Friday, November 16, 2018

Disproving Pretrib in 10 minutes

There's a YouTube video which claims to disprove pretrib in 10 minutes. The presenter is Nelson Walters who is a published author, presenter, and prominent exponent of the prewrath rapture position.

A little while ago I came across a surprising comment of his in a well-populated PW forum. I say surprising because I assume most PW proponents hold to a distinction between Israel and the church. Walters stated that believers are grafted into Israel; Israel doesn't join the Church, and Christians become part of Israel. At first I thought it was a monumental typo. But, at the time, no one there challenged him.

It wasn't a typo. Walters' blurring of the Israel-church distinction figures in his pretrib debunking video where the focus is on Matt 24:31. He asserts that dispensationalists are mistaken in taking OT verses relating to national Israel's gathering, and only applying them to Israel in Matt 24:31. This is because the church is also Israel.

As proof, Walters cites Gal 3:28 and gives us the only-one-people-of God argument. He follows up by saying that Christians are grafted into the root of the Olive Tree, which is Israel. These are familiar supersessionist statements, routinely debunked by Dispensationalists.

Although I disagree with his conclusions, Alan Kurschner (Antichrist Before the Day of the Lord) proposed four reasons why Matt 24:31 was the rapture of the church. None of these involved a blurring of the distinction between Israel and the church. While I have a number of PW books on my shelf - with good reason, Kurschner's book and Eschatos Ministries are the only mediums I currently recommend to anyone interested in learning about the system.

Some resources:

Discussion on the Olive Tree HERE

Paul Henebury: Replacement Theology: Is it Wrong to Use the Term?

Paul Henebury: Contra the 95 Theses Against Dispensationalism

An Analysis of Neo-Replacement Theology

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