I was watching the Heiser videos a second time, taking notes. He said something about a document on his website so I went searching for it. Turns out he had a set of questions he had proposed way back in 2008 for people to review in thinking about their view of eschatology.
Later, Heiser expanded on those questions in a series of posts that were appeared in 2010. This series turns out to be much better organized and in-depth than the videos. I’m not going to reproduce any part of his extended notes on eschatology, but I will be referring to that series of posts in my series.
I will admit that I am making my own plain-text copy of his blog pages for later reference. I assume his blog has been through a software upgrade at least once, because these older pages do not display properly. Then again, Heiser is notorious for doing a lot of cut-n-paste without even a cursory review of what the results look like. Lots of characters don’t transfer properly, even when it’s all English language. Thus, I’m having to edit the spelling and typography of his material to make them more consistent with standard practices.
Yes, I’ll make copies available when I’m finished, but I won’t post them directly to the Net anywhere. I’ll share them privately.
If you take the time to wade through this series, you’ll notice he is preoccupied with Dispensational Theology. He mentions the Left Behind series and some rather famous Dispie authors, but I suppose Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth is just too pedestrian for his tastes, as is Jack T. Chick and his tracts. Yet, they are major influences on the debate.
At any rate, he invests a lot time dealing with Premillennial Pre-tribulation theology, and doesn’t mention anything from the Christian Mysticism (CM) side of things. When CM people have an eschatological stance, like ours it is somewhat Amillennial in the main, but not in all the details he mentions.
A major difference is how we view the covenants of the Bible. For us, the covenants must be treated as living entities. They are an aspect of the Word of God; they never fail in themselves. Heiser’s comments about conditionality versus unconditionality I think misses the point. The covenants are like divine entities that have their own existence independent of any humans adhering to them.
Thus, God’s covenant with Israel (AKA, the Law of Moses) did not depend on the nation. It always accomplished God’s purpose, one way or another. When the people failed the conditions of the Covenant, they lost out on the blessings, but were still forced to fulfill the purpose. Here’s the thing: We don’t always know the purpose. The purpose of each covenant is indicated to some degree, but there remains for them an aspect that is visible only from the divine perspective. Thus, at no time could any mere humans truly understand the whole of the covenant, only their obligations.
There have always been elements of every covenant that were out of human view. This is why there are times when God seems very tolerant and fulfills some element of His promises for His own sake, and other times and places where He lets it drop when the people refuse to obey. We are not capable of understanding where He drew the lines because we could never see the whole picture.
While I don’t have footnotes, I’m not the first person to suggest this viewpoint. Somewhere in his studies, Heiser must of have missed this, because he tends to use the language of law and mechanics regarding the covenants of Abraham, Moses, David, etc. There’s a lot of critical questions he misses because of this, and he assumes strictures apply to the questions that I say aren’t there. His logical framework is missing something.
Furthermore, this hidden aspect of the covenants is the glue that holds them together. This is why the Old and New Covenants have continuity. We can see the traces of continuity when Paul enforces Old Testament law on a church, but the moral fabric behind that particular issue is not visible to the fleshly nature. It defies human reason, but it shines brightly in our hearts. Paul was used to operating that way, so he knew instinctively, as it were, which items belonged in both, even when it’s not obvious to scholarship.
Our covenant relationship with Christ implies a legal status, if you will, but it’s inherently personal and is linked to divine implications that our intellect cannot grasp.
