What to Call It — The Line Both Branches Cross Together (1 of 2)

Fourteen seams test whether full preterism holds together. One question is left that the seams don't answer by themselves: what to call the teaching once they've been pulled. This essay has called itself a stress test, and it is one. A stress test that finds a failure at a load-bearing point owes the reader the name of what it found, not a softer word chosen to keep the peace. The name the church has always used for this kind of failure is heresy. It's a hard word, and it belongs here, so it has to be used precisely — what it claims, what it rests on, and what it doesn't say. The order matters. The category is apostolic before it is conciliar, so this section starts with Scripture, and the creeds come second as the church's confirmation of what the texts say.

What the word means. Heresy, in the church's historic use, isn't any mistake about the Bible. Christians have been wrong about dates, about the order of events, about the meaning of hard passages, and stayed inside the faith. Partial preterists, dispensationalists, and amillennialists disagree sharply about Matthew 24, Daniel 9, and Revelation 20, and none of those disagreements is heresy. The word is kept for teaching that denies something the church has confessed as part of the faith itself — the short list every Christian has been asked to say out loud.

What Scripture says about this exact claim. Paul ties the resurrection of the dead to Christ's own resurrection, and both to whether faith saves. The false-prophet section above quoted the heart of it: if there is no resurrection of the dead, "then not even Christ has been raised," and "your faith is useless; you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:13, 15:17, NET).

Seam One put a second text on the table. Paul names Hymenaeus and Philetus, says they "have strayed from the truth by saying that the resurrection has already occurred," and says they are "undermining some people's faith" (2 Timothy 2:18, NET). That verse is not only a verdict on two men. It sets the category. The claim that the resurrection is past is, in the apostle's own words, a straying from the truth.

Paul also told a Roman governor what his hope was:

"I have a hope in God (a hope that these men themselves accept too) that there is going to be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous."

— Acts 24:15 (NET)

He said he stood on trial "concerning the resurrection of the dead" (Acts 24:21, NET). That hope lands squarely on CBV, whose resurrection is a covenant transition of Israel. It lands on IBV-R through two points: when, which Seam Eleven examined, and what, which is Baker's point 67. A full preterist will reply that the verb in Acts 24:15 (mellō, which the NET renders "there is going to be") can mean "about to," which would make the verse one more of the movement's time texts. Young's Literal Translation renders it "there is about to be a rising again of the dead." This section does not fight the timing. Its point is the content of the hope Paul shared with his accusers, a resurrection of the righteous and the unrighteous, whatever its date. Whether mellō marks imminence or only certainty is a lexical question. Greg Kinser, who once held the full-preterist view, reports that lexicons give the word the sense of "a certainty of action."⁸⁷

Seam Twelve set Colossians 2:9 and 1 Timothy 2:5 beside the claim about Christ's body. Paul wrote that "all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form" in Christ, and that the one intermediary between God and humanity is "himself human." A teaching that says Christ laid His body of flesh aside denies both.

Paul wrote 1 Thessalonians 4 so that grieving believers would "not grieve like the rest who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13, NET), and it ends, "Therefore encourage one another with these words" (4:18, NET). The comfort is one event, in which the dead in Christ rise and the living are caught up together with them (Seam Eleven). A resurrection that finished in AD 70 comforts no one standing at a grave today.

Last, Scripture says the faith is a fixed deposit that can be departed from:

"Dear friends, although I have been eager to write to you about our common salvation, I now feel compelled instead to write to encourage you to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints."

— Jude 3 (NET)

Paul puts the same boundary in sharper words at Galatians 1:8-9, where he speaks of preaching "a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you" (NET). His sentence goes on to a judgment of its own. This essay does not apply that judgment to anyone, for the reasons the last paragraphs of this section give. Its claim is narrower: Scripture itself draws a line around the faith, and names the claim that the resurrection is past as a crossing of it.

What the church confesses. The creeds then confirm, in the church's own words, what these texts say. That short list includes Christ's return and the resurrection of the dead, in every ecumenical creed the church has. The Apostles' Creed: "He will come again to judge the living and the dead," and "the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting." In its Latin text the clause is carnis resurrectionem, literally "the resurrection of the flesh." The Nicene Creed, in the form fixed at Constantinople in 381: "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end," and "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."⁶⁹ The Athanasian Creed ties the rising of all people, with their bodies, to His coming. These aren't relics of one tradition. Protestant churches that hold Scripture alone as the final authority received all three creeds as faithful summaries of what Scripture teaches — the Lutheran Book of Concord opens with them, and the Belgic Confession and the Thirty-Nine Articles name and receive them.⁷⁰

What full preterism says. It says both are past. Not reinterpreted, not deepened — completed in AD 70, with nothing of either still ahead of anyone living. The two wings state it differently, and the difference matters. CBV denies the bodily resurrection of believers by redefining it, and in Preston's hands denies that Christ now has a body. IBV-R affirms individual "Spiritual" bodies but states that "physical bodies return to the Earth and are not physically resurrected" (point 67).⁷⁹ The Apostles' Creed confesses the resurrection of the body, and IBV-R denies that in so many words, apart from any question of date. Both wings also hold that nothing of the return remains: Baker's point 17 says "no future prophetic bodily return remains to be fulfilled," and CBV places the whole hope in AD 70. So the line is not crossed only by putting the right events on the wrong date. Both wings deny the content, one by redefinition and one by plain statement. Seam Seven showed the two branches agreeing on almost nothing except the date. This is where that one agreement lands: the date is the very thing that puts both branches on the far side of the line. Their single point of agreement is the point the creeds exist to guard.