The Hope Objection, Named Once, Plainly

One more objection has been running underneath this comparison since Part Six opened, and it deserves the same direct naming the consistency challenge just received. Part Seven, not far ahead, considers the charge that full preterism, taken as a complete system, leaves nothing left inside it to hope for. A serious full preterist would say that charge gets the direction backwards, and the strongest version of their answer deserves to be heard in full here rather than only through a partial preterist summary of it.

Their argument, at its strongest, runs like this. Hope relocated is not hope removed. John 17:3 — "Now this is eternal life—that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent" (NET) — is, on their reading, a text partial preterism and full preterism both claim, turned toward a different conclusion by each. Nothing is still owed to a believer that they do not already have full access to. You are not waiting on a future event to finally start experiencing what Christ secured. You are already inside it. The "not yet" partial preterism keeps reaching for to describe its own hope is, on the full preterist account, the thinner hope of the two — a promise still held as an IOU rather than a delivered inheritance.

The charge that full preterism leaves no future resurrection gets reframed, on this reading, as the claim that the resurrection already secured your future. Most full preterists do not say nothing happens to a believer at death. They say the corporate resurrection Paul describes in real, present-tense terms — "raised us up together with him and seated us together with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus" (Ephesians 2:6, NET) — was completed, finally and corporately, in AD 70, and that every believer since simply passes directly into the fullness of that already-accomplished reality at death. From inside their system, that is not a weaker certainty than a bodily resurrection two thousand years overdue. It is a stronger one, because it has already happened rather than still hanging on a date that keeps not arriving.

The charge that full preterism leaves no future judgment on evil, they would say, mistakes what kind of judgment the New Testament's harder texts were ever describing. The judgment language was never, on their reading, a promise of some final cosmic reckoning of all evil everywhere. It described the old covenant order and the threat it posed to the early church, judged and closed out in AD 70. Ongoing evil in the world today is not unfinished business still waiting on God. It is the normal condition of a fallen world being worked out through the church's own sanctification.

And the sharpest version of their reply is not exegetical at all. It is pastoral. The charge of "no hope," they would say, is really only "hope that does not look like the hope you are used to" — and unfamiliarity is being mistaken for absence.

That is a genuinely strong answer, and the partial preterist reply is worth hearing at equal strength rather than assumed. The partial preterist case holds that the answer above holds together only if the seam located at Matthew 24:36 gets read away rather than read as a seam — "But as for that day and hour no one knows it — not even the angels in heaven — except the Father alone" (Matthew 24:36, NET), argued in 6.3 as the place where the subject shifts from the dated judgment on Jerusalem to a second, undated, still-future event. From the partial preterist side, the "hope relocated" answer needs that seam to close rather than hold — needs Acts 1:11's "will come back in the same way you saw him go into heaven" (NET), 2 Peter 3:13's "we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth, in which righteousness truly resides" (NET), the judgment seat of 2 Corinthians 5:10's "we must all appear... so that each one may be paid back according to what he has done while in the body, whether good or evil" (NET), and Revelation 20's dead of all history — "the sea gave up the dead that were in it, and Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them" (NET) — to all collapse back across that seam into the same single AD 70 horizon.

That is the same question the Consistency Challenge just above already raised, felt pastorally here instead of argued grammatically there — which is exactly why this is the strongest form the hope objection takes. Whether a hope that requires that reinterpretive work, in every believer's own reading of every one of those texts, is a delivered inheritance or a hope still, honestly, on its way is the same question this entire comparison keeps returning to in five different keys. This book is not going to answer it for you here either.