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The Bible did not come in one neat tidy package.  God delivered it progressively through men over a period of 1500 years during history in real time, even using forty different men as human authors.  As God revealed scripture, it did not come with a separate interpretive handbook and glossary for defining terms.  He expected and presumes people will get it through plain reading.

As God imparted scripture through inspiration, people understood who were hearing in that day.  The Old Testament audience did not need the New Testament to ascertain the writings.  When He delivered more, past writings become better understood in a fuller way, bringing even greater knowledge of God’s message.

God’s Word has one meaning, yet many applications.  People knew the meaning as God revealed scripture.  He required the original audience to believe and practice what He wrote.

Satanic Attack on Dispensationalism

From the very beginning, Satan directly and then through the world system attacks scripture in several ways.  He does this in one key manner by corrupting the meaning of God’s Word.  Satan twists and also confuses the meaning.  He does not want people to know with certainty what God says.  Change of meaning abolishes or invalidates the authority of scripture.

Satan wants people to think and act in a different way than what God said.  He does this in an incremental fashion, where people drift or move further away from scripture.  The doctrine and practice of the Bible changed over the centuries through a modification of its meaning.  By changing its meaning, it becomes at first a slightly different book and finally a very different one.  This fulfills what Satan wants, but also satisfies the innate rebellion of man.

Changes in the meaning of the Bible relate to contemporary events and movements in history.   Rather than adapting to what God said, people conform what God said to their desires or will.  In a plain reading of the New Testament, churches were autonomous assemblies under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ through His Words.  Satan and his system attacked them in vigorous and violent fashion.

Individual churches were vulnerable to fear of the fierce opposition of the Roman Empire.  This disposed them toward reorganization favoring extra ecclesiastical hierarchy.   Many moved toward greater cooperation and confederation.  Prominent churches took on more dominance and authority for their leaders.

Philosophies of Men

In Colossians 2:8 Paul warns against philosophies.  The New Testament addresses various heresies arising from human philosophy.  Preserved early Christian writings trace the invasion of extra-scriptural thinking into the church.  Doctrine and practice changed through intertwining neoplatonic philosophy with scripture.  The church became something bigger than local.

The church at Rome at the center of the Roman Empire took on enormous prominence.   Emperor Constantine I gave Christianity legal status in the Empire with the Edict of Milan in 313AD.  When Constantine became the sole emperor of the Roman Empire in 324, Christianity became its official religion. Christianity became a state church for the Roman Empire when Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica in 380AD.  This is the Roman Catholic Church.  The Roman Empire was Catholic or Universal, so its state church became Catholic too.

Allegorization and Spiritualization

For a true church, local only, to become universal, allegorization or spiritualization of scripture must occur.  This developed over three centuries with a unique influence, it seems, from a theologian, Origen of Alexandria.  This allowed for modification of meaning to allow change in doctrine and practice.  About a hundred years after Origen, Augustine further systematized allegorization of scripture, now known as covenantal theology.  The Bible could become a vessel in which to pour ones own doctrine and practice by allegorizing it.

Allegorization or spiritualization gives a lot of leeway with interpretation, making it highly subjective.  Someone can read what he wants into the text of scripture.  This affects the authority of the Bible.

The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was led by men raised as staunch Roman Catholics.  They reformed Roman Catholic doctrine, however, still preserving much allegorization and spiritualization.  More than Augustine, they composed a hybrid of allegorical and literal interpretation, now still referred as covenant theology.  The immediate spiritual offspring of the Protestant Reformers further systematized an approach to the interpretation of scripture.  Their system of interpretation justified a state church, something not seen in the Bible.  They could find it by spiritualizing the church.

Amillennialism

In the main, the church could become an actual kingdom through spiritualization, a view of the future called amillennialism.  The theologians of Roman Catholicism removed the distinctions by unifying Israel and the church.  The church replaced Israel.  They adapted the Old Testament prophecies of Israel and the kingdom for fulfillment in the church.  Instead of a future fulfillment of the New Testament prophecy of Revelation, they spiritualized it as fulfilled in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD.

Liberal theology easily proceeded from amillennialism.   Liberals take the same approach even further, making almost everything in the Bible to mean what they want.  They see now and in the future a spiritualized kingdom, a progressive social order.  Jesus, the cross, the resurrection, and the gospel all take on their own meaning, most often related to advocacy of social issues.  Modernism dovetailed easily and nicely from covenant theology.

Growing In and Out of Favor

Even though God and the Bible are dispensational, dispensationalism grew out of favor in mainstream teaching.  In recent times, institutionalized theology portrays dispensationalism as of recent origin, arising with Darby in the 19th Century.  Premillennialism, a literal interpretation of Christ’s kingdom, traces to the first century with the apostles.  However, believers responded to covenant theology with a systematization of a literal interpretation of scripture in the 19th century.  The Protestant system of covenant theology itself is of historically recent composition.

I contend that the rising popularity of covenant theology above dispensationalism traces to its allure to human pride. Men ascertain from God’s writings their secret meaning.  This allows for a wide variety of contradictory belief and practice.  Men like it when they’re free to do what they want, justified by what “God said.”

More to Come