Gary DeMar Told Joel Richardson to Read His Book. That Was a Mistake.

In a recent exchange with Joel Richardson, Gary DeMar was pressed on the core doctrines of the Christian faith: the bodily return of Christ, the bodily resurrection, and the final judgment. His answers sounded orthodox. They were not.

In the days following that interview, a number of people came to Gary’s defense. The reasoning was straightforward: they watched the video, they heard Gary affirm the right words, and they concluded that the controversy surrounding him was overblown. He said “yes” to a bodily return. He said “yes” to the resurrection. He seemed, by all appearances, to land on the right side of the line. Case closed.

Except it is not closed. Not even close.

There are two problems with that defense, and together they are decisive.

The first is that Gary’s answers in the interview are not what they appear to be. The words are orthodox. The meanings behind them are not. I will show this from the interview itself.

The second problem is this: Gary himself told us where to find his full answers. In the interview, he directed viewers to the book he co-authored with Kim Burgess, The Hope of Israel and the Nations, a two-volume, over-750-page work published by American Vision under Gary’s own imprint. He said, in effect, go read the book. I have. And the book does not defend Gary’s orthodoxy. It systematically attempts to refute every one of the orthodox doctrines his defenders believe he affirmed in the interview. The bodily return of Christ is called a “serious mistake” of the institutional Church. The creeds are declared wrong and worthy of opposition. The resurrection of the dead is redefined beyond recognition. The final judgment is placed in the past. This is not a book that clarifies Gary’s orthodoxy. It is a book that documents his departure from it.

Which means that the people defending Gary on the basis of the interview have, quite plainly, not read the book Gary told them to read.

And that leaves us with a question about Gary himself. How do we reconcile what he said in the interview with what appears in the book? There are only a few possibilities. He is being deliberately dishonest in the interview, saying things he knows are false. He has somehow forgotten what a book he co-authored, co-edited, proofread, and published under his own name actually contains. Or, the most charitable and, I will argue, the most accurate explanation: Gary means something different by those words than you think he does. He is not lying in the interview. He genuinely affirms the words. He simply does not affirm the meaning his audience is hearing, because his system has replaced that meaning with something else entirely.

I argue the third. And here is why.

Part One: The Interview

First, Gary tried to avoid the questions altogether. He immediately tried to redirect back to Ezekiel 38 and 39. Then when Joel pressed him and asked if he confirms a future bodily, physical, general resurrection of the dead, Gary didn’t answer the question. Instead, he started talking about “two positions out there.” One where you get a new body immediately at death, and one that’s the confessional position (the Westminster Confession of Faith). That wasn’t the question. Joel didn’t ask him to describe two views floating around in the ether. He asked Gary what he believes.

And notice what Gary does with those two views. He presents them as though both are equally acceptable, equally orthodox. The only difference he identifies between the two is the word “immediately.” And then later he confirms that framing by saying, “in the end, it’s the same result.”

That is nonsense. Getting a new body “immediately” at death is not just a timing issue. It is a complete redefinition of the doctrine of the resurrection. In that view, the flesh body we possess on this earth returns to dust, never to be seen or heard from again. Your soul sheds it like a husk, departs to heaven, and receives a brand new body. That is not resurrection. That is not restoration. That is not transformation. That is replacement, and it guts the very doctrine it claims to affirm.

Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 will not allow this. His entire chapter is built on the principle that what is sown is what is raised. The seed analogy (vv. 36-44) is a metaphor of transformation, not replacement. “It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The pronoun “it” is doing all the heavy lifting. It is the same body. Sown, then raised. Not discarded and exchanged for something else. Christ Himself is the paradigm: His body was laid in the tomb, and that same body came out. The tomb was empty. The grave did not keep what it took. If the earthly body simply rots away and you get an entirely new one, Paul’s argument collapses, because the whole chapter depends on continuity between the body that dies and the body that rises. You don’t get a resurrection without the thing that died actually being raised.

Then Gary says, “When that controversy first came up, that’s what I maintained.”

Maintained what? The closest referent in his statement is the confessional WCF position, which he most certainly did not maintain. That is why the entire controversy arose in the first place. It arose because Gary was saying on Facebook that God can’t raise bodies that don’t exist anymore, redefining “resurrection” in a way that strips the doctrine of its meaning. So again, what exactly did he maintain? That there were two views and he allowed both? That’s not maintaining anything. That’s fence-sitting.

Then Joel defines what has always been the staple resurrection doctrine of Christianity, and Gary agrees that it has been a staple. Glad he agrees that what is undeniable is, in fact, undeniable. But agreeing that it has “been a staple” is not the same as affirming that it is true. Watch the language.

Then, after trying to dodge clarity for several minutes, Gary appeals to his podcast series and his book with Kim Burgess, The Hope of Israel and the Nations. He tells the audience to go buy the book for his answers. We will get to the book in Part Two. But note the irony in advance: this is the very book that denies a future visible bodily return of Christ, denies the bodily resurrection of the dead, and calls its own position “full preterism” on pages xvii-xviii.

We affirm a position on preterism that seeks to do full and consistent justice to the eschaton of Israel’s redemptive history in the period of AD 30 to 70 in the person and work of Christ. For this reason, and for the lack of a better term at the time, back in the mid-to-late 1980s, I coined the label “consistent preterism” for this perspective (having picked up the modifier “consistent” from Albert Schweitzer’s “consistent eschatology”), so, yes, this newer perspective also belongs in the camp generally referred to as “full preterism.” But it is quite vital, as I said, to realize that this consistent preterism falls short of the error of hyper preterism while not compromising on the consistency factor by sliding off into an arbitrary form of partial preterism in order to try to save face before the ecclesial powers of the afore-mentioned historic creeds, confessions of faith, and catechisms of the Church.

So when Gary tells you to go buy that book for answers, and then turns right around in this very interview and says he’s not a full preterist, you need to ask yourself which Gary DeMar you’re listening to.

When Gary finally does affirm anything, here’s what he says: “I believe in the resurrection of the dead. That is the language of scripture. That’s the language of the Nicene Creed. I believe in the resurrection of the dead.”

See the game he’s playing. He is intentionally avoiding the words “body” and “flesh.” He hides behind the phrase “resurrection of the dead” as though it is theologically neutral, when in fact the church has always understood it to mean the resurrection of the body. The Apostles’ Creed is even more explicit than the Nicene Creed on this point: “I believe in the resurrection of the body” (Latin: carnis resurrectionem, literally “resurrection of the flesh”). The early church deliberately used the words “body” and “flesh” in its confessions precisely because there were already people in the first centuries trying to spiritualize the resurrection into something non-bodily. That is exactly what Gary is doing. He borrows the language of the Creed while gutting its meaning. The Nicene fathers who wrote “we look for the resurrection of the dead” were not leaving room for a view where your body rots and your soul gets a replacement. They were confessing what every orthodox Christian has always confessed: that the very bodies we now possess will be raised, transformed, and glorified.

And then when Joel presses further and asks about the “physical bodily resurrection,” Gary says, “I believe we will have physical bodies in our resurrection. Yes.” More games. That was not the question. The question is whether our physical bodies themselves will be raised, and Gary rejects that. But in order to pull the wool over people’s eyes and pretend he still affirms a “resurrection,” he says that “physical bodies” will be involved. Not that our current bodies are raised, but that the new body we get immediately upon death will be a “physical body.” He’s smuggling his redefinition into orthodox-sounding language. It sounds right until you realize what he actually means by it.

