A Two-Edged Sword: A Lay Preterist's Eschatology

By Paul Gentry

To Christians who sometimes have doubts:
Have you ever heard an exposition on the kingdom of God from the pulpit? Have you ever considered and unearthed for yourself the history, culture, and events of the first-century Christians? Is "only God knows" an answer to many of your questions?
All biblical prophecy is fulfilled. This is the position of Preterism, from the Latin "praeter," a prefix denoting that something is 'past' or 'beyond'. Almost since the days of Christ, eschatology has been a subject of confusion and anxiety among Christians. Christians have seldom viewed the 'time of the end' from its original viewpoint: that of ancient Judaism. Instead, they derive their last-days theories from Christian perspectives. As a result, theory and conjecture loom large in Christianity.
Paul Gentry is not a theologian schooled in divinity. He has never held a high ranking in any church denomination. He has no pecuniary interest or personal agenda in arranging his notes in book form. He simply wishes to convey the gleanings of his own studies to anyone who might be curious.
Please read these notes with an open mind. Challenge them. Satisfy yourself that you have better reasons for unsettled theories and the decline of church attendance. Send him a scathing review if you wish. All Gentry hopes is to inspire readers to ponder the truth of God's Word. "A Two-Edged Sword" will challenge you to divest yourself of devotion and tradition - just this once - and study scripture and history at arm's length, with no presuppositions or assumptions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798350905274

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A Two-Edged Sword

© 2023 Paul Gentry

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN 979-8-35090-526-7

eBook ISBN 979-8-35090-527-4

Author’s Note

This book references the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible because that version follows a word-for-word translation philosophy rather than a thought-for-thought philosophy. Rather than weighing concepts against the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, the ESV weighs English words and phrases against their counterparts in the original languages. The ESV is a literal translation. Therefore, this book references the ESV for its accuracy. For comparison’s sake, this book may reference the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), another literal translation, as well as other translations for contrast.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Reclaiming the Premise

The Sum of Israel

The Law

The Prophets

Consummation

The Kingdom of God

The Kingdom as the Gospel

The Church in the Kingdom

The End of the Age

The Day Drawing Near

The Jewish-Roman Wars

Apocalyptic Parallels

The Divine Legacy

The Resurrection and the Life

The Power of Forgiveness and Spirit of Truth

Footnotes on Covenant Eschatology

Answering Orthodoxy

Division Within

More on Dissent

Conclusion

Introduction

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. (Acts 17:11)

In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, director of the Brera Observatory in Milan, began mapping and naming natural features on Mars. He named the Martian seas and continents, or the dark and light areas on the planet’s surface, with names from historic and mythological sources. He saw straight, trench-like features on the terrain and called them canali. Canali is Italian for channels, but the term was translated into canals for English-speakers, implying intelligent life on Mars. The mistranslation was taken to mean that large-scale artificial structures once existed on the red planet, implying the existence of intelligent life there.

In 1894, Percival Lowell, a wealthy astronomer from Boston, made his first observations of Mars from a private observatory that he built in Flagstaff, Arizona (the Lowell Observatory). He concluded that the canals were indeed real and mapped hundreds of them. Lowell believed that the straight lines were artificial canals created by sentient Martians to carry water from the polar caps to the equatorial regions.

Lowell’s theories inspired the young English writer H.G. Wells to pen his opus, The War of the Worlds, which he published in 1898. In this novel, Wells spun a tale of an invasion of Earth by savage Martians and launched a whole new genre of alien science fiction.¹

We have learned since Schiaparelli and Lowell that these canali were not channels at all but rather optical illusions. Any actual channels or trenches existing on the planet were created over the eons as meteors ricocheted off the surface. Meteor bombardment created the naturally occurring terrain, and hallucinations created the rest.

The mistranslation of a single Italian word forever steered science fiction writers in a whole new direction of creativity and only temporarily steered scientists in the wrong direction of empiricism. While fanciful tales of Martians visiting the unsuspecting earthlings nearby continued to captivate and entertain large audiences, the error only temporarily sidelined the empirical truth.

Mistranslations of words and phrases from the ancient Hebrew and Greek, on the other hand, have sown seeds of much more far-reaching and deleterious consequences in the world that persist today, namely in Christendom. Numerous textual variances have been eliminated over the centuries, but even after centuries of editing for accuracy, Christians insist on embracing long-held customs rooted in error.

In the King James Version of the Bible (the KJV), for example, the Greek aeon is translated not to age but erroneously to world, as in Matthew chapter 12:

And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come (Mt 12:32, KJV).

