Progressive dispensationalism

Progressive dispensationalism is a revision of dispensationalism, arising in the 1980s and 1990s, that keeps dispensationalism’s basic distinction between the nation of Israel and the church but revises how Old Testament promises to Israel are fulfilled in the present age.¹ Where classic dispensationalism reserves those promises entirely for Israel’s future, national restoration, progressive dispensationalism holds that Christ has already begun to fulfill some of them, typologically, in the church, without that fulfillment exhausting their outstanding, future meaning for Israel.²

Historical Origin

Progressive dispensationalism developed within the wider dispensational movement in the 1980s and 1990s, revising several of classic dispensationalism’s own tenets to the point that “some question whether it still merits the same name.”¹ Its defining statements came from Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock’s edited volume Progressive Dispensationalism (1993) and Robert Saucy’s The Case for Progressive Dispensationalism (1993).¹

Core Tenets

Progressive dispensationalism retains what Martin calls “the sine qua non of dispensationalism,” the distinction between the nation of Israel and the church, that marks every form of the system.¹ It likewise retains dispensationalism’s shared conviction that God’s promise of land to Israel must still be fulfilled to the nation in the future, “regardless of how the New Testament applies the Old Testament texts.”²

What distinguishes progressive dispensationalism from classic dispensationalism is its handling of typology. Progressive dispensationalists “agree with revised dispensationalists but go beyond them in their understanding of typology,” allowing some Old Testament promises to Israel to find typological fulfillment already in the church, while insisting that this initial fulfillment “does not annul the original Old Testament meaning for Israel.”² As Glenny puts it, “even though the church fulfills these Old Testament prophecies, it does not exhaust them.”³ This both-and reading is tied to an inaugurated eschatology: “the kingdom of God has come partially (i.e., spiritually) in the arrival of Christ and, derivatively, his church, but the final establishment of his kingdom on earth awaits its consummation upon Christ’s final return.”⁴

Progressive dispensationalists also press a hermeneutical argument against reading Old Testament promises through New Testament categories set in advance. Blaising and Bock ask “whether covenantalist approaches to the question of the relationship of Old Testament and New Testament hope are already determined by a traditional structure framed within the linguistic dimensions of the New Testament before the biblical theology of the Old Testament has been properly understood in its historical setting.”⁵ On this reading, the Old Testament’s own promises to Israel should be allowed to stand on their own terms before any New Testament typological fulfillment is read back into them.

Comparison with the Reformed Confessions

Progressive dispensationalism inherits dispensationalism’s basic tension with the Reformed confessions’ reading of redemptive history as the unfolding of a single covenant of grace, administered under various dispensations rather than divided into independent economies with different bases of divine dealing: “there are not, therefore, two covenants of grace differing in substance, but one and the same under various dispensations.”⁶

Progressive dispensationalism’s own distinguishing claim, that some Old Testament promises to Israel are already typologically fulfilled in the church without their future fulfillment to Israel being thereby exhausted, draws a more specific redemptive-historical objection. Martin, who reads the whole land promise as a type fulfilled in Christ, credits progressive dispensationalism for applying the New Testament’s already-not-yet kingdom to the land promise, but argues that “it does not do full justice to the New Testament presentation of the already-not yet character of the kingdom or the nature of typological fulfillment in Scripture.”⁴ On his account, the already-not-yet tension in the New Testament does not mean that part of the kingdom belongs to the church now and part to a future restored Israel later; rather, “the New Testament shows that all of God’s saving promises have already been fulfilled in Christ and that these promises are expanding where Christ is present.”⁴

Related Doctrines

References

Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 280. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴
Martin, 288-89. ↩ ↩² ↩³
W. Edward Glenny, “Typology: A Summary of the Present Evangelical Discussion,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 40, no. 4 (1997): 634-35, quoted in Martin, 288-89. ↩
Martin, 289-90. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Martin, 287. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 7, “Of God’s Covenant with Man,” para. 6. ↩