For most of my Christian life, I was committed to a system of biblical interpretation known as Dispensationalism. Key tenets of that system include a premillennial eschatology, a pretribulational rapture of the saints, a future and physical restoration of ethnic Israel as God’s chosen people, and a commitment to a (generally) wooden-literal hermeneutic.[1] As I eventually started having doubts about the integrity of Dispensationalism’s “unified interpretive scheme”[2] and was concerned that perhaps Dispensationalists were unwittingly imposing a grand scenario on the Bible justified only by the use of a faulty hermeneutic, I nevertheless found it difficult to escape the futurists’ fold out of fear that I would be branded an “anti-Semite”. Continue reading…