Pulling the Threads on Full Preterism: The Short Version

By Michael W Winslow · October 25, 2026

A frayed edge of folded linen cloth on a dark wooden table, with loose threads pulled free and trailing across the wood.

Full preterism is the belief that everything the Bible promised about the future already happened in the year 70: Jesus coming back, the dead rising, the final judgment, the new heaven and earth. On this view nothing is left ahead of anyone. A small but serious group of Christians holds it today.

I wrote a long paper that tests that belief the way you would test a bridge: by pulling on it to see what gives. Here is the short version. The belief sounds clean, and that is the reason to pull on it. It needs a lot of extra explaining.

What the paper finds

Full preterism's own people cannot agree on what "everything already happened" means. In one documented exchange, ten of twelve basic answers were rejected or seriously changed by another full preterist. Only two came through untouched.
No one who watched the events of the year 70 reports graves opening or Jesus visibly returning, including the Jewish historian who wrote about the war page by page.
The argument full preterists lead with says Jesus promised everything to that generation, so if it did not all happen then, He was a false prophet. It breaks in two places. Jesus gave that generation a sign to act on, "when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies" (Luke 21:20) (NET), and He said the last day would come with no sign at all, like the days of Noah. And what Paul says makes faith useless is not a date. It is whether Christ was raised.
Paul puts the resurrection of believers at Christ's coming (1 Corinthians 15:23), and Jesus says in John 6 that He will raise each believer on "the last day" (NET). One branch of the movement says each believer gets a new body at death, one at a time, for nearly two thousand years. No passage of Scripture describes that.
The New Testament names this exact teaching, "the resurrection has already occurred," and says it was undermining people's faith (2 Timothy 2:17-18) (NET).
The church has kept the Lord's Supper "until he comes" (NET), and kept hearing "stay alert, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come" (Matthew 24:42) (NET), for almost two thousand years since the date full preterism says all of that was finished.

Fair to both sides

The paper does not say full preterism is wrong about everything. Something real and huge happened in the year 70. It also turns the same test on its own position, partial preterism, and names what that position costs. Its narrower claim is that the sentence "everything already happened, nothing is left ahead" does not survive its own members, the historical record, or what the New Testament says about the exact claim being made. Where that sentence lands, with the return and the resurrection both already behind us, it crosses a line the church has drawn around the faith since the beginning. The paper calls that teaching heresy, and it says so carefully: about the teaching, never as a verdict on anyone's soul.

What I hope for any reader is not that an argument is won. It is that we look toward Him whom John says we will see just as He is.

Read the full paper: Pulling the Threads: Full Preterism. The short version at the top of the paper is here: The Short Version.