This mistranslation suggests to many believers that Christ was foretelling not the coming of a new age but the coming of a new planet, and so Christians for centuries have been anticipating the earth’s literal destruction and re-creation. But how accurate is the KJV?

The text of the KJV derived from all the preceding English translations, i.e., the Bishops Bible, the Great Bible, and the Geneva Bible. The KJV also relied heavily on the Masoretic text, the Hebrew of which the translation committees of the seventeenth century did not fully comprehend, and on the Textus Receptus, a text far removed from the original Greek.² In short, the KJV was a translation that was destined for revision.

Now consider this verse in Titus as translations like the KJV render it:

Looking for that blessed hope, and the glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior, Jesus Christ (Ti 2:13, KJV).

Compare this rendering to a Greek Interlinear or a literal translation, such as the English Standard Version (ESV), which reads like this:

[W]aiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ (Ti 2:13, ESV).

Notice the difference? It’s subtle, but it makes a world of difference. In the KJV, Jesus Christ is the object of the appearing. In the ESV, the glory of Jesus Christ is the object of the appearing. The difference is profound. Properly translated, believers await Jesus’ appearance not in body but in glory, much like Elijah’s appearance as embodied in John the Baptist (Mt 17:11-13). Improperly translated, believers await another corporeal appearance of Christ, which, despite one prediction after another, never happens. And as predictions of the self-proclaimed prophets fail time after time, modern scholars, having access to manuscripts discovered since the KJV and having more familiarity with the Masoretic text, can reconcile many more textual variances and render translations much truer to the original languages.

A literal new planet and a redeemer’s flesh-and-blood return on a cloud are teachings contrary to biblical truth, as more accurate translations inform us, and these two false teachings only scratch the surface of the erroneous doctrine of orthodox Christianity regarding the Advent. Erroneous translations and teachings have altered several key elements of the faith.

Sadly, mistranslations and misinterpretations of the words of Christ and his apostles began long before the KJV in 1611, and along with these mistranslations and false teachings came the inevitable misconstruing of eschatology. Even in the second century, church fathers began to ignore the time statements that Jesus and his apostles made regarding the fulfillment of prophecy, and a centuries-long tradition of a delayed Parousia has dominated Christian teaching, despite the actual words of the text.

Especially after the sowing of rapture doctrine in the 1830s, mainstream Christianity has been teaching an incomplete fulfillment of the faith. Christ declared his work finished, but his work is not finished, mainstream Christians insist; he must still return and complete it. In the first century, the faith was once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 1:3). In the twenty-first century, however, Christians believe that more is yet to be done.

Also disturbing, though perhaps less so, is that those believers who refrain from inserting their traditions and cultures into the traditions and cultures of the biblical authors are the ones regarded as heretics. Preterists, or those who believe all biblical prophecies are fulfilled, are the shunned ones. In the modern vernacular, heresy applies not to a departure from scripture but to a departure from orthodoxy. The accusation is both unfitting and ironic.

Heretics, by today’s definition, diverge not from scripture but from established religious dogma. Heretics defy church creeds regardless of how those creeds align with scripture. This is the sad fate of the Preterist. Although the Preterist can resolve conundrums in the Bible that mainstream Christians cannot, particularly those that pertain to time statements and audience relevance, he lives as an outlier in the Christian community. Although the Preterist upholds a comprehensive, objective interpretation of the text while mainstream Christians ignore time statements and audience relevance and inject theory upon theory into their eschatological interpretations, he is the one they call the apostate.

The world of the faithful has gone topsy-turvy and done precisely what the Bible forbids. It has sought after the traditions of men rather than the will of God. In the real world, heresy hinges on orthodoxy, whose teachings derive from mistranslations and the wayward pedagogy of the church fathers. In an ideal world, heresy is deviance not from orthodoxy but from scripture. This is not to say that mainstream Christians willfully engage in heresy but rather that they merely believe error. It means simply that they are steeped in tradition. Without realizing it necessarily, they put more stock in the words of church dogma and extra-biblical literature than they do in the Word of God, which is understandable, really, for as futurists interpret them, the Scriptures themselves leave them hopelessly mired in confusion.

No sooner had the apostles immortalized their testimonies in the epistles and the words of Christ in the gospels than church fathers began to lose sight of their pronouncements concerning the events of the apostolic generation. Hence a tradition of delay theory has evolved separate and distinct from the eschatological foundation lain by Christ, the apostles, and the primitive Christians. Rather than Christ’s coming being imminent, as he taught, his coming is delayed, contrary to what he taught. And to make matters worse, church fathers began promoting this delay theory, and so forfeited unification in their eschatology, for conjecture opens multiple avenues of interpretation. And now the eschatology in the contemporary church is fragmented into nearly as many theories as it has adherents.

