JD: David this week you sent me an article from Christianity Today about the Evangelical Free Church of America. They have changed their statement of faith concerning pre-millennialism; talk to me about it.
DJ: The article you mentioned is on the Christianity Today website with the title “EFCA now considers pre-millennialism a non essential” and has a tag line that denomination drops end times doctrine from its statement of faith and a move to major on the majors and a minor on the minors. EFCA revised their doctrinal statement to read, “we believe in the personal, bodily and glorious return of our Lord Jesus Christ”. So the change involved striking pre-millennial from the phrase glorious return. Then the article noted further that pre-millennialism is clearly a minority position among evangelical believers. Now that’s troubling all by itself.
JD: David do you see this change in their statement of faith simply dropping one word as a major shift? And is it really that big of a problem as we seem to be bringing forth?
DJ: Well Jimmy I think it absolutely is a major shift and I think it is a huge problem. First of all it means that the EFCA is no longer consistently using that type of hermonutical literal grammatical historical hermeneutic. We use this method of interpretation whether we’re studying historical narrative like Genesis through II Chronicles in the Old Testament and the gospel through Acts in the New Testament or the letters in the New Testament or prophetic literature in both the Old and New Testament.
So if they no longer think that pre-millennialism is
important then they’re not consistently using this method of interpretation
when it comes to prophetic literature especially books like Isaiah, Ezekiel,
Daniel and Revelation. And how anyone handles prophecy in my mind is the sort
of litmus test where their overall interpretation of the Bible. Then I would
say they’ve cut the anger rope from the word of God then it opens the door to abandoning
Biblical interpretation concerning other doctrines.
JD: David James with Bible in hand stating that Bible prophecy
is a major Biblical doctrine.
We report this information because it is setting the stage
for Bible prophecy to be fulfilled.
Since Bible prophecy is the subject of one-third of the
entire Bible and since Bible prophecy is found in all 66 books of the Bible and
since Jesus Christ is the spirit, the focus and the centrality of Bible
prophecy I would say that it is a major doctrine that is found in the word of
God. II Peter 1:19 says that Bible prophecy is a more sure word from God than
even an eye witness account. We must study Bible prophecy.
