This blog states
"...Today, you can't serve as a Presbyterian elder or pastor if you are a dispensationalist. Many (not all) Presbyterians regard dispensationalism with suspicion and/or contempt, and treat it as either a heresy, or as heresy's dim-witted, bucktoothed cousin. "
Since there are Reformed Baptist churches and speakers like John McArthur who become friends with Covenant/Reformed/Presbyterians like R.C. Sproul, we Baptists are influenced by the rift between Covenant/Presbyterians and Dispensational Baptists, and we are left to sort out which position should Baptists hold.
I'm trying to understand the underlying causes of why Covenant Theology opposes Dispensational Theology. Here is a list I've come up with so far. Please help shed more light on this question for me. Thanks in advance.
1. Dispensational Theology takes a strict, left brain,
logical, "Literal" interpretation method of scripture, rather than accepting interpretations that view words as "figures of speech" through inferences and
intuition.
a. Certainly there are words and ideas in the Bible that are types of Christ, parables, and figures of speech, but we must use caution to not let that justify using texts to build inferences, using intuition that is not tested carefully by logic.
b. Since Covenant Theology is held tightly by Presbyterians who believe in Paedobaptism, they also rest on using an interpretation method that allows for inferences to support their views on Paedobaptism.
R.C. Sproul says in his footnotes in his Reformation Study Bible on page 37:
"Rather, the scriptural
case for baptizing believers infants
rests on the
parallel between Old Testament circumcision and New Testament baptism as signs and seals of the covenant of grace (Ge. 17:11; Rom. 4:11; Col 2:11,12), and on the
claim that the principle of family solidarity in the covenant community (the church, as it is now called) was not affected by the transition from the "old" to the "new" form of God's covenant brought about by the coming of Christ. Infant children of believers have the status of covenant children and therefore should be baptized, just as Jewish male infants had previously been circumcised. The Old Testament precedent requires it and there are no divine instruction explicitly revoking this principle."
Thus the case for paedobaptism does not rest on direct literal command in scripture, but a "parallel" derived, and inferred from other things.
2. Covenant Theology, similar to Calvinist/Reformed/Doctrines of Sovereign Grace, seeks and yearns to grasp and understand a unified, self contained systematic theology that explains the councils of God on Salvation or Soteriology.
a. Since Covenant Theology is tightly held by Presbyterians who hold tightly to Calvinism, which tries to capture the whole counsel of God with a theory that explains many verses that are hard to reconcile, therefore inferences need to be used to understand verses, where a literal interpretation makes it difficult to reconcile and create a unified system that supports itself. (I'm not debating Calvinism here, just showing the fact that inferences support the explanations for some words in Calvinism. For example the word "all", is inferred to mean "all tribes and people", rather than all individual people). So inference methods of interpretations are very important to Calvinists and strict literal interpretation methods present new problems.
b. Strict, literal interpretations undermine the inferences relied on in Calvinism for Limited Atonement when interpreting some verses.
I'm not debating if these inferences are valid or invalid. I actually tend to cautiously agree that some inferences are a "most likley" best interpretation. I'm just pointing out that strict literal interpretation methods undermine the inference methods relied on.
c. Following the desire to build a complete, systematic unified explanation for God's single, mono, plan, Covenant Theology wants to fit all of God into that single mono explanation, rather than having a God that is more complex, in ways we can't fit into a singular explanation.
Eistein did a great job of simplifying what seemed to be complex into the simple equation E=mc2. The ability to simplify things down into simple formulas that explain a wide variety of known phenomenon is a great thing of beauty to see how God is behind something in nature.
However it seems we must be cautions to seek to put God in a box and say everything God creates must be part of a theory of everything, that we can understand with our own understanding from Scripture inferences. This can cause us to over-infer about things where we should be cautious to infer, and should rather use a literal interpretation.
So these are my "hypotheses" above. I am thinking about buying this book to learn more about the underlying reasons:
The Dispensational-Covenantal Rift: The Fissuring of American Evangelical Theology from 1936 to 1944
By: R. Todd Mangum
I see this book above reviewed on
this blog, but there are not too many summaries of the conclusions in the book.
These are some hypotheses I've come up with so far. Please help me and correct me where I'm lacking understanding.
If anyone has read the book referred to above, please let me know a summary of the conclusions of the book. Thanks in advance