What's Actually Left, Once All Fourteen Are Pulled

Not nothing. Something real and serious survives contact with all fourteen of these, and it isn't a defeat for anyone who lands there.

AD 70 happened. It fulfilled real, substantial prophecy — the temple's destruction, the end of the old covenant order's central institution, judgment on a generation Jesus named directly and dated precisely. Nobody has to give any of that up.

What doesn't survive is the idea that the resurrection, Christ's own return, and the final judgment were folded into that same event. Those remain what the earliest people to accept the near fulfillment also still believed they were: genuinely ahead. Not a hedge between two extremes. A specific, textually-argued position with patristic roots older than full preterism's own 1971 starting point by well over a millennium. And the teaching that folds them into AD 70 doesn't only fail the stress test. It crosses the line the church has drawn around its faith from the beginning, which is why the section before this one calls it by its name.

One honest limit on all of this, worth stating rather than leaving for a careful reader to notice unaided: this essay pulled hardest and longest on full preterism's seams, across all fourteen of them. It also pulled, at real length rather than only as a disclosed gap, on its own reading — the idiom-consistency charge, the brake at Matthew 24:36, the pastoral cost of a hope that stays open rather than closes, all argued directly above. What survived here survived a test aimed mostly at one system, honestly extended to the other at its hardest points rather than left for a careful reader to notice unaided. It wasn't declared the winner of a comparison run with perfectly even weight on both sides — a separate essay tests dispensationalism against this same standard, at greater length, and is worth reading alongside this one — but neither is it a comparison this essay refused to run against itself. Each seam states its own limits where it makes its claim.

It's worth naming a habit worth resisting too, on any side of a question like this one. Debaters rarely say "I don't know," even in the places where that's the honest answer — the exact mechanism of what happened between Friday and Sunday, the precise reach of "this generation," what still genuinely isn't settled even inside the position that survived this particular stress test. Holding a conclusion isn't the same thing as holding it tightly. The measure worth keeping in view through all fourteen of these isn't who wins the argument. It's whether any of it drives someone back toward actually knowing Christ — not knowing about Him, the way John 17:3 means it, present tense, a relationship reached for rather than a position defended. Getting the timing right was never going to be what that hinges on.

Nobody adjusting toward that position is conceding a loss to a skeptic, walking back their faith, or admitting the whole thing was foolish. They're finding out that the two halves of what they may have already half-believed — something real happened in AD 70, and something real is still coming — were never actually in tension. The garment doesn't have to be thrown away. It just turns out one seam was sewn wrong, and the rest of it holds.

A word to full preterists themselves, if any are reading. Many who hold full preterism already hold most of what this essay defends. They believe AD 70 was real and that Jesus kept His word to His generation, and some of them, Baker among them, say plainly that Christ rose bodily from the tomb. When they correct one another, they reach for texts the church has always read, such as 1 Corinthians 15, which Baker's own article quotes at length. And at least one person who left the movement says those texts are what brought him out. Greg Kinser, in his account of leaving, says the first passage that dealt "a fierce blow to my full preterism" was John's record of Jesus's words about all who are in the tombs (John 5:28-29), and that Paul affirmed the same resurrection of the just and the unjust in Acts 24:15.⁸⁷ The distance left to travel may be shorter than it looks, and nothing true about AD 70 has to be given up to travel it. The gentleness Paul asks for in the section called "What to Call It" is meant here too. What this essay hopes for any reader is not that an argument is won. It is that we look toward Him whom John says we will see just as He is. John's word for the waiting is the word he heard from Jesus in John 15: "remain in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink away from him in shame when he comes back" (1 John 2:28, NET).⁹³