In his essay, “Hyper-Preterism and Unfolding Biblical Eschatology“, published as part of When Shall These Things Be? A Reformed Response to Hyper-Preterism (ed. Keith Mathison), Richard Pratt Jr. challenges the full preterist position that the prophetic time texts of the New Testament can only be read as they are stated and, as such, are an indication of exclusive fulfillment within first century events, specifically the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70.
Before looking at NT texts, Pratt surveys the range of prophecy in the Old Testament. Using the text of Jeremiah and the potter (Jeremiah 18:1-10) as a starting point, Pratt identifies “two major types of prophetic prediction: judgment and salvation [blessing]. All prophetic oracles gravitate in one or both of these directions.” The texts of vss. 7-10 demonstrate that the fulfillment of God’s prophetic announcements can be changed as God reacts “to the way in which human beings respond to threats of judgment and offers of blessing. In terms of his providential involvement in the world, God often watches to see how people react to the prophetic word and then moves history in particular directions.”
Pratt divides the level of God’s prophetic determination into four levels:
- Conditional predictions — these typically take the form of “if … then” prophecies and “reveal that, providentially speaking, God had not yet committed to one direction or another.”
- Unqualified predictions — unlike conditional predictions, these prophecies have no explicit conditions, but reveal that “at the moment of the prediction, God had a significant level of determination” for a specific future direction, either in judgment or blessing.
- Confirmed predictions — like unqualified predictions, these have no explicit conditions, but instead include verbal confirmation of God’s determination or visual signs to attest the prophecy.
- Sworn predictions — these prophecies are accompanied by a divine oath that “raises that prediction to the level of a covenantal certainty.”
Through each of these types of prophecy, Pratt maintains that “prophets did not want to inform their listeners about the future as much as they wanted to motivate their listeners to form the future.” It was the listeners’ response that determined God’s final providence, not a scripted plan of predetermined decisions and activities. Pratt is careful not to equate contingent prophecy with open theism, inasmuch as God’s sovereign plan is not changing, but rather the way by which He implements His plan.
Pratt goes on to survey the progression of OT prophecy, beginning with Moses and continuing to Haggai and Zechariah. The key takeaway here is that Daniel’s “seventy weeks” prophecy (Daniel 9) is a sevenfold increase of the original 70-year covenantal judgment (Jeremiah 25:11-12). This extension is caused by the lack of repentance of the Jews during their exile; the precedent for this is stated in Leviticus 26:18.
The return to Jerusalem after the original 70 years is considered then a partial realization of Jeremiah’s restoration prophecy, but the complete fulfillment of restoration and covenantal blessing was delayed until what became the time of Christ. In turn, the prophecies of Haggai and Zechariah are to be read as a renewed call for repentance, such that the restoration “might come sooner rather than later” and Daniel’s seventy weeks would be reduced.
See for example, Haggai’s contingent offer of blessing to Zerubbabel that the blessings we tend to see as manifested in Christ would have been accorded to him (Zerubbabel) instead. This is why it’s so important to understand the original context of these prophecies and recognize why their fulfillment in Jesus Christ was never the primary offer. Once the prophetic voice went silent and the contingent offers had lapsed, then fulfillment could only happen in Christ.
What does all this have to do with preterism?
The time texts in the gospels are well known and there have been countless theories devised to explain them apart from a literal reading that the events described would occur within the lifetime of the original audience. However, if we apply the principle of contingent prophecy, then the reality of a delayed fulfillment might be explained. Pratt points to Peter’s sermon on Pentecost as an example of a contingent offer within the context of imminent eschatological expectation:
Repent, therefore, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out. Then the Lord may grant you a time of recovery and send the Messiah appointed for you, that is, Jesus. He must be received into heaven until the time comes for the universal restoration of which God has spoken through his holy prophets from the beginning. (Acts 3:19-21, REB)
Peter indicates three benefits of repentance: (1) the forgiveness of sins, (2) times of recovery (or refreshment), and (3) God would send Jesus to restore all things. Certainly Peter’s early expectation appears to be consistent with full preterism in that these blessings and Jesus’ return would happen before that first generation passed away. However, the eventual “no show” of Christ forced Peter to conclude that it “is not that the Lord is slow in keeping his promise, as some suppose, but that he is patient with you. It is not his will that any should be lost, but that all should come to repentance.” (2 Peter 3:9, REB)
Peter continues on in his later letter to describe a cataclysmic return of Christ (3:10) and encourages his audience to live “devout and dedicated lives” that they would “look forward to the coming of the day of God, and work to hasten it on.” (3:11-12, REB) Peter still believed that, like Haggai and Zechariah before him, sincere repentance would work to shorten the delay of Christ’s return. The fact of Christ’s return was (and is) immutable, but the timing of his return could be changed with sincere repentance, just as the lack of repentance delays His return, even today.
The destruction of Jerusalem (AD 70) might then be seen, like the return of the Jews to Jerusalem after 70 years in Babylonia, as a partial fulfillment of God’s promise to overturn the world order, but not a complete fulfillment of the promised covenantal judgment, which will occur at the end of time and include both Jew and Gentile.
5 Comments
First off, isn’t it odd, given the scores of time texts, that just a couple passages would provide us the major qualifier, a condition buried within the promises that reads something like the tricky fine print exclusion/condition clauses on modern legal documents?
