Dispen. & Church Age

Dispensations in the Church Age:
More Than One Plan, Gospel and Kingdom?

Excerpted from "Dispensationalism and the Everlasting Gospel"

Many of the Fundamentalist of the Keswick groups adopted a pre-millennial dispensationalism which they passed on to their descendants in the later Pentecostal movement. Most Pentecostals today are avid Dispensationalist even though the original scheme of Scofield held that speaking with tongues and other such gifts ceased in the Church Age when the canon of Scripture was completed. The distinction between Israel and the Church and the belief in dispensational ages was modified by Pentecostals who divided the Church Age up into various stages of progressive revelation - a sort of dispensationalism-within-dispensationalism. [This idea was propagated by Aimee Semple McPherson in her book Lost and Restored. Many Pentecostals have interpreted church history as a sequence of restorative steps back to the pristine or Apostolic era of the Church. Aimee claimed that she received this understanding by direct revelation without a premeditative thought about it. This almost exact view of Church restoration, with Aimee’s modified chart, is found in S. C. McClain’s Highlights in Church History. His book has shaped many Oneness people’s views of Church history and its restoration. It also has influenced their understanding of the place of Oneness theology in Church history. McClain says that the Pentecostal movement brought "the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the Christian church. Many new organizations, standing for different phases of gospel truth, had sprung up as results from the great revivals in the previous church period, . . ." McClain believed that within the Age of the Church itself there were "different phases of gospel truth."]

Therefore since some had only an increment of the full truth "available" to them, they were only responsible for the truth or "light" revealed by God in there era. One was saved according to the how much they walked according to the "light available to them." For example, Luther is considered a great man of God who received more light when he taught justification by faith. But, the truth of the Pentecostal experience, which came after Luther, was a fuller revelation than what Luther knew. Luther cannot be judged for not speaking in tongues because it was not "revealed" or was not "available" in his day. However, we are responsible for the Pentecostal truth. We cannot merely rely on justification by faith, because greater truth has been revealed. Since we have more light, we must walk in that light or lose what we already have. This is the rationale of many Pentecostals.

This concept of "walking in all the light revealed" is a well-traveled concept, going back to at least the earliest pietistic groups in America. This notion is based on a complex of biblical passages coupled with a dispensational view of salvation. One passage is John 12:35, where Jesus warns, "Walk while ye have the light." Another parallel verse is 1 John 1:7, where John tells us to "walk in the light even as he is in the light." Hebrews 6:4 is used by some, because it speaks of "being enlightened" as though it were a stage, from which a Christian is to go on to perfection. Others, like Phoebe Palmer, refer to Jesus' words in John 16:12, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," to support the idea that there are different levels or stages of "light" that a Christian moves through. For Palmer, this passage explained why she could remain justified while lacking entire sanctification.

Phoebe Palmer used this idea, possibly drawing from Charles Finney who used this language to explain her experience of sanctification:

"Could I stand still at this point, and remain in a state of justification while refusing to comply with what I knew to be the demand of God and in fulfilment of covenant engagements long since made? I saw I could not; I must either make the necessary sacrifices, or I must sin, and, by my disobedience, forfeit a state of justification. And it is here justification would have ended with me had I refused to be holy. Do you ask, How did you retain a state of justification before, when all was not given up? Perhaps I cannot answer your question better than by referring you to what the Saviour said to His disciples, "I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." I had, for some time previous to this, been answerable to the light as I had received it. The holy Spirit had led me onward, revealing higher and yet higher duties, as I was able to bear the, till I was brought up to the point described, and was unable to be answerable to my covenant engagements, and yield my self up entirely and irrevocably to God;" [Phoebe Palmer, Full Salvation; Its Doctrine and Duties, (Salem, OH: Schmul Publishers, 1979), p. 27.]

