Douglas Wilson Responds to Full Preterism

Wilson does a fine job dismantling the Full Preterist paradigm. He offers ten reasons to reject it, and among them, he points to my podcast episodes to argue for the ecclesiastical consequences of abandoning orthodoxy:

As Uri Brito pointed out in a couple of his podcasts (here and here), the implications of this issue are massive. It is not a matter of abandoning congregational polity for presbyterian polity, or deciding to baptize with heads upstream from now on.

I could not embrace full preterism without that undoing the entire architecture and fabric of my mind. And I say this as someone who knows what it is like to go through theological paradigm shifts—I have been to the fair, and ridden on all the rides. Got sick on some of them. I have transitioned from Arminianism to Calvinism, from credo to paedo, from premillennial to postmillennial, and you know. One of those guys. If any one of those transitions was like bumping into the table and spilling a glass of water, full preterism would be like the Great 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

I am telling you all that all Reformed theology hangs together, and this is a theological jenga game—and full preterism is like trying to pull out a long block second from the bottom. It is not possible to talk about this issue all by itself.

Futurists and partial preterists disagree with one another about numerous passages of Scripture. But we don’t disagree with one another about the structure and framework of human history. We line the books up differently, and sometimes have fierce debates about that, but we both use the same bookends—creation and the eschaton.

What this means is that my difference with the full preterist does not fall in the same category, not at all. It is actually a difference about the meaning and teleology of all human history in its entirety. This is not a trifle, in other words. The ramifications are massive.

I like living where I do, and have no desire to move to an Arminian dispensational neighborhood. Let us be frank, I would have trouble adapting. But if an angel told me to move there, and to grow some five-point tulips in my backyard as a testimony to them, I think I could do it. Moreover I think I could do it without quarreling with the neighbors. But moving to a full preterist neighborhood would be like moving to an alien world. If an angel told me to move to Jupiter in order to grow giant cabbages, I confess that I would not even know where to start. I would be at an utter nonplus. And not only would I have difficulty not quarreling with the neighbors, I think I would have difficulty not quarreling with the angel.

Some of you might be saying aha! “He wouldn’t change his mind even if an angel told him to.” Yeah, well (Gal. 1:8).