The Word-Splitting Has No Brake (2 of 2)

Edward Stevens does not argue the other way on this verse. He agrees that Acts 1:11 promised a visible return: the angels, he writes, "promised that He would descend visibly 'in like manner.'"⁸² So the live question inside the movement is not whether Acts 1:11 means something seen. It is whether "this same Jesus" was seen. On their own account, as Seam Four sets out, He was seen only by people who were then removed.

One text's application to Matthew 24 is genuinely disputed and should be held as such. The other has a real counter-argument, and that counter-argument has a real answer, worked out on the actual grammar rather than asserted past. That difference is what allows a real, closed judgment on Jerusalem in AD 70 without needing every "coming" text in the New Testament to mean the same thing.

Full preterism doesn't have that off-switch. And a method with no principled stopping point doesn't stop where its adherents want it to. It's already documented doing exactly this: the same "spiritual, not physical" hermeneutic built to solve Genesis 3's death and Revelation 20's judgment shows up again, applied to a literal creation and a literal flood. The book is Beyond Creation Science: New Covenant Creation from Genesis to Revelation, by Timothy P. Martin and Jeffrey L. Vaughn (third edition, 2007). Don K. Preston, president of the Preterist Research Institute and the movement's most prolific popularizer, endorses it in print: "Sacred cows die hard. Yet, this work by Martin/Vaughn has fired some heavy duty shots at two sacred cows, prophetic futurism and the global flood / young earth view of Genesis."²⁷ Fairness requires the other half. Covenant Creation is contested inside the movement. Brad Baker, for one, writes in his own acknowledgments that he strongly disagrees with it, and others oppose it as well. What the endorsement shows is narrower: the method has a published home inside the movement, with support from its best-known popularizer. A method with no brake does not stay where it started. A door with no lock doesn't stay shut because you'd prefer it to.