They Are Not Dispensationalists — And You Are Probably Not One Either

Before anything else, a clarification is in order, because the argument that follows is easily misread. I am not questioning whether the glory of God is the ultimate purpose of history. I personally affirm that it is. My criticism is directed at a different point in Ryrie's third sine qua non: the claim that the glory of God as the unifying theme of Scripture is a distinctive of dispensationalism — a feature without which one is no longer a dispensationalist. That is the claim I want to test. And the test, as we shall see, produces results that no traditional dispensationalist will be willing to accept.

The Third Sine Qua Non, As Stated

According to Ryrie's threefold sine qua non, a dispensationalist is identified by (1) keeping Israel and the Church distinct, (2) a consistently literal hermeneutic, and (3) the conviction that the underlying purpose of history — and the unifying theme of the biblical narrative — is the glory of God rather than salvation. The third item is presented not as a pious commonplace shared with the wider Christian tradition, but as a defining mark of the system. Sine qua non, after all, means "without which, nothing." Fail this test, and you are out.

The criterion has two parts that are usually fused together: the glory of God as (a) the telos of history and (b) the unifying theme of the biblical narrative. My quarrel is exclusively with (b). When the criterion is enforced — as it routinely is, against progressive dispensationalists — it is the second part that does the actual work of exclusion. The question, then, is what happens when that same criterion is enforced consistently across the rest of the tradition.

The Research

So I conducted the research. I asked a simple question: which dispensationalists have actually identified, as the unifying theme of Scripture, the glory of God? And which have proposed something else? What I found was alarming: a vast network of false dispensationalists, hiding in plain sight for generations, who must finally be exposed.

The list of the accused — sorted by the rival theme they dared to propose — is as follows:

The Kingdom of God. Alva J. McClain, J. Dwight Pentecost, Michael J. Vlach, John S. Feinberg, Eugene Merrill, Herman A. Hoyt, Rick Griffith — and, most awkwardly of all, C. I. Scofield himself.

Redemption. Glenn R. Kreider and T. Maurice Pugh.

Christ. Willem VanGemeren.

The dispensations. Roy L. Aldrich.

And then there is Lewis Sperry Chafer — the founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, the institutional cradle of normative dispensationalism — who never defended a single unifying theme at all.

Under Ryrie's criterion, the disqualification is total and impartial: defend the wrong unifying theme, like the majority of the tradition, and you are out; defend no unifying theme, like the man who built the institution, and you are equally out. There is no third option.

The false dispensationalists have been exposed. The tradition has been warned.

What the List Actually Shows

The exercise above is, of course, ironic. The point is not that McClain, Pentecost, Vlach, Feinberg, Scofield, Chafer, and the rest are not dispensationalists. They obviously are. The point is that the criterion that would exclude them is the very same criterion routinely deployed to exclude progressive dispensationalists from the tradition. If the criterion is sound, it cuts down half of the dispensational hall of fame. If it is not sound, it should not be used as a gatekeeping device against anyone.

A few observations follow.

First, the diversity of proposals is striking. Far from there being a settled dispensationalist consensus that the glory of God is the unifying theme of Scripture, the tradition has actually produced a plurality of candidates: the Kingdom of God, redemption, Christ, the dispensations themselves. This is not a marginal pattern; it includes some of the most central figures in the system's history. The sine qua non presupposes a uniformity that the tradition simply does not display.

Second, the conviction that the glory of God is the telos of all things is shared widely with the broader Christian tradition. The Westminster Shorter Catechism opens with it; Soli Deo Gloria is one of the five solas of the Reformation; Jonathan Edwards devoted entire treatises to it. As a doxological conviction it identifies no one in particular as a dispensationalist — it identifies almost any classical Protestant. The distinctive work of the third sine qua non therefore has to be done by the more specific claim that the glory of God is the unifying theme of Scripture and that salvation is not. And it is precisely on this more specific claim that so many leading dispensationalists have departed from Ryrie.

Third, Chafer's case is the most telling of all. Chafer is not a borderline figure; he is the foundational systematician of the tradition. To the best of my knowledge, he never proposed a single unifying theme of Scripture. If Ryrie's third sine qua non is what makes a dispensationalist, then Chafer is disqualified by silence — which is absurd. The reasonable conclusion is not that Chafer was secretly a covenant theologian, but that the criterion misdescribes what dispensationalism actually is.

The Irony Has One Target

The irony has one target, and it is not the glory of God. Ryrie's sine qua non is routinely used as a weapon against progressive dispensationalists — a formal declaration that they no longer belong to the tradition. The exercise above applies that same weapon consistently, and the results speak for themselves: the criterion that is used to expel progressives would, if applied honestly, expel Scofield, Chafer, Pentecost, Feinberg, Vlach, and McClain along with them.

The problem, then, is not with the progressives. The problem is with treating Ryrie's sine qua non as an unquestionable canonical authority. Either the canonization of the criterion is questioned — or its implications are accepted in full, and the tradition proceeds to expel everyone who does not fit. Selective application is not an option. A sine qua non that is enforced only against progressives, while Scofield and Chafer are quietly exempted, is not a theological criterion. It is a political one.

What I Am Not Saying

To prevent the most natural misreading of this article, let me restate the boundaries of the argument.

I am not denying that the glory of God is the ultimate purpose of history. I affirm it.

I am not denying that the glory of God is a legitimate candidate for the unifying theme of Scripture. It is one serious candidate among several that dispensationalists themselves have proposed.

I am not denying that Ryrie's contribution to the systematization of dispensationalism is significant. It is.

What I am denying is the elevation of one particular thematic synthesis — the glory of God as the unifying theme of Scripture, over against salvation — to the status of a sine qua non of dispensationalism. That elevation cannot survive contact with the tradition's own history. The very names a dispensationalist would most want to keep inside the system are the names that the criterion, consistently applied, ejects from it.

If the criterion ejects Scofield, Chafer, McClain, Pentecost, Feinberg, and Vlach, the criterion is wrong. And if the criterion is wrong against them, it is wrong against the progressives too.