Does McClain's Kingdom Framework Contain an Internal Contradiction? Progressive Dispensationalism as the More Coherent Path

In The Greatness of the Kingdom, Alva McClain makes two claims that, placed side by side, invite careful scrutiny.

In Chapter 18, treating the Old Testament, McClain argues that the blessings promised under the New Covenant are not merely covenantal blessings in a general sense — they are, at their core, blessings of the Promised Kingdom. They belong to it constitutively. Remove them, and you have not simply diminished the covenant; you have touched the Kingdom itself.

When McClain turns to the New Testament, he acknowledges what virtually no serious interpreter would deny: the Church already participates in the blessings of the New Covenant. The Spirit has been poured out. Sins have been forgiven. The law has been written on hearts.

The Syllogism McClain's Own Work Implies

Consider what follows from these two premises together:

1. The blessings of the New Covenant are fundamental blessings of the Promised Kingdom.
2. The Church presently participates in the blessings of the New Covenant.
3. Therefore, the Church already participates in blessings of the Promised Kingdom.

The first two premises are drawn directly from McClain's own work. The third is my conclusion. I invite readers to weigh in: does it follow? If the blessings are Kingdom blessings at their core — and if the Church genuinely receives them now — what logical move blocks the third step?

The Interregnum Framework

McClain's framework insists that we currently live in an interregnum — literally, a period between reigns: the Davidic Kingdom was offered, rejected, and totally suspended/postponed. This present age is therefore parenthetical, a hiatus between the Kingdom's legal guarantee and its actual arrival. The Kingdom exists only de jure, in a judicial or positional sense, but emphatically not de facto: proclaimed, decreed, and guaranteed, but not yet operative.

This position has roots in the broader tradition of classical dispensationalism's postponement doctrine, which holds that the entire Messianic Kingdom program was deferred when Israel rejected her Messiah. On that reading, the Church age is not the Kingdom — not even its beginning — but a pause between offer and eventual fulfillment.

The implications for the New Covenant and its blessings are significant: if the Kingdom is entirely absent in every operative sense, then the blessings the Church receives through the New Covenant must somehow be dispensed apart from the Kingdom itself — as advance courtesies extended on the Kingdom's credit, or anticipatory tokens of what will one day be fully given.

Six Questions the Framework Must Answer

All of this raises questions I invite you to consider with me about whether McClain's theology of the Kingdom contains an internal contradiction.

1. What does it mean to receive real blessings of a Kingdom that does not yet exist in any operative sense?

If the Kingdom is entirely non-operative, what exactly is being received? Blessings presuppose a benefactor who is presently acting. The Spirit's outpouring, the forgiveness of sins, the renewal of the heart — these are not promissory notes. They are enacted realities.

2. Is not a received blessing, by definition, a de facto reality?

When a covenant promise is fulfilled and its fruit is experienced, has something not actually happened? Can one genuinely experience the benefits of a reign while maintaining that the reign itself remains entirely inoperative?

3. Can a constitutive Kingdom blessing be extracted and dispensed apart from the Kingdom?

If a blessing is constitutive of the Kingdom — belonging to it at its core — can it be detached and given separately without ceasing to be the very thing McClain says it is? Can a blessing be constitutively Kingdom-shaped in the Old Testament and yet become non-Kingdom in character when received by the Church? This question presses on how the tradition has handled the hermeneutical continuity between the Testaments.

4. Is it coherent to say the fruit of the Kingdom is present while the Kingdom itself is absent?

If the blessings are real, present, and — by McClain's own account — constitutively Kingdom blessings, in what sense does the Kingdom remain entirely absent? Can the constitutive benefits of a reign be historically experienced while the reign remains entirely non-operative?

5. Are these blessings enacted realities or legal abstractions?

When the Spirit is actually poured out, sins are actually forgiven, and hearts are actually renewed, are these merely legal abstractions? And if the answer is that these blessings are present only in a derivative or anticipatory mode, does that not require a qualification that McClain's categorical framework seems to resist?

6. Is the conclusion protected by definition rather than argued from evidence?

If no present fulfillment of Kingdom blessings can count as any present manifestation of the Kingdom — regardless of what the text says — is that a theological conclusion, or a definitional stipulation? The question of whether classical dispensationalism's handling of the Kingdom involves a hermeneutical double standard is worth pressing here.

Conclusion: Progressive Dispensationalism as the More Coherent Path Forward

The questions raised above do not merely expose a tension within McClain's framework — they point toward a resolution. And that resolution, I would argue, is most consistently supplied by progressive dispensationalism.

Progressive dispensationalism, as developed by scholars such as Craig Blaising and Darrell Bock, takes seriously precisely what McClain's two-premise structure implies but resists drawing: that the present reception of genuine Kingdom blessings constitutes a real, if partial, inauguration of the Kingdom itself. The Kingdom is not simply decreed and postponed. It has been inaugurated — genuinely, historically, operatively — in the person, resurrection, and session of Jesus Christ, who now reigns at the Father's right hand as the enthroned Son of David. What awaits is not the Kingdom's beginning but its consummation: the full, earthly, and visible manifestation of a reign that is already, in the most meaningful sense, underway.

This framework is not an abandonment of dispensational commitments. It retains the distinction between Israel and the Church. It retains the expectation of a future, literal fulfillment of Davidic and land promises. It retains the integrity of a redemptive-historical hermeneutic that reads the covenants with grammatical-historical care. What it refuses to retain is the logical move — forced, I submit, and not merely cautious — that severs Kingdom blessings from the Kingdom itself whenever those blessings are received by the Church in the present age.

The classical dispensationalist faces a dilemma that no terminological adjustment fully resolves: either the New Covenant blessings received by the Church are genuinely constitutive Kingdom blessings, in which case the Kingdom is genuinely, if partially, present; or they are something else — derivative, anticipatory, analogical — in which case McClain's own claim that they are fundamentally Kingdom blessings requires revision. One cannot simultaneously hold that the blessings are constitutively Kingdom-shaped and that their present reception involves no present Kingdom reality whatsoever. This is the core tension that the comparison between traditional and progressive dispensationalism makes unavoidable.

Progressive dispensationalism escapes this dilemma by embracing what the biblical data presses upon us: that Pentecost was not a parenthesis but an inauguration, that the outpoured Spirit is not the Kingdom's promissory note but its first fruits, and that the forgiveness of sins and the renewal of the heart are not pre-Kingdom courtesies extended to the Church on the Kingdom's credit — they are the Kingdom's own life, already breaking into history through the covenant that Christ's blood ratified.

To receive the blessings of the Kingdom, on any coherent accounting, is to stand already within the Kingdom's reach. The reign may not yet be consummated. Its full glory remains ahead. But a Kingdom whose constitutive blessings are presently operative is, in the only sense that ultimately matters, already present. Progressive dispensationalism has the theological honesty — and the exegetical warrant — to say so.