The Last Days of Dispensationalism: A Scholarly Critique of Popular Misconceptions

How we understand Gods future purposes for the world must shape to a significant degree how Christians live life in the present. The decades since the publication of Hal Lindseys The Late Great Planet Earth have seen a great deal of end-times speculation. Signs of the end-time apocalypse occurring soon have been heralded across our radios televisions the internet and through written forms of media urging people to either be ready for the rapture or be left behind to endure the horrific suffering of the tribulation as Gods end-time program unfolds. Is this really what the Bible teaches about the purposes of the God of whom our Bible declares so loved the world that he gave his only son in order that all things be reconciled. The Last Days of Dispensationalism carefully examines this popular understanding known to us as dispensationalism and urges us to think again and to see within the Bibles grand salvation narrative and in the person of Jesus Christ a better message of redemptive hope for the future and a greater sense of meaning and purpose for the present. Alistairs work offers a refreshing and much-needed approach to biblical hope. He combines a lucid grasp of the main contours of biblical theology with an attention where necessary to exegetical detail. His writings will prove invaluable to those people who want to think hard about what the Bible is really saying to have some of their assumptions challenged but also to grow into new depths of biblical convictions and faith. --Peter Walker Associate Vice-Principal and Lecturer in New Testament Studies Wycliffe Hall University of Oxford My newspaper reported this week on Western Christians in Israel celebrating the resumption of Jewish settlement activity in the West Bank probably unaware that this is a major obstacle to peace. They imagine that their support of Israel will speed the return of Jesus. This timely book exposes the defective hermeneutic and erroneous conclusions of such dispensationalism. We all should read it. If we understand its message perhaps we will indeed see the last days of dispensationalism. --Philip Church Senior Lecturer School of Theology Laidlaw College This is a much-needed corrective of an unbiblical stance on Israel that actually causes considerable global harm to Western interests. The book is cogently but charitably written well-argued and above all biblical in its conclusions. --Bob Robinson Senior Lecturer School of Theology Laidlaw College Alistair Donaldson is a lecturer in Biblical Theology Biblical Studies and Worldview at Laidlaw College in Christchurch New Zealand.