A Newer Refinement Worth Knowing

Dispensationalism has not stood still since Darby and Scofield, and a fair account of the position has to include where it has moved. In the closing decades of the twentieth century, a number of dispensational theologians — sensing that the older system's sharp wall between Israel and the church created real exegetical strain — real friction in how the text itself has to be interpreted — particularly around passages that describe Christ already reigning — developed what is now called progressive dispensationalism. It keeps the classic system's most important commitment: God's promises to ethnic Israel, the land included, remain intact and will be fulfilled to Israel as Israel, not quietly reassigned to the church through spiritualized reinterpretation. But it drops the older system's insistence that the church and the kingdom are two separate programs running side by side, largely disconnected until the rapture clears the way for Israel's program to resume. Instead, progressive dispensationalism holds that Christ began His Davidic reign at His ascension — already, in some real sense, seated and reigning, the same present-tense claim about the kingdom this book's own Part One made from Matthew 28:18 and Ephesians 1:20-21 — while the reign's full, earthly, Israel-centered expression remains genuinely future, still awaiting the millennial kingdom the older system also expects. This is, in its own way, an already/not-yet reading of the kingdom, arrived at from inside dispensationalism's own commitments rather than borrowed from outside them, and it deserves to be named as the more sophisticated conversation partner it actually is, rather than left invisible behind the older chart most readers meet first.

It is worth being precise about the spread of opinion inside this newer camp too, rather than describing it as though it spoke with one voice on every question. Progressive dispensationalism is not a single settled position on the timing of the rapture. A number of its leading voices retain the classic pretribulational rapture even while revising the older system's Israel/church architecture; others have moved toward a mid-tribulational or post-tribulational timing, or decline to make the rapture's timing a load-bearing feature of the system at all. What holds progressive dispensationalism together as an identifiable position is not agreement on when the rapture happens, but agreement that Christ's Davidic reign is already, in some real sense, inaugurated, and that Israel's land and national promises remain future and intact regardless of how the rapture question is settled.