Truth Unites - Why Full Preterism is the Worst End Times View

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

Gavin Ortlund offers a critique of full preterism and distinguishes it from partial preterism. Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Have you ever wondered about how to interpret the New Testament's predictions about what is going to happen in the last days? Like, who is the Antichrist? And should we even use that word? What's the great tribulation? When is that going to happen? What about these other events Jesus predicts before the second coming of Christ and so forth? This is a huge area where maybe one of the biggest areas where Christians disagree and where the New Testament is difficult to interpret. and modern evangelical Christians tend to assume a certain view of these things that either has zero historical precedent or is kind of largely at variance with church history. I've said this many times. If you gave the church fathers the left behind series, they would not recognize a lot of what

is going on in those books, and they would say, what is going on here? This is a fascinating area where basically, and I'll just identify one of the differences here, is that throughout church history, many Christians believe that some of these eschatological events, eschatology means the doctrine of the last things or the end times, many of these eschatological events had already happened. So their future with respect to the writing of the New Testament, but their past with respect to us. And this view is called preterism, from the Latin word praetare, meaning past. So one of the goals of my channel is to do theological triage, which means ranking different doctrines, and then also to do theological retrieval, meaning wanting to learn more from church history,

engage, draw from historical theology as we're trying to do theology today. These are two of the goals, and they fit together, actually, and I think they're really needed right now as a lot of people are rethinking things and so forth. So I try to do things. I want to promote peaceable dialogue and understanding, and especially try to distinguish what are the first-rank issues you have to believe as a Christian from, say, the third-rank issues. They're not hills to die on. And so that's what I want to go through in this video, and especially what I want to try to distinguish here is what kinds of preterism are first rank. They really mark the difference between orthodoxy and heresy. There are distinctively Christian views versus non-Christian views,

versus what are the things where we can disagree to disagree? They're not hills to die on. So in this video, let's do three things. Let's distinguish between two different kinds of preterism, full preterism, and partial preterism. One of these things I think is a matter of heresy, the other, I think, is totally not. I'm a partial preterist, full disclosure. Secondly, we'll work through some of the appeals for partial preterism. Why is that a reasonable view? Why might some Christians hold that, even if you don't agree personally, try to understand it? And then third, I'll give an argument against full preterism, which, and say a little bit about why this view is so problematic. So first, let's just distinguish between full preterism and partial prederism.

Sometimes these are called, so partial preterism, sometimes it's called, moderate preterism or orthodox preterism. Full preterism is sometimes called consistent predorism, hyper-preterism, radical preterism. All these terms are disputed in the debates. Full preterists believe, try to wrap your head around this, all the eschatological events of the New Testament were fulfilled in the first century. We are currently living in the new heavens and on the new earth. Jesus' second coming was not a bodily event at the end of history. It was a spiritual return manifested in judgment on Jerusalem, in 70 AD especially, and the final resurrection took place spiritually toward the latter portion of the first century. And this would be,

basically, I think we can safely say this is a first-rank issue. This would be heretical. This view cannot affirm the Apostles' Creed that Christ will come to judge the quick and the dead. and I think there are two reasons why I would very emphatically classify this as a first rank issue, that is to say heretical, that is to say outside of Christian orthodoxy, that is to say not Christian. One is the way Paul classifies Hymenaeus and Felitis in 2 Timothy 2. Okay, this is a view people were saying at that time as well. And he says they have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. this tells you categorically what kind of error this would be. The other big reason is 1st Corinthians