Then when Joel asks “when Jesus returns...” Gary ignores that and moves on. No answer. Just deflection. He rambles about what many pastors have said at funerals, how they say “so-and-so is no longer in his wheelchair, he’s dancing in heaven now.” He does this to make his view seem like an acceptable mainstream alternative, as though popular funeral rhetoric validates a theological position.

And again, it is not the “same result.” In the orthodox view, God conquers death itself by raising the very body that died. Death does not get to keep what it took. That is the entire triumph of 1 Corinthians 15:54-57: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” If your body simply decays into nothing and you receive a different one, death wins the body. Death keeps what it claimed. There is no victory over the grave. There is only escape from the grave by getting something else entirely. That is Platonism, not Christianity. The Christian hope has never been escape from the body but the redemption of the body (Romans 8:23). The two views are not the “same result” any more than a hostage being rescued is the “same result” as a hostage being killed and replaced by a clone.

Then Gary says, “I believe that there will also be a consummation at the end of history where Jesus will wrap everything up. So I believe in the resurrection of the dead. I believe there will be a consummation at the end of history. That is why I am not a full preterist.”

He thinks there might be an “end,” but in his own podcasts with Kim they admit the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. Yet he constantly accuses others of believing things without Scripture. And it was common among full preterists to argue that there may be some kind of “end” that Scripture simply doesn’t address. That’s not a distinguishing mark of orthodoxy. That’s a standard full preterist caveat.

Joel ends this segment by asking, “So you do believe in a future bodily, physical, visible return of Jesus and judgment of the earth at the end of the age when Jesus returns?”

Gary: “Yes. Okay. Yes, I do. Okay.”

Baloney. Gary knows exactly what Joel is asking and what Joel means by those words, and if Gary actually affirmed what Joel meant by that question, there would never have been a controversy to begin with. The controversy exists precisely because Gary redefines every one of those terms. “Bodily” doesn’t mean what you think. “Physical” doesn’t mean what you think. “Return” doesn’t mean what you think. He says “yes” to the words while meaning something entirely different by them. That is not affirmation. That is equivocation.

How do I know? Because Gary told Joel to go read his book for the full answers. I have. And here is what the book says about every orthodox doctrine Gary just claimed to affirm.

Part Two: The Book

I read The Hope of Israel and the Nations cover to cover. All of it. Every episode across both volumes, totaling some twenty-four chapters and well over 750 pages of dense theological argumentation. I also listened to every podcast episode on which the book is based. What follows is a report on what the book actually says, documented with direct quotations, placed side by side with what Gary told Joel Richardson. The reader can judge whether the two are reconcilable.

The Book and Gary’s Role in It

Before examining the content, it is important to establish that this is not merely Kim Burgess’s book with Gary as a passive bystander. Gary DeMar is listed as co-author. He wrote the Preface. He participates actively in every single episode as an interlocutor who adds arguments, supplies texts, draws conclusions, and voices agreement. In the Preface, Gary describes how he deliberately structured the podcast format to draw out Kim’s theology, knowing it would be transcribed and published. He explains that both he and Kim spent hours editing and proofreading, and that he “also added content for clarification and to fill in some gaps as well as a few footnotes.” This is a jointly produced work, published by American Vision, bearing Gary DeMar’s name on the cover. When Gary told Joel Richardson to read this book for his answers, he was pointing to a work he co-authored, co-edited, and published under his own imprint.

That matters because it forecloses the most charitable escape route available to Gary’s defenders. This is not a case of guilt by association, where Kim says something and Gary gets blamed for it. Gary wrote the Preface. Gary edited the chapters. Gary added content. Gary published it under his own organization. And then Gary directed his critics to the book as the definitive answer to the controversy. Whatever the book teaches, Gary owns it. Fully and without qualification.

Affirming the phrase “resurrection of the dead” while your published book redefines “the dead” as Old Testament saints in an underworld is not a theological disagreement about timing. It is using a familiar label to point to an entirely different reality. The label passes. The content does not. And Gary knows both of these things, because he wrote the Preface, edited the chapters, and then told Joel Richardson to go buy the book.

What the Book Teaches About the Return of Christ

One of the most important sentences in the entire two-volume work appears on page 408 of Volume 2. Kim Burgess writes: “This is how the NT understands the Reality of the New Covenant parousia/presence of Christ. It is in, by, of, and through the Spirit, not the flesh. The days of Christ in the flesh on earth are long over (Heb. 5:7).”

Let that sentence do its work. “The days of Christ in the flesh on earth are long over.” This is not a statement about the ascension as a past event. It is a statement about the permanent condition of Christ’s relationship to bodily existence. He had a body. He used it to die. That is finished. He will not return in a body.

Burgess is not shy about stating the implication on page 414 of Volume 2: “With all due respect, I believe that the institutional Church has made a serious mistake by teaching that the parousia of Christ is going to take place in His same physical/material, visible, and bodily form.” The reason given is that “the parousia, unlike Christ’s incarnation, does not belong to the Old Covenant order. It belongs to the New Covenant order! The nature of the New Covenant order is in, of, by, and through the Spirit. Therefore, the form or manner of the parousia (presence) of Christ will change with the transition of the covenantal orders. Christ will come, just as He was careful to teach His disciples in John 14 and 16, in the person of the Holy Spirit, not again in the flesh. As such, in His New Covenant presence, He will no longer be limited by space and time. He will not be on the outside as a person talking with His disciples. He will be dwelling in them, transforming them into His image from the inside out, from one stage of glory to another.”

Not again in the flesh. The institutional Church made a serious mistake. These are not ambiguous formulations. The book further identifies the Holy Spirit as the parousia itself on page 410 of Volume 2: “The Holy Spirit is the New Covenant parousia/presence of Christ, and of the Father, on earth!” And on pages 350-351 of Volume 2: “Pentecost and the Parousia go together, hand in glove. They are the bookends of the same Reality!”

Burgess had already defined what the parousia looks like in practice: “The parousia of Christ is, in reality, the permanent, universal, and Spiritual ‘presence’ of Christ in, by, and through the Holy Spirit in the Church and in the world.” Gary’s response? “That’s an excellent way of putting it, and it is so obvious.” So obvious, Gary said.

In Episode 15, Burgess goes further, dismissing the idea that anyone will ever see Christ return visibly. He labels the notion of a visible, physical return an “inane notion” and a “fallacious tradition,” arguing instead that Christ appears “only to the saints” by faith, invisible to the world. The return of Christ, in this framework, is something perceived spiritually, not observed historically. No one will ever see it happen, because it is not the kind of event that happens in visible space and time.

Every major NT term for Christ’s return is captured by this framework. When Burgess treats 2 Thessalonians 2:8 on page 412 of Volume 2, where Paul speaks of Christ destroying the lawless one “by the epiphany of His presence,” he argues that the two clauses in the verse interpret each other, and concludes: “We find that the very meaning of Christ’s ‘epiphany/appearance’ or ‘presence’ is none other than the Holy Spirit!”

But the most devastating blow to any attempt to reconcile this book with orthodox Christianity comes on pages 202 and 418 of Volume 2. Whether one holds to partial preterism or not, every branch of orthodox eschatology affirms that at least one coming of Christ remains future: the bodily, visible return at the end of history. Partial preterists place some “coming” texts at AD 70 while reserving the Second Coming for the future. Futurists place all of them in the future. But both camps agree that a future bodily return is non-negotiable. Gary and Kim deny it. On page 202 of Volume 2, Burgess states: “We dealt with 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 in the last episode, so we need not stop and do that again here. Let it simply suffice now to say that Paul is linking the parousia/revelation of Christ, the coming of the end, and the completion of Christ’s preparatory work between AD 30 and 70 of removing/defeating all the human and demonic obstacles to the coming establishment of the New Covenant Kingdom of God. There was ever only one coming of Christ in view in the NT beyond His birth/incarnation, that is, when He was to be revealed from heaven in His power and glory.” And on page 418 of Volume 2, Burgess makes it explicit: “The NT only teaches one coming of Christ future to itself, not two.” One coming. Not two. There is no second event on the horizon. The one future coming the NT anticipated has already happened.

