What is preterism?

Question 10136.

The preterist view holds that most or all of biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the first century, chiefly in the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in AD 70. The name comes from the Latin praeter, meaning past, and that single word tells you everything about the direction of the system.

It is a serious position held by serious men, it has grown noticeably over the last thirty years, and it deserves a proper hearing rather than a caricature. I do not hold it, and I want to explain both what it argues and why I have concluded that it cannot stand.

Two kinds of preterism

The distinction matters enormously, and failing to make it leads to a great deal of unfair argument. Partial preterism holds that most prophecy, including the Olivet Discourse and much of Revelation, was fulfilled in AD 70, but that the Second Coming, the general resurrection and the final judgement remain future. Men holding this position are within orthodoxy, however much I disagree with them.

Full preterism, sometimes called consistent preterism, holds that every prophecy including the return of Jesus, the resurrection of the dead and the final judgement was fulfilled in AD 70, and that we are now living in the eternal state. This is not a variation within orthodoxy. It denies a bodily future return and a bodily future resurrection, and I regard it as a departure from the faith rather than a difference of eschatological opinion.

Most people who describe themselves as holding the preterist view mean the partial version, and I will take that as the main object of discussion. But it is worth saying plainly that the partial position has proved to be a doorway to the full one for a good many people, and that ought to give its advocates pause.

The strongest argument for the preterist view

Any honest treatment begins with the best case for the other side, and the preterist view has one argument that must be taken seriously. In Matthew 24:34 Jesus says that this generation will not pass away until all these things take place. Preterists take generation in its ordinary sense of about forty years, and AD 70 falls roughly forty years after the discourse.

That is not a trivial point and I will not pretend otherwise. Every futurist has to give an account of that verse, and some of the accounts offered have been strained. The word for generation, genea, does ordinarily mean the people alive at a given time.

The preterist view also points to the repeated language of nearness in Revelation. The time is near. Things that must soon take place. Behold, I am coming quickly. If those phrases mean what they appear to mean, a first-century fulfilment looks natural.

How preterists read AD 70

The destruction of Jerusalem was a genuine catastrophe, and preterist writers are right to insist that most Christians know far too little about it. Josephus describes famine so severe that people ate leather, factional fighting inside the walls, the burning of the temple, and over a million dead by his reckoning.

On the preterist view, that event was the coming of Jesus in judgement on the old covenant order, the great tribulation of Matthew 24, the day of the Lord, and the fall of Babylon in Revelation. Babylon is identified as apostate Jerusalem rather than Rome, and the beast is usually identified as Nero.

Coming on the clouds is read as Old Testament judgement language rather than as a physical descent, and there is real substance to that. Isaiah 19 has the Lord riding on a swift cloud and coming to Egypt, and nobody supposes He arrived in person in the seventh century before Christ.

Answering the generation argument

Here is where the preterist view runs into difficulty. Read Matthew 24 as a whole and Jesus lists things that plainly did not happen in the first century. The sun darkened and the moon not giving its light. The stars falling from heaven. All the tribes of the earth mourning as they see the Son of Man coming with power and great glory. Angels gathering the elect from the four winds, from one end of heaven to the other.

Nothing in the historical record answers to that. Jerusalem fell, terribly, and the tribes of the earth did not see anybody coming in glory. To make the passage fit, the preterist has to treat the plainest sentences as figures of speech while treating the sentence about the generation as literal, and I cannot see a principled basis for the switch.

The better answer is that Jesus is speaking of the generation that sees the events He has just described begin. The demonstrative pronoun, this generation, most naturally points to the generation present at the fulfilment of the signs He has been listing, not to His hearers who would see only the preliminary ones.

The date of Revelation

The whole preterist reading of Revelation depends on the book being written before AD 70. If John wrote it in the mid-nineties, as the earliest external evidence says, then a book prophesying the destruction of Jerusalem was written twenty-five years after that destruction, which is difficult to sustain.

Irenaeus, writing in the second century and claiming a line of testimony back to Polycarp who knew John, places the vision towards the end of the reign of Domitian, which means about AD 95. That is the earliest and clearest statement we possess on the question.

