Max King's Heresy Lives On in Kim Burgess and Gary DeMar

I don't follow CrossPolitic. I’m not a Fight, Laugh, & Feast network member, and I have no first-hand experience with what goes on in their Facebook group. However, based on a blog post and video from Pastor Toby Sumpter, it appears that a few guys have pressed them to speak out against Gary DeMar, who is sliding into the heresy of hyper-preterism, and Pastor Toby seems to be annoyed with the push-back. He writes:

Now Uncle Gary has been making some pretty wheezy coughing noises and he may have contracted the bad juju, but I’m waiting for an official diagnosis, which I won’t be getting from the autistic reformed internet bros. When determining something as serious as heresy and the potential of excommunication, the Bible requires careful deliberation, due process, you know, establishing what they used to call in the olden days, facts, you know with evidence. As firm believers in due process, we are approaching this carefully and deliberately, which you can be assured is not the same thing as dragging our feet. But if I’ve seen anything on Facebook over the last couple of days, it has been a serious lack of careful reading and reasoning skills.

I don’t know if Pastor Toby would include me in that group, so I did not take this personally. Furthermore, I understand that some people on Facebook can be annoying and careless with accusations. I have been on the receiving end of that, and in my hyper-preterist days, I was guilty of dishing it out. So, I get it. Pastor Toby and company want to be careful and deliberate. Good for them.

With that said, I will say this: we don’t need to wait on Fight, Laugh, & Feast to figure out whether Gary DeMar is propagating hyper-preterism.

He is. Period. And his latest podcast with Kim Burgess proves it yet once again.

In case you have not listened to the 45-minute episode on Adoption as Sons and Redemption of Our Body or do not plan on it, I came across a FB comment that summarized it perfectly with Kim’s approval:

Friends, this redefinition of the “resurrection of the body” is straight out of Max King’s The Cross and the Parousia of Christ. The hyper-preterists have a nickname for it: the corporate body view, aka CBV. It was also the view Sam Frost, when a hyper-preterist, defended in a seven lecture series on 1 Cor. 15 and his book Exegetical Essays on the Resurrection. It was the view articulated by David Green, a coauthor with Sam Frost, in House Divided, a hyper-preterist response to Dr. Keith Mathison’s When Shall These Things be? Gary DeMar recently praised this book and said that its exegetical arguments needed to be answered. This was the view I latched on to as a hyper-preterist and argued for seven years.

Some concluding remarks from Sam’s Exegetical Essays on the Resurrection: [emphasis mine]

The final phase of God’s redemptive plan, God was under obligation to demonstrate his righteousness by keeping his promises to Israel. He had promised to pour out his Spirit on them, and restore them (Ez 37). He promised to reunite the 12 tribes under one house and one Lord (Ho 1.10-11). He had promised to remove their sins in single day (Zec 3.9). He promised to redeem them and call them sons of God, to build a new temple that would never be overrun, to give them an inheritance that would never fade, to bless them, to restore them, to prosper them and to dwell with them forever. How could any of these promises come to pass under the reign of the Sin and the Death? Simple. They couldn‟t. Then how was God going to answer the impossible? With man, it is impossible, but with God this is possible. Through Christ, it is finished. The new covenant God would make with the united house of Israel would be the covenant by which God would answer all of these promises. However, what about the Gentiles? Abraham‟s covenant stated that “all nations shall be blessed through thy seed” (Gn 12.3). If the new covenant is made only with Israel, then how would those who are not Israel become “fellow heirs”? This indeed was a “mystery” Paul said (Eph 3.6).

The new covenant entailed the torah being written on the heart (Jer 31.33). Yet, in Paul’s day, the Gentiles, who by nature did not have the law of Moses, were now showing that the law was written on their hearts in fulfillment of the new covenant (Ro 2.14). Were they now Jews? Was God transforming Gentiles into fellow citizens of Israel, thereby transforming Israel itself? According to Paul, this was exactly what was happening (Eph 2.11-19). Did this not require a physical change? Not according to Paul. It required a spiritual change in the spiritual body of Christ, which was brought about through the death and resurrection of the one body, Jesus Christ, the temple of God.

