This past week Gary DeMar appeared on CrossPolitic to discuss the doctrine of the resurrection. Listening to the interview was deeply frustrating. It wasn’t just sloppy, it was dangerous. This is exactly how error dresses itself up as insight, and why clarity and fidelity to the Word of God matter more than ever.
In response, I made several comments on Facebook as different points struck me while listening. What follows is a collection of those posts, presented in full, followed by a concluding reflection. There is certainly much more that could be addressed, but these are just some initial reactions.
DeMar and the Nicene Creed
Gary DeMar insists that he “affirms” the Nicene Creed. But when pressed on one of its most explicitly eschatological lines—“He shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead”—his handling of the Creed collapses under its own contradictions. At first, DeMar admits, “Well, that’s another issue. We don’t know what verses they used.” Yet moments later, after his co-host suggests he could defend the statement from Scripture, DeMar abruptly reverses himself: “Oh, I can too. I do. I believe that. Exactly. And I know what verse they used.” In the span of seconds he moves from ignorance to certainty, not because of careful creedal reflection, but because his argument requires it.
This is compounded by his misrepresentation of what a creed is. DeMar portrays the Nicene Creed as little more than a patchwork of Bible quotations. That is simply false. While some lines closely echo Scripture (“Maker of heaven and earth,” “suffered under Pontius Pilate”), other parts are theological syntheses (“of one substance with the Father,” “resurrection of the dead”) that summarize the whole teaching of Scripture rather than cite a single verse. The Creed is a confession, not a proof-text quiz. Its purpose is to declare the church’s settled interpretation of Scripture against heresy. By reducing it to “find the verse,” DeMar empties the Creed of its doctrinal weight.
Even more, DeMar ignores the Creed’s grammar. The church confesses that Christ “shall come again with glory to judge the quick and the dead.” This is not simply quoting a phrase from Acts 10:42, 2 Timothy 4:1, or 1 Peter 4:5; it is expressing the church’s ongoing, future-oriented hope. The Nicene fathers did not insert this line to record a past event but to direct the faith of the church to the future return of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the final judgment. DeMar collapses all of this into AD 70, ignoring the fact that the Creed deliberately frames it in the future tense.
DeMar claims he “believes that exactly,” but he does so only by redefining it. What the church means by this line is the future, universal, visible return of Christ in glory. What DeMar means is a past, localized judgment on Jerusalem. In other words, he affirms the words while denying their sense. This is the same tactic Arius used with Scripture: quote the Bible faithfully but twist the meaning. The Nicene fathers anticipated that kind of sleight of hand, which is why they employed precise, extra-biblical language like "homoousios" to shut down heretical redefinitions.
DeMar is not standing with the Creed. He is standing against it, using its words as a mask while tearing out its heart.
The Westminster Confession and “Self-Same Body”
Gary DeMar objects to the Westminster Confession’s statement that the resurrection involves the “self-same body,” claiming that 1 Corinthians 15 never uses those words. But this is simply a Biblicist1 dodge that ignores Paul’s actual argument.
Paul is crystal clear: the very body that dies is the body God raises. Again and again he says, “what is sown … is raised” (vv. 42–44). The same body that is perishable, natural, and mortal is raised imperishable, spiritual, and immortal. The seed becomes the plant; it is transformation, not replacement. To say we swap out one body for another at death makes Paul’s imagery meaningless and erases his eschatological hope, which he ties not to the moment of death but to Christ’s return (vv. 22–23, 51–53).
That is precisely why the Westminster Confession uses the phrase “self-same body." The resurrection is a transformation of the body, not a replacment. If you deny “self-same,” you are left with Paul saying the body dies and another shows up later, which is the very opposite of his seed analogy: what is sown is what is raised, only glorified. DeMar may sneer at the wording, but the doctrine is Paul’s and the Westminster Confession faithfully captures the apostle’s teaching.
The Intermediate State and the Old Testament Saints
Gary DeMar says it’s unthinkable that we would die and go to heaven as just spirit and then wait “thousands of years” for our resurrection bodies. He emphasizes that man is "body and soul." But that’s exactly what his own system demands for Abraham, Moses, David, and every Old Testament saint until AD 70. According to hyper-preterism, the resurrection happened at the destruction of Jerusalem. That means for well over a thousand years, the faithful saints of the Old Covenant died and entered the intermediate state, and not in heaven, as disembodied souls, precisely the condition Gary thinks is crazy and incomplete for us.
If Gary’s logic is right—that disembodied existence is a theological problem—then the whole company of Old Testament saints lived in a problem for centuries. And if it wasn’t a problem for them, why is it suddenly a problem for us? Paul had no issue describing the intermediate state as being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor 5:8). That’s not a defect—it’s our hope until Christ returns. The real absurdity isn’t waiting for resurrection; it’s pretending, like Gary, that we already have it.
Playing Word Games with 1 Corinthians 15
Gary DeMar likes to play a word game with 1 Corinthians 15. When Paul writes, “But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen” (v. 13), Gary immediately pounces: “But notice what it says. The resurrection of the dead. Not the resurrection of the body, but the resurrection of the dead.” This may sound clever to an unsuspecting audience, but it is completely refuted by the very chapter Gary is trying to explain.
