How a Coherent System Gets Assembled, One Piece at a Time

You now know the difference between already and not yet, across five separate doctrines, argued from three sides, in more depth than most Christians ever get the chance to acquire. You know it is not a technicality, a hairsplitting distinction that matters only to people who enjoy theological arguments for their own sake. It is the difference between a body that is still, this morning, visibly aging, and a body that has finished changing for good. It is the difference between a war you are still being armed for and a war that has already, entirely, been won.

Here is something true of all three views you have just spent two long parts of this book weighing, not only one of them: nobody who heard any of the three stated all at once, as a single, complete, unhedged claim, would sign on immediately without wanting to sit with it first. Every one of the three, examined piece by piece, sounds like a series of individually reasonable readings of individually real verses. Every one of the three, stated as a single finished sentence, is a much bigger claim than any of its individual pieces let on. That is not a defect unique to one of the three positions. It is simply what a coherent system is — a set of individually plausible readings that add up, together, to something a reader deserves to see whole before adopting, rather than accepting one true-sounding piece at a time, in scattered conversations, months apart, never once asked to hold the whole thing in view at once.

This part of the book is going to walk you through what that looks like using all three systems in turn, stated the way you would actually meet each of them out in the world, unlabeled, one claim at a time — full preterism first, because its five components compress most naturally into five short, complete sentences, and because it is the view most often absorbed exactly this way, in real conversations and on real Facebook pages. Dispensationalism and partial preterism follow, given the same full treatment rather than a summary, because the discipline this part of the book is teaching only works if it is demonstrated the same way on every view it applies to — including, especially, whichever one you already find yourself most persuaded by. Whichever of the three you find yourself drawn to by the end of this book, the same discipline applies: see the whole system stated plainly before you let it have you, not only the one persuasive piece that happened to reach you first.