Pulling the Threads: Full Preterism
What to Call It — The Line Both Branches Cross Together (2 of 2)
Nor is this one camp's private judgment. A 2004 article in The Master's Seminary Journal, written from a dispensational seminary that agrees with this essay about almost nothing else in eschatology, reached the same verdict about the International Preterist Association, the movement's main umbrella organization: its eschatology is heterodox, and no orthodox creed or statement of faith contains it.72 A critic from a different camp says the same. Kenneth Gentry is a postmillennial partial preterist whose eschatology differs sharply from Swanson's. Replying to a colleague who noted that most partial preterists regard full preterism as heretical, Gentry writes, "This is certainly true, and important." He points to Keith Mathison's edited volume, When Shall These Things Be? A Reformed Response to Hyper-Preterism (P&R, 2004), as demonstrating it, and in a note he reprints from an earlier book, says no creed or council of the church supports the view.92 Other critics have written against the movement at length. Gentry has written Have We Missed the Second Coming? Samuel Frost, who taught in the movement before leaving it, wrote Why I Left Full Preterism. The movement's reply to Mathison's volume is House Divided: Bridging the Gap in Reformed Eschatology, and the objection it presses, that creeds are being used to settle a question Scripture should settle, is the objection this section's order answers: Scripture first, creeds second.86 When critics who disagree with each other about Matthew 24 agree on this, the agreement is worth noticing.
The strongest reply, and why it doesn't hold. The best answer available to a full preterist goes like this: the creeds speak in the future tense because the people who wrote them believed the coming was still future to them, and a later creed can't overrule what Scripture says about timing. The first half of that explains the apostles' own generation. It doesn't explain the fourth-century church. The bishops at Nicaea in 325 had AD 70 more than two and a half centuries behind them; at Constantinople in 381, more than three. Several of the fathers named in Seam Two read Matthew 24 as fulfilled in AD 70, and one of them, Eusebius, sat at Nicaea itself. They knew the texts full preterism relies on. They were willing to fight over a single letter of a Greek word to get the faith right. And they still confessed the return and the resurrection as ahead of them. Nothing in the record suggests anyone at those councils thought either had already happened. The creeds aren't museum pieces, either. "We look for the resurrection of the dead" is said in the first person, in the present tense, by whoever is saying it — the same shape as "until he comes" in Seam Six. Every generation that has confessed the faith has confessed that hope as its own.
The second half of the reply — a creed can't overrule Scripture — is true, and nothing here asks a creed to. The question isn't whether a council outranks Paul. It's whether the church read Paul rightly for nineteen centuries, on the one point all its creeds agree about, or whether that reading first came right in 1971. The burden of that claim sits with the one making it.
What the word doesn't say. Heresy names a teaching. It isn't a verdict on anyone's soul, which belongs to God alone, and it isn't permission to treat anyone who holds it with contempt. Many full preterists love Christ, read their Bibles seriously, and came to this view trying to take Jesus's "this generation" at His word — the same instinct that makes partial preterism right about AD 70. Paul's own instruction for exactly this situation, in the same chapter that names Hymenaeus, is to correct opponents with gentleness, in the hope that God will grant them repentance and a knowledge of the truth (2 Timothy 2:24-26). A hard word, said gently, to people who are still loved. That is the only way this essay means it.
Why it matters more than an argument. This was never finally about who reads Matthew 24 better. John says why:
"Dear friends, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that whenever it is revealed we will be like him, because we will see him just as he is. And everyone who has this hope focused on him purifies himself, just as Jesus is pure)."71
— 1 John 3:2-3 (NET)
The knowing of God that John 17:3 calls eternal life starts now, and it is real now. But it is reaching toward a face. Full preterism doesn't just move a date. Stevens lists 1 John 3:2 among the texts that show "what the first century Church expected to experience at the Parousia."82 On that reading, John's "whenever it is revealed" was fulfilled for them, and every believer since meets the Lord one by one at death, with no appearing that anyone now living waits for. John says the hope of seeing Him is what keeps a person reaching, and keeps them clean. Take away the appearing, and the reaching has nowhere to arrive.