How Partial is Your Preterism?

Gary answers a question from one of his YouTube videos about partial preterism, full preterism, and everything in between.

The New Testament says much about the temple as a New Covenant expression of the Christian’s new life in Christ. Jesus’ completed redemptive work makes the need for a physical temple unnecessary and contrary to the redemptive principles of the New Covenant, “for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple” (Rev. 21:22). His ministry begins with the declaration that He became flesh and “tabernacled” among His people (John 1:14). Jesus is “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29), “the temple” (2:19-21), and the “chief cornerstone” (Matt. 21:42; Acts 4:11; Eph. 2:20) which means there is no longer a need for a physical temple made of stones. By extension, believers are “as living stones, … being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5). Those “in Christ” are the true temple of God (1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16; Eph. 2:21).

Jesus and the people of God are the focus of the only temple that has any redemptive significance under the New Covenant. To be “in Christ” is to be in the temple and all it stood for, “the renewed centre and focus for the people of God”[1] (Rom. 12:5; 1 Cor. 1:2, 30; Gal. 3:14, 28; 5:6). The New Testament references to the temple of stone refer only to its destruction (Matt. 24:1-2), never its physical reconstruction. It is highly significant that “Jesus never gives any hint that there will be a physical replacement for this Temple. There is no suggestion, either in the Apocalyptic Discourse or elsewhere, that this destruction will be but a preliminary stage in some glorious ‘restoration’ of the Temple.”[2]

The original physical temple was a shadow of better things to come. It was designed to be a temporary edifice looking forward to the completed work of Jesus Christ (Isa. 66:1-3; cf. 1:11-13; Mal. 1:10-11). For futurists like dispensationalists to insist that another temple is needed to complete some type of covenantal obligation with the Jews goes against the entire New Testament and makes the “first covenant … faultless” where we are told that there is “no occasion sought for a second” (Heb. 8:7).

Wars and Rumors of Wars

A first-century interpretation of the Olivet Discourse was once common in commentaries and narrative-style books that describe the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. There is also a history of skeptics who turn to Bible prophecy and claim Jesus was wrong about the timing of His coming at “the end of the age” and the signs associated with it. A mountain of scholarship shows that the prophecy given by Jesus was fulfilled in exacting detail when He said it would: before the generation of those to whom He was speaking passed away.

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Gary answers a question from one of his YouTube videos about partial preterism, full preterism, and everything in between. There are disagreements among many commentators about which biblical verses refer to AD70 and which refer to the Second Coming. Gary also interacts with a recent article by Ken Gentry about this topic.

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[1] Timothy J. Geddert, Watchwords: Mark 13 in Markan Eschatology (Sheffield, England: JSOT, 1989). Quoted in Peter W. L. Walker, Jesus and the Holy City: New Testament Perspectives on Jerusalem (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 9.

[2] Walker, Jesus and the Holy City, 8.

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