Gary reinforces this in Episode 9 when he says: “The creeds do not make a distinction between the AD 70 coming of Jesus and the Second Coming. This is true, for example, the Westminster Confession of Faith and its catechisms and similar confessions.” He is not defending the creeds. He is identifying what he considers a flaw in them: they failed to recognize that the “coming” they confess already happened. If the creeds had gotten it right, they would not be pointing us forward. They would be pointing us backward to AD 70.

And on page 417 of Volume 2, Gary himself says: “We can’t go to the Nicene Creed in AD 325 and then to the Constantinopolitan development of the Nicene Creed in AD 381 and come up with an explicitly stated hermeneutic.” The creeds do not provide a reliable guide to eschatological interpretation. They got it wrong.

This is not partial preterism. But that is almost beside the point. Whether one agrees with partial preterism or not is a secondary question. The primary question is whether a given eschatological system stays within the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. And every system that does, regardless of where it falls on the spectrum between full futurism and partial preterism, affirms one non-negotiable: a future, visible, bodily return of Jesus Christ. That affirmation is not a distinctive of any one school. It is the common ground of every position that has ever been recognized as orthodox. Futurists affirm it. Partial preterists affirm it. Historic premillennialists affirm it. Amillennialists affirm it. Postmillennialists affirm it. The ecumenical creeds confess it. The Reformed confessions confess it. It is, in the most literal sense, the article of faith on which every branch of the church has agreed for two thousand years.

This book denies it. It says that believing in a future visible return is a “serious mistake” made by “the institutional Church.” It dismisses the idea as an “inane notion” and a “fallacious tradition.” It explicitly states that the NT teaches only one coming of Christ future to itself, not two, and that coming has already occurred. Every escape hatch has been welded shut from the inside. Whatever label Gary and Kim prefer for their system, the system itself has stepped outside the boundary that every orthodox position, across every tradition and confession, has always agreed upon.

Gary told Joel: “Yes” to a future bodily, physical, visible return. His book says the Church made “a serious mistake” by teaching it. Christ comes “in the person of the Holy Spirit, not again in the flesh.” And the NT teaches only one future coming, which has already occurred.

What the Book Teaches About the “Second Time”

There is only one text in the entire New Testament that uses the word “second” in connection with Christ’s coming. One. It is Hebrews 9:28: “Christ also, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time for salvation without reference to sin, to those who eagerly await Him.” It is part of the reason the church speaks of a “first” and “second” advent at all. Whatever a theologian does with this verse determines what is left for the future.

Gary and Kim place it in the past.

The argument builds on the Day of Atonement typology that structures all of Hebrews 9. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest entered the Most Holy Place once to make atonement for the sins of the people (Lev. 16). The people waited outside the sanctuary. When the high priest emerged, he appeared to them a second time, signaling that the atonement had been accepted and their sins dealt with. Hebrews maps this typology onto Christ: He entered the heavenly sanctuary “once” to bear the sins of many (His incarnation, death, and ascension), and He will appear “a second time” to those who eagerly await Him, not to deal with sin again but to bring salvation to completion.

On pages 327-329 of Volume 2, Burgess places this “second time” at AD 70 without equivocation: “Given everything that the NT consistently has to say about it, it was in conjunction with the eschatological events in Israel in AD 70.” The second appearance of the high priest has already occurred. The people who were “eagerly awaiting” Him were first-century believers. The salvation He brought was the completed covenantal transition. There is no second appearance still outstanding.

Burgess then explains the critical hermeneutical move that makes this possible. The incarnation and the parousia, he argues, “are two different comings of Christ as to the form or manner of His presence as they are ruled by two different sets of covenantal hermeneutics.” The first coming was physical, visible, bodily, because it belonged to the Old Covenant order. The second coming is spiritual, invisible, because it belongs to the New Covenant order. “These two comings of Christ are not one and the same paradigm.”

Stop and feel the weight of that. The second appearing of Christ in Hebrews 9:28 was not physical. It was not visible. Nobody saw it happen. It occurred spiritually, invisibly, in AD 70, when the temple was destroyed and the Old Covenant order was permanently removed. The high priest “emerged from the sanctuary,” so to speak, but not in any way that the world could observe. The typology of the Day of Atonement, where the whole point is that the people see the priest come out, is spiritualized so that no one actually sees anything.

But it is Gary’s own voice in this same passage that seals the matter. Gary DeMar says on page 328: “If this first epistle of Peter’s was written prior to AD 70, and it was, and the New Testament talks consistently about Jesus saying that He was going to come before that generation passed away (Matt. 24:34; Mark 13:30; Luke 21:32), then it seems to me that this ‘second time’ had to be the very thing that Jesus promised was going to take place before that generation passed away.” This is not Kim speaking with Gary nodding along. This is Gary DeMar, in his own words, placing the “second time” of Hebrews 9:28 in AD 70. “It seems to me,” he says, as though offering a casual observation, when in fact he is consigning the only “second” coming text in the New Testament to the first century.

The implications are total. If the “second time” of Hebrews 9:28 occurred in AD 70, then the NT has no remaining text that speaks of a future “second” coming. The phrase “Second Coming” itself becomes an anachronism, a label for an event that has already happened.

And the book never addresses Acts 1:11: “This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” The disciples saw Him go bodily. The angels said He would come back the same way. The book’s system requires that this “same way” is not actually the same way at all, that “bodily” departure is followed by a “spiritual” return. But Burgess and DeMar never engage the text. They simply let their covenantal hermeneutic override it without acknowledgment.

So when Gary told Joel Richardson “Yes, I believe in a future bodily, physical, visible return of Jesus,” what was he affirming? Not the “second time” of Hebrews 9:28, because his book places that at AD 70. Not a future coming taught by the New Testament, because his book says the NT teaches only one such coming, and it has already occurred. Not what the creeds mean when they say “He shall come again,” because his book says the creeds are wrong on that point. Gary affirmed the words. The book has emptied them of every text that could give them meaning.

What the Book Teaches About the Bodily Resurrection

In Episode 13, Gary DeMar tips his hand with a revealing remark: “I know they say, ‘Well, we know about the Second Coming and the physical resurrection of the body and the burning up of the cosmos.’ But how they get there with their interpretations is the question.” Read that list. The Second Coming. The physical resurrection of the body. The burning up of the cosmos. Gary is naming the three central eschatological affirmations of creedal Christianity, and what follows over the next several hundred pages is the systematic dismantling of all three. He is not asking an innocent methodological question. He is setting up targets.

The bodily resurrection takes the first hit in Episode 14, titled “Our Adoption as Sons and the Redemption of Our Body.” Burgess devotes the entire chapter to proving that “the redemption of our body” in Romans 8:23 does not refer to the bodily resurrection of individual believers. His argument turns on the Greek. Burgess writes: “The most controversial aspect here is going to come down to the question as to what exactly this ‘body’ is that Paul was referring to in 8:23... the explicit Greek here is ‘our body’ (a first-person plural pronoun, ‘our,’ combined with a singular noun, ‘body’)... Paul did not write ‘our bodies’ in 8:23.” Because the noun is singular rather than plural, Burgess concludes that Paul was not speaking of individual physical bodies at all. He was speaking of a single corporate body: Israel, Jerusalem, the Old Covenant people of God.

