There
are great living dispensational scholars today who understand that the
Bible has various programs for different times in divine history. There
is also a large company of such godly scholars in the past who made
outstanding contributions to our grasp of the full message of the Word
of God. What they have written is still with us today in terms of how we
should interpret the Scriptures. Below are some thoughts that any
interpreter of the Bible should be aware of.
THE NEW INTERPRETATION OF BIBLE PROPHECY
Dr. Robert Thomas
Since the 1970s, evangelicalism and evangelical hermeneutics have
undergone radical changes, changes that have affected interpretation of
the Bible’s prophetic teachings.
Iain Murray specifies the general time period of evangelicalism’s
slippage: “We have seen that the new evangelicalism, launched with such
promise, had lost its way in the United States by the late 1960s.” Later
he notes regarding evangelicalism’s attempt to attain academic
respectability.
purposes – as non-existent. History shows that when evangelicals allow that
approach their teaching will sooner or later begin to look little different from
that of liberals.
Probably the single most devastating change in hermeneutics has been a widespread endorsement of the step of preunderstanding
at the beginning of the exegetical process. It has dispensed with the
goal of a traditional grammatical-historical approach for achieving
objectivity in letting the text speak for itself.
The flippant way many evangelicals have forsaken the traditional
principle of single meaning illustrates the impact of incorporating
preunderstanding into the exegetical process. ... The moment we neglect
this principle we drift out upon a sea of uncertainty and conjecture.
One of the areas in which PD (Progressive Dispensationalism) has
departed from traditional grammatical-historical principles lies in its
notoriety for violating the traditional hermeneutical principle of
single meaning. The [PD’s] purpose that not only national Israel of the
future will fulfill her Old Testament prophecies, but also the church is
currently fulfilling those same prophecies. What PD calls
“complementary hermeneutics” clearly violates traditional principles of
literal interpretation.
New evangelical hermeneutics have opened wide doors for PD in
implementing its preunderstanding and its quest to find a midpoint
between Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism. … By thus ignoring the
way the original historical setting “freezes” the meaning of a text, D.
L. Bock concludes that textual meaning is dynamic, not static—ever
changing through the addition of new meanings. [Bock] tries to justify
this change by calling it revelatory progress, but revelatory progress
speaks of new passages with new meanings, not new passages that change
meanings of older passages.
If the current direction of evangelicalism continues, the movement
will eventually reach the status of postmodernist and deconstructionist
approaches to the Bible. The only remedy for this sickness will be a
return to traditional grammatical-historical principles of
interpretation.
Adapted from: The Gathering Storm, gen. ed. Mal Couch
