Gary DeMar Continues to Lie about Dr. Talbot

The Record Shows Dr. Talbot Did the Opposite

A friend sent me Gary DeMar’s recent Facebook post. I wouldn’t have seen it myself. DeMar blocked me years ago for pointing out stuff like this. He’s blocked a lot of people for the same reason. I had to look at it through my wife’s account.

The claim is false. DeMar has said in the past that Talbot “accepted and welcomed” Sam Frost into Whitefield with “open arms when he was a FPist.” That Whitefield was fine with full preterism. That’s not what happened.

I’ve got the evidence. September 28, 2010. Talbot wrote a post called “For the Record.” In it, he walks through his relationship with Frost step by step. Frost came to Whitefield in 1998 as “Reformed, committed to the abiding validity of the Moral Law of God on all men, especially Christians, Preterist Postmillennialist.” Partial preterism, in other words. Not full preterism.

That changed during his studies. By 2003, when Talbot got a copy of “Misplaced Hope,” he knew. He confronted Frost directly. He told him full preterism was “a doctrinal teaching considered heretical by Confessional Standards.”

Talbot remained Frost’s friend. He argued with him, year after year, trying to get him to see the inconsistency between full preterism and Reformed theology. That took time. That took patience. But friendship is not endorsement. Talbot never approved of what Frost was teaching. Not once.

Talbot wrote another piece responding to Frost’s attempts to defend full preterism against the Westminster Confession. He demolished it. He pointed out that Frost himself had admitted: “you cannot be thoroughly Reformed if, in fact, you posit the fulfillment of 1 Corinthians 15 in A.D. 70.” Then Talbot closes with: “you can not be ‘Reformed’ or ‘Evangelical’ if you are a full (hyper) preterist.”

That’s Talbot’s position. The opposite of what DeMar claims.

Here’s the problem with DeMar’s story: he’s got nothing to back it up. No quote from Talbot saying he approved. No letter. No institutional policy from Whitefield saying they welcomed hyper-preterists into the faculty. Nothing. Zero.

What we actually have is the opposite. Talbot calling it heretical. Talbot arguing it’s incompatible with Reformed theology. Years of pastoral correction. An institution that didn’t cave, even while remaining kind to a wayward student.

And here’s the thing: Frost himself eventually saw the problem. Talbot’s blog post notes that Frost kept saying he couldn’t make it work. He was “trying to adjust and synthesize the doctrines, but each time the inconsistencies were unresolved.” That’s what pastoral correction looks like. It works. Frost eventually left full preterism.

In fact, Frost’s own biography on his Vigil blog says it outright. After years of wrestling with the contradictions, “several challenges to the ‘hyper’ Preterist view he espoused finally gave way, largely due to the unwavering commitment to Samuel by the Dean of Whitefield Theological Seminary, Dr. Kenneth G. Talbot, who continually challenged him.” That’s Frost crediting Talbot; not for accepting his heresy, but for challenging it until he repented of it. DeMar’s claim that Talbot “accepted and welcomed” Frost into full preterism is refuted by Frost’s own pen.

This is DeMar’s standard move. Make a claim. Don’t cite anything. Block those with the facts. Then repeat the claim months later to a fresh audience who hasn’t seen the rebuttal.

This is what someone does when he needs to protect a narrative.