"Preterism's Achilles' Heel," answered.
He says the tribulation, the Antichrist, the coming, the resurrection, and Israel's deliverance are one indivisible package. He's right. Then he forgets to look at the date Jesus put on it.
People keep sending me Reggie Kelly's "Preterism's Achilles' Heel," usually with a note that says "this ends it." I've read it several times now. It's one of the better futurist pieces out there, because it doesn't play games with "this generation" and it doesn't invent a gap. It makes one argument, hard, and it deserves a straight answer. Here it is, in his order.
First, a word about his source. The article opens by defining preterism with a quotation from Kenneth Gentry. Gentry is a preterist. He holds that the great tribulation of Matthew 24:21 and everything in the Olivet Discourse through verse 34 was fulfilled in AD 70, and he has written books saying so. The article's own definition comes from a man who puts "the unequaled tribulation" in the first century. That isn't a knockdown, but it tells you how the piece was built.
Where he is right, and I agree without reservation. Jeremiah 30:7, Daniel 12:1, and Matthew 24:21 describe one tribulation. Daniel 12:1 and 12:2 tie that tribulation to the resurrection. Matthew 24:21 and 24:29–31 tie it to the coming of the Son of Man. 2 Thessalonians 2:1 and 2:8 tie the coming to the gathering and the destruction of the lawless one. He calls this "a clear and inextricable connection," and he says anyone who splits it "divides the indivisible." I have been saying that for a year. The partial preterists he criticizes do split it, and I think he's right that they can't. He even says, fairly, that "consistent preterists" see the force of the connection and refuse to split it. We do.
Here is the whole disagreement in one sentence. He keeps the package whole and moves it to the future. I keep the package whole and leave it where Jesus dated it.
The date is in the texts he cites. Daniel 12 doesn't just describe the tribulation and the resurrection; it dates them. "How long shall it be till the end of these wonders?" (12:6). The answer: "when the shattering of the power of the holy people comes to an end all these things would be finished" (12:7). All these things, which means the tribulation of verse 1 and the resurrection of verse 2, are finished when the holy people's power is shattered. There is one event in history that answers to that, and it is the one Jesus described from the Mount of Olives: the nation, the city, the Temple, and the priesthood broken by Rome in AD 70. I take Daniel's "end of the days" (12:13) to be the end of Israel's days as the covenant nation under the old order, because that is what verse 7 says the end consists of, and Daniel was promised his place "at the end of the days," the same end verse 7 dated.
Jesus put the same date on the same package. "Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place" (Matthew 24:34), and "all these things" in Matthew 24 includes the tribulation (24:21), the darkened sun (24:29), the Son of Man on the clouds (24:30), and the trumpet and the gathering (24:31). Luke says it in the plainest words in the New Testament, of the siege of Jerusalem: "these are days of vengeance, to fulfill all that is written" (21:22). All that is written. The article's "indivisible complex" and Luke's "all that is written" are the same thing, and Luke tells you when it was fulfilled.
His Acts 2 argument cuts my way. He notes that the darkness comes "after the tribulation" (Matthew 24:29) and "before the day of the Lord" (Acts 2:20), so the tribulation ends with the day of the Lord. I agree completely. Now read the rest of Acts 2. Peter said Joel's prophecy was being fulfilled in front of that crowd: "this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel" (2:16). He quoted the darkened sun and the day of the Lord in the same breath (2:19–20), and then he told the same crowd to "save yourselves from this crooked generation" (2:40). The day of the Lord that followed the tribulation was the day that came on the generation Peter was talking to. His sequence is right. His century is wrong.
"The New Testament treats the day of the Lord as future." Yes. Future to the men who wrote it, and they said how far. Paul told the Thessalonians "you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night," and "you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you" (1 Thessalonians 5:2, 4). He promised them "relief" when the Lord is revealed, and vengeance on "those who afflict you" (2 Thessalonians 1:6–7), which is only relief if it comes to the people being afflicted. Peter told his readers the delay was God's patience "toward you" (2 Peter 3:9). Every "future" day-of-the-Lord text he lists is addressed to first-century readers as their day. The article never engages the audience, and the audience is the argument.
