Periodical Reviews -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 147:587 (Jul 1990)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Anonymous


Periodical Reviews

“Revelation and the Hermeneutics of Dispensationalism,” William H. Shepherd, Jr., Anglican Theological Review 71 (1989): 281-99.

As seen in the second half of his title, Shepherd’s interest is dispensational hermeneutics. However, assuming a readership basically unfamiliar with dispensationalism, he finds it necessary to spend half the article recounting some of the history of dispensationalism and summarizing its main tenets.

The historical review traces aspects of the history of millennialism from early chiliasm to modern dispensationalism as represented by Darby and Scofield. (He appears to mistake Scofield as one of the founders of Dallas Theological Seminary. One would have thought a reference to the Anglican clergyman W. H. Griffith Thomas, one of the actual founders, would have been of interest to the primary readers of this article.) Shepherd is aware of only one modification in dispensational thought—a historicist recasting of Scofieldism in the writings of Hal Lindsey. Throughout the article the meaning of the term “dispensationalism” shifts rather effortlessly between the popular eschatological views of Lindsey and the expositional-theological system of Scofield. After a brief summary of Scofield’s seven dispensations and Lindsey’s correlation of tribulational prophecy with current events, he does note, correctly, that “the fundamental division is not sevenfold, but dual: Israel and the church, law and grace.”

Shepherd then explores literal hermeneutics, accepting George Marsden’s 19th-century contextualization of the method and also pointing out inconsistencies in its application by Scofield and Lindsey. This shows that literalism is not sufficient by itself to describe the dispensational hermeneutic. The distinctive lies rather in the way the tensions and apparent contradictions caused by a literal approach to scriptural teaching about Israel and the church are harmonized. That they must be harmonized follows from a commitment to biblical inerrancy. The harmonization takes place by what Brevard Childs called “‘dissimilation’ (‘to make dissimilar’),” a procedure

that can be traced back to Augustine but that was followed by dispensationalists on a broader theological level. “Thus dispensationalism is a system which preserves a doctrine of biblical inerrancy by exegetical dissimilation of texts that conflict on a literal level.”

Having said this, Shepherd is more or less aware that except for the role played by the theological distinction between Israel and the church, he has done nothing more than identify conservative biblical interpretation. As he brings the article to a close, it becom...

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