Preterist writers respond by re-translating Irenaeus, by appealing to internal evidence about the temple in Revelation 11, and by arguing that the conditions of the seven churches suit an earlier period. Those responses are not absurd, but they require the external evidence to be set aside, and I am not willing to set it aside on that basis.

What soon and near actually mean

The nearness language deserves a better answer than it usually receives. Peter tells us in his second letter that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day, and he says it precisely in answer to scoffers asking where the promise of His coming has gone.

The Greek in Revelation 1:1 is tachos, which carries the sense of suddenness or speed as much as of imminence in the calendar. When these events begin, they will move quickly. That is a different claim from saying they begin soon after the writing.

There is also the matter of imminence itself, which I regard as a genuine biblical doctrine. The Rapture requires no preceding signs, so every generation of believers has properly lived as though the Lord might come in their lifetime. Nearness language sustains that expectation without committing Scripture to a first-century fulfilment.

The hermeneutical problem

My deepest objection to the preterist view is not any single verse. It is the method. Once you decide that a mass of detailed prophetic description was fulfilled in an event that does not visibly match it, you have established that prophecy need not correspond to its fulfilment in any recognisable way.

That is a costly principle to establish, because the prophecies of the first coming were fulfilled with astonishing literal precision. Bethlehem was Bethlehem. Thirty pieces of silver were thirty pieces of silver. The pierced hands were pierced hands. If the first coming was fulfilled literally, I see no reason to expect the second to be fulfilled figuratively.

The same method, applied consistently, dissolves the distinction between Israel and the church, since the promises to Israel are transferred to the church by spiritualisation. That is why the preterist view so often travels in company with replacement theology, and I address that in my article on replacement theology.

What AD 70 actually was

I do not want to react against preterism by pretending AD 70 was insignificant. It was enormous. Jesus wept over the city and foretold its fall in detail, telling the disciples that not one stone would be left upon another, and telling them to flee to the mountains when they saw armies surrounding it.

Luke 21:20-24 is, in my judgement, a genuine prophecy of AD 70, and it reads quite differently from the parallel material about the Son of Man coming in glory. The early Christians took it seriously and, according to Eusebius, left the city before the siege closed. The prophecy worked exactly as prophecy is meant to work.

So the futurist is not obliged to deny a first-century fulfilment of anything. He is obliged only to deny that everything was fulfilled then, and to notice that Jesus speaks of Jerusalem being trampled by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled. Until is a small word carrying a large future.

The problem of the unfulfilled promises

If the preterist view is right, then God’s covenant promises to Israel about the land, the throne and the kingdom were either fulfilled in a way nobody could observe or quietly transferred to somebody else. Neither option sits well with a God who says His gifts and calling are irrevocable.

Romans 11 was written after the ministry of Jesus and before the fall of Jerusalem, and in it Paul is emphatic that God has not rejected His people, that a hardening has come upon Israel in part until the fullness of the Gentiles comes in, and that all Israel will be saved. Read Romans 11:25-27 and ask whether AD 70 looks like the fulfilment of it.

A destruction of the nation is a strange way to keep a promise of restoration. The preterist view has to make the fall of Jerusalem the climax of God’s dealings with Israel, when Paul presents it as an interruption within a larger purpose.

Where full preterism collapses

The full version deserves a separate word because it fails at the level of the creeds and of Scripture itself. Paul told Timothy that Hymenaeus and Philetus had swerved from the truth by saying that the resurrection had already happened, and that they were upsetting the faith of some.

That is the exact error, named and condemned in the New Testament. If the resurrection is past, then the dead in Christ are not going to be raised, our own bodies are not going to be redeemed, and 1 Corinthians 15 becomes unintelligible.

Add the plain promise of Acts 1:11, that this same Jesus will come in the same way as the disciples saw Him go, and the position becomes untenable. He went visibly, bodily and personally, and He will return the same way.

Being fair to those who hold it

I have argued strongly and I want to finish that section carefully. Partial preterists include men of real learning and genuine devotion, and some of them have written better on the Olivet Discourse’s first-century background than most futurists have.

