All Christians are Preterists - The American Vision
All Christians believe in fulfilled prophecy. This makes them preterists to some degree. A preterist interpretation of prophecy puts its fulfillment in the past. What separated unbelieving Jews from believing Jews in the first century was the issue of fulfilled prophecy. Was Jesus the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures that predicted a coming redeemer? Jews who rejected Jesus as the promised Messiah believed He was not the fulfillment of these many prophecies. To them, Jesus was an imposter. He was the son of a carpenter (Matt. 13:53–58). Jews who still believe in the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures are looking forward to their version of the First Coming of the Messiah.
Floyd Hamilton has calculated that there are more than 330 distinct predictions that Jesus fulfilled.
[1] Christians believe these prophecies have been fulfilled. Their fulfillment is in our past, thus, making us preterists.
The New Testament also contains prophetic material. There are prophecies related to the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus predicted Peter’s denial of Him (Matt. 26:33–35; Mark 14:29–31; Luke 22:33–34; John 13:36–38). In the last chapter of John’s gospel, we find a prediction about the disciple whom Jesus loved, presumably John, and Peter (John 21:18–23). In Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21 there is a record of Jesus’ comprehensive Olivet Discourse that maps out the future of Israel’s temple and describes wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, plagues, national conflicts, great signs from the heavens, signs in the sun, moon, and stars, persecution, the spread of the gospel to the then known world (Matt. 24:14; Col. 1:6, 23), the abomination of desolation, false prophets, false christs, and more.
“[T]he term
preterism … derives from the Latin presupposition
preter (‘past’) and the verb
ire (‘to go’), thus referring to what which has gone past and belongs to history.”
[2] In Latin, the perfect tense commonly functions as the preterite tense and refers to an action
completed in the past. The Greek equivalent would be the
aorist tense.
John was told, “write the things which you have seen, and the things which are, and the things which are
about to happen after these things [
μέλλει γενέσθαι μετὰ ταῦτα]” (Rev. 1:19; 4:1). Some things were happening as Revelation was revealed to John (the things which are), and some things were about to happen. A preterist would connect what John had seen, the “things which are,” with the things that were “about to happen” after these things with no postponement or gap in time.
Since John is told that the events revealed to him were to take place “soon” (1:1) “for the time is near” (1:3), Revelation is about events that were to happen soon for those living in John’s day, in particular, in events leading up to and including the end of the Old Covenant represented outwardly by the temple and Israel’s capital city, Jerusalem. The Old Covenant had been replaced with a better covenant in the person and work of Jesus Christ who embodies all that the Old Covenant could only represent in temporal (stones) and fallen elements (human priests). Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), the temple built without hands (John 2:13–22; see Mark 14:58; 15:29; Acts 6:14),
[3] the fulfillment of the Davidic kingship (Acts 2:22-36), and “a high priest, who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, a minister in the sanctuary and in the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, not man” (Heb. 8:1–2). The Old Covenant was planned obsolescence. The unbelieving Jews turned the temple into an idol like the brass serpent in the wilderness (Num. 21:4–9; John 3:14–16; 2 Kings 18:4).
There is another component to consider in the interpretive process: audience relevance. How would John’s audience have understood the prophecy? Even today, prophecy preachers turn to the time indicators in Revelation and argue that Jesus is coming soon. But if “soon” means near to the time when we hear a prophecy enthusiast say that Jesus’ coming is “soon,” then why didn’t “soon” mean “soon” to Revelation’s first readers?
Dave Hunt’s book
How Close Are We? includes the following subtitle: “Compelling Evidence for the Soon Return of Christ?” What did Mr. Hunt want his readers to understand by the use of the word “soon”? He certainly didn’t have in mind nearly 2000 years in the future from the time he wrote his book in 1993.
On the Brink is the title of a prophetic work written by Daymond R. Duck. In the introduction, Duck tells his readers that his book has “
300 Points of Light on the Soon Return of Jesus.”[4] Duck and Hunt want their readers to believe that Jesus’ coming is going to take place soon, and by soon, they mean near, and by near they mean in this generation, and by “this generation,” they mean this one here and now. Why didn’t “soon” and “near” mean “soon” and “near” to those who read these time words in the first century?
Chuck Smith published
The Soon to be Revealed Antichrist in 1976. What did Chuck Smith mean by “soon”? While he says we can’t know who the antichrist is, he does say “God is giving us many signs that we are nearing the last days — the stage is being set.” Smith also stated that “we are living in the last generation, which began with the rebirth of Israel in 1948 (
see Matt. 24:32–34).”
[5] We get some idea from these comments what Smith meant by near.
