It Was Never One Garment (2 of 2)

A fair-minded reader will push back here, and the objection deserves its strongest form: every living tradition argues with itself. Calvinists argue about the order of God's decrees. Partial preterists argue about how far Matthew 24:36's seam reaches and when Revelation was written. Disagreement inside a movement shows it's alive, not that it's false. That's true, and it would settle this seam if the disagreements documented here sat at the edges of the system. They don't. They sit at the content of the one event the movement is named for — whether anything could be seen, whether the dead rose as persons or as a nation, whether the place of the dead still exists, whether Christ still has a body. Theologians who argue about the order of the decrees still agree on what God decreed. A movement whose own leaders can't agree whether its defining event involved bodies, whether anyone could see it, or what it left behind isn't arguing about the details of something it has named. It hasn't yet said what it claims happened. That's the difference between a family argument and an empty center.

And it isn't only two people. The same compiled archive already cited in Seam Four catalogues roughly forty separate points of doctrine on which the movement's own named leaders take flatly opposing positions, in their own published words, independent of the Baker scorecard entirely.⁵¹ A representative sample, not the whole list: Max King holds the resurrection occurred solely at AD 70; William Bell holds it was a gradual process running from AD 30 to AD 70 — two different shapes for the single event the whole system is named after.⁵⁴ Kurt Simmons, himself a full preterist, names a second split directly and calls it dangerous: some in the movement, following Sam Frost's line, read "death" cast into the lake of fire in Revelation 20:14 as imputed Adamic guilt; Max King reads the identical verse as the annulment of the Mosaic law. Simmons's own conclusion, from inside the movement: this specific disagreement is what actually drives full preterism toward Universalism, not the system as a whole — "the real culprits are false notions regarding the source and nature of mankind's condemnation."⁵⁵ Closure and universalism travel together often in this literature, but not always: Baker's statement of faith says flatly, "We reject the doctrine of Universal Reconciliation" (point 96).⁷⁹ A third: most of the movement's leading names — Preston, Stevens, Curtis, Mills — place Satan's supernatural power ending at AD 70; Dan Harden, in the same archive, locates it at the cross instead, arguing ordinary human sin accounts for all the evil anyone sees today without needing Satan blamed for any of it.⁵⁶

Three more splits, on three different core doctrines, found independently of the twelve-point scorecard, using only the movement's own words. A fourth sits one layer down from these: even when did the New Covenant age actually begin has no settled answer. William Bell dates it flatly to AD 70, the moment the Old Covenant fully ended. A separate voice in the same archive and Preston's own language both describe it as already begun at the cross, "not in full effect" until AD 70 — initiated at one point, completed at another, four decades apart.⁵⁷ Nobody here is contradicting himself, and that is not the point. Three different authors, asked when their own new age actually started, give three different shaped answers, and none of them treats it as a minor detail.

One more split touches the gospel's own call, because it asks whether the people the church preaches to are still in Adam. Baker reports three answers inside the movement, his own included: "Some teachers argue that no one is in Adam after AD 70 because there is no continuing corporate Adamic body. Others continue to teach that unbelievers remain in Adam today in essentially the same way people existed before AD 70. I differ from both positions."⁸⁵ Three answers, from inside one movement, to a question the New Testament treats as basic.

The pattern isn't an artifact of one Facebook exchange with one man. It's what happens whenever the actual content behind "AD 70" gets pinned down by anyone, on nearly any question, across the whole of the movement's own literature.