A primer on holiness written in 1918 states that the proper candidates for entire sanctification are, "All who have been clearly converted, and are still walking in all the light." [Harmon A. Baldwin, Lessons for Seekers of Holiness, (Chicago, W. B. Rose, Agent, 1918), Online, Accessed: 24 July 2001, Available at: http://home.earthlink.net/~adamsfmmac/Chptr04.html] Current holiness teachers still use this concept in their teaching on Christian perfection and holiness:

"A Christian can make a lot of mistakes in ignorance and still have a perfect heart. He (or she) might blunder where he doesn't know better. But where he has the light, there he walks. . . . Doretta was as determined to follow Christ as any teenage convert I had ever seen. And just as full of mistakes. But Doretta was walking in all the light she had. She had a perfect heart. That is why she matured spiritually. As light increased, so did her Christian growth." [J. W. Jepson, If You Want To Be Perfect, Start Now, copyright © 1998 by J. W. Jepson, Online, Accessed: 24 July 2001, Available at: http://www.christcenter.net/Perfect.htm]

At the 1997 General Conf. of the Church of God (Cleveland Tennessee), Paul S. Jernigan stated: "There are yet things to be brought to light and revealed to the Church." He exhorted the conference: "Our cry in The Church of God is, "Lord, shine your light of truth upon us now." He criticized those who did not "walk in all the light":

"We were confounded by the people that seemed to be well satisfied to just be in the shadow of the truth. . . . It seems to me some people are only happy with half-truths, or just enough light that doesn't bring them to that place of change." ["It's Not Dark Where I'm Standing," Paul S. Jernigan, General Sunday School Coordinator, 92nd Annual General Assembly of The Church of God, August 29, 1997, Chattanooga, Tennessee, Online, Accessed 24 July 2001, Available at: http://www.thechurchofgod.org/97assembly/messages/pjernigan.htm]

Another example of the abuse of the "walking in all the light" concept I found was in this statement:

"All it takes to be in God's organisation (sic) is sincere faith in him. Religious experts hate sincerity; for it destroys their monopoly on God. They forget that, although the Good Samaritan was wrong in his religion, he was right in his heart, where it really counts. A cult member, Hindu, or atheist may be in the kingdom of heaven if walking in all the light that he or she has." ["The Last Seven Years," Online, Accessed: 24 July 2001, Available at: http://godstuff.virtualave.net/BB3/BB3.06.html]

The logical end of the "walking in the light" is hard to dismiss. Since God reveals truth in stages and one is right with God by following that light, then those who don't walk in all the light are walking in darkness. Therefore, those who were right with God previously, when they were faithful to all the truth that was available, but subsequently fail to accept the new light, cease to fellowship with God. Hence, those presently walking in all the light are to reject fellowship with the "lesser lights:"

"So God's people are to fellowship together with only those who walk in the light as Christ is in the light. And since in Christ there is no darkness or error or false doctrine at all, then this Biblical test for fellowship would prevent God's people from worshipping with any groups or churches who were not following, walking, or living in all the truth, but who had a mixture of truth and error within." ["Let There Be Light" Ministries," January - February, 2001, Online, Accessed 24 July 2001, Available at: http://www.lightministries.com/webdoc241.htm]

Further proof of the exclusivistic trajectory this thinking takes comes from a ministry web site which claims as its purpose "the preaching of the WHOLE gospel message of present truth." It asserts: "There are many precious truths contained in the Word of God, but it is `PRESENT TRUTH' that the flock needs now." "Present Truth" is a catch phrase in some more extreme quarters of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement. The Bible is considered past truth. We need it and must believe it. But, God also gives "present truth" through modern apostles and prophets. Those who follow this path of "Full Gospel" thought find themselves challenging the Protestant conviction of Scripture alone. For them, there is truth which goes beyond and in some ways improves on the knowledge the Bible provides. These examples demonstrate how "Full Gospel" teaching can be taken to extremes and how whole or full gospel teaching can eventually lead to sectarianism and various forms of spiritual elitism.

On a recent internet Christian discussion site, one person took the "walking in the light" doctrine to its logical and fatal conclusion. He asked: "If the Buddhist has never sinned, and has walked in all the light he or she has, then how can he be condemned?" This points out the fatal mistake of determining one's responsibility to truth by a sliding scale. If one is only responsible for what light may be available to them, then one who has never heard of Christ can claim salvation outside of Christ on some other basis. It also points out the problems that occur when truth is thought of as being revealed in stages or dispensations rather than in the objective words of Scripture and in the Person of Jesus Christ. Paul clarified this issue for the Greeks in Athens with these words:

"Therefore since we are God's offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone-- an image made by man's design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead." (Acts 17:29-31 NIV)

The whole world will be judged by Christ on the basis of his resurrection. It is the revelation of God's truth in objective, factual, and historical form. The light that is available to this generation and all who have lived in the Age of the Church comes from Jesus Christ. He is the Light of the world: "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life." (John 8:12 NIV) And it is this Light by which all nations will be either saved or judged.

