Defining the System
During the 20th Century, Dispensational Theology grew from a relatively unknown system of theology to probably the most influential, if not most widely held, conservative and orthodox understanding of Scripture in America. The reasons for Dispensationalism’s rise and popularity are many but what I intend to examine in these posts are whether or not they were warranted. Any system of theology must be two things; above all it must be in conformity to Scripture but it also must be consistent. That it must conform to Scripture I will take as self-evident. Making the assumption that Scripture is not self-contradictory, it then follows that a system of theology that conforms to Scripture must also be self-consistent. Does Dispensationalism conform to Scripture and is it consistent with itself? In this series, I intend to examine these two questions by means of analyzing the hermeneutic of Dispensationalism in light of various passages of Scripture.
Why did I decide to examine the hermeneutic rather than something directly spoken of in Scripture? It is obvious that the matter of hermeneutics is of foundational importance as hermeneutics determines our understanding of Scripture. How we read the word of God can be as important as the Gospel itself since what we understand the Gospel to be is determined by our hermeneutic. Thankfully, what I will examine here does not rise to the level of touching the Gospel. But there are other, more practical than directly theological, reasons to focus on hermeneutics. I am a Baptist and as such I write from a Baptist perspective. Though this short series is largely critical rather than positive (I do not explain what I believe to be the proper hermeneutical approach), the specific perspective from which I write is that of most Baptists throughout history: until around the late 1800s, Baptists almost universally held to the particular form of Covenant Theology espoused by the 1689/2nd London Baptist Confession of Faith and the system of hermeneutics that accompanies that theology. Further, in recent years, Dispensational Theology has shown itself to be particularly susceptible to the errors of the Reformed Paedobaptists; for instance, as much as fifty percent of the PCA is currently made up of former Baptists. Though Reformed Baptists have much agreement with Reformed Paedobaptists, the matter of hermeneutics is central to their disagreements. Similarly, while Reformed Baptists share much in common with Dispensational Baptists, the matter of hermeneutics determines most, if not all, of their differences. So, I have chosen to focus on the issue of hermeneutics in Dispensationalism.
For these posts, I limit myself to primarily referencing two books. They are Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism, Revised and Expanded (Chicago: Moody Bible Institute, 2007) and Michael Vlach’s Dispensationalism: Essential Beliefs and Common Myths, Revised and Updated (Los Angeles: Theological Studies Press, 2017). All references from these two authors are from their respective book except as explicitly referenced otherwise. In a very real sense, these two writers represent Dispensationalism as no others do. Ryrie particularly can be called the face of Dispensationalism for most of the latter half of the twentieth century. Unlike someone such as Hal Lindsey, Ryrie is scholarly and avoids the excesses of the purely popular Dispensationalism; but he also wrote at a popular enough level to not simply remain in the academic realm. Vlach is (as best I can tell) the most likely successor to Ryrie; he similarly spans the popular-academic gap. Further, Ryrie represents the Modified/Revised Dispensational position while Vlach is much closer to the Progressive Dispensational system. He doesn’t fully embrace it but labels himself as somewhere “between Revised and Progressive Dispensationalism, while also having a healthy respect and reliance upon Traditional Dispensationalism.” (https://dispensationalpublishing.com/a-dispensational-discourse-with-dr-michael-vlach/) As such, he can bridge the current divides in Dispensationalism. For instance, he understands the reasons driving the Progressive changes in a way that Ryrie simply does not, even if he doesn’t fully embrace those changes. Any other references or quotations I make are from easily accessible sources.
I do realize that, by limiting my critique to primarily these two writers & books, I will likely miss nuances of the Dispensational arguments; there are other, more thorough writers than Ryrie, Vlach’s book is (intentionally) basic, and each specific form of Dispensationalism will have slight hermeneutical differences. My purpose here is not to write a scholarly critique for scholars or to address every possible argument but rather to attempt an accessible examination of the basics of the Dispensational hermenuetic. I believe Ryrie and Vlach give me the proper foundation for such an attempt. Having dealt with these preliminaries, I turn to examining Dispensationalism.