Daniel 12:2 and the resurrection. He says moderate preterists turn it into a metaphor for national revival. That's Philip Mauro's reading and it isn't mine. I take Daniel 12:2 as a real resurrection of the dead, and I take Daniel 12:7 as its date. What rose was the dead who had been in Hades since Abel, the ones Jesus said would hear His voice (John 5:25, 28), the ones John saw given up when "Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them" (Revelation 20:13), in a book that says "the time is near" at both ends. That's the resurrection Paul called "the hope of Israel" (Acts 28:20) and said was "about to be" (Acts 24:15, the Greek mellein). The article says consistent preterists hold that "living believers were translated" in AD 70. The main consistent-preterist position does not hold that, and I don't; the church was still on the ground after 70, at Pella and in every city Paul wrote to. The living were gathered into the kingdom. The dead were raised out of Hades. Nobody vanished.
Israel and the land. This is where the article's heart is, and I'll answer it from Paul rather than from the news. "All Israel will be saved" (Romans 11:26) is introduced by "in this way," houtōs, which describes a manner, not a future date: the remnant believing (11:5, "at the present time there is a remnant"), the Gentiles grafted in, the natural branches grafted back as they come to faith. The Deliverer "will come from Zion" is Isaiah 59:20, and Paul quotes it the way he quotes every prophecy of Christ, as something accomplished in his own day. The olive tree has one root. Nobody is replaced; people are grafted in and broken off by faith and unbelief (11:20). On the land: Joshua said "not one word of all the good promises that the LORD had made to the house of Israel had failed; all came to pass" (Joshua 21:45), Solomon ruled it from the river to Egypt (1 Kings 4:21), and Nehemiah said God "kept his promise" (9:8). Abraham himself was "looking forward to the city that has foundations" and "a better country, that is, a heavenly one" (Hebrews 11:10, 16). The land promise was kept, and the thing it pointed to is the city Hebrews says we have come to (12:22).
Zechariah 12:10, which he saves for his finale, is quoted in the New Testament twice, both times by John and both times of the generation that pierced Him: at the cross, "They will look on him whom they have pierced" (John 19:37), and in Revelation, "every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him" (1:7), four verses after "the time is near." John applied it to them. The article applies it to us.
"Anti-Semitic triumphalism." He wonders aloud whether that is "the real attraction" of preterism. I'll say it once, plainly. I hold that the Jewish remnant of the first century was the church's root, that Jew and Gentile are "one new man" (Ephesians 2:15), and that "if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring" (Galatians 3:29), no asterisk. That's the opposite of replacement; it's inclusion. A question about motives is not an argument about texts, and I'd rather talk about the texts.
1948 and "the times of the Gentiles." Luke 21:24 says Jerusalem would be trampled "until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled." John tells you how long the trampling lasts: "forty-two months" (Revelation 11:2), which is the war, not nineteen centuries. Acts 3:21, "heaven must receive him until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets," is dated by Peter three verses later: the prophets "proclaimed these days" (3:24). I take the "until" of Acts 3 to be the "until" of Psalm 110:1, which Peter had already quoted at Pentecost (2:34–35), "until I make your enemies your footstool," and Hebrews tells its readers that footstool was coming in "a little while" (10:13, 37).
Where this is contestable. I'll name it, because he didn't. The majority reading of Daniel 12:2 is a bodily resurrection at the end of history, and I'm against the majority there. What happens to believers who have died since AD 70 is the question my reading has to answer, and I answer it with Revelation 14:13 ("blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on") and Hebrews 9:27, with no waiting room; you can disagree. The land promise is a place where honest readers divide, and I've given my reading, not a proof. He never raises Acts 1:11, which is the strongest futurist text; if he had, I'd have conceded it's the hardest verse for me and pointed to Daniel 7:13, where the Son of Man comes to the Ancient of Days.
Here is where I'd leave it. The article's whole case is that the package can't be split, and I agree. The package has a date on it in Daniel 12:7, in Matthew 24:34, in Luke 21:22, and in Acts 2:40. By what rule in the text do you keep the package whole and move the date?