Where’s the Church? The Church as the Unfinished Business of Dispensational Theology -- By: Michael D. Williams

Journal: Grace Theological Journal
Volume: GTJ 10:2 (Fall 1989)
Article: Where’s the Church? The Church as the Unfinished Business of Dispensational Theology
Author: Michael D. Williams


Where’s the Church?
The Church as the Unfinished Business
of Dispensational Theology

Michael D. Williams

Paul addressed the church as a concrete assembly, an assembly which functions as the representative of the rule of God within our world. That assembly is an essential constituent of the believers salvation and subsequent sanctification. The classical dispensationalist distinction between Israel and the church as belonging to different metaphysical realms, however, has worked to the detriment of dispensational ecclesiology. The combination of an overemphasis upon the individual believer and the church as a transcendent, mystical body has tended to view the concrete this-worldly assembling of the body of Christ as relatively unimportant. When the true distinction between Israel and the church is seen to be historical rather than metaphysical, the church, as the historical, visible body of Christ, becomes the centerpiece of Gods dealings with the world during the present dispensation.

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Introduction

Dispensational theology has often been depicted by its opponents as an anti-church theology. The liberal theologian, George Ricker Berry, writing in the 1920’s concluded that dispensationalism depreciates the church and its relationship to the redemptive purposes of God through an inordinate importance upon Israel in its eschatology and an antithetical mind set that either compartmentalizes biblical magnitudes (Israel/church) or pits them against one another (heaven/earth). Berry wrote that the Jews “continue to keep forever their position as the chosen nation of special privilege. The Christian church thus becomes really subordinate to the Jewish nation.”1

This charge did not present a major problem for dispensational theology. The dispensationalist could accept the charge as true, provided that one restricted the church as it is articulated in the charge to a this-worldy entity. Classical dispensationalists such as C. I. Scofield and Lewis Sperry Chafer were no more enamored with the denominational and sectarian realities of modern Christendom than John Nelson Darby had been with the Established Church of his day. They held that the church as an institution in this world cannot help but participate in the ruin of the world-system, and will ultimately be replaced upon the stage of world history by the earthly people of God—Israel. The elevation of Israel, however, was never an end in itself for dispensationalism. Rather, it operated as a foil for ecclesiology, and especially for the explication of the greater heavenly glory of the true body of Christ. The elevation of Israel was not meant ...

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