I am continuing my response to Pastor Bob DeWaay.
He devotes a brief time in talking about what the Early Church writers believed on eschatology. He rightly states that the Early Church was premillennial. But what was conspicuously absent from his discussion was any acknowledgment of the fact that Early Church writers believed that the the Church will encounter the Antichrist, and that the resurrection would follow after the Great Tribulation. This is exactly the core of what Prewrath affirms.
It is not that every Early Church writer wrote on this subject; but everyone that actually did affirmed that the Church would go through the Great Tribulation.
Not only can someone search in vain for a pretribulational statement in the Early Church, but you will not find any pretribulational statements until the early 19th century.
As Evangelicals our ultimate authority is not in what the Early Church writers believed—it is in the inspired Scriptures. It is, however, very telling that the first generations of the Church believed what Prewrath affirms: The Church will encounter Antichrist.
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