He then identifies this corporate “body” using three parallel texts from Luke. In Luke 2:38, Anna speaks of “the redemption of Jerusalem.” In Luke 24:21, the Emmaus disciples speak of Christ being the one “about to redeem Israel.” In Luke 23:51, Joseph of Arimathea is “waiting for the Kingdom of God.” All three, Burgess argues, refer to the same eschatological expectation: the covenantal transformation of Israel from a fleshly, physical, Old Covenant entity into a spiritual, heavenly, New Covenant reality.

The conclusion is stated plainly: “We can begin to surmise that Christ redeems this ‘body’ by transforming or changing it from being a ‘Jerusalem’ that, quite literally, was ‘according to the flesh,’ an earthly, visible, tangible, physical/material city... into being the Spiritual, universally-present, and eternal ‘Jerusalem’ that would come down out of heaven to earth from God as the New Covenant Bride of Christ.” And then, in all capitals of emphasis: “THIS is how Jerusalem was redeemed in Christ by the Spirit! THIS is how OT Israel was redeemed! THIS is how the Kingdom of God came!”

“The redemption of our body” equals the covenantal transformation of Jerusalem from flesh to Spirit. Not the raising of physical bodies from graves. Not what the Apostles’ Creed means by “the resurrection of the body.” Not what the Westminster Larger Catechism means when it says “the bodies of the dead shall be raised up.”

Consider what this does to the broader argument of Romans 8. Paul writes that “the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now” (v. 22), and that believers themselves “groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body” (v. 23). In the orthodox reading, this is the church militant crying out for the consummation: the physical creation longing to be liberated from its bondage to decay, and believers longing for the resurrection of their bodies. It is a forward-looking hope, anchored in what has not yet happened. In Burgess’s reading, the “creation” groaning is the Old Covenant order in its death throes, and the “redemption of our body” is the covenantal transition completed in AD 70. The groaning is over. The redemption has occurred. There is nothing left to wait for.

To drive the point further, Burgess writes in Episode 15: “We must get our minds away from talking about physical, visible, tangible, material realities like holy mountains, holy cities, holy land, stone temples, and fleshly human bodies!” Note the list. Fleshly human bodies are placed in the same category as stone temples and holy mountains: Old Covenant relics to be left behind. If you are still thinking about the resurrection of your physical body, you are thinking in Old Covenant categories.

And this is not a passing remark. It is the hermeneutical instruction that governs everything that follows. The reader is being told, explicitly, to stop interpreting eschatological texts as referring to physical bodies. Every text that mentions “body” in an eschatological context must now be read as referring to the corporate, covenantal body of Old Covenant Israel, not to the flesh-and-bone bodies of individual believers.

This is also why the Facebook controversy matters. The entire debate began years ago when Gary was saying publicly that God cannot raise bodies that no longer exist, that bodies decompose and the molecules disperse, and therefore “resurrection” cannot mean what the church has always said it means. That was not a misunderstanding on the part of his critics. That was Gary stating his actual position before he learned to wrap it in creedal language. The book simply provides the theological infrastructure for what Gary was already saying on social media: your physical body is irrelevant to eschatology. It stays in the ground. “Resurrection” means something else.

Philippians 3:20-21, a text Burgess does not substantively engage, says that Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” The pronouns are devastating to Burgess’s system. “Our lowly body” is the body we now inhabit. “His glorious body” is the body Christ now possesses. The transformation is from the one to the other. Not replacement. Not corporate covenantal transition. Transformation of the body we have into the likeness of the body He has. And notice: Paul says Christ has a glorious body now. The days of Christ in the flesh are not “long over.” He has a body. It is glorious. And ours will be conformed to it.

The redefinition extends to the very phrase “resurrection of the dead.” Burgess argues on pages 443-444 of Volume 2 that the Corinthians who denied the resurrection were not denying a general bodily resurrection. They were denying “that there was any hope for these Old Covenant saints” who had died before Christ. He writes on page 449: “It was this hope of the resurrection of ‘the dead’ in OT Israel that was being denied by some in Corinth, not a denial of the resurrection of Christ Himself, for they all believed that, but a denial of the resurrection of these long-deceased OT saints.”

The “resurrection” they were waiting for was the release of OT saints from an underworld called Sheol, and it happened at AD 70. Acts 24:15 is cited as a mello text: “there is about to be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked.” Imminent, not two thousand years in the future. And the fulfillment is identified on pages 449-450 with Revelation 20:11-15: “It is this resurrection of the OT dead out of Sheol (Hades) and the destruction of this realm of the dead that the Apostle John wrote about in conjunction with the covenantal events of AD 70.”

For believers who die after AD 70, there is no resurrection event to await. They go directly to be “at home with the Lord.” The bodily resurrection has been eliminated from the eschatological horizon. The system has no mechanism for it, no text for it, and no expectation of it.

Gary tells Joel he believes in “physical bodies in our resurrection.” His book redefines “body” as a corporate covenantal entity, redefines “resurrection” as the transition from Old to New Covenant, redefines “the dead” as Old Testament saints in an underworld, and explicitly instructs readers to stop thinking about “fleshly human bodies.” The word is the same. The meaning is completely different. Affirming a phrase is not the same as affirming the historic doctrine the phrase was coined to express.

What the Book Does to 1 Corinthians 15

First Corinthians 15 is the single most important chapter in the New Testament on the subject of the resurrection. It is where Paul makes his most sustained, most detailed, most carefully argued case that the bodily resurrection of believers is not optional, not metaphorical, and not negotiable. If the dead are not raised, Paul says, “your faith is vain; you are still in your sins” (v. 17). Everything rides on it.

Gary and Kim’s book takes this chapter and turns it into an argument for something else entirely.

The chapter opens with what Paul calls the matter “of first importance” (v. 3): Christ died, was buried, and was raised on the third day. He appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, then to five hundred brothers at once, then to James, then to all the apostles, and finally to Paul himself. The resurrection of Christ is physical, bodily, witnessed, and historical. Paul then builds from this foundation to the resurrection of believers. The logic is simple and devastating: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised” (v. 13). The resurrection of believers and the resurrection of Christ stand or fall together. They are the same kind of event. You cannot affirm one and deny the other.

This is where the “firstfruits” metaphor becomes critical. Paul writes in verse 20: “But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.” Firstfruits is an agricultural term. The firstfruits are the initial portion of the harvest, identical in kind to the rest of the crop. They are not a different species. They are the first installment of the same thing. If Christ’s resurrection is the firstfruits, then the harvest that follows must be of the same kind: bodily, physical, the dead being raised. If the “harvest” turns out to be a covenantal transition rather than a bodily resurrection, then the firstfruits metaphor is incoherent. You cannot have a firstfruits of grain and a harvest of something that is not grain.

Paul then establishes an order (tagma) in verses 23-26: “Christ the firstfruits, then at His coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He has abolished all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” The connectives are sequential: “then,” “then,” “for,” “until.” This is a timeline. Christ rises first; believers rise at His coming; then the end arrives when all enemies, including death as the final one, have been subjected.

