PRETERISM

 The difficulties faced by full preterists in proving their views are two-fold:

A. The main contention, as I understand it, of the full preterist viewpoint is that there will be no future coming of Christ (since that already occurred in 70 AD), no cataclysmic destruction of the physical universe to be replaced by a new one, and (for some preterists), no final judgment. They are thus placed in the same uncomfortable position as atheists in having to prove universal negatives. That is awfully hard to do since they need to explain away every single indication in the Bible that those events are still in the future. If only one reference remains, they have lost their case. The futurists, on the other hand, only have to look for one instance in the Bible to prove their case.

B. The second problem faced by preterists, and it is closely related to the first, is that they must rely on a chain of reasoning, a practice that they are almost as wedded to as some dispensationalists in proving their respective contentions. I may have lost track of a few points I have read in various preterist sources, but here is my best recollection of all the contentions that must be met before their view can be said to be proved in any sense of the word. Each interpretation must be correct since they all ultimately depend on one another to make their point.

1. The Second Coming of Christ to earth predicted in the Gospels, Acts and the Epistles has already occurred in 70 AD in a spiritual manner. Details such as him coming on the clouds as he ascends with angels and trumpets and shouts are all to be taken figuratively.

2. If He has already come, no further coming is necessary and therefore should not be expected.

3. The “earth-shaking” language of world-wide destruction employed in these passages should be interpreted as figurative hyperbole and not taken in the least as being literal or global in scope.

4. This is a reasonable interpretation since the destruction of the temple was necessary to end the Old Covenant and fully institute the New Covenant, and these were figuratively “earth-shaking events.”

5. The phrase “Heaven and Earth” in the NT is synonymous with either the Temple or the Old Covenant, and does not mean the physical universe.

6. “Heaven and earth” in Genesis 1 includes the spiritual cosmos.

7. The use of language such as “near” or “soon” in NT predictions of coming judgment must be interpreted in terms of a few years at most and cannot mean “rapidly once it begins,” “soon in God's perspective of time,” “without unnecessary delay,” or have anything to do with the fact that each one of us will be experiencing God's judgment, one way or another, as soon as we die, if not sooner.

8. All but one of the prophecies in the OT of the Day of the LORD, the coming day, “that day,” etc. were completely fulfilled within the lifetime of their audiences and hold no future meaning for us. That includes language denoting the judgment of all mankind, all nations worshiping in Jerusalem, and portents in the heavens and on earth.

9. The one exception to this rule is found in Isaiah 65 where “New Heavens and New Earth” refers to the New Covenant which came much later, even though the language says it is “about to” happen.

10. I and II Peter are addressed to a predominantly Jewish audience who would be rightly worried when they witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and think that their world had come to an end.

11. The Book of Revelation's references to a future New Heaven and New Earth dictates that it must have been written before 70 AD despite the contention of most Bible scholars.

I'm sure that there are more vital underpinnings to the preterist view, but let's just look at the eleven above. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and that holds for a chain of reasoning as well. If only one of the above contentions can be disproved, the whole house of cards falls. Another way to view it is in terms of probabilities. If A and B and C, etc. need to be correct in order for the whole to be correct, then the overall probability for that to happen is the product of the individual probabilities. Let's be very, very generous and say that each of the eleven necessary interpretations above has an 80% probability of being correct. Even then, the overall probability that the preterists have proven their case would only be 8.6%. And, in fact, many of their contentions don't have a single leg to stand on.

By contrast, the futurist point of view is that at least one of the OT and NT prophecies of a Second Coming, worldwide judgment or transformation of the physical universe refers to events yet to happen. So even a 50% probability of one single scripture pointing in that direction results in much greater odds of being correct than the preterist view. And if a second unrelated scripture can be found that might indicate the same thing, the odds increase drastically, etc. It is the difference between trying to get heads ten times in a row by flipping a coin, and aiming for at least one in ten.