Dispensationalism is going to get us all killed

I remember the exact moment the world ended for me.

It was November 2008, and as a third grader at Worth Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, I was inconsolable. What was the cause of my dismay? Barack Obama had just been elected president of the United States.

To a 9-year-old boy raised in the shadow of “gundamentalism” (a hybrid of religious fundamentalism and armed Christian nationalism), the math was simple: Obama was the Antichrist, the Middle East would ignite, and I would likely be “left behind” to face the seven-year “Great Tribulation.”

I lived in a constant state of terror with my eyes glued to the news for signs of the “abomination of desolation.” My spiritual lineage was direct: Pastor emeritus Raymond Barber (now deceased), was a mentee of J. Frank Norris, the infamous “Texas Cyclone” who shot a man dead in his church office and was dubbed the “Shooting Salvationist.”

At Worth Baptist Church and in my Arlington home, we didn’t just study the Bible; we studied the headlines through a very specific, very violent lens called pretribulation dispensationalism.

For decades, this “Left Behind” theology was dismissed as a quirk of the uneducated Bible Belt. However, the “gundamentalism” of my youth has ascended from fringe independent fundamental Baptist pulpits to some of the highest echelons of the U.S. military.

When commanders tell their troops President Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon,” we are no longer dealing with a strange theological peculiarity of the American South. We are, instead, dealing with a kind of theological death wish that has been weaponized by the state.

It is time to call this what it is: A heresy that will get us killed.

The conciliar case against the pre-trib Rapture

To the average observer, “dispensationalism” sounds like academic jargon. To its adherents, it is a roadmap of the end times. It teaches that history is divided into distinct “dispensations” (from the Greek oikonomia, a compound of oikos (house) and nemein (to manage or dispense). In this scheme, we are currently in a “parenthesis” that will end with a secret “Rapture” and seven years of blood-soaked tribulation in the Middle East, culminating in Jesus’ return to fight a war.

But here is the problem: This two-stage return of Christ contradicts 2,000 years of Christian orthodoxy. The Nicene Creed, the foundational statement of faith for nearly every Christian tradition, affirms that Christ “shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead.”

Note the language: It is a unified sequence. One event. One judgment.

“Dispensationalism contradicts the historic faith and meets the conciliar definition of heresy.”

By bifurcating the Second Coming into two distinct phases, dispensationalism contradicts the historic faith and meets the conciliar definition of heresy. It is in direct opposition to the teachings established by the ecumenical councils of the early church. Historically, the Council of Ephesus (431) already took aim at the “fanciful theories” of millennialist teachers (like Apollinarius).

While the church always has held to a future coming of Jesus Christ, it has consistently rejected the kind of sensual, sensational, worldly and blood-soaked “comic book” eschatology that characterizes dispensationalism.

When a theology claims the church is a “parenthesis” and that the “real” work of God involves a return to Old Testament-style temple sacrifices, it is not conservative or biblical. It is a Christological and ecclesiological heresy.

Temple of doom

The most dangerous and problematic aspects of this theology are the insistence on rebuilding a physical temple in Jerusalem. This notion not only distorts biblical prophecy and undermines the uniqueness and sufficiency of Christ but also risks igniting geopolitical tensions.

For some commanders currently briefing U.S. troops, the war in Iran isn’t about geopolitics or nuclear nonproliferation; it is about clearing the path for the third temple and the return of Jesus Christ.

But from the perspective of historic Christianity, this is a denial of the gospel itself. The New Testament teaches that Jesus Christ himself is the temple. He is the Final and Sufficient Sacrifice. To suggest that God “needs” a third temple with animal sacrifices is to say Christ’s death on the Cross was insufficient.

When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth participates in Bible studies led by preachers who claim God “blesses” the allies of a specific political state regardless of its actions, he is not practicing Christianity. Rather, he is reveling in a “blood-soaked, Christian nationalist wet dream,” as Mikey Weinstein recently put it.

Returning to sanity

I am a survivor of this theology. I know the paralyzing fear it produces in children and the arrogant certainty it produces in deluded self-proclaimed theologians, prophets and pastors who know more about headlines than they do historic Christianity.

We cannot allow the “gundamentalism” of Fort Worth to dictate the foreign policy of the United States. We must advocate for policies grounded in constitutional principles and reality — not the delusional worldview of Tim LaHaye, John MacArthur, Paige Patterson, J. Frank Norris and other ham-fisted theological warmongers and abusers who make drunkards and cowards like Pete Hegseth salivate.

We must demand that our leaders — including and especially Secretary Hegseth — adhere to the oaths they swore to the Constitution, not to a fringe, 19th-century theological invention that seeks to hasten the apocalypse.

The Nicene Creed ends with a hope for “the life of the world to come.” It doesn’t end with a hope for a nuclear Armageddon triggered by a “signal fire” in Iran. If we do not excise this heresy from our military and our government, we may find that the “end times” we’ve been warned about are not a divine prophecy but a self-fulfilling and man-made disaster.

The world did not end for me in 2008. However, if we let these Christian nationalists have their way with our military, it might just end for all of us in 2026.

 

David Bumgardner is a writer, theologian and educator living in Columbus, Ohio. He is a former BNG Clemons Fellow and a graduate of Texas Baptist College at Southwestern Seminary. He is a licensed commissioned pastor and holds an evangelism license through the Anglican Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Diocese of Boga, and Missio Mosaic, an ecumenical missional society and religious order. He is awaiting the conferral of his master of arts in practical theology degree from Winebrenner Theological Seminary. 

 

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