15 and the way Paul classifies a rejection of the bodily resurrection. And I would say, you know, to use Paul's language, to affirm full preterism is to swerve from the truth and make your faith futile. I don't think we have to be able to use the word heresy sometimes. It's not unloving to set boundaries to orthodoxy because we are just basically saying Christianity is not everything. Okay. There are some things you just have to believe. And the reason I just, I hate full preterism. It just completely vitiates all of our hope. You cannot read the last battle, the last book in C.S. Lewis's Narnia books and feel the same way if you're a full preterist. All that hope is wrong if you're a full preterist. Later I'll give an argument for why that view is wrong. But first,

there's also partial preterism, which is completely different. Partial preterists believe that some prophecies in the New Testament were fulfilled in the first century, specifically the Great Tribulation, a judgment coming on Jerusalem, the Antichrist, although that terminology is not the best terminology. That's actually just terminology from the Pistol of 1st John, which is not really talking about one person, but that's how the common parlance has come to be. and a judgment and what did I say? Oh, the destruction of the Jewish temple. And basically, partial predators think these events are fulfilled during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, culminating in the destruction of the temple in 70 AD. Let's just, I don't know if I said that very well.

Let's put this up on the screen to distinguish these. Past and future differing events. So those are the things you can see in the past, but in the future, the major eschatological offense. The four big ones are still future. The second coming, final resurrection, final judgment, and the final state, the inauguration of new heavens and the new earth, banishment of the wicked to hell, all that. The big ones are still future for partial preterists. So textually, partial preterists think that the Olivet discourse, that's Matthew 24, and the other synoptic parallels, that's Mark 13 and Luke 21, are passed.

and they think the middle portions of Revelation, chapters 1 through 19, roughly, are referring to first century events. So you can read a partial pederist like Ken Gentry, and he's going through and he's giving a really detailed commentary on Revelation, looking at Josephus and other historians, and basically trying to show that these events are pretty plausibly interpreted as talking about various events in the 67 to 70 AD period of the first Roman Jewish war. the seven seals of Revelation 6 and the seven trumpets of Revelation 8 and 9, they have some remarkable correspondence with what Josephus tells us happened. And then he talks, other examples would be the beast of Revelation 13. He thinks that's basically the Roman Emperor Nero, and more basically the Roman empire. And he thinks the great prostitute of chapter 17. And the Babylon of chapter 18 is Jerusalem, first century of Jerusalem. When I preached through Second Thessalonians 2 a few years back, always a fun to be, a fun passage to be assigned, trying to say, okay, what am I going to do with

the man of lawlessness here? Most people, again, the common parlance is the Antichrist, but that's not the most technical term from the New Testament. And most people think the man of lawlessness, Second Thessonians 2, is the same as the beast of Revelation in chapter 13 of Revelation. And basically, I was kind of persuaded. This is talking about Nero and the imperial power that he wielded against Christians, because he did exactly what this verse is talking about, about calling himself God, going into the temple, and so on and so forth. But my preaching strategy was not to really emphasize that. You just talk about more about the principles and how to apply the principles to your life. I don't, at least I discussed this, but I didn't emphasize that. Because again,

it's a third rank issue. You want to leave some space. Plus, it's relieving to be able to quote Augustine in the city of God is saying, I frankly confess, I do not know what he means. He says that about the restrainer in that Second Thessalonians two text. So all this is just to say, trying to be clear. I'm just trying to explain the kinds of passages that partial preterists look at and trying to make clear, full preterism versus partial preterism. I know this can seem really strange, but again, to us, here's the thing. What can feel normal to us in the modern day, theologically, sometimes actually is historically eccentric.

Throughout church history, there have been three main views about how to interpret this anti-Christ figure or beast or man of lawlessness, so on and so forth, and the idea of a future global politician, which is the general view you'll find as the, the default assumption of many modern-day Christians doesn't have as much historical precedent. Usually in church history, it's one of two other ideas, either the papacy, common view among early Protestants, or among early Christians like John Chrysostom and Lactantius, you'll find

it's Nero. That's a common view in the early church. Now, I have a whole video out explaining why I'm a partial preterist. Let me just briefly canvass summarizing from that video very quickly, why would anyone think this. I realize as I put that out there, some of us again are, it strikes us initially as so strange, even though historically it's a pretty common view. But the idea that the middle portions of revelation already happened, people hear that and they're, their alarm bells go off. Why would anybody think this? Well, essentially, we're trying to take seriously the teaching of Christ.

