Category Archives: Two-age Structure

THE GOSPEL’S LAST DAY VERDICT

salvation, Two-age Structure, Worldview March 25, 2025 Comments: 2

PMW 2025-024 by Dr. Ardel B. Caneday (from All Things Christian blogsite)Judgment day

Gentry note: Below is an insightful article that comports with the evangelical and Reformed understanding of the Already/Not Yet principle of biblical interpretation. An excellent read! For 28 years Dr. Caneday served as Professor of New Testament & Greek at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul. He recently retired from full-time teaching and now serves as an adjunct professor at UNW.

Dr. Caneday’s article:

In December 2021, I published four articles responding to Harrison Perkins’s criticism of my chapter, “Covenantal Life with God from Eden to Holy City” in Progressive Covenantalism: Charting a Course between Dispensational and Covenantal Theologies. R. Scott Clark published the article on The Heidelblog. There, Perkins blatantly claimed, “In the end, Caneday does promote a salvation by works.” So outrageous was his accusation that I patiently responded with four articles demonstrating that his assessment and accusation were wrong and thus slanderous. Those accusations by Perkins, Clark, and others derive from their common failure to account for the New Testament’s presentation of the salvation of the Last Day brought forward in the person of Christ Jesus, consequently the already but not-yet character of salvation, including justification and forgiveness of sins, featured in this article.

Despite being available for more than four years, neither Perkins nor Clark have ever acknowledged their error of judgment nor repented of their published defamation. Though I did not write my recently published article at Christ Over All to counter Perkins’s false accusation published by Clark, it nonetheless does just that. Thus, though I rarely repost articles I have published elsewhere on this blog, I repost this article as a capstone to the earlier four-part series to expose the slanderous accusation written by Harrison Perkins and published on The Heidelblog.
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THE GOSPEL, SECOND COMING & ‘THIS AGE’ (1)

Great Commission, Second Coming, Theologians, Two-age Structure December 30, 2022 Comments: 2

PMW 2022-099 by B. B. Warfield

Gentry note:
This article (under the shorter title “The Gospel and the Second Coming”) is from volume 1 of The Selected Shorter Writings of B. B. Warfield. It gives Warfield’s brief argument for postmillennialism. It also shows that this theological giant back in the early 1900s recognized the two-age structure of redemptive history (“this age” and “the coming age”). This is significant in that some current-day writers wrongly believe is an amillennial construct, despite being held by Greg Bahnsen, Keith Mathison, me (!) and others. Though I do not agree with ever angle he presents within, here is Warfield’s insightful article.

The Gospel, Second Coming & “This Age”

The Millennium
The term “millennium” has entered Christian speech under the influence of the twentieth chapter of the book of Revelation. From that passage, imperfectly understood, there has also been derived the idea that is connected with this term. We say, from that passage imperfectly understood. For the book of Revelation is a symbolic book; that is to say, what it describes it describes not directly but indirectly, through the medium of symbols. To take its description literally is therefore to substitute the symbol for the reality. That is what is done when the opening verses of the twentieth chapter are read as if they predicted a period of long duration in the earthly history of the Church, in which Satan is to deceive the nations no more and the resurrected martyrs are to live and reign with Christ.

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