Journal: Conservative Theological Journal
Volume: CTJ 03:10 (Dec 1999)
Article: The Destructive View Of Preterism
Author: Thomas D. Ice

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CTJ 3:10 (December 1999) p. 386

The Destructive View Of Preterism

Thomas Ice

Executive Director
Pre-Trib Research Center, Arlington,TX

AN ADDRESS GIVEN BEFORE THE:
CONSERVATIVE THEOLOGICAL SOCIETY
2ND ANNUAL MEETING, AUGUST 3, 1999
TYNDALE SEMINARY, FT. WORTH, TEXAS

I have a book that just came out about a couple of months ago. It is a debate book between Ken Gentry and me. Ken Gentry is the leading Preterist out there and we’re going to be discussing what is Preterism.

I was involved in Preterism for about 20 years because I was involved with the Christian Reconstruction Movement, and they basically have revived what is called Preterism. You might be interested to know that in 1843, when the journal Bibliotheca Sacra was first started, it taught Preterism. You can go back and look at the early articles - Moses Stewart and James Robinson and those kinds of people wrote in the journal. It was 70, 80, 90 years before Dallas and even before Bib Sac moved to Dallas Seminary, it became a futurist organ. But it’s interesting to go back and look at that. Moses Stewart was one of the leading Preterists (I noticed someone footnoted him in a paper; I can’t remember who it was). Preterism is from the Latin word meaning “gone by” and it means that something has passed. One of the problems with talking about Preterism is that I have to spend a lot of my time explaining it to people before I can then interact with it. So, it cuts your time in half and you might walk away feeling you haven’t had much criticism of it, or how to deal or interact with it.

What I tried to do in this book, in the first few chapters, was to present a positive case for futurism, because that’s what we are. Then in the rebuttal section, I tried to critique Preterism or interact with Preterism, because the Preterists always take the lead by going to their passages and arguing, then we respond. I found that hardly anybody has thought through how you inductively develop Futurism from the Bible. I tried an approach, and I would certainly be happy if people could

CTJ 3:10 (December 1999) p. 387

improve upon it in the book. Preterism is the belief that holds, and this is a quote from Ken Gentry, “that the Tribulation prophecies occurred in the first century, thus are passed.” So Preterism deals with basically different views revolving around Bible prophecy that we see as future, and they almost always start with the Olivet Discourse. Any presentation that you will hear will start with the Olivet Discourse. And, David Chilton, who died a few years ago from a heart attack in his mid to late 40’s, and became a Full Preterist, (and we’ll explain what that means in a minute, in oth...

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