Mathison would have God promise, predict, and assure all first century believers through Jesus, John, Peter, and Paul that they were living in “the last days” (Acts 2:16-17), and in the words of Peter himself in 1 Pet 4:7, “the end of all things is near” and then be stymied somehow by an unforeseen rejection of the gospel.
Nowhere do the Resurrection and judgment appear as separable from the restoration of Israel. Jesus’ parables in no way imply a gap between, for instance, the vengeance upon the vineyard caretakers and the giving of the vineyard to others. Yet that’s what’s implied by Mathison’s scheme. You have God saying, “Well, I was going to give you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but since you didn’t say please, I’m only giving you the peanut butter. I won’t give you the jelly until you say please.” Come on, Keith! Anyone can tell you’re graspng at straws.
Moreover, Peter again shows that the restoration of Israel/the coming of salvation was imminent without any conditional stipulations in 1 Peter 1:5, “…who are kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation about to be revealed in the last time.” Hebrews 9:28, the only passage in Scripture that refers to the Second Coming with the word “second”, defines it not simply as judgment but also as the accomplishment of redemption, “so Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.” No intervening “comings”, no conditions.
In fact, as I mentioned in my Jeremiah and the potter post, Paul is clear that God intended all along for the Jews’ hearts to be hardened, so any claim that some massive wholesale repentance was an achievable stipulation is horribly problematic, especially coming from a Reformed guy like Mathison who denies the synergism necessary for complete fulfillment as a fundamental matter of doctrine! God did delay forty years so that the maximum number of people could hear — Paul had just penetrated the heart of the empire a few years before AD 66, and this jives really well with Peter’s statement that God was not slow in keeping His promises. Gosh, think of what Peter’s audience would have said about his statement in light of the two millennia delay futurists insist upon!
At some point, it becomes obvious that Mathison and other futurists are grasping at straws, even when it challenges their own fiercely-defended beliefs on sovereignty vs. man’s ability to choose. All to uphold the creeds. the production of which the Westminster Confession of Faith describes as fallible (“All synods or councils, since the Apostles’ times, whether general or particular, may err; and many have erred”).
Well, given your recently stated resolve to refocus your blog, this may be the last of these eschatology posts I get to comment on for HiS. I’ll miss it – it’s been enjoyable for me. Luckily, I can talk about more than just eschatology, and I certainly intend to do so. Congrats on your first year anniversary!
Well, given your recently stated resolve to refocus your blog, this may be the last of these eschatology posts I get to comment on for HiS. I’ll miss it – it’s been enjoyable for me. Luckily, I can talk about more than just eschatology, and I certainly intend to do so. Congrats on your first year anniversary!
Thank you, but you won’t be rid of me that easily. Eschatology is one of the few things I’ve learned a little bit more than nothing about, so I fully intend to keep plugging away in speculating to that regard, even if I don’t know for sure how it’s going to end (ha ha).
BTW, the author of the article in question was Richard Pratt Jr., not Mathison, though the latter certainly bears some overall accountability for being the editor of the collected book. I’ve gotten the impression from several of the articles now that their approach is not a direct refutation of full preterism, but instead constructing arguments designed to undercut any exclusive claims by FP, e.g. all prophecy must have been fulfilled in the first century.
Another example: I’m halfway through Mathison’s own article and he’s just made the argument that the phrase “the coming of the Son of Man” doesn’t necessarily mean the second coming of Christ to Creation, whether physical or spiritual, but could mean the ascension of Jesus to heaven, to receive his throne.
The promised exegetical rebuttal is at the end of the book, but I’m making myself read the entire thing front to back.
Woops! Pratt it is.
What in the world is Mathison’s argument intended to convey? Many preterists, myself included, agree with Mathison’s point. I think the ascension into the clouds was meant to illustrate in the physical what was going on in spiritual terms (is heaven really in the sky?), which was the fulfillment of Daniel 7’s Son of Man going before the Ancient of Days on the clouds to receive power and glory (receiving His throne). Mathison’s point certainly doesn’t help the case for anyone expecting a literal or in any way physical return of the Son of Man on clouds. Maybe you can explain how he uses this to undermine full preterist claims.
And for the record, before I was a full preterist, I was bewildered at why FPs insisted that everything had to be fulfilled in the first century; it seemed to be an arbitrary hermeneutic. But what wore me down was how all the apocalyptic language was leading toward things that as a partial preterist I definitely believed had happened in the first century. What I began to see was that it was truly an arbitrary hermeneutic to suggest bits and pieces were fulfilled and others yet to come.
http://preteristheresy.blogspot.com/
Hope you enjoy the attached link. My goal for this blog is to “Speaking to Full Preterists in a Language They Can Understand” by using their own writings to show them how heretical their view is. The division found within Preterist circles shows what kind of fruit they bare.
There are many errors and consequences of this system of interpreting bible prophecy and I hope to show these throughout the blog.
I have also posted some humorous posts to liven up the discussion. I hope you enjoy.
Elshaddai, I think Pratt is correct about the “four levels” in reference to prophecies. We see each demonstrated in the OT, at one level or another.
But I’ll have to disagree with his interpretation of the 70th weeks of Daniel 9. As you know, I’m not Preterist, whether full or partial.