Responding to the Critics!
On June 12-16, 2015, the Bellview church of Christ in Saufley, Florida sponsored a lectureship entitled Refuting Realized Eschatology. This is significant development.
For years, there has been a “conspiracy of silence” on the part of many, many churches within the church of Christ fellowship, concerning Covenant Eschatology. Attempt after attempt has been made by me and others, to get some of the leading “defenders of the faith” from that branch of the churches of Christ to openly debate the issue, with only limited success. It has been popular among them to claim that the preterist movement is so small as to not warrant any discussions. But now, obviously, the leaders of that congregation feel the need to devote an entire lectureship to address the issue!
What is truly sad about the lectures at Bellview is that, as has been the case in case after case, the speakers do not even properly understand Covenant Eschatology! They make one misrepresentation after another. They set up straw man after straw man. When they knock down their fabricated, false claim about what preterists believe, they proclaim that they have responded to the critics of traditional eschatology! In truth, all they have done is to reveal their own lack of study, their sloppy exegesis or, at worst, their willingness to distort the truth.
One of the saddest, and most glaring examples of misrepresentation is the fact that speaker after speaker on that lectureship claimed that I, Don K. Preston, am afraid to debate Covenant Eschatology. This is such a ludicrous claim that, if not so seriously false, it would be laughable! See my response to that charge here.
On the radio program, “Two Guys and A Bible,” with William Bell and Don K. Preston, William and I have begun a series of programs in which we will be responding to the critics of the Bellview Lectureship. The show airs each Tuesday evening at 6 PM central time, and can be found at www.fulfilledradio.com. Just scroll down on the right hand side of the page for the archives.
On Tuesday (6-16-23) William Bell and I began to examine and respond to the lessons by each of the speakers. On that first program, we examined the very weak presentation by Dub McClish. In his presentation, as just suggested above, McClish badly misrepresented what true preterists believe and worse, he abused what the Bible says!
William Bell and Responding to the Critics!
In the following weeks, William and I will be examining each of the lessons by every speaker on the Bellview Lectureship, demonstrating the utter fallacy and failure of those men to refute Covenant Eschatology. William did a response on Tuesday 6-23-15. I was unable to do be with him as I had traveled out of state for an all day study day with a group of preachers. That was a fantastic event, but, I cannot say more about it at this time.
The Bellview lectures are archived here, and William and I urge you to watch them, to understand the context that William and I will be addressing each week. (Take note that we are not afraid to post a link to those lectures. But, if you were to ask the Bellview folks to post a link to our responses, their response would be , let’s just say “!”