When he goes out and he's sending out the 12, he says, Matthew 10, 23, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel before the Son of Man comes. Six chapters later, teaching about discipleship, some of you who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom. And finally, most climactically and most provocatively, at the end of the Olivet discourse, after mentioning his glorious coming, he says, I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. So what partial preterists think is this is not the second coming, but it's what we call a typological anticipation of the second coming. It's a judgment coming of Christ that happens in the first century that anticipates the second

coming, but this is more historical and focused and so forth. And I think there's a lot of good reasons for that. These various different texts all seem to corroborate each other because they're stating nearness. They're stating 30 or 40 years, which is exactly what it would have been, in three distinct ways, all of which are. kind of clarify each other. You're reading the Olivet discourse, Matthew 24, similarly to how you read Isaiah 13 and Ezekiel 32 and other prophecies of historical judgment. There's a lot of remarkable parallels in how the language is used about the sun turning to blood and the moon turning to blood and so on and so forth. And there's also just this general sense of imminence and nearness throughout

the New Testament. You also have Jesus' parables and statements of judgment against this generation. You know, people try to get around the this generation clause, but everywhere, like one chapter earlier, this generation, all the blood of the martyrs were going upon this generation. No one ever has interpreted that as this race or something like that, the way people try to get around it in Matthew 24. So basically, there's a lot of reasons to think, okay, Jesus seems to be saying something's right on deck from his standpoint, speaking around 30 AD. It's just coming around the corner. Before you go through these cities, while some of you are still alive before this generation passes away, something's going on. And again, there's a lot of reasons

for this that I've got into. One is the situationally specific language of the Olivet discourse. It just looks like it's talking about a first century local event relevant to those living in and around Jerusalem. For example, in Luke's version, he says, when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, the desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains. I mean, it's hard to think of what this would even mean if it's talking about something over 2,000 years later. By the way, one of the convincing things for me was just reading through Josephus on the destruction of Jerusalem and other historians talking about this. This was a major historical event. Let me put up some paintings.

Sometimes you forget how significant this was. Here's an 1850 painting of David Roberts entitled The Siege and Destruction of Jerusalem. On the bottom right there, you can see the Roman army under the General Titus, who later became an emperor approaching and lighting fire to the city. Here's an 1867 painting entitled The Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, and it conveys some sense of the devastation this was. We have to understand the significance here. This is the temple.

It was destroyed in 586, 587 BC under the Babylonians when they took over Jerusalem. then it stands for 600 years and more. And if there's anything, I mean, even if you had nothing in scripture about this, even if Jesus didn't talk about the armies coming to attack the Jerusalem and so forth, you'd still wonder about the religious significance of this event, the temple being destroyed. So when you get to the New Testament and you find the whole Olivet discourse is introduced by Jesus saying, not one stone will stand upon another,

and then he's asked, when is this going to happen? And you know, you want to take this very seriously. So we're trying to take these timetable references seriously. However, here is what happens. Third section of the video, once you start to get the appeal for partial preterism, some people switch over all the way into full preterism. And they think, well, and everything happened to that. And this is very tricky.

The issue here is that this preterist hermeneutic has a lot of explanatory power. Basically, what you're saying is you're trying to take the timetables at face value, as well as the general sense of imminence throughout the New Testament. Once you're able to embrace this, you see how powerful it feels. Basically, when Jesus said, I'm coming soon, he meant, soon. He didn't mean two millennia, and you have to interpret the word soon, really weird. Or he said, before this generation passes away. He meant before this generation passes away. So the power of this hermeneutic is you're just trying to honor the timetables. And so the appeal becomes, don't project an interpretation back onto these words that would have been completely unrecognizable to anyone actually hearing them. Right. Can you imagine that Jewish Jesus's listeners hearing all before this generation passes away? And then could any one of them have possibly understood that actually means more than 2,000 years later? Wouldn't they feel a bit deceived by this language? So that's the appeal. You could call it kind of an appeal to common sense hermeneutics.

