Are Pre-Trib Rapturists No Good for This World? Part 3

Jan 4

Posted by Mike Stallard in Rapture | No Comments

Here I would like to pick up again my critique of an article by Tom Kratttenmaker in August 2010 entitled “What if the end isn’t near?”  His article is a criticism of Christians who hold to a pre-trib rapture.  Those of us who hold that view, according to Krattenmaker (as well as others), are too focused on the future and not willing to work on problem-solving in the present world. So we are not good for this world — that is the way I am saying what he means.

The particular issue I want to raise in this post is the tendency of overstatement that I found in a few cases in the article. One particular statement that needs to be highlighted is the following:

Those enraptured by the rapture tend to view current events through the lens of biblical prophesy [sic], reading everything from the Obama election to the oil disaster in the Gulf Coast as fulfillment of one or another cryptic passage from Revelation.

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Covenant Theology and Dispensationalism

Jan 4

Posted by Mike Stallard in New Covenant | 3 Comments

Today I started teaching a module, a Masters level course, at Baptist Bible Seminary on covenant theology.  Since I am a traditional dispensationalist, the analysis and critique will certainly be from outside the system of covenant theology.  All of the required books in the course are by covenant theologians.  I figured my students may not have read the covenant guys on their terms.  I am having them read Michael Horton’s book Introducing Covenant Theology, G. I. Williamson’s book The Westminster Confession of Faith for Study Classes, a few sections in Berkhof’s Systematic Theology and some in Calvin’s Institutes.  Of course, all of my personal notes and lectures are from the dispensational side of the debate.

On the opening day, I started by sharing the areas of agreement between the two camps and by trying to get my students to look fairly at the issues and, most of all, to look in detail in the Word of God itself and not just the theology books.  Those of us in systematics sometimes spend too much time reading outside the Bible instead of the Bible itself.  Hopefully, when the module is over, my students will have a biblical understanding that allows them to critique covenant theology fairly and accurately.  Of course, I hope all my students come out of my class dispensationalists.

My first grandchild

Nov 15

Posted by Mike Stallard in Family | 2 Comments

On Saturday morning November 13 at 6:37 am my first grandchild, Ella Marie Stallard, was born at Paoli Hospital in Paoli, PA.  I was already a grandfather from the day she was conceived.  I just had not seen her yet.  Naturally, I have included a picture.  Now I know from experience what I knew only intellectually — “children’s children are the crown of old men” (Proverbs 17:6)!  A flood of prayers has already gushed from my heart for Ella and her parents (my son David and his wife Brielle).  I hope the world she will live in (if the Lord tarries His coming) will be better than the way it appears to be headed.

Are Pre-Trib Rapturists No Good for this World? Part 2

Oct 13

Posted by Mike Stallard in Rapture | No Comments

In responding to the USA Today article “What if the end isn’t near?” from August 23, 2010, I want to deal in this particular posting with some basic thoughts on how the article and some (more liberal?) evangelicals think about the motivation of pretrib rapturists when it comes to social issues like nuclear weapons and environmentalism.

The basic idea I want to suggest is that there are many more factors involved in one’s view of such things than how end time events are understood.  Let’s take the two issues of nuclear weapons and environmentalism one at a time.

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Tommy Ice and the Barndollar Lectures

Oct 13

Posted by Mike Stallard in Barndollar Lectures | No Comments

A couple of weeks ago we had my good friend Dr. Tommy Ice present “The History of the Doctrine of the Rapture” in the Barndollar Lectures at BBS.  Some of the things I appreciated about Tommy’s presentation are the following:

1.  He did not try to force the pre-trib rapture into the early church fathers when it was not there.

2.  He helped us to understand that some people in history like Bede who are taken to hold to a pre-trib rapture by some hold to a conflagration view, not a pre-trib rapture view.

3.  He helped us to know with hard historical facts that the pre-trib rapture doctrine predates Darby.

4.  He helped me especially to put some things together that I had not seen.  From my dissertation research on Arno C. Gaebelein I had run across Emile Guers, a pastor in Geneva, who had been influenced partly by Darby in 1837ff.  Guers later wrote a book in the 1850s entitled The Future of Israel.  This book teaches a 3 1/2 year tribulation not a 7 year tribulation, but it has a rapture before the trib.   Dr. Ice pointed out that Darby held to only a 3 1/2 year tribulation until the middle 1840s.  It was later that Daniel’s 70 weeks are brought into the discussions that were then going on relative to the tribulation.  So now I feel like I understand the early dispensational thinking of the 1830s a little better.

Are Pre-Trib Rapturists No Good for this World?

Oct 12

Posted by Mike Stallard in Rapture | 6 Comments

I have mentioned Tom Krattenmaker, editorialist for USA Today, under the topic of “Evangelicals and Sports.”  I’ll be doing more of that in the days ahead.  However, I consider our differences in that arena somewhat mild and less important than in the area of a recent editorial:  “What if the end isn’t near?” (August 23, 2010).  The subtitle comment of the article tells the basic thrust:  “Too many evangelical Christians welcome the biblical rapture with an unsettling eagerness.  This fatalistic view serves neither fellow humans nor the planet.  A new breed of believers thankfully is taking another path toward Jesus.”  In general, I read the editorial as a gigantic caricature of my own pre-trib rapture view which I consider to be main stream among my kind of evangelicals.

