Home Debates A Response to Gary DeMar and Preterism

A Response to Gary DeMar and Preterism

by Alan Kurschner

This week on Gary DeMar’s radio program he responded to the Prewrath position, briefly. For those who do not know Gary DeMar, he is a preterist author and teacher. Listening to his comments on the Prewrath position, I found them surface-level at best. Basically, his conclusion was: since Prewrath shares a futurist approach to Matthew 24 along with pretribulationism, prewrath does not have any new critiques for the preterist position.
He also claims that Prewrath does not have good scholarly exegesis that would critique preterism as well as support prewrath. I find this odd since it has been over a year now that Charles Cooper’s book has been published, God’s Elect and the Great Tribulation: An Interpretation of Matthew 24:1-31 and Daniel 9. This book is a solid, scholarly book that not only supports prewrath but has substantive critiques against preterism, some critiques that I am sure Gary DeMar is not even aware of. So I would challenge DeMar to read the book and respond to it.
Moreover, Gary DeMar in his show laments that premillennialist teachers are not eager to debate or interact with preterists. I will give DeMar the benefit of the doubt here since he is mostly (if not exclusively) exposed to pretrib premillennialists.
DeMar has debated pretrib teacher Thomas Ice for example, and I have heard this debate, which I was left shaking my head since I was not impressed by either of them. (Incidentally, Thomas Ice will not defend his pretribulationism in debate with a prewrath teacher, but he will with a preterist. That should tell you something.)
I am writing a couple of books right now and my second book is specifically on a refutation of preterism. Would it not be fitting that once that book is published there could be a public debate with DeMar with copious amounts of cross-examination? I think so. And I am sure Cooper would desire to defend his exegesis in his book in a debate with a preterist.
One of the radio programs that DeMar comments on the Prewrath, he gave his garden-variety preterist arguments to Matthew 24: “This generation,” the second-person “you,” the term “Antichrist” is not mentioned, etc., etc. He also gives the impression that “we preterists are scholarly, and you premillers over there are just ‘popular.'”
I was at a conference in Florida earlier this year where I met DeMar briefly, unrelated to eschatology, but he had a booth in which I bought several preterist books that I have been wanting to read for a while. I was disappointed by these preterist books since they did not provide much meaningful exegesis. And some of the salient issues that should have been discussed were completely ignored such as distinct purposes of the gospel writers for the Olivet Discourse (Preterists just assume that the writers had one purpose).
Again, I give DeMar the benefit of the doubt since he has been exposed all his life to sensational-popular, surface-level pretrib teachers who are not interested in meaningful interaction. But there is a new kid in town, the prewrath position, a kid who is much more sober about the Biblical text and seeks to be exegetically faithful to Scripture.

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