This guy is just a bag of logical fallacies.
He throws in some 'appeal to tradition', 'guilt by association' and 'poisoning the well' fallacies but the main thrust of his argument is and example of 'the plain truth' fallacy which implies that the truth is always simple by nature and only enemies of the truth would seek to make it complicated.
His argument takes the following form: "Because I think Dispensationalism is too complicated, it is therefore false."
My response is two fold:
1. Complexity does not equal false nor simplicity equal truth.
2. The accusation of Dispensationalism being excessively complicated is false to begin with. In fact, the basics are quite simple to understand and the whole system has as a core hermeneutic that the bible is to be taken at it most obvious meaning whenever possible. In short, if there is a passage of scripture that confuses you, read it to a third grader and ask him what it means. He'll get it right almost every time. Dispensationalism tries very hard not to per-interpret scripture (i.e. bring one's doctrine to the text) nor to explain passages away as meaning something other that what it seems to say. Of course some passages are more difficult than others but the point here being that it doesn't take a PhD in theological studies to understand the Dispensational hermeneutic, all you have to do to understand the bible is to read it. Further, what's so complicated about the idea that Israel has been cut off (Romans 9) and that God now treats all humanity alike whether Jew or otherwise and that therefore there are certain key differences between this dispensation and others that came before or that will come after? In short the modern church is not Israel and aught not act as though they are or as though the promises made to Israel pertain to anyone other than to Israel. There's nothing terribly complicated about that!
Resting in Him,
Clete
P.S. I don't understand the vague reference to Ephesians chapters 2 & 3. Both chapters, as well as the rest of the book says what it means and means what it says. There's nothing there that conflicts with dispensationalism, in fact, quite the contrary.
You are not very familiar with how D'ism has fared down through time. If you go back to the heyday of Ryrie who has a chapter in D'ISM TODAY that expressly says there are 2 watertight programs and peoples, you have the core of the problem: a complication. Everything you look at from that point on will be subject to a complication that you might actually be reading something for people to know 2000 years from now.
May I then please define complicated as 'attempting to ground on flimsy prooftexts around which everything else must dangle, and for which we need tons of teachers to teach the dangling.' Those texts are the end of Mt 23 about 'until you say 'blessed is he...' and Rom 11:26 about 'all Israel...saved...' There are also countless
discredited texts, for ex., Acts 13's sermon punchline, or Eph 2-3 about the promises to Israel or Rom 9:26 which supports the 'Israel' that is both Jew and Gentile with 4 distinct OT quotes.
I grew up in it and have listened to it for 40 years; none of this is guesswork or rumor or 2nd hand. I have spoken directly to Sauerwein and Walvoord.
One of the complications you mentioned is about Israel being cut off. That's not the complication. the complication is that after that happened (referring to the ethne as such), D'ism says that the ethne is to be the focus of God's work once again in the future. So you are minding your own business reading somewhere, and the D'ist says no, that has to do with the _______ in the future. Or that such and such an OT passage can't be about the believer because it is about the millenium. Or that what the apostles say about a passage is not even known while 3 D'ist teachers are quoted about it (Amos 9). Or that Ps 2, 16, 110 may be the most commonly quoted passages from the Psalms, but the D'ist quotes 89 and Ezek 38, 39 100x more often than those three.
So in another attempt to be simple: the NT is the authoritative reading of the OT. The D'ist reading is very complicated, ie, manipulated to fit a system.
As you know from the list of 10 propositions about NT eschatology, one of the other big complications is the avoidance of Gal 3:17. This tells us what really got replaced theologically. But D'ism has come along and called something else replacement theology. This is not just complication, it is confusion. Could it be that the reason D'ism did this is because it truly has the same beliefs as Judaism, which Gal 3:17 was referring to?