What I have just shared illustrates how many Pentecostals applied the Dispensational logic to the Church Age. While Scofield and others saw salvation as a progressive revelation in biblical history, Pentecostals took it to radical extremes, teaching that there was progressive salvation in the Church dispensation. This was not acceptable for most dispensationalists, but it was strangely logical and consistent to the method of dispensationalism. For certain Pentecostals the logic was: "Since one could arbitrarily divide the history of salvation in the Bible into different economies of salvation, why couldn't one do the same with the Church Age?" If one accepts the former, there is little to prevent the latter.

I would challenge the unfounded concept that the Church Age contains several different ways or means to salvation. Difference stages or levels of "light" do not exist in the age of the Gospel. Jesus is the only door (John 10). The Father draws all men through Jesus (John 6:44). We trust only Him. Jesus is the Light (John 9:5). We only need walk in the Light (a figurative expression for living by faith in Christ) to be saved. The notion of difference levels of "light" fails to be supported by the plain teaching of Scripture. There is only one Gospel (Galatians 1:8,9). There is only one faith (Ephesians 4:5; Jude 3). Christ is the only way to God (John 14:6). We trust in only one Savior (1 Timothy 4:10; Jude 26). Any complication and confusion of these facts is created by a foreign system seeking to reconstruct God's plan in order to validate itself. The mistake initiated by the dispensational scheme (different means of salvation in different dispensations) eventually bore the unbiblical fruit of distorting the Gospel in the Church Age (or dispensation).

This problem has afflicted Pentecostals as much or more than other Christian groups. Many Pentecostals, rooted in the restorationist tradition, have interpreted church history as a sequence of restorative steps back to the pristine or Apostolic era of the Church. Aimee Semple McPherson was one prominent early Pentecostal who propagated this idea. She shared these ideas in her book Lost and Restored. McPherson claimed that she received this understanding by direct revelation without a premeditative thought about it. [Aimee relates that she was standing before a large crowd and praying for God to give her something to say, when: "Just then something happened: – the power of God went surging through my body, waves of glory and praise swept through my soul, until I forgot the throng of eager faces that had a moment before seemed to swim before me, forgot the footlights, and the learned men with their long tailed coats, forgot that I was only a child of eighteen, and the many there with their grey hair knew more in a moment than I in the natural could know in a lifetime, and ‘I was in the Spirit.' . . . My mouth opened, the Lord took control of my tongue, my lips and vocal organs, and began to speak through me, not in tongues but in English. The Spirit spoke in prophecy, and as He spoke through me I did not know what the next word was to be. . . ." (Aimee Semple McPherson, Lost and Restored: The Dispensation of the Holy Spirit from the Ascension of the Lord Jesus to His Coming Descension, (Los Angeles, CA: Foursquare Publications, 1989), p. 8f.)] In this book was a chart depicting the revelation she received about the Church Age. (Figure 2)

This chart is based on Joel 1:4 and Joel 2:25 which she understood as referring the history or dispensation of the Church. The first half of Church history was a spiritual decline of the Church illustrated by the imagery of Joel's locust devouring the tree. Aimee saw the Church's falling away as starting after the time of the Apostles. From that time until the Middle Ages the Church was seen as progressively falling into greater apostasy. The second half of the chart points to the restoration of the Church as God returns the tree to its former state before the plague of locusts stripped it. This is seen as beginning with the Reformation and progressively improving until the time of the Pentecostal outpouring at the turn of the 20th century.

An almost exact recreation of Aimee's chart of the Church's fall and restoration, is found in S. C. McClain's Highlights in Church History (Figure 3). His book has shaped many Oneness people's views of Church history and its restoration. It also has influenced their understanding of the place of Oneness theology in Church history. McClain says that the Pentecostal movement brought "the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the Christian church. Many new organizations, standing for different phases of gospel truth, had sprung up as results from the great revivals in the previous church period, . . ." [S. C. McClain, Highlights in Church History, (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1990), p. 55. On this same page McClain interprets Nahum 2:3-5 as predicting the coming of the automobile. He says that the fulfillment of this "prophecy" is a confirmation of the Pentecostal revival because "in the very year 1900, in which Henry Ford demonstrated his first automobile on the streets of Detroit, God began in a general way to pour out His Holy Spirit with the initial sign of speaking in other tongues in the same manner as on the Day of Pentecost in 30 A.D."] McClain believed that within the Age of the Church itself there were "different phases of gospel truth." His teaching was merely the perpetuation of the impetus begun in dispensational theology and the subsequent modifications which emerged in Pentecostalism.