Episode 23 provides the most systematic treatment of this chapter in the entire work. Beginning on page 387 of Volume 2, Burgess takes the six contrasts Paul draws in verses 42 through 54 and maps them, one by one, onto the Old Covenant order versus the New Covenant order. He provides a chart on page 390 with two columns, the left labeled “Old Covenant Order” and the right labeled “New Covenant Order.” Corruptible versus incorruptible equals the Old Covenant order decaying versus the New Covenant order enduring. Dishonor versus glory equals the Old Covenant’s lesser glory versus the New Covenant’s surpassing glory. Weakness versus power equals the Law’s inability to conquer sin versus the New Covenant’s resurrection power. Natural versus spiritual equals the Adamic creation order versus Christ’s Spirit-based order. Earthy versus heavenly equals the Old Covenant “made of dust” versus the New Covenant “from heaven.” Mortal versus immortal equals the Old Covenant terminated in AD 70 versus the New Covenant eternal.

Burgess writes on page 389: “I am not riding roughshod over 1 Corinthians 15 by asserting that these six sets of contrasts found there between Adam in the Genesis One creation and Christ in the ‘new creation’ that is in Him also have application to what the contrast is between the Mosaic Covenant order and the New Covenant one.”

But “application” is doing too much work in that sentence. Burgess is not saying these contrasts also apply to the covenantal transition in addition to the bodily resurrection. He is saying they are the covenantal transition. “Sown in corruption, raised in incorruption” is not about your body being laid in the grave and raised in glory. It is about the Old Covenant system being replaced by the New. “We shall all be changed” is not about bodily transformation at the last trumpet. It is about the covenantal transition. The trumpet sounded in AD 70. The “spiritual body” of verse 44 is not a glorified physical body empowered by the Spirit. It is the New Covenant order itself, a spiritual reality replacing a physical one.

As I showed in Part One, Paul’s seed analogy demands continuity between the body that is sown and the body that is raised. Gary and Kim’s system destroys that continuity entirely by making the chapter about covenantal orders rather than physical bodies. The “it” that is sown becomes the Old Covenant. The “it” that is raised becomes the New. But that is not the same “it.” You do not plant barley and harvest a covenant.

The “mystery” of verses 51-52 suffers the same fate. Paul writes: “Behold, I tell you a mystery; we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” In the orthodox reading, this is the climactic promise: at Christ’s return, the dead will be bodily raised and the living bodily transformed, all at once, in an instant. In Gary and Kim’s reading, the “last trumpet” sounded at AD 70. The “change” is the covenantal transition. “The dead will be raised imperishable” refers to Old Testament saints being released from the underworld into the New Covenant kingdom.

Then comes verse 50, which Burgess treats as decisive: “Now I say this, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” In Burgess’s framework, this verse becomes proof that physical, bodily existence is categorically excluded from the kingdom altogether. “Flesh and blood” cannot inherit; therefore the kingdom is spiritual, not physical, and the resurrection has nothing to do with flesh. It is the same interpretive move the Gnostics made in the second century, and the early church fathers spent considerable energy refuting it.

But the verse does not say what Burgess needs it to say, and the reason is linguistic. Paul chose his words with precision. The phrase he uses in verse 50 is “flesh and blood” (sarx kai haima), not “flesh and bones” (sarx kai ostea). In ancient usage, these two phrases carry distinct meanings. “Flesh and bones” connotes the body’s materiality, its physical, tangible substance. “Flesh and blood,” by contrast, focuses not on the body’s materiality but on its weakness and perishability. Sirach 14:18 uses it exactly this way: “So is the generation of flesh and blood, one dies and another is born.” The phrase describes mortality, not matter. Paul chose “flesh and blood” deliberately, and the choice tells you what he meant.

This reading is confirmed by the synonymous parallelism of the verse itself. The two clauses run in exact parallel: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” and “nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.” Each clause defines the other. “Flesh and blood” equals “what is perishable.” Paul is not saying that physical substance is excluded from the kingdom. He is saying that the mortal, corruptible body in its present perishable condition cannot inherit it. That is a statement about the body’s current state, not a permanent verdict against the body’s existence.

And this matters enormously for the structure of Paul’s argument, because verse 50 is not the conclusion of the chapter. It is the dilemma that sets up the solution. The revelation of the mystery in verses 51 through 54 is Paul’s answer to the problem verse 50 identifies. The sequence runs: perishable flesh cannot inherit the imperishable kingdom (v. 50), therefore we shall all be changed (v. 51), the dead will be raised imperishable (v. 52), and this perishable body must be clothed with imperishability (v. 53). The solution to the dilemma is not the destruction of the body. It is the transformation of the body. Mortal flesh is not annihilated. It is the very object of the divine saving action. It is raised, transformed, and clothed with imperishability so that it becomes fit to inherit the kingdom it could not enter in its present state.

Burgess reads verse 50 as the end of the discussion. Paul reads it as the beginning of the answer.

Now consider what Burgess’s reading does to Christ Himself. In Luke 24:39, the risen Jesus tells His disciples: “See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Touch Me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” Note what Jesus says. Not “flesh and blood” but “flesh and bones.” He is not asserting perishability. He is asserting materiality. He is claiming a real, physical, tangible body, one that can be touched, one that bears the marks of the cross, one that ate fish in their presence. The risen Christ is bodily. He is material. He is not a ghost or a spirit.

But He is also no longer “flesh and blood” in the sense Paul means in verse 50. He is no longer mortal, perishable, or corruptible. His body was raised from the grave transformed, incorruptible, imperishable, glorified. He is, in Paul’s own language, the firstfruits: the first instance of exactly the transformation verse 50 requires and verses 51 through 54 describe. The risen Christ does not contradict verse 50. He is the proof that verse 50’s dilemma has a solution. His transformation is the pattern for ours.

Under Burgess’s reading, none of this works. If “flesh and blood” means physical substance rather than perishable condition, then the risen Christ, who explicitly claimed flesh and bones, is excluded from inheriting the consummated kingdom He will present to the Father in verse 24. The King is disqualified from His own throne by the hermeneutic applied to the verse. The firstfruits cannot be harvested. The pattern invalidates the promise. This is not a peripheral difficulty. It is a reductio ad absurdum that the text itself forecloses, because Paul chose “flesh and blood” and not “flesh and bones,” and that choice is not accidental.

Verse 56 is the lynchpin that holds Burgess’s entire redefinition of “death” together: “The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” If the power of death comes from the Law, and if the Law was the Old Covenant, and if the Old Covenant was abolished at AD 70, then death’s power was broken at AD 70. Death, in this system, is not biological mortality. It is the spiritual condition imposed by the Law. Remove the Law, and you remove the death. This is why Burgess can claim that the “death” of 1 Corinthians 15 has already been conquered. It is not the death that puts your body in a coffin. It is the death that kept Old Testament saints in an underworld under the condemning power of the Law. AD 70 ended that. Physical death continues, but it is theologically irrelevant in their system, a biological event with no eschatological significance.

On pages 438-441, Burgess redefines the “death” of 1 Corinthians 15:54 (“death is swallowed up in victory”). Using Isaiah 25:6-9, he identifies “the covering over all peoples” and “the veil stretched over all nations” as interchangeable with “death,” and then links them to Paul’s use of “veil” in 2 Corinthians 3. His conclusion: “The ‘death’ in view in both Isaiah 25 and 2 Corinthians 3-4 is NOT physical/biological but is the spiritual death in sin that is resident in the minds and hearts of all people in Adam.” And on 1 Corinthians 15:55, where Paul cries “O Death, where is your sting?,” Burgess links the passage to Hosea 13:14 and concludes on page 441: “The specific ‘death’ that is in view is the ‘Sheol’ existence that occurred for people after the event of physical or biological death during the time of the OT.”