In a very real sense, the Dispensational view, at its very core, can be summarized quite simply: it is the dual positions that Scripture must be read literally (the grammatical, historical hermeneutic) and that therefore Israel and the Church must be distinct. (Ryrie pp39-40, Vlach pp8, 31-50). These are the two tenets that are common to every list of Dispensational essentials or definitives. Dispensational scholars do not allow for either of these two to be compromised but, in particular with the hermeneutic, actually state they must be rigid and unbending. Ryrie contrasts non-dispensationalists who (he claims) inconsistently use the grammatical-historical method with the Dispensationalist who must “consistent[ly] use. . . it in all areas of biblical interpretation. . . .” (47). He again shows this inflexibility in application to be the defining mark of Dispensational hermeneutics when he defines the difference between the Dispensationalist and others who use the grammatical-historical hermeneutic as the “claim to use the normal principle of interpretation consistently in all his study of the Bible.” (93 emphasis in original) Further, Ryrie says that the presence of spiritualizing or allegorizing (which he implicitly defines as anything other than a normal, plain, or literal interpretation) “in a system of interpretation is indicative of a non-dispensational approach.” (47)
Vlach also holds to this strict application of the plain/normal interpretation. He says “Dispensationalists affirm a consistent historical-grammatical or literal hermeneutic applied to all areas of Scripture. . .” and, as an application of this, that “the New Testament [does not] reinterpret, transcend, transform, or spiritualize promises and prophecies in the Old Testament. . . The New Testament will offer newer revelation but it will not contradict or override the meaning of previous passages in the Old Testament.” (87-88) Again, he says his system “hold[s] to ‘passage priority’ in which the primary meaning of a passage is found in the passage at hand and not in other passages.” (87) This contrasts with “Covenantalists [who] also affirm a [sic] historical-grammatical hermeneutic to many areas of Scripture, but. . . believe that typological and even spiritual hermeneutics need to be applied to some areas of scripture. . . .” (88 emphasis in original)
To be absolutely certain I am not holding Dispensationalism to a standard it does not claim for itself, I offer this passage from Ryrie; he first quotes Daniel Fuller as representative of the non-Dispensational Historic Premillennial position and then critiques him.
“In Covenant Theology there is a tendency to impute to passages a meaning which would not be gained merely from their historical and grammatical associations. . . .” This is quite an admission, for it means that the covenant premillennialist is not a consistent literalist by his own statement. (95)
Ryrie specifically calls this out as “compromis[ing] the literal principle.” (95) For the Dispensational hermeneutic then, one must not only use the grammatical-historical hermeneutic, he must also not use any additional method of interpretation. He may not read any meaning or understanding from (or into) a passage that cannot, by the use of the grammatical-historical method alone, be gained from that specific passage. He may, by comparing scripture with scripture, restrict or clarify the meaning of the passage under consideration, but he must never widen the possible meanings and find some interpretation that could not be found from the passage alone. Vlach states “there is no need for one passage to have priority over others since all Scripture is inspired by God and makes its own contribution. . . . no passage overrides the meaning of another passage” and he defines his hermeneutic as the principle that “the primary meaning of any Bible passage is found in that passage.” (30-31) This hermeneutic is quite rigid.
If, then, it can be demonstrated that Dispensationalism must compromise its hermeneutic at any point, the system is faulty. If the New Testament fails even once to maintain the strict rigidity of the solely grammatical-historical approach, then, by Ryrie & Vlach’s own definitions, the New Testament is not Dispensational. If then there is a single New Testament passage that the Dispensationalist cannot interpret solely according to its own “normal” or “plain” sense (Ryrie 47) but must grant an Old Testament passage interpretive priority over it, the Dispensational hermeneutic, as stated by its defenders, is inconsistent with itself and must be rejected. Or, if the New Testament, literally interpreted, does not hold the Church distinct from Israel or gives the name Israel to the Church, even if only in one verse, then the New Testament is not wholly Dispensational. And assuming the New Testament is not wholly Dispensational, Dispensationalism is wrong. I don’t need to critique every aspect of Dispensationalism to show it to be wrong. It is a very complex system with careful systematics and impressive interpretations of practically every passage of Scripture; but I don’t need to interact with all of those aspects. Assuming I can show its hermeneutic or its Church-Israel distinction to fail, then by design, the rest of the system fails as well.
I believe I can show, not one, but many places where the New Testament writers do these very things: give New Testament, ethnically Gentile Christians the label of Israel or otherwise understand the Church to be the same entity as Israel, tell us a passage in the Old Testament means something other than what we can understand solely from that passage itself, and which New Testament writing the Dispensationalist must interpret, not according to that passage’s own plain sense, but according to his understanding of the Old Testament. These New Testament passages will be the subject of the next two posts. After examining these passages, I will conclude with some further comments and critiques.