Only after the advent of the printing press and the mass production of Bibles did lay people en masse begin to see for themselves once again, after centuries of misguided teaching, that they had already inherited the promises of God, that they need not continue to merely hope for that inheritance but may reap its blessings here and now. Albeit only a few saw this initially, such as the Spanish Jesuit Luis del Alcázar, because Bible translations lacked accuracy and because tradition can exert a powerful stranglehold on people. Add to the futurist tradition that an adolescent’s dream in 1830 inspired the expectation of a raptured church, and this mountain of error becomes seemingly impossible to climb.

If one hangs on the words of his elders and mentors, does he really receive the word with all eagerness, as the Bereans did? Perhaps an objective approach to scripture with a clean slate, as if of a child, may enkindle eagerness for the truth of God and dispel some of the complacency in the twenty-first-century church. Perhaps if people could just synthesize into a paragraph or two the ultimate purpose of God as revealed in the Scriptures, to build a new heavenly city and level the old degenerate one, they could present their faith to the world with the mission and meaning intended for it and set their church back squarely on its foundation.

Jesus intended to build his church with such power that it would withstand the forces of evil that would seek to dismantle it. He wielded a two-edged sword to this end, but in modern times has seen his church compromise her principles and surrender to moral relativism and social justice at an alarming rate. In modern times, he has seen his betrothed devoid of his central message: the kingdom of God. So, in these modern times, the church suffers complacency like she seldom has before.

The message of the Bible is the message of the kingdom. The Old Testament presents a temple peoples’ biography, which centers on an expectation of an eternal kingdom, the never-ending impetus for God’s power and glory on the earth. The New Testament centers on the arrival of that kingdom. The Garden of Eden was the prototype of this kingdom.

Yes, that’s right—the Garden of Eden, where God and the holy people once dwelt together. Israel’s history doesn’t begin with Jacob or the patriarchs; it begins with Adam. Israel and Adam were the same people. An assumption among believers is that the gist of the creation story is not covenantal but rather biological or natural, and that Adam is the father of all—the Chinese, the South Africans, the Australians, the Amerindians, the Scandinavians, and all the rest—all people all around the planet, even though the writer of Genesis did not even know the world was a planet.

And then, as believers believe, the subject of Genesis inexplicitly changes to a tiny nation in the Ancient Near East called Israel, which remains the subject of pretty much the rest of the Bible.

Well, that’s not how people tell stories. In a story, the subject doesn’t change. And in the Bible are passages that trace Israel’s lineage to Adam—Luke 3, for example.

This just stands to reason. If the story is about all the world’s people, why would foreigners have to have been grafted onto Israel’s tree?

Adam and Israel are the subject of the Bible. They share the same genealogy. Adam and Israel are the same people.

Adam means mankind, and that does not include foreigners, such as Nod, Assyria, Persia, or anyone else. Anyone not a part of the Adamic people was unclean, a beast of the field.

When Adam (Israel) forsook God and ate the fruit of another, sin didn’t enter the world of the Chinese, the South Africans, the Australians, the Amerindians, the Scandinavians, or any of the rest. It entered Israel. Israel was the idolatrous nation. Israel fell from grace in the Garden, not Nod. Israel had an expectation of a Messiah; no one else’s cosmology included a messiah. Israel is the subject of the entire Old Testament and, for all intents and purposes, virtually all of the New.

Understanding the subject of this autobiography makes the story easier to summarize. The Old Testament is ethnic Israel’s history and prehistory. The New Testament is her eschaton, or the end of her history.

In a nutshell, that’s the Bible. But the story doesn’t end there. Not at all. While the Old and New Testaments capture Old Covenant Israel’s idolatrous and tumultuous history, the New Testament leaves off with the opening chapter of New Covenant Israel’s everlasting and glorious future, a future that is planted in ethnic Israel through her Messiah but immortalized through the embrace of foreigners into God’s kingdom. The future is not ethnic Israel’s future, but spiritual Israel’s future, for since that first generation of believers, no longer are foreigners considered unclean (Acts 10:9-28).

Yes, all is fulfilled; the everlasting future is now. The old heaven and earth are swept away and the new ones forever established. That is, the authority of the temple, of the Law, of Moses, has been ceded to the authority of Christ.

Christians may balk at the prospect of dismissing the stores of knowledge they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes in the faith of the Scriptures and eschatology, but consider a simple question: what can it hurt to at least understand other eschatological views? Even if other views are wrong, shouldn’t some knowledge of them help to solidify the more established views? The Preterist view will not hold hostage the unwilling; orthodox Christians are free to reject it. But shouldn’t they at least know what they are rejecting? The next chapter outlines some of the biblical doctrine that they reject.

