The Rotten Fruit of Hyper-Preterism

I recently stumbled across a video on YouTube. I don’t know who Rafael is, but the other three participants were very familiar to me. All of them were once hyper-preterists, and more than that, they had been committed advocates of what is called Covenant Creationism. For those unfamiliar, Covenant Creationism is an attempt to take the hyper-preterist hermeneutic and retroactively impose it upon Genesis. Instead of receiving the creation account as the historical record of God’s making the heavens and the earth, it reinterprets the text to mean the “creation” of a covenantal order, not the actual creation of the universe. It was a clever way of stripping the Bible of any real scientific relevance, so that “science” could be left to speak authoritatively about origins, while Genesis was confined to theology and symbolism.

Even back when I myself was in hyper-preterism, I repeatedly warned that this was atheism in disguise. By divorcing the creation account from the real world, Covenant Creationism removed the Bible from speaking truth into the physical order. Once you surrender Genesis, you have opened the door to surrendering all of Scripture. If God’s revelation is no longer tied to actual history and creation itself, then what keeps the gospel from also being reduced to mere, so-called “covenantal” categories without historical reality?

That warning was not just something I leveled against others. It was the very path the Lord used to bring me out of hyper-preterism. When I began to pick away at the errors of Covenant Creationism, I quickly realized that its problems were not isolated. The same flawed hermeneutic undergirded hyper-preterism itself. Pull on that thread, and the whole system began to unravel. What started with doubts about Covenant Creationism eventually led me to dismantle hyper-preterism altogether, until I could no longer cling to it in good conscience.

Now the consequences have become tragically plain. In this video, Alan, Dustin, and Tami are no longer simply ex-hyper-preterists. They have not only abandoned hyper-preterism, but they have renounced Christ altogether. What began as a theological system claiming to offer a more “consistent” interpretation of Scripture has ended with the wholesale rejection of the faith once delivered to the saints.

This trajectory should not surprise us. Hyper-preterism already places a wedge between the clear teaching of Scripture and its fulfillment in history, by claiming all prophecy—including the resurrection and return of Christ—was fulfilled in AD 70. Covenant Creationism simply applied the same hermeneutic to the very first pages of Scripture. When you reinterpret creation itself as a “covenantal metaphor” rather than the real beginning of God’s universe, you have already given away the foundation upon which the gospel rests. The apostle Paul explicitly ties the gospel to the reality of the first Adam and the first creation (Romans 5:12-21; 1 Corinthians 15:21-22, 45-49). To deny that reality is to unravel the gospel.

Hyper-preterism and Covenant Creationism are not harmless side theories. They are apostasies in seed form, carrying within themselves the roots of atheism. Their hermeneutic steadily eats away at the foundations of the faith until nothing remains. What begins as a clever reinterpretation always ends in open unbelief. The trajectory is unmistakable. You do not arrive at a stronger or purer Christianity. You arrive where Alan, Dustin, and Tami now stand, outside the faith and bowed to the spirit of the age. These systems masquerade as biblical, but in truth they hollow out the very categories Scripture gives us: creation, fall, redemption, consummation. Remove those, and you are left with nothing but human speculation. And once speculation reigns, the last step is always the same, the denial of God Himself.