The article goes on to champion the work of Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, founder of the Two Futures Project, who is attempting to get evangelical Christians to “join the nuclear abolition cause.”  The article bemoans the fact that many evangelicals who hold the pre-trib rapture are enamored with end times stuff and are therefore not willing to engage the needs of the world such as abolishing nuclear weapons and helping the environment.  This article reminded me of an event that occurred when I was an aerospace engineer working on F-16s for General Dynamics in Ft. Worth while I attended Dallas Theological Seminary.  A fellow worker came to sit down in my cubicle and told me that Christians were responsible for pollution.  He was a member of the Sierra Club and had rather strong feelings about this.  When I asked him why he thought this way, he gave me two reasons:  1.  Christians use the cultural mandate passage in Gen. 1:26-28 to give us the right to rape the planet; 2. Christians believe Jesus is going to come back and jerk us off this planet so we don’t care about fixing anything that is wrong.  This was the first that I had encountered that thought.  It is interesting that at the time I had been a pre-trib rapture kind of Christian for 8 years and had never heard that in any of the churches I was involved in.  I have encountered it since, but I don’t view those who shun all social activism as representing the majority of Christians who believe strongly in the Second Coming.  I feel so strongly about the caricature of this article that I intend to make several posts highlighting various facets that I think need to be explored along different lines instead of the in-your-face drubbing that is given.

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Evangelicals and Sports Continued

Oct 12

Posted by Mike Stallard in Sports | No Comments

In an earlier post, I had mentioned Tom Krattenmaker’s book Onward Christian Athletes which is critical of the influence that evangelicals have in the sports world in America.  I am scheduled to give a faculty forum paper on “Evangelicals and Sports” in chapel at BBS on November 8 (in about a month).   I am interacting mostly with this book but not exclusively.  My research assistant, Stephen Stallard (my nephew), has been digging for articles and books on the topic from our library and elsewhere. 

In my continued reading and meditation on this topic and of Krattenmaker’s book, I have come to agree with some of the things that are being said.  However, I am still concerned about what I perceive to be perhaps one more way in which the pluralists in society are trying to marginalize those who believe in absolute truth.  In one article in USA Today (“And I’d like to thank God Almighty,” Oct 12, 2009), Krattenmaker notes “But Jesus’ representatives in sports aren’t just practicing faith.  They are also leveraging sports’ popularity to promote a message and doctrine that are out of sync with the diverse communities that support franchises, and with the unifying civic role that we expect of our teams.”  His first statement that evangelicals in sports are not just practicing their faith is problematic on the face of it for me.  Evangelicals believe that evangelism is part of their faith, not something in addition to practicing their faith.  Taken to its logical conclusion Krattenmaker’s approach seems only to want those at the table of sports who never try to persuade others to their view.  He needs to restate this differently to come across reasonably to evangelicals.  I also wonder about the idea of a unifying civic role for sports.  Regional pride certainly exists, but to use this to argue against Baseball Chapel might be a bit much.  I am looking forward to writing the paper — I’ll probably start over the upcoming weekend.  I will outline both where I agree and where I disagree.

I will post my paper in my articles section and attach it to a post when I am finished with it.

Gospel-centeredness, Jesus, and Social Action

Aug 5

Posted by Mike Stallard in Gospel-centered | 9 Comments

I recently attended the Bible Faculty Summit conference on Christology which was held this year at Maranatha Baptist College.  I delivered a paper entitled “Gospel-centeredness, Jesus, and Social Action.”  In that paper I critique Richard Stearns’ recent book A Hole in our Gospel and the writings of N. T. Wright.  In the former, I show that the definition of the gospel has been expanded wrongfully to include the so-called social gospel.  In the latter, I show that the implications of the gospel are inappropriately expanded in the social direction.

In doing this analysis, I wanted to support social action for Christians (which I believe in) and not just have a knee-jerk response to liberal social gospel ethics.  However, I wanted the Bible’s teaching to clearly draw the parameters and definitions.  Although I greatly respect Stearns’ desire for more social action on the part of Christians,  I do not believe that this need justifies expanding the biblical definition of the gospel.  I have provided an excerpt below of my critique of Stearns.  I am doing some additions to the paper.  I hope to post a link to the completed work when I am finished.

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Life & Weddings

Aug 5

Posted by Mike Stallard in Family | 1 Comment

I have been silent for awhile on my blog.  I had good reason.  I was on the road quite a bit and much of it for good family reasons.  The highlight of it all was my son Phil’s wedding to Leah.  It is such a blessing when your son chooses well.  His mother and I are proud of him.  Hopefully now as we approach the Fall semester I will be back in the swing of things for blogging.

Honesty, Integrity, and the Gaza Flotilla

Jun 10

Posted by Mike Stallard in Arab-Israeli Conflict | 1 Comment

I am not sure if you saw this or not.  But I ran across an article discussing the fact that Reuters, the well-known news service, modified pictures of the Gaza Flotilla episode when Israeli forces stopped the boats headed to Gaza.  Reuters apparently removed weapons in the pictures such as knives in the hands of the activists on the boats as they attempted to fight the Israelis who had boarded.  Why would Reuters do such a thing?  Apparently they are not just reporting the news.  They are trying to manipulate opinion in a direction against Israel by portraying the activists as more helpless than they actually were.  If you are interested in checking out the photos, go to this link:  http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=164073.  The article is entitled “Reuters cropping knives out of flotilla photos?”