Actually, as a life-long premillennarian (much of it in my early years as a dispensationalist), I found his MP3 to be cogent, clear, and disconcertingly convincing. I plan on reading his "A Case for Amillennialism" and Venema's "The Promise of the Future" next week on vacation.

Frankly, one of the things I liked about the MP3 was Riddlebarger's going out of his way to show appreciation for his own dispensational heritage, to quote the best of dispensational scholarship (rather than the popularizers), and to speak respectfully of them (even admonishing his congregation not to think or speak of dispensationalism as a heresy or "anything like that"). It's almost enough to make me reconsider my negative comments about my M.Div. alma mater (Kim received his PhD at Fuller under Muller).

Todd nailed it: presuppositions rule. The dispensationalist operates on two principal controlling notions: Israel is to be sharply differentiated from the church in the redemptive plan and prophecy should be interpreted in its literal common-sense manner. The implications of this mean that, as MacArthur said in his now infamous message at last year's shepherd's conference: "If you get Israel right, you get prophecy right." The more mainstream Reformed presuppositions see the NT as reinterpreting the OT and applying it to the Christ event. The Abrahamic promises are fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The Mosaic law is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. The church is the "spiritual seed of Abraham," heirs according to the promise and joint heirs with Christ.

Premills (almost definitionally) and classic orthodox Reformed Postmills and Amills (i.e., those outside the mainline heresies) are just as serious about taking the Bible as the Word of God. Actually, the orthodox Reformed are often more zealous in defending inerrancy than broad evangelical premills. What I grew up calling "spiritualization" seems to me to be more of a Christocentric interpretation of Scripture along the lines of John, Paul, Peter, and the book of Hebrews.

Both sides believe that one should interpret the Bible literally, according to its genre. The difference comes in terms of whether the NT reinterprets the OT in terms of Jesus (cf. as Jesus seems to suggest in the Emmaus road conversation) or whether God intends a fulfillment for national Israel separate from his Gentile program. If you are reading poetry, it would be unfaithful to the text to interpret poetic references to breasts like date clusters or bunches of grapes or hair like goats running down a mountain as anything other than figurative language. If Jesus says that the OT ALL speaks about him, then perhaps our grammatical-historical and contextual analyses of the OT should point forward to Jesus as the ultimate meaning of our penultimate historical and redemptive OT text. And, when Paul calls the church the "Israel of God" (says I know the counter argument here), perhaps we have, within the text, a direction as to how we should interpret the OT prophetic literature regarding Israel.

BTW, progressive dispensationalism has more in common with G.E. Ladd's approach to salvation history than it does to the writings of Chafer, Walvoord, Ryrie, or Pentecost. By softening the differentiation between Israel and the Church, adopting a more "already but not yet" view, and allowing the NT to provide Christ colored lenses through which to read the OT, it will be interesting to see how long progressive dispensationalism lasts before eventually melding into classic Amill/Postmill eschatology.

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Dennis E. McFadden, Ex Mainline Baptist (in Remission)
Atherton Baptist Homes, CEO
First Baptist Church of Alhambra, Member, Transformation Ministries (CA)

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