Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 166:664 (Oct 2009)
Article: Periodical Reviews
Author: Jefferson P. Webster

BibSac 166:664 (Oct 2009) p. 482

Periodical Reviews

By The Faculty and Library Staff of

Dallas Theological Seminary

Jefferson P. Webster

Editor

“Learning from Left Behind? A Call for Coherent Accounts of Scripture,” Brock Bingaman, Anglican Theological Review 91 (2008): 255-72.

Bingaman, a Ph.D. candidate at Loyola University Chicago, has undertaken an ambitious project in this essay. He intends to help readers understand the beliefs and the historical development of dispensationalism and to provide “a positive critique that offers a coherent account of Scripture firmly rooted in the ancient context” (p. 258). Yet his approach is not completely positive, since he hopes to convince Christian leaders that “the key to a demise of dispensationalist influence is a more coherent account of the biblical text” (p. 264). Thus it is clear that he believes dispensationalism to be less than completely coherent.

According to this critic of dispensationalism the system is in error and needs to be refuted, particularly because of four deficiencies. (a) Dispensationalism is “philosophically deficient in viewing the Bible as a compendium of ‘facts’ that can be known directly,” (b) “hermeneutically deficient” in its “commitment to literalism,” (c) “historically deficient” because in its use of the Bible “texts from widely divergent settings are often ripped from their historical context and made to mesh together,” and (d) “biblically deficient in its approach to particular texts as well as its central tenets, such as the rigid distinction between Jews and Christians, supposedly derived from carefully sifting through the biblical material” (pp. 264-65).

The essay is divided into four sections. After an introduction that demeans the readers of the Left Behind series, Bingaman explains dispensationalism, summarizes the “historical development of this theology with particular focus on its founder John Nelson Darby” (p. 258), and then provides an alternative coherent reading of Matthew 1-2 in order to seek to “undermine the appeal” of dispensationalism (p. 272).

More troubling than the tone of the article, which is dismissive and flippant toward other Christians, is the lack of scholarship evidenced therein. In the forty-eight footnotes, there is only one citation each of Chafer and Darby and none of sources from other dispensational writers, except several references to the stories told in the Left Behind series. Thus there is limited engagement with dispensational scholarship. Bingaman’s understanding of dispensationalism appears heavily dependent on secondary literature, particularly Er...