Beginning in verse 35, Paul anticipates the objection: “But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?” Notice that Paul himself identifies “the dead” with the question of the body. He does not contrast them, as Gary tries to do; he equates them. The whole issue is precisely what happens to the body when the dead are raised.
From verse 35 through verse 44, Paul uses the Greek word sōma—“body”—ten times! His entire explanation of “the resurrection of the dead” is carried out in terms of the body. “That which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be” (v. 37). “But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body” (v. 38). “There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial” (v. 40). “So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption… It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (vv. 42–44). The point is unmistakable: it is the raising and transformation of the body.
Furthermore, Paul ties Christ’s bodily resurrection directly to ours: “For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised” (v. 16). But Christ’s resurrection was unmistakably bodily—the tomb was empty, His wounds were visible, and His body, once perishable, was raised in glory. For Paul’s logic to work, “the dead” must mean the same thing: human bodies in the grave. To separate “the resurrection of the dead” from “the resurrection of the body” is to equivocate and thus sever Paul’s argument at its root.
In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul uses sōma again and again to make crystal clear that the resurrection of the dead is the transformation of the body that dies. The dead who are raised are not souls arising to heaven, but bodies made glorious, incorruptible, and immortal in union with Christ’s own resurrection body. Gary’s attempt to drive a wedge between “the resurrection of the dead” and “the resurrection of the body” is wordplay that collapses under the weight of Paul’s own teaching.
Paul, the Pharisees, and Acts 23–24
Gary DeMar continues to avoid the connection between Paul and the Pharisees in Acts.
If hyper-preterism were true, the entire scene in Acts 23 and 24 would be incoherent. The Pharisees believed in a bodily resurrection at the end of the age. Their hope was not a symbolic “corporate body” resurrection fulfilled in AD 70, but the real raising of human bodies from the grave. Yet Paul stood before the Sanhedrin and declared, “I am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question.” If hyper-preterism were correct, Paul was not confessing what the Pharisees believed at all, but something entirely different, which would mean he was deliberately taking advantage of their ignorance in order to split the council and win support.
The reaction of the Pharisees shows the folly of this position. When Paul made this declaration, they immediately sided with him against the Sadducees. They were not confused about their doctrine; they knew precisely what they meant by resurrection: the future raising of the dead in their bodies. If Paul had in mind something entirely different, like a metaphorical resurrection of Israel in AD 70, they would not have mistaken that for their own hope. The Pharisees were not so naïve as to confuse a metaphor with the very heart of their eschatological expectation.
Paul’s defense before Felix makes the matter even clearer. He confessed openly that he worshiped the God of his fathers, “believing all things which are written in the law and in the prophets, and have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust.” Paul is not appealing to a doctrine foreign to the Pharisees but explicitly aligning himself with what they too affirmed. He roots his hope in the same belief they confessed: a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked.
This is where the irony becomes especially sharp. Gary DeMar and other hyper-preterists love to play word games with “resurrection,” claiming that phrases like “resurrection of the dead” should not be equated with “resurrection of the body.” Yet in order for hyper-preterism to make sense of Paul in Acts 23 and 24, they are forced to project that very tactic back onto Paul himself. They must claim that Paul used the language of the Pharisees while privately redefining the words in his own mind. That would mean Paul was pulling the same sleight of hand that hyper-preterists now employ—saying “resurrection of the dead” while meaning something completely different from bodily resurrection. This not only attributes dishonesty to the apostle but undermines the entire point of his defense, for the Pharisees would never have rallied to him if they thought he was speaking metaphorically and contradicted their own doctrine.
In the end, hyper-preterism forces one of two conclusions, both of which are untenable. Either the Pharisees were unbelievably stupid, confusing their doctrine of a bodily resurrection with a symbolic corporate resurrection they had never believed, or Paul was deceitful, deliberately twisting language to mislead both the Sanhedrin and Felix. The far more reasonable explanation, and the one that accords with the plain reading of the text, is that Paul truly shared with the Pharisees the hope of a bodily resurrection of the dead, the very doctrine that distinguished them from the Sadducees.
Conclusion
The interview with Gary DeMar revealed more than just interpretive differences—it revealed the bankruptcy of the hyper-preterist framework when tested against Scripture, creedal Christianity, and even its own internal consistency. Whether in his misuse of the Nicene Creed, his dismissal of the Westminster Confession, his redefinition of Paul’s seed imagery in 1 Corinthians 15, or his distortion of Paul’s testimony before the Pharisees, the pattern is the same: affirm the words, deny the meaning.
This is not careful exegesis or faithful confession. It is the very method of error that the church has had to resist in every age. The Christian hope is not in a past metaphorical event but in the future return of Christ, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. To deny that is not simply to take a different “eschatological view.” It is to gut the gospel of its final hope.
A Biblicist is someone who insists that doctrine must be expressed only in the exact words of Scripture, refusing to accept theological conclusions that are drawn from Scripture by good and necessary consequence.
Well written. Thank you. Dr. Andrew Sandlin has been sounding the alarm on DeMar as well. I'm praying for the man.
Gary DeMar’s hyper-preterism and bodiless resurrection heresies remind me of the old Stone-Campbell troubler Max King.