If the “death” of 1 Corinthians 15 is Sheol, and if Sheol was destroyed at AD 70 per Revelation 20:14, then the defeat of death is not a future event. It is past. Physical death is left entirely unaddressed by the system. On page 442, Burgess confirms: “It is this death in Sheol that Christ came to do away with per Revelation 20:11-15 and it is this death that Paul was referring to in 1 Corinthians 15:26 when he stated, per the literal Greek, ‘The last enemy, death, is abolished.’”

In the orthodox reading of 1 Corinthians 15:54-57, Paul’s cry “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” is a shout of defiance against the grave itself. God will not let death keep what it took. In Gary and Kim’s reading, the grave is not even in view. Physical death is irrelevant. “Death” means Sheol, and Sheol was abolished in AD 70. Your body still rots. The grave still wins the body. There is no rescue, only replacement.

And notice the self-contradiction in how Burgess handles the Greek of verse 26. He insists that the verb (katargeitai) is a present passive indicative and accuses “virtually all translations” of “exegetically cheating” for rendering it with future force (”will be destroyed”). He then translates it as “is abolished,” which functions as past tense in English, not present. He argues for the present tense and translates it as a past. If he actually respected the present tense he keeps thumping the table about, he would have to say “is being destroyed” or “is being rendered inoperative,” which implies an ongoing process not yet complete. But that would concede the orthodox position: that Christ is presently reigning, progressively subduing enemies, and that the last enemy, death, will be finally destroyed at the terminus of that reign. So Kim cannot follow his own rule. He accuses the translators of cheating and then commits a different error in the opposite direction.

He then cites 2 Timothy 1:10, where Paul says Christ “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” The verb there is an aorist active participle. Burgess claims this “is starting to bring in the progressive aspect.” But the aorist is the tense-form Greek uses to view an action as a complete whole, as a snapshot from the outside. It is the opposite of progressive aspect. The present tense is the one that conveys imperfective, ongoing, in-process action. So Burgess has assigned the present tense verb in verse 26 to his “definitive/completed” category and the aorist participle in 2 Timothy 1:10 to his “progressive” category. He has the aspects exactly backwards.

Kim then rearranges the order of verses 24-28 to fit his threefold time structure. Paul’s actual sequence runs: verse 24 (”then the end”), verse 25 (”for He must reign until”), verse 26 (”the last enemy to be destroyed is death”), verse 27 (”for He has put all things in subjection”), verse 28 (”when all things are subjected... the Son Himself also will be subjected”). Kim reorders them: verses 26-27a become the “definitive” past, verse 25 becomes the “progressive” present, and verses 24 and 28 become the “full and final” future. He has placed verse 26 before verse 25 in his logical order and verse 24 after verse 28 in his theological order. Paul wrote a sequence. Kim scrambled it to fit a grid. And the reason he has to scramble it is that Paul’s actual sequence does not cooperate with his system. The connectives establish a forward-moving chronological and logical progression. Death is destroyed last, at the terminus of the reign, after the “until” has been satisfied.

Burgess even retranslates 1 Corinthians 15:49. Where virtually every English translation reads “we shall also bear the image of the heavenly,” Burgess insists on page 444 that the correct rendering is “let us also bear the image of the heavenly,” a hortatory subjunctive rather than a future indicative. He claims that futurist translators “shun this like the plague” despite it being, he says, the predominant manuscript reading. If Burgess is right, then Paul is not promising a future transformation but exhorting present moral effort. The future hope of bodily glorification becomes a present ethical command. The eschatological promise evaporates into a pep talk.

And on 1 Corinthians 15:57, he notes that “gives us the victory” is present tense in Greek and writes: “It is very important to note that it is not in the future tense so as to read that God, some day, at the end of time, ‘will give us’ the victory.” The same wooden tense argument, again. But by now the pattern is clear: every verb that can be pressed into present or past service is pressed into present or past service, and every future-oriented reading is dismissed as “exegetical cheating.” The chapter is not allowed to point forward. The bodily resurrection of the dead at the last day, the very doctrine Paul wrote this chapter to defend, has been exegeted out of the text.

What remains? A covenantal transition that happened in the first century. A release of Old Testament saints from an underworld. A “death” that means spiritual alienation rather than the grave. A “change” that means the shift from Old Covenant to New rather than the transformation of mortal bodies into immortal ones. A “trumpet” that already sounded. A “mystery” that has already been revealed and realized. A “victory” that has already been given. And a physical death that continues indefinitely, unaddressed and undefeated by the system.

What the Book Teaches About the Final Judgment

The Nicene Creed confesses that Christ “shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end.” The Apostles’ Creed is equally direct: “From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.” This is not an appendix to the Christian faith. It is one of its central articles. Every ecumenical creed places the final judgment in the future. Every Reformed confession places it in the future. Every catechism taught to every Christian child for two thousand years places it in the future.

Gary and Kim’s book places it in the past.

In Episode 18, Burgess takes up 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10, one of the most dramatic judgment texts in the New Testament: “When the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” The church has universally understood this as describing the final, visible, glorious return of Christ in judgment. Burgess applies it entirely to AD 70 and the destruction of Jerusalem.

Revelation 20:11-15, the Great White Throne judgment, receives the same treatment. This is the passage where the dead, great and small, stand before the throne, and the books are opened, and anyone whose name is not found in the book of life is thrown into the lake of fire. Burgess writes that “all in Sheol were brought to judgment, one way or the other, in AD 70.” The Great White Throne is not at the end of history. It is at the end of the Old Covenant.

And this is not limited to Kim’s voice. Gary DeMar himself, on the American Vision website, takes up Matthew 25:31-46, the parable of the sheep and the goats. This is the text preachers have cited for centuries to warn of the day when every human being will give account to the King. Gary writes: “There is no indication that Matthew 25:31-46 describes a single event. Rather, the passage describes a judgment over time, related to Jesus’ dominion as an ‘everlasting dominion’ (Dan. 7:14).” He links it to Daniel 7, which he argues “is a prophecy describing the inauguration of the messianic kingdom rather than the second coming.” And he concludes: “The King of glory is continually judging and reigning among the nations. The judgment began in that generation (Matt. 11:21-24; Luke 10:13-15).”

The sheep and goats judgment “began in that generation.” It is not a future single event. It is an ongoing process that started in the first century. The most fearsome and hopeful judgment scene in the entire Bible has been dissolved into the general providence of God in history.

Now inventory what remains. 2 Thessalonians 1:5-10? AD 70. Revelation 20:11-15? AD 70. Matthew 25:31-46? Ongoing since the first century, not a single future event. What about John 5:28-29, where Jesus says “an hour is coming, in which all who are in the tombs will hear His voice, and will come forth; those who did the good deeds to a resurrection of life, those who committed the evil deeds to a resurrection of judgment”? The book’s system has already redefined “the dead” as Old Testament saints in Sheol and placed that resurrection at AD 70. The “tombs” are not physical graves. The “coming forth” is not bodies rising from the ground. It is a covenantal event that has already happened.

What about Acts 17:31, where Paul tells the Athenians that God “has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead”? In the system Burgess and DeMar have constructed, every “day” of judgment, every “coming” of Christ, every act of divine retribution described in the New Testament has been assigned to AD 70.

What remains for the future? Ongoing judgment at individual death, when each person departs this life and faces Christ. A general, diffused, providential judgment as Christ reigns over the nations in history. But a future, corporate, public, visible judgment of the living and the dead? The book provides no text for it, because every text the church has ever used for that purpose has been assigned to the past.

