Expert: Todd Tyszka - 10/1/2010

Question
Hello Mr. Tyszka,

The last subject I asked you about was on Christians divided on scripture. I suppose this new question may still be an outgrowth of that.

John Schoenheit is a part of Truth Or Tradition ministries, and I have several of their YouTube videos in my folder. Mr. Schoenheit acknowledges that there are people who do not believe in, "Once Saved, Always Saved", but in his video series entitled, "Christian Salvation is permanent" he gives explanations based on a chart, examining Greek terminology for the words "born again" and "adopted sons", and he cites scripture (such as Romans 8) to conclude that we are God's Holy children now, and we cannot be separated from Him because of the indwelt Holy Spirit. I've found perhaps 1 or 2 other Christian ministries on YouTube that seem to agree with him, without discussing dispensational understanding of the bible. One of them says that if a Christian leaves the church, he was never saved.

I know there is opposition to dispensational theology. I think there's a great, underlying problem when Christians feel insecure about their salvation because they do not understand the seeming conflicting scriptures about it. I won't ask you to speak on this again.

But I will ask you if you believe that dispensationalism is worthwhile? Is it a heresy?

Thank you for your time. God bless you.

David.

Answer
Hi David,
I am not familiar with the individual or ministry you mentioned but I am very familiar with the doctrines you mentioned, although I'm not sure how you are tying them together with a question.

Personally I believe that dispensationalism is worthwhile, it is a valid way to look at God's revelation to mankind. I don't believe it is a heresy and it has many supporters. However, it is very difficult to break up the history of the church into these periods of time called dispensations. It is not clear cut. There are also different perspectives on them (e.g. progressive dispensationalism or hyperdispensationalism/ultradispensationalism). The Calvinists or reformed crowd view God's revelation as covenants, thus they largely believe in what is termed Covenant Theology or Federalism. It gets more complicated than this but you get the idea.

I hope I have answered your question which I took as pertaining to dispensationalism and my thoughts on it. Thanks again for an excellent question.

Todd Tyszka