Isaiah 65 could die. Honest scholars differ here in all sincerity; the student must watch what each method actually does with such texts and commit with integrity.

10. The new covenant: correcting his own team

    What is the New Testament claiming when it quotes the Old: fulfillment, partial fulfillment, or illustration? Rosscup, an avowed dispensationalist, respectfully dissents from teachers on his own side, including MacArthur's chapter denying present new covenant fulfillment. This cup is the new covenant in my blood; Paul is a minister of a new covenant; Hebrews declares the mediator's death has taken place and the called receive the promise. To Rosscup the natural force is partial, inaugurated fulfillment now, believers under the covenant's spiritual provisions, while Israel's land promises await their own day, and saying we are under the benefits but not under the covenant is misusing language to guard a system.

11. This is that

    At Pentecost Peter cites three texts: Psalm 16 on resurrection, fulfilled in Christ risen; Psalm 110 on the session at God's right hand, fulfilled in Christ ascended; and Joel 2 on the outpoured Spirit, introduced with this is that, not this is like that. Two of the three plainly claim fulfillment, arguing the third claims some real aspect of it: the Spirit poured out in measure today. And partial fulfillment undercuts nothing: the nations already enjoy the Abrahamic covenant's international blessing by faith, while the first advent's literally fulfilled details, Bethlehem, Judah's tribe, guarantee the literal fulfillment still to come for Israel.

12. Bows, horses, and the Colt revolver

    What of Ezekiel 39's bows, arrows, and horses in a future battle? Two literal options: the Revelation judgments may so shatter manufacture that armies revert to primitive weapons; or Ezekiel described real future weaponry in the vocabulary his hearers knew, the form changing as the Colt revolver succeeded older arms, the story of the Texas Rangers finding Samuel Colt in his basement supplying the lecture's illustration, while the weapons remain literal weapons. And the charge that the second view licenses spiritualizing the land compares apples with nuts: weaponry changes form across centuries; the land God gave the fathers does not.

13. Rock houses are not built overnight

    The close is pastoral: the mass of issues seems overwhelming, but God is not throwing up shanties; he builds rock houses, slowly, through years of notes, review, and rereading, until the blast on the hillside finds something that stands. And when a question outruns memory, the honest answer builds credibility: great question, let me look at my notes and get back to you, and then be sure you do.

1. The Stonehaven believers loved a family across a real doctrinal divide, and the argumentative young visitor left only a legacy of hate. What determines which legacy we leave when we disagree about the Bible?

2. Rosscup publicly and respectfully dissents from his own admired teachers where he thinks the text requires it. When has loyalty to a teacher or tradition tempted you to soften what a passage actually says?

3. God builds rock houses, not overnight shanties. Where in your grasp of Scripture are you tempted to want the shanty's speed, and what would patient rock-house building look like this year?