Reclaiming the Premise

The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. (Ps 24:1)

Naturally when reading a work of literature, we transport our minds into the time and place therein rather than transport those characters and their actions and words into our own time and place. We don’t pluck Abraham Lincoln or Ludwig van Beethoven out of their biographies and plant them in our own time and place. So why should we do that with Moses or St. Paul?

Modern evangelical Christians study the Bible in a vacuum. They read into their twenty-first century cultures a story devoid of technology, the scientific method, and a twenty-first-century interpretation of the cosmos. The Bible makes no mention of nuclear warfare, DNA, or computer chips. These kinds of things do not belong in the narrative, and so they do not belong in any eschatological study.

For modern readers, the Bible presents a message of love and personal redemption, which may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth. Present-day students of the Scriptures may be commended for their reverence for the text, but almost always in a strictly devotional sense and seldom in a critical sense. That is, most Bible readers pour the words of God into a fundamentalist mold that fits their modern-day expectations and ignores the richer, more comprehensive message of the text in its cultural and historical settings. The fundamentalist mold, being devoid of much of the allegory and imagery in the language of the Bible, ignores some key elements of hermeneutics, such as scriptural vernacular as it relates to ancient Jewish culture, audience relevance, time statements, and the era that the Scriptures were written in and pertain to.

Rather than applying biblical events and circumstances to the biblical figures experiencing them, Christians apply these events and circumstances to themselves. In the mindset of contemporary believers, virtually every incident, every interaction, every utterance of dialogue in the Bible must apply personally to them in some way, as if they themselves were imprinted on the pages. Injecting modern Western parlance into ancient Near-Eastern culture, however, only distorts the message.

Let’s start with a few idiomatic terms and phrases that modern readers make assumptions about, first inserting the word death into its proper literary context. Understanding the death from which believers are redeemed is fundamental to understanding eschatology and, frankly, to understanding the Bible.

In much of Christendom today, the death in the Garden of Eden is not spiritual but rather biological. Biology rather than covenant has become the premise of the creation story. God literally turned dirt into people and paraded one of each species of the world’s animals in front of Adam for identification. Man’s fall, consequently in this context, is not a fall from grace but rather is strictly a fall from biological immortality.

The creation story presents myriad questions and contradictions when read with such wooden literalism. God establishes a physical relationship with man, with whom He literally walks and talks, and whom He excommunicates for disobeying His command to abstain from eating a forbidden fruit. An immediate question to ask, then, is if God literally banished man from His sight, then is God literally still on the earth? Is God a literal, four-dimensional God? Did a flesh-and-blood Creator exile a flesh-and-blood creature? Another question is why God would merely breathe life into man only to embark on a literal, earthly relationship with him.

But when read as a temple narrative, the story relates the establishment of man’s covenant not with a supreme being with arms and legs who walks on the ground like a biped, but rather his covenant with his transcendent, spiritual Creator. Adam was a covenant creation who walked with and glorified his heavenly Father as one who came to life in spirit when God breathed into him (Gn 2:7). Surely the Creator’s covenant with a sentient, spiritual being was more meaningful to Him than a covenant with mere flesh and blood was. Otherwise, He could just as easily have breathed that very ordinary breath of life into dolphins or salamanders.

Once upon a time, Christians understood that death was synonymous with condemnation, which the Bible clearly articulates. Death was to worship idols or, to borrow from the verbiage of the text, to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which was knowledge of things adversarial to God, rather than to eat of the tree of life, which was from God and was all that man needed for his physical, emotional, and spiritual happiness. Knowledge of sin is what killed the people of this narrative, or alienated them from God. The modern church, however, equates death in the garden almost exclusively with the arrest of biological functions.

This tradition of the modern church imparts a dual-creation doctrine. God created once before man fell, then again after he fell. He created a perfect world, then an imperfect world. Before man fell, organisms did not degrade. Cells did not die; therefore, they must have been different before the fall. After the fall, God must have created another natural world, one in a form that included death and decay. God first created a perfect world before mankind sinned (and yet a world in which he sinned, ironically, since he disobeyed God). Then He created an imperfect world after mankind sinned. In this recreated hostile world, living things died, natural disasters wreaked havoc, and all the licentiousness of the unrepentant heart unfolded in the human drama as illustrated in the pages of the Old Testament. In the former world of Eden, however, tragedy did not beset man, and neither did decay. That world was completely different. It was a world of immortals with radically different anatomies.

