Gary DeMar’s Big Nothing Burger

Defending Creation While Denying Its Renewal

In his recent American Vision piece, “You Can’t Beat Something With Nothing,” Gary DeMar argues that Christians cannot defeat bad ideas with silence or retreat. He takes aim at rapture-driven pessimism and last-days fatalism that treat the world as a sinking ship. When believers assume cultural collapse is inevitable, they disengage. The result is a vacuum. If Christians withdraw from education, politics, economics, and the arts, something else will fill the space.

On that point, he is correct. Scripture never teaches cultural abandonment. God created the world good. He commanded man to exercise dominion. The Great Commission is not an evacuation order but a mandate to disciple the nations. If Christians believe the only thing that matters is escaping to heaven, they will neglect the earth God made.

DeMar’s warning against escapism is helpful. The church should reject a theology that breeds passivity. The problem is that his solution creates a different kind of vacuum that is worse.

The Three Questions and the Drift Into Hyper Preterism

The controversy centers on a simple letter containing three straightforward questions. Will there be a future bodily, glorious return of Christ? Will there be a future physical, general resurrection of the dead? Will there be a final judgment that ends history and ushers in the new heavens and earth?

Those questions should not be difficult for a Christian to answer. Yet DeMar refused to answer them directly. Instead of affirming a future bodily return and a future resurrection, he has increasingly argued that the decisive “coming,” “judgment,” and “resurrection” texts were fulfilled in AD 70.

That is not Christianity in any meaningful Biblical sense. That is full, or hyper, preterism. And the irony is striking. An article that warns against worldview vacuums is paired with an eschatology that leaves the church without a clear future horizon. If the resurrection is past, if the decisive coming is past, and if there is no climactic end to history, then what exactly are we moving toward?

The Irony of Cultural Concern Without a Future Consummation

DeMar criticizes dispensationalism for making everything about heaven and for encouraging cultural withdrawal. That critique often lands. But his own system ends up flattening the future even more severely.

In a hyper-preterist framework, history simply continues indefinitely. Sin continues. Death continues. Murder and rape continue. There is no final day in which death is destroyed. There is no moment when Christ publicly appears to judge the world and renew creation. There is no clear consummation.

That creates a deeper problem than dispensational pessimism. At least classic dispensationalism affirms a future bodily return and a future bodily resurrection. Full preterism denies both in any ordinary sense. In that respect, it is worse.

To deny a future bodily resurrection is to abandon creation. Scripture does not present salvation as escape from matter but as the redemption of matter. In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul argues that if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised, and the entire gospel collapses. He speaks of a body that is sown perishable and raised imperishable. The continuity between the body that dies and the body that is raised is essential to his argument. Death is the last enemy. It is not a permanent feature of an endless historical process.

When Paul warns in 2 Timothy 2:18 about those who say that the resurrection has already happened, he connects that teaching to the overthrow of faith. The pastoral concern is obvious. If the resurrection is behind us, the church loses her future hope.

Peter makes the opposite move. In 2 Peter 3:11–15, he grounds present obedience in a future, cosmic consummation. He writes that since all these things are to be dissolved, believers ought to live lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God. He speaks of the heavens being set on fire and dissolved, and of a new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

Notice the logic. Future judgment and renewal drive present faithfulness. The certainty of a coming day shapes ethical seriousness now. The delay of that day is not proof that nothing climactic is coming. Peter explicitly says the Lord is not slow but patient, not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance.

The apostolic pattern is clear. A definite future consummation strengthens cultural engagement. It does not weaken it. Christians labor because history is moving somewhere. They build because Christ will return. They endure because death itself will be destroyed.

If you remove that horizon and compress everything into AD 70, you do not solve escapism. You trade one distortion for another. You warn against abandoning creation while denying its final redemption. You criticize making everything about heaven while removing the bodily resurrection that secures the restoration of earth.

Under this view, the believer ultimately remains a disembodied soul in heaven while the chaos of earth continues indefinitely. Sin does not end. Death does not end. History does not culminate in a public triumph of Christ that restores what was lost in Adam. Even if one speaks of receiving a “spiritual body” at death, that is still disembodiment in any meaningful biblical sense if it denies the redemption of this present body. Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 15 depends on continuity. The body that is sown is the body that is raised. Redemption does not discard the body that dies. It transforms it.

If this present body is never raised, then creation is never truly redeemed. The curse remains in place. The material world simply continues as it is, while believers dwell in heaven apart from the bodies that died. That is not the hope the apostles preached.

It is true that you cannot defeat something with nothing. But cultural confidence cannot be sustained without a real, future, bodily triumph of Christ over death and sin. The church’s hope is not an endless continuation of fallen history. By denying Christ’s ongoing incarnation and our future bodily resurrection, that position abandons creation while claiming to defend it.

The biblical vision is far stronger. Christ will return. The dead will be raised in their bodies. Creation itself will be renewed. That is the horizon that fuels perseverance and meaningful cultural labor now.