PRIVATE INTERPRETATION

THE REACTIONARY AND IDIOSYNCRATIC CHARACTER OF DISPENSATIONALISM

Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. 2 Peter 1:20

There was nothing more characteristic of the Puritan method of preaching than the way in which they always came to the application. They were always very insistent upon that. I have sometimes wondered whether the trouble with many of us is our tendency to forget the application. There are many reasons for this. The chief one, I believe, is the danger of reaction, and of an over violent reaction, against something else. It is a very subtle thing, but quite unconsciously we allow other people, and other positions, and other ideas, and other movements to determine ours. That, surely, must always be wrong. We should always be in control, we should always be positive, we should not merely be a reaction against something.

- David Martin Lloyd-Jones"

"It is mortifying to remember that I not only held and taught these novelties myself, but that I even enjoyed a complacent sense of superiority because thereof, and regarded with feelings of pity and contempt those who had not received the 'new light' and were unacquainted with this up-to-date method of 'rightly dividing the word of truth.' For I fully believed what an advertising circular says in presenting 'Twelve Reasons why you should use THE SCOFIELD REFERENCE BIBLE,' namely, that: 'First, the Scofield Bible outlines the Scriptures from the standpoint of DISPENSATIONAL TRUTH, and there can be no adequate understanding or rightly dividing of the Word of God except from the standpoint of dispensational truth.'

What a slur is this upon the spiritual understanding of the ten thousands of men, 'mighty in the Scriptures,' whom God gave as teachers to His people during all the Christian centuries before 'dispensational truth' (or dispensational error), was discovered! And what an affront to the thousands of men of God of our own day, workmen that need not to be ashamed, who have never accepted the newly invented system! Yet I was among those who eagerly embraced it (upon human authority solely, for there is none other) and who earnestly pressed it upon my fellow Christians. I am deeply thankful, however, that the time came (it was just ten years ago) when the inconsistencies and self contradictions of the system itself, and above all, the impossibility of reconciling its main positions with the plain statements of the Word of God, became so glaringly evident that I could not do otherwise than renounce it."

- Philip Mauro

ispensationalism is built on the legacy of Augustine. I say that in the negative sense. In other words, Dispensationalism as a hermeneutic is derived systematically as a negative reaction to Augustines alleged allegorical crimes.

It works like this. A Bible college professor has a new flock of students at his feet. He wants to indoctrinate them with his system of hermeneutics. So he begins by telling them all about what an evil man Augustine was, and how he allegorized Scripture and all of the horrors that resulted from his hermeneutic. Then, when he has sufficiently demonized the man, when he has built up this great big, monstrous boogey man, he moves on to Phase Two, and he explains to them that unless they want to be like Augustine, they have to accept these certain propositions that have been invented by Darby and his followers. They have to submit themselves to these rules of interpretation, and if they dont bring themselves and their consciences and their Bibles under the authority of these so-called rules of interpretation, they will be unable to rightly divide the Word of Truth and will be guilty of all the hermeneutical crimes of Augustine. Now this is, at best, reactionary. At worst it is manipulative and perverse. But this is how Dispensationalists entrap others into believing their system. They create a negative caricature of Augustine, a real demonization, and then classify all medieval and Reformed and Puritan hermeneutics under that heading. Then they present John Darbys system as the bright and shining alternative, the only refuge for sound exegesis of Scripture to which the frightened disciples must flee, unless they want to become these monstrous heretics. Now, my point here is not to defend Augustine. I have no interest in that whatsoever. I have his book City of God, and it has been sitting unread on my bookshelf since I purchased it as research material during my Bible college days. Aside from little clips and quotations here and there, I have never read his works, not a one of them. Perhaps someday I will pick them up and see what he really had to say, but right now, I am reading a wonderful and well-researched biography on George Washington called George Washington's Sacred Fire, which I heartily recommend to anyone who wants to know whether or not George Washington was a Christian. When I have finished that, I have another Washington biography which I just bought this

week, not to mention a number of books in the Puritan Paperbacks series, which I still havent gotten to. Perhaps when I have finished all of that, I will get around to Augustine. My point is this: you dont build your theology on Augustine or anybody else outside of Scripture for that matter. You do not do so positively, and you do not do so negatively. The fact of the matter is that there is no unified consensus upon the man, and that your perspective of him will vary depending upon who you talk to or who you read. The Reformed crowd loves him of course, and the medieval Waldensians held him in high esteem, while the Dispensationalist crowd on the other hand nearly goes into convulsions at the mere mention of his name. So if you are building your hermeneutic on the reputation of Augustine, you are building it on a very sandy, very uncertain foundation indeed. The fact is that Scripture speaks for itself. And the Holy Ghost is our guide to understanding its meaning, not some extra-Biblical set of rules of interpretation invented by nineteenth century non-Baptist novices such as Darby or Scofield who set themselves up as authorities on Biblical interpretation while everyone else was busy reaching the lost for Christ, planting churches or laboring on the mission field. We may rest confidently in the promise of our Saviour that the Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth(John 16: 13) and never worry in the least about whether or not we are obeying Mr. Darbys rules or Mr. Scofields rules, because said rules are, of course, entirely without authority and utterly valueless. Worse than that, they actually result in a private interpretation. What else can you call it when, for centuries, the vast, overwhelming majority of true Bible-believing Christians - which numbers in the multiplied millions -understood the Scriptures one way, while the Dispensationalist, arriving late on the playing field interprets them in an entirely different manner, and takes it upon himself to correct all others and to imply that they had no real understanding of Scriptural interpretation and Scriptural truth because they did not use these rules of interpretation? What right does this small minority of latecomers have to dictate how all others should or should have interpreted the Word of God? When such a marginal faction of Christians made up of individuals from the greatest period of apostasy and complacency in the history of the Church has the audacity to arrogate to themselves the exclusively accurate method of interpreting the Scriptures, they are, beyond a shadow of a doubt, themselves guilty of private interpretation. I am well aware of how they try to justify their position. I know how they try to dig up fragments from various ancient writings to suggest that Christians have always been Dispensationalists. But these efforts break down completely when you analyze the aforementioned writings and realize that they only reflect a scheme of progressive revelation, without incorporating the fundamental theses of Dispensationalism that God has two distinct peoples, Israel and the Church, and that never the twain shall meet. No Beloved. Dispensationalism is nothing more than a theological innovation, the hermaneutical fad of the twentieth century, a private interpretation. It has no authority over Scripture or the people of God, and no right to dictate how we understand our Bibles. The sooner all true, Bible-believing Christians will regurgitate it completely, the sooner we can see our anemic and sickly churches nursed back to life and health. May God grant that it may be soon for Jesus sake and the sake of his Kingdom and people. May God give us grace to utterly forsake this reactionary private interpretation.