July 14, 2008
Dear Brothers of Calvary Bible Church:
Last year in our Shepherd’s In Training study we were privileged to work our way through Barry Horner’s “Future Israel: Why Christian Anti-Judaism Must Be Challenged” where he exposed the historical roots and exegetical fallacies of Augustinian eschatology also known as supercessionism (or replacement theology). Now having laid this crucial and solid foundation, I would like for us to build a biblical and theological superstructure that honors the normal understanding of language and a consistent biblical hermeneutic and thus advances a premillennial understanding of the promised earthly Kingdom (a unique phase of the eternal, universal Kingdom of God) that ultimately bridges history with the eternal state and fulfills God’s covenantal promises to Israel. I can think of no better work to assist us to these ends than Alva J. McClain’s authoritative work entitled, “The Greatness of the Kingdom: An Inductive Study of the Kingdom of God” (BMH Books, 1959).
Unlike many well-meaning and respected theologians that promote a doctrine of the Kingdom of God primarily on the basis of novel allegorical interpretations or on a single text or passage that languishes in serious dispute, McClain labors to investigate the whole of Scripture through a most compelling inductive study on the subject. I would humbly add that this magnificent study is ranked in the top ten most influential books of my life and ministry; and regardless of your eschatology, no serious student of the Bible should ever advance his system of the Kingdom of God, especially with respect to eschatology, without having studied this work.
McClain was the founder (1937) and first president (1962) of my alma mater, Grace Theological Seminary in Winona Lake, Indiana. My friend and former colleague on the Bible faculty at the Master’s College, Dr. Doug Bookman (whom some of you will remember from when he spoke at CBC) has this to say about “The Greatness of the Kingdom”:
“Though I would take some little umbrage with his treatment of this passage or that issue, the value of the work is to be found in the way he traces the progressive and organic development of the kingdom concept throughout the whole of God’s written revelation. Indeed, this is a case study in progressive revelation, and it honors the reality that God’s revelation is always a progression from truth to greater truth. (This as opposed to the flawed notion that God’s revelation has progressed from error to truth, God having once spoken what He knew could only be understood to mean one thing and then later revealing that He meant something entirely contrary to the plain words which His spokesmen had used when He spoke unto the fathers by those prophets.)
The notion sometimes witlessly obtains that the concept of a literal kingdom on earth, a culminating era toward which God is inexorably moving human history for His own glory, is a function of one passage late in the Bible, that absent Revelation 20 no careful student of Scripture would have ever conceived such an idea. Such a notion is most certainly refuted by carefully and exhaustively tracing the idea of that glorious and God-glorifying kingdom through all the stages of sacred history as recorded in the Scriptures. I know of no work that does that as effectively as McClain’s Greatness. Thus it might be fairly said that this book is pre-millennialism proclaimed with full throat. In a day when much of the evangelical world seems to be in full flight from premillennialism, and when theological arguments are employed to the woeful neglect of exegesis, I would strongly encourage the careful study of this magisterial work. Indeed, I think it could be averred that there is no real integrity in rejecting pre-millennialism if you have not done so. And by the same token, there may not be much chance of rejecting pre-millennialism if you have done so.”
May I encourage each of you to purchase the book (through whatever means you choose), read it prayerfully and devotionally, and be prepared to study it with me this fall when SIT resumes in September.
In His Majesty’s Service,
David Harrell