Where they have served the church well is in taking the original audience seriously and in rebuking the sensationalism that has disfigured so much prophetic teaching. If the alternative to the preterist view is a stream of confident predictions about helicopters in Revelation 9, I understand entirely why people leave.

The answer to bad futurism is good futurism, not a system that resolves the difficulty by placing everything in the past.

The pastoral cost

There is a practical loss in this system that troubles me as much as the exegesis. If the main events are behind us, the church loses the expectation that shaped it from the beginning. The Thessalonians were told to wait for God’s Son from heaven, and waiting was a live posture rather than a historical memory.

Comfort one another with these words, Paul told them, having just described the Lord descending with a cry of command. That comfort depends entirely on the event being future. You cannot console a bereaved believer with something that happened in the first century.

I have written about that expectation in my article on the doctrine of imminence, and I regard it as one of the most practically sanctifying doctrines we have.

The alternatives

Preterism is one of four historic approaches to Revelation, alongside historicism, idealism and futurism. Each answers the question of when the visions are fulfilled, and each carries consequences for everything else.

I hold the futurist position, which takes the visions from chapter 4 onwards as describing events still to come, and I set out the reasons in my article on futurism in biblical interpretation. It is the reading that requires the fewest special manoeuvres and treats prophecy the way the first coming taught us to treat it.

Where the system came from

The preterist view has a traceable history, and knowing it helps. It was set out in developed form by the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Alcazar in the early seventeenth century, in a work arguing that Revelation described the conflict of the early church with Judaism and pagan Rome rather than anything later.

The context was the Reformation. Protestant writers were applying Revelation’s judgement passages to the papacy, and a system placing all fulfilment in the first century removed that application at a stroke. That origin does not make the preterist view false, and it does explain why it appeared when it did.

Its modern revival owes most to a group of American writers from the 1970s onwards, and it has spread largely through the reformed and postmillennial world rather than through the churches I know best.

A word about tone

Debates in this area generate more heat than light, and I have watched friendships suffer over it. If you are going to disagree with the preterist view, disagree with the strongest form of it, quote its advocates accurately, and grant what they have got right about the first-century setting of the Gospels.

The full version is a different matter, and there I would speak plainly to anyone drifting towards it. Denying a future bodily resurrection is not an eschatological preference. It is a denial of something the church has confessed from the beginning.

A test worth applying

If you want a single practical test of the preterist view, try this. Read Revelation 19 and ask whether anything remotely like it occurred in AD 70. Heaven opened, a rider on a white horse called Faithful and True, armies of heaven following, the beast and the false prophet thrown alive into the lake of fire.

Then read Revelation 20 and ask the same about Satan bound for a thousand years, and whether the two millennia since AD 70 look like a period in which he has been unable to deceive the nations. Peter describes him as prowling around like a roaring lion, and he wrote that before Jerusalem fell.

The preterist view has answers to both questions, and they involve treating the plainest passages as figures while treating the difficult ones as literal. That is the manoeuvre I keep coming back to, and it is why the preterist view has not persuaded me.

So, now what?

Test any prophetic system by asking what it does to your Bible. Does it let the text say what it appears to say, or does it require a running translation into something else? Does it leave you expecting your Lord, or explaining why you need not?

And do not let disagreement here become contempt. I think the preterist view is mistaken and I have said why at length, and I would still gladly sit under the ministry of a partial preterist who preaches Jesus faithfully. Are you holding your own position because you have examined it, or because it is what your circle happens to believe?

“Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)

For Further Study

J. Dwight Pentecost’s Things to Come remains the fullest dispensational treatment of the interpretive systems and gives preterism a fair summary before answering it. John Walvoord’s The Revelation of Jesus Christ works through the book on futurist lines and interacts with the alternatives at each stage. Charles Ryrie’s Dispensationalism and his Basic Theology set out the hermeneutical principles at stake more briefly. Arnold Fruchtenbaum’s Footsteps of the Messiah is valuable for the Old Testament background that preterist readings tend to underplay. Millard Erickson’s Christian Theology provides a fair-minded survey of the options for readers who want to hear each position in its own words, and Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology supplies the older framework on which much of this discussion rests.