The Permanent Incarnation: The Chalcedonian Problem

Perhaps the most theologically alarming element of this entire work is its implications for the doctrine of the permanent incarnation. The Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD) established that Christ permanently united divine and human natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” The glorified body of the risen Christ is eternally His. He ascended bodily. He sits bodily at the right hand of the Father. He will return bodily.

Burgess places the bodily incarnation squarely within the Old Covenant order on page 414 of Volume 2: “Christ’s incarnation, which was under the Old Covenant order (’under the Law’: Gal. 4:4), perfectly fit the bill for the nature of the Old Covenant order because the Old Covenant order was ‘natural’ and ‘earthy’ (made of dust). It was physical. It was material. It was visible. It was bodily. Christ came in that form because He had to have a human body to be able to die to make atonement for sin.”

Read that again. Christ’s bodily existence “fit the bill” for the Old Covenant order. It was bodily because the Old Covenant was bodily. He needed a body to die. Now that the dying is done, the bodily form belongs to the past. “The days of Christ in the flesh on earth are long over” (p. 408). He comes now as the Spirit.

The book never affirms that Christ retains a glorified human body at the right hand of the Father. It never engages Chalcedon. It simply categorizes the incarnate body as an Old Covenant phenomenon and moves on.

But the implications of that categorization are fatal to every orthodox claim Gary makes in public. Follow that logic to its necessary conclusion. If Christ’s bodily existence was an Old Covenant phenomenon, and if the Old Covenant has been permanently removed, then Christ does not currently possess a human body. He is not, at this moment, the God-man seated bodily at the right hand of the Father. He is present in and through the Spirit. The incarnation served its purpose. The body was the instrument of atonement. Now the instrument has been retired.

This is a direct collision with Chalcedon. The Definition of Chalcedon (AD 451) established that the two natures of Christ, divine and human, are permanently united “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” The human nature, including the body, is not a temporary accommodation to a covenantal era. It is an eternal feature of who the Son of God is and will forever be. He did not borrow humanity for thirty-three years and then return it. The incarnation is permanent. The glorified, bodily, risen Christ ascended with that body, retains that body, and will return with that body. This is not a confessional footnote. It is the settled christological consensus of the entire Christian tradition, East and West, Catholic and Protestant, Reformed and Lutheran. Every tradition agrees: Christ has a body now.

Gary and Kim’s system has no place for that body. They have categorized it out of existence by tying it to a covenantal order they believe ended in AD 70. And this is precisely why Gary cannot honestly answer “yes” when Joel Richardson asks whether he believes in a future physical, bodily return of Christ. Not because Gary lacks the nerve to say it, but because his own published system has removed the theological precondition for it. You cannot have a bodily return if the body has been categorized as belonging to a finished era. You cannot have a physical coming if the nature of the New Covenant parousia is, by definition, spiritual and not physical. You cannot affirm what your system has already denied.

Gary said “yes” to the words. The book said “no” to the meaning. And the meaning is the doctrine. The words without the meaning are not orthodoxy. They are its vocabulary, emptied of its content.

Open Opposition to the Creeds

The book’s opposition to the ecumenical creeds and Reformed confessions is not incidental. It is progressive and deliberate. In the early episodes, the creeds are criticized for having “the wrong historical focus.” By Episode 17, the criticism escalates to an explicit declaration of war: “We have no choice, in all exegetical honesty and integrity, but to oppose the creeds of Church history on this point which wrongly assert that after two millennia now, we are still waiting for this sixth stage to be manifested. No.” The sixth stage is the parousia. The creeds say we are still waiting. Burgess says “No.” Gary published it.

The Westminster Confession is directly quoted and then condemned. Burgess cites WCF Chapter 7, Section 5, which says that under the Old Covenant the elect had “full remission of sins and eternal salvation,” and responds on pages 379-380 of Volume 2: “This is a terrible case of jumping the gun, eschatologically, and of flattening out the covenant structure if there ever was one. Contrary to Westminster, no such salvation was fully available to these OT saints before the completed work of Christ.” He further charges on page 361 that “Bullinger and the later Westminster Assembly proceeded to re-structure Scripture according to their own dictates” and that “theological damage has been done by this re-structuring.”

As for those who object, Burgess writes on page 451: “The creeds and long-standing Church tradition by way of the creeds and formal confessions of faith have them hog-tied. But we need to be willing to take upon ourselves whatever ignominy comes with daring to question the creeds to get at the Biblical truth.”

Elsewhere, he refers to creedal formulations as “rebar-reinforced creedal concrete” and calls the traditional understanding of orthodoxy merely “so-called ‘orthodox’ Church tradition.” The scare quotes around “orthodox” say everything.

This is not a theological discussion conducted within confessional boundaries. It is a declared departure from them.

And this raises a question that Gary’s orthodox defenders simply cannot answer. The defense typically runs like this: Gary affirms the creeds because he uses creedal language. He says “resurrection of the dead.” He says “he shall come again.” He says “bodily return.” The words are there. The phrases are present. Therefore Gary is orthodox, and his critics are overreacting.

But consider what the creeds actually contain. Strip away the technical vocabulary and the ecumenical polish, and the eschatological content of the Nicene Creed is remarkably simple. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. His kingdom will have no end. We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come. That is essentially it. The creeds present the bare bones: Christ returns visibly and gloriously, the dead are raised, the age to come is ushered in. These are not complicated propositions buried in dense theological language. They are the plainest possible summary of what the New Testament says about the future.

Now ask the question: if Gary’s system is compatible with those bare bones, if he genuinely affirms a future visible return, a future bodily resurrection, and a future age to come in the sense the creeds intend, then what exactly is wrong with the creeds? Why do they need to be opposed? Why are they “rebar-reinforced creedal concrete”? Why is the tradition that produced them merely “so-called ‘orthodox’”? Why does Burgess say they must be opposed “in all exegetical honesty and integrity”? Why does Gary say the Westminster Confession caused “theological damage”?

You cannot have it both ways. Either the creeds got the essentials right and Gary affirms them, in which case there is nothing to oppose, nothing to call “concrete,” and no reason to put scare quotes around the word “orthodox.” Or the creeds got the essentials wrong and Gary must oppose them, in which case his verbal affirmations of creedal language are a facade covering a system that the creeds themselves would condemn. Gary and Kim have chosen the second option explicitly, repeatedly, and in print. They said so. They cannot now have defenders claim the first option on their behalf.

The attack on the creeds is not incidental to this controversy. It is the confession within the confession. It is Gary and Kim telling the careful reader exactly what their system amounts to. When a man calls the ecumenical creedal tradition “rebar-reinforced concrete” that must be broken up, he is not asking for a refinement of creedal theology. He is announcing his departure from it. And that departure cannot be papered over by the occasional use of creedal vocabulary in a public interview.

The “End-End” Dodge

Gary DeMar does not embrace the label “hyper-preterist.” And Burgess devotes a portion of Episode 19 to distinguishing himself from full-stop hyper-preterists on one point: the transition of the covenants (Old to New) was complete at AD 70, but the transition of the ages (”this age” to “the coming age”) continues. There is, they allow, some kind of future “end-end” to world history.

But the distinction between “hyper-preterism” and whatever Gary and Kim call their own position is itself a piece of historical revisionism worth pausing on. The term “hyper-preterist” was not invented by Gary’s critics as a slur. It was coined by Reformed theologians, including Kenneth Gentry and Vern Crisler, to identify precisely the system Gary and Kim are teaching: a preterism that denies the future bodily return of Christ, the general resurrection of the dead, and the final judgment by placing all of those events in the first century. That is the definition. That is what “hyper” was coined to mark. Gary and Kim’s system fits the definition on every point.

