The Five Things, Three Ways

There are five things the New Testament describes as belonging, in some sense, to the future: the devil's final judgment, the resurrection of the body, the second coming of Christ, a new heaven and new earth, and a final judgment of everyone who has ever lived. This part of the book is going to walk you through all five. For each one, you will first meet what this book calls the universal answer — what that doctrine means for how you live this week, regardless of which view eventually turns out to be right. Then you will meet three honest answers to the interpretive question itself: what dispensationalism says, which you now have some grounding in from Part Three; what partial preterism says; and what full preterism says. Every answer will come with the actual texts attached, elaborated enough that you can weigh them for yourself rather than simply trusting this book's summary of them.

Before we walk through the five, you need two words defined clearly, because they look almost identical and mean something close to opposite. Preterist comes from the Latin praeteritus, meaning "gone by" or "past" — a preterist, in the theological sense, is someone who reads a given prophecy as something that has already happened, rather than something still awaiting fulfillment. Partial preterists believe that some New Testament prophecies were genuinely fulfilled in the past, in the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. This applies especially to prophecies tied to Jerusalem, its temple, and the old covenant order. But partial preterists also believe other things remain genuinely ahead of us, not yet fulfilled, still awaited — the five things this part of the book is about to walk through. Full preterists go further. They believe everything the New Testament describes as future was fulfilled by AD 70, without exception. That includes the bodily resurrection itself — the claim that separates full preterism from every other Christian tradition across two thousand years of church history.

One habit is worth building before you meet the five doctrines themselves, because it will serve you through this entire book, not just this part of it. Each of the three views leans on a different kind of strength, and it is not the same kind in all three. You already met one of them by name in Part Three: dispensationalism's strength is plain sequencing — reading the text's own markers of order the most straightforward way available, rather than treating some numbers as literal and others as symbolic depending on which is convenient. Partial preterism's strength is cumulative convergence — rarely one decisive verse, more often several independent lines of evidence, grammar and audience and timing, pointing the same direction at once. Full preterism's strength is internal consistency — following the New Testament's own "already" language all the way to where the grammar itself would take it, without stopping short of the conclusion it supports. Notice which kind of strength each case is actually offering you as you read the five doctrines below, and it becomes far easier to see why careful, Bible-loving people land in different places, rather than assuming whichever view you find yourself doubting simply was not paying attention.