The Full Case, Verse by Verse

Part Four gave you the shape of the disagreement between the three views this book has been walking you through — dispensationalist, partial preterist, and full preterist — on each of the five disputed doctrines, with real texts attached to every position. Part Five then answered the question sitting underneath that disagreement, the one Part Four could only point toward: not when these five things happen, but what you are actually being changed into on the road to their fulfillment. That answer is the reason the deep dive that follows will not collapse into a pure timing debate. Without it, the verse-by-verse work below is just the same chart war fought at greater length. With it, the five doctrines you are about to meet again are the timing of your own becoming a partaker of the divine nature — which is what makes the depth worth the length it takes. This part of the book goes back through the same five doctrines, one at a time, and this time goes all the way down: every citation given in full, every argument built out to its actual conclusion. And — this matters more than anything else in this part of the book — every position, including the ones this book ultimately disagrees with, is stated at the full strength a thoughtful, well-read believer holding that position would actually state it. Nothing here is a strawman. If you finish this part of the book still holding a different view than the one it argues for, you will at least know you were given the real argument to weigh, not a caricature built to be easy to knock down.

There is a reason this matters beyond simple fairness. An early draft of this book answered the full preterist claim about the resurrection with what amounted to a shrug: look in a mirror, you're still aging. Therefore, the argument went, the resurrection obviously has not happened yet. That is true, as far as it goes. It is also, on its own, a strawman. It answers a spiritual claim about the nature of resurrected existence with nothing more than a biological observation, and any full preterist who has thought carefully about their own position will simply reply that you have missed the point of what they are claiming. A serious full preterist argument runs through something deeper: God's own timelessness, and the possibility that resurrection language describes an already-accomplished spiritual reality, apprehended now by faith. It is the same way a believer's justification is complete the moment they believe, even while their sanctification continues unfolding across an entire lifetime. That argument deserves an answer that actually engages it — not a mirror, but a body: specifically, the one resurrected body anyone in history ever actually got to examine, and what that body was shown, in front of witnesses, to be. You will meet that answer in full in this part of the book, in the section on the resurrection, and you will meet it again, put to direct use, in Part Seven.