What happened historically is that full preterists, unwilling to wear the label, attempted to redefine it. Ward Fenley and others began reserving “hyper” for an even more radical fringe, the “Israel Only” camp, which denied the ongoing relevance of the Gospel to anyone beyond Old Covenant Israel. By making that group the new “hyper-preterists,” the broader full preterist movement could position itself as moderate by comparison. Gary has adopted this rhetorical move wholesale, likely without examining its origins. But the move is sleight of hand. The “Israel Only” position is not an aberration from full preterism. It is its logical conclusion. Once you place the consummation entirely in the past, there is nothing left to anticipate. The chain of inference runs in one direction, and Gary DeMar and Kim Burgess are well down that road, whatever exit they claim to have taken.

The distinction they draw, between their “nuanced preterism” and “full-stop AD 70 preterism,” ultimately reduces to a single claim: there may be some future “end-end” that the Bible does not specifically address. But that claim, far from being a distinguishing mark of orthodoxy, is standard currency in full preterist circles. I know this firsthand. During my own years in that movement, it was routine for full preterists, particularly those in the covenant creationist camp, to allow for a future end of the world grounded not in biblical prophecy but in the natural sciences. The sun will eventually burn out. Physical matter is finite. Entropy is real. Therefore the world will presumably end, at some point, by processes that physics rather than Scripture describes. No one in that conversation was appealing to a biblical text, because according to their own framework, the Bible is not concerned with such matters. Scripture addresses the redemptive history of Israel. What happens to the physical cosmos is a question for science, not exegesis. And no one thought this constituted an orthodox eschatology, because everyone understood that what the creeds confess is not that the world will eventually run down, but that Christ will return, the dead will be raised, and history will be brought to a definitive, visible, divinely orchestrated close.

Gary and Kim’s own book makes this embarrassingly plain. In their introduction, they state their foundational thesis directly: “The specific history that the Scriptures have in mind when it comes to the subject of Biblical eschatology is the redemptive history of Old Testament Israel!” The consummation of that history was AD 70. Generic world history, the ongoing story of humanity on this planet, is not what the Bible’s eschatology is about. And then, in what may be the most honest moment in the entire work, on page 6 of Volume 1, Kim says this: “Now if you ask me, does the Bible ever, anywhere, say anything literally about the end of time, I would have to say, no, it does not. But that gets me into a problem because I cannot comprehend that. As to how it works, per the God-ordained laws of physics in this world, there is nothing merely physical or material that can or will last forever. I think that world history does have a telos somewhere, but that is not what the Bible, first and foremost, was concerned about at all, subject-wise.”

Read that again slowly. The Bible does not say anything literally about the end of time. Gary believes the world will end not because Scripture says so, but because the laws of physics say so. He thinks history has a telos somewhere, but the Bible is not his source for that belief. Physics is.

This is not orthodoxy hedging its bets. This is full preterism being honest about its conclusions. The creeds confess a future consummation because they are summarizing what Scripture teaches about it. When a man says the Bible does not address the end of time, and then gestures vaguely toward thermodynamics as his reason for believing the world will eventually stop, he has not preserved the creedal confession. He has replaced it with speculation. And that speculation, I can testify from personal experience, is exactly what circulated in full preterist communities during my own time in that movement. The label changed. The substance did not.

When Gary is asked what this end-end looks like in terms of Scripture, he gives a remarkable answer: “I have always thought that the ‘end-end’ will be taken care of by God. I have never sat down and dealt with or considered how or when the end-end is going to end.”

He has never dealt with it. He has never considered it. This is the man who told Joel Richardson that he believes “there will also be a consummation at the end of history where Jesus will wrap everything up.” He claims to believe in a future consummation, but he has never considered what it involves, has no biblical text for it, and grounds his expectation not in prophecy but in physics.

And the reason is not hard to find. Every biblical text the church has ever used to describe the consummation has been placed in the past by this book. The resurrection of the dead? AD 70. The defeat of death? AD 70. The Great White Throne judgment? AD 70. The parousia? AD 70. “Death is swallowed up in victory”? AD 70. The new heaven and new earth? AD 70. What content is left for this supposed future consummation? Burgess offers Isaiah 11:9 and Habakkuk 2:14: the earth filled with the knowledge of God. That is postmillennial optimism about civilizational sanctification. It is not a creedal consummation. There is no bodily return, no bodily resurrection, no final judgment, and no transformation of the created order.

You cannot affirm something you have “never sat down and dealt with.” You cannot claim to believe in a future consummation when your entire theological framework has emptied that concept of all biblical content and replaced it with an appeal to the laws of physics. The “end-end” is not a theological position. It is a placeholder, a scientific intuition dressed up as a creedal safety net. It is what full preterism has always offered when pressed on this point. And it was not enough then, and it is not enough now.

Conclusion: Words and Meaning

The case is not complicated. It is simply long, because the book is long, and the evidence must be documented rather than asserted.

Here is the pattern. In the interview, Gary affirms the words. In the book, he redefines the meaning. “Bodily return” becomes the Holy Spirit’s presence. “Resurrection” becomes covenantal transition. “Death” becomes Sheol. “The second time” becomes AD 70. “Physical bodies” becomes whatever you receive at death, not the body that was laid in the grave. Every term is kept. Every meaning is replaced.

This is how theological sleight of hand works. You don’t deny the words. You redefine the meaning and keep the words. The audience hears the familiar language and assumes the familiar content. But the content has been swapped out. The label on the bottle says “orange juice.” The liquid inside is something else entirely. That is not orthodoxy. That is the appearance of orthodoxy. And the appearance is not enough.

This is exactly why the councils had to write creeds in the first place. Heresy has never been in the habit of denying the right words. It just redefines them. The Arians at Nicaea were willing to affirm almost every phrase the orthodox party put forward, so long as the language was elastic enough to accommodate their own redefinitions. That is precisely why the council had to get specific, had to drill down past the words to the substance, and had to insist on homoousios rather than settling for language both sides could sign. Affirming the phrase “bodily return” while teaching that Christ comes “not again in the flesh” is the same maneuver. The words pass the test. The theology does not.

Gary DeMar co-authored, co-edited, and published a two-volume work through his own organization. That work teaches, in plain language, with detailed argumentation, that the bodily return of Christ is a mistake of the institutional Church (p. 414), that Christ comes now in the person of the Holy Spirit and “not again in the flesh” (p. 414), that the days of Christ in the flesh are “long over” (p. 408), that 1 Corinthians 15 is about the covenantal transition from Old to New and not about physical bodies being raised (pp. 387-392), that the “death” of 1 Corinthians 15 is spiritual death and Sheol rather than physical death (pp. 438-442), that the resurrection of the dead was the release of OT saints from Sheol at AD 70 (pp. 449-450), that the Great White Throne judgment occurred at AD 70 (pp. 449-450), and that the ecumenical creeds must be “opposed” on these points because they have caused “theological damage” (pp. 361, 451).

One of these two presentations, the interview or the book, is not the truth. The reader can decide which one is supported by 750+ pages of detailed argumentation published under Gary’s own name, and which one was offered in a brief exchange when the pressure was on.

As for those who would call this an unfair reading, I can only say: I have quoted the book directly, extensively, and in context. The quotations speak for themselves. If someone believes I have misrepresented the text, the book is available for purchase through American Vision. Read it. See for yourself. That is, after all, exactly what Gary told Joel Richardson to do.