Additional Considerations
In parts 2 and 3 of this series, I have examined seven different New Testament passages that contradict the core tenets of Dispensationalism. Of course, those who teach Dispensationalism have answers for each of these passages but, when those answers are examined, they turn out to require dropping, modifying, or otherwise inconsistently applying the strict grammatical-historical hermeneutic.
One such argument that Vlach uses in his explanation of the essentials of Dispensationalism and elsewhere is that Scripture speaks of multiple senses of Abraham’s seed/offspring. He says “Dispensationalists point out that the concept of ‘seed of Abraham’ is used in several different ways in the New Testament, and that context determines which meaning is in mind” (49) and again “[t]here is no enlargement or expansion of Israel to include Gentiles, although there is an expansion of the ‘people of God’ concept to include believing Gentiles. . . .” (77) Ryrie says essentially the same thing; “the Scriptures speak of more than one kind of seed born to Abraham.” (161) But this expanding of a concept is exactly what Dispensationalism says must not, cannot be done with other concepts, in particular with the concept of Israel (Vlach 42-43, 77). It is precisely what the Reformed believe the New Testament Scriptures do with the concept of Israel. Vlach admits that the New Testament can enlarge the concept of Abraham’s seed, which in the Old Testament only ever means the physical descendants of Abraham through Isaac and Jacob (e.g. Gen. 21:12; Exod. 32:13, 33:1; Ps. 105:6; Is. 41:8; Jer. 33:26); on what grounds does he refuse to allow the New Testament to do the same with the concept of Israel which has at least four distinct (though related) meanings in the Old Testament (Jacob, all Jacob’s descendants, the nation formed by the Mosaic Covenant, and the Northern Kingdom)? He has no basis for this refusal except his own presuppositions which he imposes on Scripture. If he is to be consistent, Vlach must, just as he does with Israel, find the meaning of seed of Abraham solely in the Old Testament where it is only used to refer to Abraham’s physical offspring through Isaac and Jacob. But the New Testament is too clear to allow for this kind of interpretation and so, as I have shown, those who hold to Dispensationalism cannot be consistent in applying their own hermeneutic; doing so would make the New Testament, in passages such as Gal. 3:16, contradict the Old Testament.
This Dispensational hermeneutic is largely an outgrowth of the enlightenment; it insists we read Scripture essentially as we would any other man-authored writing–according to the intent of the humans who wrote it–rather than as a supernatural book. Those such as Vlach place too great an emphasis on the authorial intent of the human writers with statements like “the New Testament writers do not reinterpret or transcend the original intent of the Old Testament writers.” (31 emphasis added) While humans did write the words of Scripture and those words are really and truly the words of their respective human authors, every text of the Old and New Testaments was inspired by God; in this sense, there is only one author of the entire Scriptures. God has told us that the human writers of Scripture often did not understand, at least not fully, what they were writing. Much of the Old Testament was originally delivered by way of visions; in Num. 12:6-8 God contrasts the clarity of speaking face-to-face with the visions by which he communicated to the prophets. He calls those visions “riddles” (ESV) or “mysterious language” (NASB). Sometimes the very writers themselves admit to not understanding at all what they were writing. At least twice Zechariah had to ask what his visions meant (Zech. 4:4-5, 11-13) and Daniel similarly failed to understand what was being shown to him (Dan. 8:27 & 12:8-9). Peter wrote that the Old Testament prophets “made careful searches and inquiries” into the salvation they were foretelling, because they did not know “what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.” (1 Pet. 1:10-11). Yes, men wrote the various books of the Bible, but God is the author of the whole Scriptures (“[a]ll Scripture is breathed out by God. . .” 2 Tim. 3:16), not the men who penned the words.
[K]nowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
2 Pet. 1:20-21
That same Spirit makes clear to us in the New Testament what he intended to be shadowy and only partially seen in the Old. As Augustine put it, “the New is in the Old concealed, the Old is in the New revealed.” God never intended the Old Testament to stand on its own but gave it with a veil that only Christ, by his death and life in the New Testament, could remove (2 Cor. 3:14-16).
If God in the New Testament tells us that Christ and all who are in him are the very same Israel to whom the promises were made, he has every right to do that no matter how those under the Old Testament might have understood him. I believe he does this and I believe the New Testament is clear that Israel and the Church are the same entity, though now having been given a new form. To be sure, it is not that God’s words prior to Christ were given to be confusing or were deceptive; rather, he intended to convey enough by them “to make [Israel] wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15) and only later to make clear the full meaning of his words. It is God’s authorial intent, not human intent, we must look at above all else.
The strict Dispensational hermeneutic also does substantial damage to the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. Baptists often briefly state this doctrine as “the Bible is our sole authority for faith and practice.” If the Scriptures are actually sufficient, if they truly are our sole authority, then hermeneutics, as part of our faith and practice, cannot be brought to the Bible but must come from it. We cannot hold our hermeneutic as an a priori of our faith but must derive our interpretive grid from the statements and examples of Scripture. Ryrie and Vlach do not directly address this issue, but another contemporary Dispensationalist, Mark Snoeberger, does; when contemplating what to do with passages such as Hos. 11:1 & Matt. 2:15 he posits that the very “centerpiece of the concept of ‘literal’ interpretation” is that “hermeneutical principles” are “something to be settled as a matter of transcendental presupposition before [we] can even start reading the Bible.” (https://dbts.edu/2015/05/08/whatever-happened-to-literal-hermeneutics-part-2/) This is a direct rejection of the sufficiency of Scripture! Of course it is impossible for anyone to come to Scripture without any prior understandings or even hermeneutic; we must have a common standard of language in order to begin to approach Scripture. But that is no excuse, once we have come to Scripture, to refuse to alter our hermeneutic to match the hermeneutic that the Scriptures apply to themselves. We must never set our hermeneutic up beforehand as a foundational doctrine that holds sway over the Scriptures. Snoeberger’s presupposed hermeneutic is theological liberalism redivivus; to place man’s philosophically discovered laws of language above Scripture itself is an example of the same misguided approach to Scripture that drives liberal theology. The Scriptures are miraculous in their origin, content, and preservation; therefore, by definition, they are, at least partially, outside the normal laws of God’s creation. Philosophy and natural laws are inadequate when dealing with the supernatural. If the Scriptures were only to be read strictly according to the grammatical-historical method, then even the unregenerate would have no great difficulty expositing them (1 Cor 2:13-14) and there would be no need for the revelation of Christ to remove the veil that inhibits the proper understanding of his word (2 Cor 3:14-18). Our principles of interpretation must not be conformed to this world such that we read Scripture as an ordinary book written by men; they must be submitted to and transformed by the very book they are seeking to interpret.
I have tackled only Vlach & Ryrie’s primary statements regarding the Dispensational hermeneutic (with a few supporting statements by Snoeberger); there are many nuances and secondary issues which Vlach in particular mentions that could be investigated but that has not been my purpose with these posts. I have examined how Scripture interprets itself, portions of God’s word where he tells us who he considers Israel to be in the aftermath of Christ’s work, why we must allow the New Testament to directly shape our interpretation of the Old Testament, and how each of these compares to the Dispensational hermeneutic and insistence that Israel be defined by Old Testament statements. There are of course many, many other issues beyond these hermeneutical issues that I could discuss but, though it can be said that Dispensationalism historically developed “backwards” from eschatology, logically, its hermeneutic is the center out of which flow all the other disagreements between Reformed and Dispensational doctrine. And so, as I stated in part one, even if it gets everything else correct, if its hermeneutic is faulty, Dispensationalism must be rejected.