The Text Names This Exact Move and Calls It a Wound

Paul names two men — Hymenaeus and Philetus — for teaching that the resurrection had already happened, and says it was spreading through the church like gangrene, destroying the faith of real people (2 Timothy 2:17–18).²⁸ This is the New Testament's own direct address to the claim full preterism makes, by name, as a warning rather than an endorsement.

This is the one seam full preterism's own popularizer has answered at book length rather than in passing, and the answer deserves to be engaged on its own terms rather than waved off as a generic rescue move. Don K. Preston's case, in outline: Hymenaeus and Philetus weren't condemned for teaching that a real, corporate, covenantal resurrection was coming in their own generation — a claim Preston himself makes — but for a different and more radical error, one that removed any future accountability at all and unraveled the moral seriousness of the faith Paul spends the rest of the letter defending.³⁹ On this reading, 2 Timothy 2:17-18 isn't a warning against full preterism. It's a warning against a cruder, over-realized cousin of it that full preterism itself also rejects.

That distinction would matter if the text drew it. It doesn't. Paul states the error in a handful of words — the resurrection has already happened — and names its effect: it "overthrows the faith of some." Nothing in the passage narrows the charge to resurrection-with-no-future-accountability specifically, as opposed to resurrection-already-happened as such. The narrower reading has to be supplied from outside the verse, by the same move this essay presses against full preterism's hermeneutic everywhere else: a plain statement, read down to fit what the system already needs it to mean, with the qualifying clause doing work the text itself never states. Full preterism affirms exactly what Paul names as the error's content — the resurrection, already happened — and asks to be excused from Paul's verdict on the strength of a distinction the verse doesn't draw. That's a real argument, made by a serious writer, at real length. It still isn't an answer to what Paul actually wrote.