Isaiah 44.5 prophesies that there will be a day when Gentiles take the name of Israel. This is affirmed in Ps 87 as well, where Gentiles are explicitly mentioned as being recorded as “born in Zion.” But, for Paul, “Jerusalem above is the mother of us all” (Ga 4.26). There are two Jerusalem‟s in Paul‟s theology. The one “below” is destined for destruction, but the Jerusalem “above” is the Zion spoken of in Is 54.1-ff (Ga 4.21-31). That Zion is heavenly is also explicitly stated in He 12.22. The spiritual dimension of the gospel, then, has transformed the OT sacrifices, rites, and temple. This allows Paul to understand that one who is born of the Spirit is a true Israelite, and since the Spirit has been poured out on the Gentiles, then the Gentiles are “true Jews are ones that are so inwardly, who are circumcised in the heart by the Spirit, not by the written code” (Ro 2.29). How, then, are Gentiles included into Israel‟s blessings? By the Spirit.

This naturally raises the question of Israel. The Gentiles were not being saved apart from Israel, but were being saved as a result of God righteously answering his promises made to Israel. The Spirit was poured out “in the last days” (Ac 2.18) upon “men of Israel” (2.22). God was uniting together “in one body” (Eph 2.16) Judah, Israel and the Gentiles as he promised in Hosea mentioned above. This one body is called the “body of Christ” and it is in this body that the “body of the death” Israel had in Adam was being sown and transformed into the “spiritual body” of Christ, the Last Adam. The Gentiles were also sown in Christ‟s body through his death and were being made alive in Christ by the Spirit of God, “that same Spirit that raised him from the dead” (Eph 1.20). Through the calling of “all Israel” together in Christ, the house of Judah and the house of Israel, the northern tribes dispersed among the nations by Assyria in the 8th century B.C., Paul was able to understand that the restoration of Israel‟s “all things” was coming together in his generation by the Spirit of God. The destruction of “Jerusalem below” in A.D. 70 marked the completion of Christ‟s redemptive work, and the completion of the building of God. From the time of that completion onwards the glorified body of Christ on earth, united with those saints and angels in heaven (He 12.22-ff) of those faithful saints of the OT along with the faithful remnant of those Israelites that received the “deposit of the Spirit, guaranteeing what is to come” (Eph 1.14) are bringing “healing to the nations” (Rev 22.2) to those “on the outside of the city” (22.15).

With this picture in mind, we clearly see that the Tree of Life in the end (Rev 22.2) is again accessible to Adam by entering the gates of the city (21.25). What Adam was denied because of his sin, he is now given freely in Christ. What Adam lost, is now given back in Christ. Wherein Adam was ruled by the Sin and the Death, he is now reigning with Christ, who rules “all things.” This was the promise announced to Eve: he shall crush his head. Paul wrote, “The God of peace shall soon crush satan under your feet” (Ro 16.20). When all that represented separation and the rule of Death and Sin was demolished and gone, that is, when the “administration of the death engraved on stones” (II Co 3.7) had “vanished” (He 8.13), the “sting of the death” lost its sting and victory was given completely to those firstfruit saints, and to “all generations” (Eph 3.21) that call in His name. God had saved “all Israel” from their sins.

The Preterist message, then, is quite simple: God has created a new heavens and a new earth and a new people of God made up of “whosoever”. We are not ruled any longer by the dominion of Death and Sin that kept mankind separated from God in life and in death. We are not serving a God that is boxed in a temple, served by special priests, of which only one can actually enter into an even smaller room once a year to offer bulls and goats. We are not required to cut our flesh in order to say “we are God’s people.” We no longer are obligated to trace our genealogy to Abraham, but are sons and daughters of Abraham because we have been transformed into sons and daughters through the resurrection power of the Spirit. God is transforming all peoples, all nations, all cultures to reflect his mercy and love and righteousness through Jesus Christ, his son.

