Gary DeMar's Hyper-preterist Hermeneutic

If you want to understand how hyper-preterist interpretation actually works, the most recent (and final) episode from Gary DeMar and Kim Burgess on 1 Corinthians 15 puts it on full display. They ended up skipping almost the entire chapter, never walking through Paul’s argument, logic, or flow of thought. Instead, they immediately jumped outside of 1 Corinthians 15, grabbed the phrase “last trumpet,” hunted down “last trumpet” verses tied to a “time text,” and then insisted that the entire chapter must conform to that timing. This is the consistent pattern: the time texts drive everything. Not the passage in front of them. Not the Greek. Not the argument. Just the time texts. This is why they routinely skip the hardest verses. They do not know what those passages actually say, but they insist the fulfillment must have occurred in the first century because of supposed timing connections found elsewhere.

I know the method because I used to practice it myself. When I taught Acts 1:11 at a hyper-preterist conference, I spent more than half an hour avoiding what Acts 1:11 actually says. I ran everywhere else in Scripture searching for time texts to chain together so I could assert that whatever the verse means, it must have been fulfilled in their day. That is not exegesis. That is reverse-engineering a conclusion.

You can see the same thing in Gary DeMar’s recent attempt to reinterpret Hebrews 9:28. He suggests ἐκ δευτέρου might mean “in a second place” instead of the idiom “a second time.” But notice what he never does in his article: he never explains what that means. He never expounds the text itself. He’s just “asking questions.” Instead, he simply shrugs and says at the very end, “No matter which way ‘out of the/a second’ is understood, what the writer of Hebrews described to his first-century audience was near to them.”

That is the move. If the passage does not cooperate, skip it. If the Greek does not cooperate, redefine it. If the argument does not cooperate, ignore it. Just get back to the “time texts” and insist that fulfillment is already behind us.

That is the hyper-preterist hermeneutic in a nutshell, and Gary DeMar is no exception.