Monday, January 11, 2021

One Plan, Not Two

 The key idea of Dispensationalism is that God still has two plans in play, one for Israel and one for the Church. What makes this so odd is that the New Testament not only goes to great lengths to say the exact opposite, but that the exact opposite, that Jew and Gentile are united in the Church and there is only one plan in play now, is the central message of the New Testament.


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Romans 1:17 - “κ πίστεως ες πίστιν”. I understand the difficulties of translation, but I don’t understand why there would be an impulse to translate this any other way than “out of faith and into faith”. Contextually it clearly seems to be a reference to motion from the Jewish era into the era of the Church, from Old Covenant into New Covenant. The just in the predominantly Jewish past lived by faith, as with Abraham, and the just in the New Covenant, whether Jew or Gentile, equally lives by faith. As such the phrase parallels “to the Jew first and also to the Greek” in the previous verse.


This then has to be seen as leading to Romans 9-11.

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