Not only is this nonsensical but it also defies scripture, which makes no claim to a recreated natural world, and which communicates numerous clues as to the Israelites’ lives in the spirit being more meaningful than their lives in the flesh, such as Paul’s assertion to the Colossians that they were dead yet their lives were hidden with Christ in God (3:3). The apostle told his audience of first-century Christians that they were dead, yet he expected these dead people to read his letter. How nonsensical; dead people don’t read. For Paul, life was not mere flesh and blood. Paul was telling them that life was in the spirit, as it was in the garden.

God created a spiritual being capable of communion with Him. When man forsook God and chased after idols, he died. That is the death that Adam inflicted on himself and his progeny. Adam suffered condemnation because he forsook God and worshipped idols, presumably not of his own making but idols that others were worshipping, likely those in the land of Nod. God warned Adam that on the day he would taste of that forbidden tree, he would die (Gn 2:17), yet when the day came that the man tasted of that tree, he did not keel over and orphan his children. He roamed the land for many more years. What he did instead was exile himself from the presence of God. He suffered spiritual alienation. Condemnation was the manner in which he died that day.

Biological death was never the plague of Israel. The plague of Adam’s fall resulted from disobedience, a violation of God’s precepts, a failure of worship. His disobedience was his idolatry. And that is the context of the Old Testament. God blessed the people for their obedience and cursed them for their disobedience. In the Garden of Eden, to know not only good but also evil was Adam’s one great trespass against the will of God. From the beginning, idolatry was God’s arch enemy, the Satan (or the Hebrew sâtân) who opposed and plotted against Him.³ What other sphere of knowledge could the Adamic people have acquired that would have resulted in their walk with God becoming their estrangement from God?

The transgression Adam committed first and foremost was the restriction on partaking of the fruit of another. Everything that this people, or man, needed in the garden was good. God created good things in it for him. To seek things contrary to God, therefore, was man’s great downfall. The restriction on knowing evil—of eating the fruit that the serpent peddled—was one of scant few directives God had for man when the two fellowshipped together in the garden, and the one law at that time that man violated.

Idolatry was a plague of Israel, not of nature. The world did not fall; Adam/Israel did. What offense would sparrows and armadillos have been punished for? Why would they have forfeited their immortality? Does God punish for the sake of punishing?

And yet in the garden, even before man fell, organisms died. Plants did, anyway, according to fundamentalists, but plants were the exception, these people argue, because they were sustenance for everything else. So admittedly, then, death did occur in the garden, even if only among organisms that lacked nerve endings. This assumption, of course, is theory, for the Bible makes no such allusion. And that begs a question of nature: why did animals need sustenance? What if an animal, for whatever reason, stopped eating? Would it have starved to death? And what of an eventual, unbearable overcrowding if human beings, as God commanded, were to have remained fruitful and continued to multiply indefinitely while not dying? After they deforested the entire planet, what would the growing populations of forest creatures have eaten, and what spaces would they have inhabited that they would not have suffered the consequences of attempting to cross a busy highway?

Likewise, what if human beings were to have stopped eating? Could immortal creatures have starved to death? Surely not, so why would God have created trees that were good for food and not simply trees that were good for shade (Gn 2:9)?

Certainly, to the Hebrew writers, death was a biological phenomenon, but it was also a spiritual one. To be sure, life in the Spirit was more purposeful to the ancients than life in the flesh was. Life in the Spirit was their raison d’être, their reason for life in the flesh. When Ephraim (Israel, or the ten Northern tribes) worshipped Baal, he died. Death came to Israel through idolatry. This dead people did not repent but instead sinned more and more (Hos 13:1-2), which they did as living, breathing biological organisms. When Ephraim died, he did not die in the flesh. Idols portended death for him; God, on the other hand, was his tree of life.

Likewise the Pharisees, who, like whitewashed tombs, knowing not the Father, were the walking dead, full of dead men’s bones (Mt 23:27). Strangers to God, they were dead. Apart from the spirit, the body is dead (Jas 2:26) It is the Spirit who gives life, Jesus said. The flesh is no help at all (Jn 6:63).

Death was separation from the Father, and the continuous procession of false gods that foreigners introduced to the holy people illustrated the proclivities of this favored group toward idolatry and consequently their seemingly endless and often desperate groping for some connection to their tree of life. Hence the exposure of the vices in their hearts. David lamented this condition of his nation: there is none who does good, not even one (Ps 14:3, 53:3). Idolatry was the wedge between the Hebrews and Yahweh. Idolatry was Israel’s great sin, the serpent that persistently lured her away from Providence and down paths of