Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 180:719 (Jul 2023)
Article: Book Reviews
Author: Matthew S. DeMoss

BSac 180:719 (July-September 2023) p. 358

Book Reviews

By The Faculty And Staff Of Dallas Theological Seminary

Matthew S. DeMoss

Editor

After Dispensationalism: Reading the Bible for the End of the World. By Brian P. Irwin with Tim Perry. Bellingham, WA: Lexham, 2023. xxiii + 405 pp. $29.99.

Irwin is associate professor of Old Testament and Hebrew Scriptures at Knox College in Toronto, Ontario, and Perry is professor of theology at Providence Seminary in Otterburne, Manitoba. According to the authors, “This book sketches the origins of [dispensational eschatology], identifies its current proponents, and describes the future it predicts. It also examines the genres of biblical writing that this approach uses most, their original contexts, and how their original audience likely understood their contents. . . . In short, this book commends dispensationalism’s scriptural zeal even as it finds that its way of reading often misses what the biblical authors wished to communicate” (2).

The book is divided into three parts. In the first, “The World of End-Times Preaching,” the authors briefly survey end-time understandings in Christian history and outline a history of dispensationalism from Darby to Lindsey and LaHaye. This is followed by an overview of biblical texts used to defend dispensational eschatology: particularly Ezekiel 36–37, Daniel 9, Matthew 24, John 14, 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4, and Revelation 19–20. The authors criticize dispensationalism for overlooking “the original biblical audiences and contexts” of these texts (95). Instead, dispensationalist eschatology “cherry-picks across the canon to shoehorn passages into our context” (95). Further, they assert, “The unrelenting focus on present fulfillment means that ‘literal interpretation’ can be idiosyncratic and constantly shifting” (95).

Part 2, “The World of Prophecy and Apocalyptic,” discusses literary genres and hermeneutical approaches. The authors criticize dispensationalism for adopting “a literalistic reading [of prophecy and apocalyptic literature] in place of a truly literary one, with significant consequences for interpretation: namely, a post-exilic oracle is wrongly transposed to the distant future, shoehorned into a highly detailed eschatological schema” (138). In addition, they argue that “an overly literalistic approach to reading also often fails to consider the social ...