The Body of Christ, the Church of the Firstborn, should have this vision and this goal and this goal only: healing for the nations. Ethnic boundaries, cultural boundaries, racial boundaries, religious boundaries, theological boundaries, gender boundaries are all “elements of the world” burned up in Christ. There is only one body in Christ, and there is only one city that upon entrance saves. Yes, there are those on the outside of the gates of salvation, but they are the one beckoned to enter the city whose gates “on no day are shut.” Our message is simple: All the promises in Christ are “yes” and “amen” right now. There is not one thing that is not fulfilled in Christ and in his people. His people have been trying to say this for 2,000 years, but have been blockaded by error which denies that not all the promises are for today, only some of them are. The message that has been trying to get out in the history of the Church, however, is finally bursting forth upon the world scene, and this time, the Roman world and the Jewish world of the first century will not be the only worlds once turned upside down. God is going global. We can see trickles of water breaks on the walls of error all throughout the history of the Church. But the small leaks, noticeable from the early fathers till today, have become holes. The walls are giving, the water of life in the Church is pushing. The water that has already leaked beyond the walls has accomplished amazing results. Imagine if the entire wall comes down!

From David Green in House Divided:

Biological reanimation is not the resurrection and the life: Jesus is the Resurrection and the Life. To "live" (i.e., to be resurrected) is to believe in Him. We who put our trust in Christ's sin-atoning blood in the new covenant world today are in "the Life, and we shall "never die" As we will discuss in more detail below, since the consummated death of the Adamic, old covenant "man" in AD 70, the universal church is now and forever the resurrected, living, and “spiritual body” of Christ.

From Max King in The Cross and the Parousia of Christ: The Two Dimensions of One Age-Changing Eschaton: [emphasis mine]

It is axiomatic that context determines content. It is our conviction that the failure of interpreters to identify and remain within the context of the gospel's end-time message is a key factor in the ever-increasing eschatological chaos that for centuries has wreaked havoc in a fragmentized Christen-dom. The closing period of the Old Testament age is the biblical framework for understanding both the meaning and the fulfillment of such things as the resurrection of the dead, the coming of the kingdom of God, the new Jerusalem, the new heaven and earth, etc.. Through the Christ event, these things all occurred within the period of transition from the old to the new aeon. To whatever extent the consummated arrival of "the coming good things" (Heb. 10:1) was futuristic in gospel eschatology, the consummation of the old aeon was futuristic. The new is brought forth of the old, and the outworking of this great change is the meaning and function of the gospel's thorough-going eschatology.

We have maintained, and we believe that it has been demonstrated ade-quately, that the resurrection controversy at Corinth was rooted in the covenantal transition occurring at that time, and that this is the only context of time and history for the fulfillment of the resurrection set forth and defended at great length by Paul. In summarizing the resurrection, it will be shown that the closing period of the Old Testament dispensation is an adequate and biblical framework for the three stages of resurrection set forth by Paul in 1 Cor. 15; namely, the resurrection of Christ, afterward His own at His coming (hence, the end), which in turn represents the point in time for "the resurrection of the dead" that was being denied by some at Corinth.

If you prefer pictures, here’s the title page of Max King’s magnum opus:

Notice the one body, the one man (Old Covenant Israel) dies along with “The Old Aeon” and resurrects into the new body, the new man in “The New Aeon.” This “one age-changing eschaton” occurred in the years 30AD-70AD. This transition, this “resurrection of the body,” was initiated by “The Cross” and reached its consummation in “The Parousia of Christ,” which, according to hyper-preterists, occurred in 70AD, signified by the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple.

Or, as David Johnson said above and Kim Burgess affirmed, “Under the old covenant the body of Israel's existence was perishable, dishonorable, weak humble, lowly, and disappearing. Israel lived in a body of death that was about to be changed into a glorious spiritual body. It had been sown in the death of Christ and was being raised in Christ. And according to Paul this transition would take place before all the Corinthians fell asleep. (1 Cor 15: 51).”

Max King died recently. I hoped his heresy would die with him, but alas, Kim Burgess and Gary DeMar are giving it a fresh voice through American Vision and their Covenant Hermeneutics and Biblical Eschatology podcast.

The “autistic reformed internet bros” have this one right. It’s past time for laughing and feasting. It’s time to fight.