Dispensationalism

Dispensationalism, was once held to be a serious heresy by the majority of evangelical Christians. Today, it is the other way around: anyone who is not a pre-tribulation-rapture-pre-millenialist-dispensationalist is considered suspect in fundamentalist/evangelical circles. Personally I think it is a viewpoint that is 1) wrong 2) not necessarily evil in and of itself, but has contributed to some distrurbing trends. It is interesting to me the way that history and theology are intermingled, and how that intermingling has vast and surprising effects on politics and public policy. I think this has totally been the case with dispensationalism. I have a lot of fragmented thoughts on this, and it is going to take me several posts to get them all out, but I think here I'll give you so pre-lims:

1. pre-tribulation-rapture-pre-millenialist-dispensationalism has led to an irrational and immoral support of the nation of Israel by the United States.

2. pre-tribulation-rapture-pre-millenialist-dispensationalism has led to widely held misconceptions about end-times, bible prophesy, and the nature of the Kingdom of God, which has flawed the way people interpret history, current events, and most importantly Scripture.

3. pre-tribulation-rapture-pre-millenialist-dispensationalism fosters/grows out of a gross misunderstanding of the purpose and program of biblical prophesy, which can be easily illustrated by a recent informal poll of about 120 9th graders and a Christian school. Everyone of them agreed with this statement: "The primary role of a prophet in the Bible was to fortell the future." Does the church train its young people to think that Ezekiel and Jeremiah were nothing but glorified psychics!?!? Sadly, I think the answer is yes.

More on this later, I must go and eat at Il Viccino with my wife.