No Witness, and the Silence Has a Name (3 of 3)

There's a present-tense version of the same question, and it's no longer hypothetical — it's already been asked and answered. Mainstream Christian testimony has a recognizable, common form, repeated constantly across every tradition: the Spirit testifies to the believer of the risen Savior, tied to Jesus's own standing promise, "I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). No comparable testimony exists for full preterism's own distinctive content. Nobody says the Spirit testifies that Christ has returned, that the dead are already raised, that the new creation is already complete — not as personal, present-tense witness, the way ordinary Christian testimony works everywhere else.

This was put directly to Edward Stevens rather than left as this essay's own rhetorical device: whether he had ever heard a first-person witness to the parousia itself.⁴⁶ His answer, quoted in full because paraphrase would soften it: "That silence tells us one of two things: Either the endtime events did not occur and the Christians were too embarrassed to mention it. Or, all the Christians who knew about it and experienced those events were no longer on the earth. They were SILENT because they were ABSENT."⁴⁶ That's a false choice — partial preterism needs neither branch, since on this view the events simply haven't happened yet, no embarrassment or cover-up required — and even granting it, "the witnesses were removed" only accounts for the silence of one vanished first-century generation. It does nothing to explain why no full preterist alive today, two thousand years into a reality this movement holds is already fully realized, offers anything resembling the ordinary Christian testimony everyone in the movement's own church background grew up hearing. The honest answer to what concrete difference distinguishes living inside a finished new creation from ordinary Christian regeneration and sanctification is none — and unlike most costs named in this essay, this one wasn't inferred from silence. It was asked, directly, of the sitting president of the movement's oldest organized body, and answered. The same admission is on the record in print. In his 2003 foreword to Russell's The Parousia, Stevens asks: "If all living Christians remained on earth after AD 70, why didn't some of those who saw these incredible events in AD 70 say something about it?" And he is open about what his own answer rests on: "The 'time statements' forced us to believe that it must have occurred, regardless of a lack of historical confirmation." If the text sets a time frame, he writes, "we are bound to believe it, regardless of whether we can find external historical or traditional support for it, and regardless of whether our credulity is stretched to the breaking point."⁸² That is a coherent position, and it is stated honestly: the dating outranks the lack of evidence. It also means the silence cannot be answered from history. The only place left to answer it is the time texts themselves, and the section after Seam Five takes them up.

And the strongest confirmation isn't a skeptic's argument. It's the church fathers who agreed with the near-fulfillment reading. Eusebius, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine — all of them tied Matthew 24 to AD 70.¹⁸ Every one of them still expected a future resurrection. The people closest to the event, the ones who had every reason and every text in front of them to draw the full-preterist conclusion if it was there to be drawn, didn't draw it. Nobody did, as a complete system, until 1971.¹⁹