Since there was more light revealed to each stage of Church History, it was logically incumbent upon all Christians to search out what new truth was waiting to be revealed from the Bible. This contributed to the view of the Bible as truth-within-Truth [cp. How We Read the Bible for more a more in-depth treatment of this subject]. Fused with the restorationist impulse of Holiness-Pentecostal theology, dispensationalism encouraged many early Pentecostals to search the Bible for "new truth" to be revealed in their day. This drive to discover something "new" became a hallmark of Pentecostal piety, as noted by Howard Goss, a early leader of the Pentecostal movement:

"Walking in the light of God's revelation was considered the guarantee of unbroken fellowship with God. I feel that it still is, for that matter. Consequently, a preacher who did not dig up a new slant on some Scripture, or get some new revelation to his heart every so often; one who did not propagate it, defend it, and let it be known that if necessary he was prepared to lay down his life for it, was considered slow, dull, and unspiritual. Calling a man a "compromiser" killed his ministry far and wide. Because of this, no doubt, many new revelations, which began to cause confusion, were condoned." [Ethel E. Goss, The Winds of God, (Hazelwood, MO: Word Aflame Press, 1990), p. 245-6.]

The central figure in Oneness theology was G. T. Haywood. He wrestled with the state of those who did not follow the New Birth doctrine held by many Oneness Pentecostals. He resolved the conflict in his mind by utilizing the "walking in all the light" model:

"The one question that is so often asked is, ‘are all those people who thought they were born of the Spirit, and were not, lost?' No, not by any means. They shall be given eternal life in the resurrection if they walked in all the light that was given them while they lived. God is a just Judge, and there is not unrighteousness in Him. But those who refuse to walk in the light shall be overtaken with darkness. (John 13:35, 36; see also John 15:22-24)." [G. T. Haywood, The Birth of the Spirit in the Days of the Apostles, (Indianapolis, IN: Christ Temple Book Store, n. d.), p. 12.]

The second figure in the development of Oneness teaching was A. D. Urshan. He used the same logic as Haywood to resolve the same issue:

Q. Would these folks be lost if they had not gone on to the water and Spirit birth?
A. No, for when they continued to walk in the light they had, they consequently entered into the deeper and higher divine experiences. 1 John 1:4-7. Also John 8:31-36. [Evangelist Andrew D. Urshan, Apostolic Faith Doctrine of the New Birth, (Cochrane, WI, self-published, 1941), p. 13.]

Admittedly, many of these "revelations" of light were no more than insights from biblical texts to be applied in one's Christian life. However, there were significant cases where much more was involved. In some instances, more than merely fresh understanding and application of the Gospel of Christ was proposed. In some radical forms of dispensationalism a new order or economy of God's working in salvation was taught. This included the expectation by some of a better or "full" salvation - greater light which God requires of people which was not known previously in Church history. This understanding lead to the whole "full gospel" movement which radically shaped the Protestant Church in America. [cp. "Can the Gospel be Fractured? for an extensive treatment of this subject.]

I am not saying that every dispensationalists teaching is questionable or wrong. Many Gospel preaching people have been and are dispensationalists. What I am saying is that dispensationalism is a system, brought to the Bible, rather than found in it. As a scheme exogenous [Coming from the outside. Not developing within but being insert from the outside.] to the Bible it creates a restrictive grid, that directs the reader to see certain biblical texts in ways that harmonize them with dispensational theology. This is a serious problem because the Gospel is either obscured, lost or some other agenda, – even one's doctrine of salvation – supplants the biblical one. I believe this has happened in the case of the movement which produced the United Pentecostal Church. Their view of salvation and interpretation of Acts 2:38, both in original conception, and now as they perpetuate it, is deeply conformed to and restrained by the dispensationalist view. I have yet to read any of their authors address this issue. Obviously, this is because the dispensational system is natural to their theology and would not come under question from someone within their belief system. Nevertheless, there is a critical need within Oneness Pentecostalism for biblical, historical and theological reflection on dispensational theology's impact on Oneness Pentecostal theology.