Amazing Grace

Zach,
I have read your posts, your poems, and your repeated claims that you are “truly Reformed” while simultaneously rejecting the eschatology of the confessions you claim to follow. What you are doing is not Semper Reformanda. It is a brazen smuggling of nineteenth-century Darbyite dispensationalism into the Reformed tradition under false colors, and it is theologically diabolical.
You insist that TULIP and the five Solas are the only essentials of Reformed theology, and that covenant theology and amillennialism are optional accretions inherited from Rome. This is historical and theological nonsense. The Westminster Confession, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the Second Helvetic Confession all articulate an amillennial (or, in some cases, postmillennial) eschatology grounded in covenant theology. They do so because the Reformers and the Puritan theologians who followed them read the New Testament as the authoritative interpretation of the Old. They saw one people of God, one covenant of grace, one church, and the present reign of Christ over the nations through His Word and Spirit. Your claim that “Scripture teaches dispensationalism” and that the confessions merely aped Augustine is the kind of special pleading that would have been laughed out of any Reformed academy.
Your pre-tribulation rapture, secret coming for the church, seven-year tribulation with the Spirit’s absence from earth, and literal future millennial kingdom ruled from a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem are not “more biblical.” They are a system invented in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, and unknown to the early church, the medieval church, the Reformers, or the confessional tradition. The New Testament does not teach two distinct peoples of God with two distinct destinies and two distinct plans. Ephesians 2–3, Galatians 3, Romans 9–11, and the entire book of Hebrews collapse any such dualism. The church is not an intercalation; it is the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham.
Your hermeneutic is the opposite of careful exegesis. You demand “literal unless the context clearly shows otherwise,” yet you refuse to let the genre of apocalyptic literature, the typology of the Old Testament, or the New Testament’s own use of prophetic texts govern the meaning. You spiritualize the clear New Testament teaching about the present reign of Christ (Matthew 28:18, Ephesians 1:20–23, 1 Corinthians 15:25, Revelation 1:5–6) while insisting on a wooden literalism for numbers and sequences in Daniel and Revelation that the authors themselves treat symbolically. This is not grammatical-historical interpretation. It is selective literalism in service of a system.
Worse, you repeatedly claim that Jesus personally anointed you in 2001 and that you now possess “infallible doctrine.” That is not Reformed. It is not even Protestant. It is the language of a private prophet whose authority sits above Scripture and the church. When you then use that alleged authority to declare amillennialism and covenant theology “unbiblical” and “from Rome,” you are not reforming the church. You are substituting your novel system for the careful, corporate reading of Scripture that has marked the Reformed churches for five centuries.
Your position promotes escapism, severs the unity of the covenant, and leaves the church with a truncated view of Christ’s present kingship. That is not a minor difference of opinion on secondary matters. It is a diabolical reconfiguration of the biblical story that confuses the saints and replaces the historic Reformed hope with a nineteenth-century invention dressed up in the language of the five Solas.
You are free to hold dispensational premillennialism. You are not free to call it Reformed while rejecting the confessional eschatology of the churches that produced and still confess those Solas. Stop the deception.

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One response to “Amazing Grace”

Mike Ruins says:

November 14, 2026 at 6:22 pm

Zach,
I have read your posts, your poems, and your repeated claims that you are “truly Reformed” while simultaneously rejecting the eschatology of the confessions you claim to follow. What you are doing is not Semper Reformanda. It is a brazen smuggling of nineteenth-century Darbyite dispensationalism into the Reformed tradition under false colors, and it is theologically diabolical.
You insist that TULIP and the five Solas are the only essentials of Reformed theology, and that covenant theology and amillennialism are optional accretions inherited from Rome. This is historical and theological nonsense. The Westminster Confession, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, the Belgic Confession, and the Second Helvetic Confession all articulate an amillennial (or, in some cases, postmillennial) eschatology grounded in covenant theology. They do so because the Reformers and the Puritan theologians who followed them read the New Testament as the authoritative interpretation of the Old. They saw one people of God, one covenant of grace, one church, and the present reign of Christ over the nations through His Word and Spirit. Your claim that “Scripture teaches dispensationalism” and that the confessions merely aped Augustine is the kind of special pleading that would have been laughed out of any Reformed academy.
Your pre-tribulation rapture, secret coming for the church, seven-year tribulation with the Spirit’s absence from earth, and literal future millennial kingdom ruled from a rebuilt temple in Jerusalem are not “more biblical.” They are a system invented in the 1830s by John Nelson Darby, popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible, and unknown to the early church, the medieval church, the Reformers, or the confessional tradition. The New Testament does not teach two distinct peoples of God with two distinct destinies and two distinct plans. Ephesians 2–3, Galatians 3, Romans 9–11, and the entire book of Hebrews collapse any such dualism. The church is not an intercalation; it is the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham.
Your hermeneutic is the opposite of careful exegesis. You demand “literal unless the context clearly shows otherwise,” yet you refuse to let the genre of apocalyptic literature, the typology of the Old Testament, or the New Testament’s own use of prophetic texts govern the meaning. You spiritualize the clear New Testament teaching about the present reign of Christ (Matthew 28:18, Ephesians 1:20–23, 1 Corinthians 15:25, Revelation 1:5–6) while insisting on a wooden literalism for numbers and sequences in Daniel and Revelation that the authors themselves treat symbolically. This is not grammatical-historical interpretation. It is selective literalism in service of a system.
Worse, you repeatedly claim that Jesus personally anointed you in 2001 and that you now possess “infallible doctrine.” That is not Reformed. It is not even Protestant. It is the language of a private prophet whose authority sits above Scripture and the church. When you then use that alleged authority to declare amillennialism and covenant theology “unbiblical” and “from Rome,” you are not reforming the church. You are substituting your novel system for the careful, corporate reading of Scripture that has marked the Reformed churches for five centuries.
Your position promotes escapism, severs the unity of the covenant, and leaves the church with a truncated view of Christ’s present kingship. That is not a minor difference of opinion on secondary matters. It is a diabolical reconfiguration of the biblical story that confuses the saints and replaces the historic Reformed hope with a nineteenth-century invention dressed up in the language of the five Solas.
You are free to hold dispensational premillennialism. You are not free to call it Reformed while rejecting the confessional eschatology of the churches that produced and still confess those Solas. Stop the deception.

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Amazing Grace

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