the timetables at face value. And I have to say that's a powerful appeal. And as you read through futurist interpretations of the Olivet discourse, they do feel kind of tortured, splitting hairs, qualifying things excessively. It does seem like a view that would have been hard to anticipate at that time if you were there and hard Jesus's words. Now, I'm about to make an argument against full preterism, but hang with me here because I'm trying to explain. The power of this appeal is in this sort of common sense hermeneutics, and it is a powerful appeal. Let me put it as, I'll just quote J. Stewart Russell. His book, the Perusia, was published in the late 19th century, first published in 1878, perhaps the most significant text in this whole development of

preterism. And isn't how he puts it. He's dealing with Matthew 24 and these words about this generation passing away, he says, words have no meaning. If this language uttered on so solemn an occasion and so precise and express in its import does not affirm the near approach of the great event which occupies the whole discourse of our Lord, 99 persons in every hundred would undoubtedly understand his words as meaning that the predicted catastrophe would fall within the limits of the lifetime of the existing generation. Unless, therefore, our Lord intended to mystify his disciples, he gave them plainly to understand that his coming, the judgment of the Jewish nation, and the close of the age would come to pass before the existing generation had wholly passed away.

Lots of people have found his case very challenging. I really appreciate R.C. Sproll on these topics, because you can see this, you know, very well-known leading theologian kind of, being honest about his own wrestling with this. At one point, he talks about reading Russell's book, and he says, I can never read the New Testament again the same way. I read it before reading the Perusia. I hope better scholars than I will continue to analyze and evaluate the content of this important work. So what I'm trying to do here is show, what I'm trying to do so far is to show, okay, we've got two different options. Partial preterism, full preterism. They're very different in their significance. One of these is something Christians can disagree on. Wait,

Whether you think Nero is the Antichrist does not make you a Christian or not. Another one of them, no, is like a cardinal issue of orthodoxy, whether you think a bodily resurrection and future coming of Christ are going to happen. That does set the boundaries for whether you're within the faith, whether your faith is futile, as Paul says. So then I'm trying to show there's some powerful appeals for some kind of preterism. But let me now show why I think full preterism ultimately just doesn't work. and I think there are a lot of reasons that we can make, but let me just appeal to the very one we've

already identified, this common sense hermeneutics. Because here's the irony of full preterism. The whole appeal is, hey, let's take the timetable references at face value. Let's take this as the original hearers would have taken them. Now, we can take that very appeal and apply it to full preterism as well. Because when you get to the resurrection, the rapture, and the millennium, full preterists lapse into the same kind of excessive, qualifying, and hair-splitting, and tortured exegesis that they decry in the futurists. Okay, they're the ones going against common sense hermeneutics on these topics. For example, Revelation 20, the Millennium, this is a passage Russell himself really wrestled with. And if I recall,

I admire his honesty in kind of putting it out there. If I recall, he actually abandoned a total preterism on this text. But contemporary full preterists usually go basically about Revelation 20. They have to identify with something in the past. Sometimes it'll be the period between Christ's ministry and the fall of the temple, 40 years. Other times, they'll date it from the fall of the temple to some future event. Sometimes the fall of Masada, that's another event toward the tail end the first Roman Jewish War around 72 or 73 AD. That's reported to us by Josephus. Then you have other times they'll push it into the second century,

into the 130s AD, another Jewish uprising against the Roman Empire. But here's the thing. Any view like that is going to rub against the whole premise of the whole power of preterist terminutics, which is heed the timetables, take them at face value, take them as they would have been taken by the original hearers. Can you imagine any reader of John's Apocalypse, the Book of Revelation, hearing 1,000 years, and then thinking it's actually 3 or 40 or 62, the number 1,000 years can be literal or symbolic. That's a legitimate discussion. But it always refers to a long period of time in the scripture. And to think of, you know, especially when you add on the

