Dispensationalism is not faulty because of its adherents. As the prevailing evangelical ethos in our country, I have met thousands of faithful, Bible-believing, zealous saints who subscribe to various dispensational features. It’s the mode of operation of the American church.
But the system of Dispensationalism is faulty for ten reasons:
1) Literalizes the text in places where literal readings are unnecessary. This approach overlooks the Bible’s rich, genre-saturated literary nature, which is a source of profound enrichment to the Christian reader.
2) Separates theological paradigms like law and gospel and thus misses the gracious nature of the law and the command-driven imperatives of the gospel.
3) Fails to see the compelling nature of Israel’s story as a preparation for the story of the new Israel. Israel is the seed planted in the parched desert places, nourished by priests, prophets, and kings, and flourished under the reign of the One Priest, Prophet, and King.
4) Truncates biblical categories that demand far more glory and weight in the text. It minimizes covenantal realities into stages rather than the maturation of history.
5) Subjectivizes and moralizes historical characters instead of seeing their typological and historical function in the text.
6) Reject eschatological realities that were declared in the first century to be true and tangible by futurizing them into a future millennium.
7) Differentiates Israel and the Church without reading the Messianic story as a recapitulation of the Israel story.
8) Spiritualizes this age and thus fails to see the earthly transformative effects of the vindication of Jesus.
9) Transforms piety into an introspective paradigm that sees the salvation of souls as the sine qua non of the Christian experience.
10) Fragmentizes the biblical story and thus fails to see each biblical text as a part of the overarching whole.
Dispensationalism is a system that is slowly perishing. As a mode of interpretation, it cannot survive the test of time or the present tests of biblical scholarship.
