If You Could Leave The Movement…

After the shocking article by Jason Bradfield, the protege of hyperpreterist leader, Sam Frost I thought it would be interesting to consider how a person could or would ever leave the hyperpreterist movement.  Bradfield’s article (see here) certainly sounded like someone on the edge of abandoning the movement.   However, it is becoming more and more apparent that Bradfield has no intention on leaving the movement.  He is simply trying to distance himself from his fellow hyperpreterists and join his mentor, Frost in creating a privatized version which they can better control.

But what if someone actually did want to leave the movement?  I don’t mean like some of these half-hearted, fake departures we have seen by people like Sharon Nichols and others who spend more time validating and chumming around on hyperpreterist message boards more than they did when they claimed they were in the movement.  I mean, what if someone wanted to actually repudiate hyperpreterism as a person would as they abandoned say an addiction to drugs, smoking, drinking or being part of a cult.  How would a person do that?

Now, I’m obviously not saying a person who leaves the hyperpreterist movement should immediately turn to hostility toward his or her former “heresy-mates”, but I am saying that there should be some manifested level where the person realizes they can’t maintain that those who remain within the heresy are “brothers and sisters in Christ” — since hyperpreterism is not historically Christian anymore than is Mormonism or JWs.

What makes leaving the movement even more difficult today is that even if you do move away from it, there are plenty of possibile pseudo-hyperpreterists, like Kenneth Talbot who is attempting to fashion a new version of preterism called “Realized Preterism”, what hyperpreterist Michael Bennett claims will ultimately lead to “full preterism” (see here).  Hyperpreterist John Noe claims to be advocating “Preterist-Idealism” (see here). Frost is also now trying to fashion a new version he is calling “fuller preterism”.  What happens is that these “alternatives” are like hooks that don’t allow a person to really make a clean break from the movement.  It is like a crack addict who gives up crack but then gets hooked on another drug.

So, a person who really wants to leave the movement is going to need to have courage and God’s Will helping them out of the movement.  With all sorts of fake “former-hyperpreterists” out there, the snares are set.  But if a person can get out of the movement, what then?  Should they go back to “futurism”?  Let’s stop and be honest with ourselves.  What in the world is “futurism” any way?  Hyperpreterists often like to oversimplify the definition of preterism as claiming it means past or believing prophecy was fulfilled in the past.  Well, unless they are trying to claim EVERY prophecy was fulfilled in the past (such as a consistent hyperpreterist named “RiversOfEden” has [see here]), then not even hyperpreterists believe ALL prophecy is fulfilled in the past.  Some they see as continual and perpetual and some yet to be fulfilled.  In the same way, there is NO CHRISTIAN that holds that all prophecy is yet future.  There is no such thing as “futurism”.  This label was created because of the embarrassing reality that to be a hyperpreterist makes a person go against not some made-up group called “futurists”, but against ALL of historic Christianity, which are united in believing the exact same eschatological basics that hyperpreterism calls us to deny.

So, the real comparison is heretics against Christians, not “preterists against futurists”.  That being said, how can a person who has left the hyperpreterist movement ever return to historic Christianity?  Well, one issue is that many people who had fallen into hyperpreterism did so after being or being heavily influenced by Dispensationalism.  Dispensationalism’s eschatological concepts, with raptures and boogeyman Antichrist behind every world leader who can be connected to a 666 sequence is NOT the eschatology of historic Christianity.  If many of the people who have fallen into the hyperpreterist movement are like me, they came from churches that almost never preached about any significance of the AD70 events and even erroneously applied the Olivet Discourse (Mt 24/Mk 13/Lk 21) to our future.  Again, this is NOT how historic Christianity has interpreted the text.  No wonder then it is so fascinating to us when we read our Bible’s with a “preteristic lens”.  Things jump off the page; things we feel like preachers and pastors have hidden from us or were too dense to see themselves.  Why then would anyone want to return to that?

I’m not asking you to return to Dispensationalism or anything that borrows its interpretations.  Historic Christianity has ALWAYS understood the significance of the AD70 events yet WITHOUT going “hyper” and “shifting paradigms” to the point where what a person believes would no longer be recognized as part of Christianity.

Look at some historic Christian commentaries on the Olivet Discourse and you’ll see how it was rightly interpreted.

Mt 24, Mk 13, Lk 21 (see also John Calvin’s exegesis of these texts).  What you’ll find is that these Christians had a “preteristic” interpretation of the texts, long before the term “preterism” became vogue.  Really, there is no reason to even create a new term.  This is the issue I have with the so-called “Partial-Preterists” like Kenneth Gentry, Gary DeMar, Hank Hanegraaff and others.  What they do by introducing a new term is make is seem as if this interpretation of the text never existed until they came along.  Again, it is no wonder that a person then wouldn’t become suspicious of ALL of Christianity and instead make their own way, as the hyperpreterists do.  Who can blame them when Partial-Preterism’s very existence implies that historic Christianity didn’t have a correct interpretation of eschatology until they came along.  Further, this is why I am so opposed to Kenneth Talbot trying to introduce a hybrid form of “full preterism”.  Even if Talbot’s privatized version maintains the four basic historic Christian eschatological points, Talbot relinquishes the idea that God has been guiding His Church.  Instead, Talbot is saying, more or less, “Hey, I’m here to offer an eschatology you can embrace, since 2,000 years of Christianity has been unable to offer an united eschatology”.  This implication is patently untrue.  There is no reason to offer up some new privatized eschatology (unless your motivations are a powerplay).  Simply point people back to historic Christian eschatology BEFORE the rise of Dispensationalism’s influence.

To conclude, if you could leave the hyperpreterist movement, you should steer clear of people on the sidelines trying to get you to come try their privatized version.  Take some time to reconnect to the historic Christian Faith.  The one that billions of Christians have believed and practiced for thousands of years.  God bless and keep you…I know it is going to be difficult at first.