cataclysmic war with Satan depicted at the end of the millennium. It's like, where are you going to put that into 132 AD or something like this? So what I'm trying to show here is the preterist appeal to timetables and to a common sense hermeneutic is inconsistent. It only looks at the short timetables, not the long timetables. This is why Revelation 20 is such a significant text on our Bibles. Because here you have this thousand years, you know, what do we do with that? I like how Keith Matheson puts this in his really helpful book responding to full preterism. Quote, hyperpreterists continually argue that a generation cannot be stretched to 2,000 years or more, and yet they take the thousand years of Revelation 20 and compress it into a generation.

Boom, what a sentence. You know, that's well said. And so this is the irony is that the very strength of preterism becomes its undoing when you try to make it consistent for all the texts. I think what we want to do is take all the timetables and take them seriously. The short ones and the long ones. And a thousand years is a long time. And I think that's talking about, I'm a millennial, so I think it's talking about the church age. But whatever view you take of that, it's certainly not two to three years or 40 or 60 years. A millennium is a long period of time. So what I think that leaves us with is a more complicated

New Testament eschatology. Some things are imminent. I really think this is, we have to reckon with this, something happens at the end of, toward the end of that New Testament era. One of the challenges for partial preteries, of course, is we have to date all the books prior to 70 AD. I think you can do that, but that's, you know, try to be honest about the challenges. And there's other challenges as well. But I actually think a good case we made that Revelation was written before 70 AD, but that's a whole other thing. Point for now is just to say, and this is the approach that I respect the most is we've got to put all the texts together and that does yield a more complicated picture. So I hope this video will be helpful. Boy, it's so common

now for people to reference me as, well, I don't agree with Gavin about everything, comma, but. And I'm always so curious, you know, what are people mostly disagreeing with? though I, because I just put out so much content about so many things. So I am very content with this. I understand. You do not have to agree with me about all these particulars. I change my mind on some of these little details. What I'm trying to do here is do some triaging of issues here and show, hey, full preterism, this is not good. This is going to take us outside of the Apostles' Creed and outside of Christian Orthodoxy. Partial preterism, though, makes a lot of sense, and let's keep working at that. So that's basically what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to help us with triage here

and trying to help us with retrieval. The two areas I think evangelicals can benefit most from retrieving the past are eschatology, the end times, and creation. How the world began. All right, so that's it. I'm going through a series of videos on eschatology. I've done one on universalism. That one got shared in a universalist chat forum, so I got bombarded with universalist comments. Thank you, everyone who commented. That was actually helpful in kind of edifying to read through. One of the weaknesses of that video is, evidently, I didn't read through this book, which is very important. Rameli's book, A Larger Hope. So I'm going to read this. So Universalists, I'm listening to your criticisms there, but just to set expectations, I'm not anticipating changing my mind. Okay, I'm pretty

convinced from the scriptures already on that topic. But I do think I can better improve my historical treatment by engaging with this book. The other thing I'm going to do is annihilationism. So the next and final video in this series on eschatology will be an explanation of annihilationism, trying to triage it, trying to be respect, trying to steal man it. I'm not persuaded of that view, but I have respect and understanding for it. So I'm going to try to treat it with respect and steal man it and triage it to show this is not a heretical view. But ultimately why Revelation 2010, I'm not persuaded of how the annihilationist readings of that that I'm getting to. So that's coming down the pipeline.

Let me know what you think in the comments on this one. think it'd be worth more treatment of these preterist issues. You know, one thing I could do is, like, do a deep dive on some of these questions. I'm given the big picture here. We could do a deep dive on Second Thessalonians, too, and work through it. A deep dive on Revelation 20 and work through it. These are important texts, and sometimes we neglect them. I find there's two impulses. Either we get hyper-focused on these details of eschatology, or we just completely neglect them. So it'd be fun to work through these more. All right, thanks for watching. Let me know what you think in the comments.