My Road to Progressive Dispensationalism

For as long as I have studied theology seriously, I have considered myself a dispensationalist. I began, however, firmly within the traditional camp, shaped by McClain, Walvoord, Ryrie, Pentecost, Thomas Ice, and others of similar conviction. My acquaintance with Progressive Dispensationalism (PD) came only through the critical lens of these traditional authors, who tended to caricature the system and present it in an unfavorably distorted light. I read none of the primary PD literature myself; the negative impression I had inherited was sufficient to dissuade me. After all, Ryrie had assured me that PD was scarcely dispensationalism at all.

The Unexpected Door: The Eternal State

My approach to PD came, ironically, through an unexpected door. While still a traditional dispensationalist, I became absorbed in the question of the eternal state — what heaven and the new creation would actually be like. Faced with two competing conceptions — heaven as an ethereal, disembodied realm wholly discontinuous with present existence, and heaven as the renewal and consummation of the created order — I found myself drawn decisively to the latter. Randy Alcorn's Heaven was particularly formative during this period. Long before I had read a single page of PD literature, and entirely on the strength of biblical-theological reflection, I had already concluded that there must be substantial continuity between the millennial kingdom and the eternal state. The conviction was firmly settled in my mind.

Vlach and Blaising: The New Creation Model

The actual gateway to PD, curiously, was Dr. Michael Vlach's blog. Among the many fine pieces he had posted there, I came across one describing what he called the "New Creation Model." Reading it was, in effect, recognizing my own convictions — articulated more clearly than I had managed to articulate them myself. In that article Vlach commended Craig A. Blaising's contribution to Three Views on the Millennium and Beyond, and so I read my first piece of properly PD scholarship. Blaising's essay was a revelation. It supplied a robust theological substructure for the holistic, creation-affirming eschatology I had been groping toward, anchoring my intuitions in a coherent biblical-theological framework. I had already embraced holistic redemption and millennial-eternal continuity; what Blaising provided was the architecture beneath them. From there the inference was natural: if PD proved this illuminating on a question I had already worked through independently, it deserved a serious hearing on the rest. I began, at last, to read PD on its own terms.

Saucy: Reshaping Ecclesiology and the Spirit's Work

The transition, of course, was gradual rather than sudden — a matter of patient reading rather than overnight conversion. If Blaising introduced me to the New Creation Model and deepened my grasp of holistic redemption (with Vlach as the threshold), Robert Saucy was the one who reshaped my ecclesiology and my understanding of the Spirit's work. Saucy persuaded me that Spirit baptism is not a phenomenon unique to the present age, and he reframed for me the categories of "the people of God" and of the church as the community of the New Covenant.

Bock: The Final Piece on the Kingdom

The slowest transition concerned the Kingdom of God. By this point I considered myself an intermediate — a "revised dispensationalist" in the sense Vlach uses the term (or "integrative," as I used to call it). Vlach and McClain still exercised significant influence on my thinking here, and despite the steps I had already taken, I continued to resist any robustly present-tense reading of the Kingdom. It was Darrell Bock who decisively broke this final hold. His argument that the salvific benefits we presently receive from the exalted Christ — the indwelling of the Spirit, forgiveness, and the rest — are not merely New Covenant blessings but specifically Kingdom blessings, gave me the conceptual key I had been missing. I had already accepted these as New Covenant benefits; what Bock showed was that, on the very logic of the texts, they cannot be severed from the Kingdom itself.

Once I saw it, I could not unsee it. Returning to McClain, I noticed a striking internal tension. In chapter 18 of The Greatness of the Kingdom, when McClain treats the salvific benefits in their Old Testament anticipation, he straightforwardly identifies them as Kingdom benefits. Yet when he turns to the present dispensation, he acknowledges that those same benefits are now, in fact, being dispensed — but abruptly declines to call them Kingdom benefits, even though these same benefits were called Kingdom benefits in his treatment of the Old Testament.

The same pattern recurs in George N. H. Peters and, more recently, in Vlach. The benefits are treated as Kingdom benefits in the Old Testament predictions. Later, they are acknowledged to be present, but somehow the connection to the Kingdom is lost with respect to the present benefits. So, following Bock, I understood that a benefit cannot be a Kingdom benefit in promise and then cease to be one upon delivery — least of all when the Giver is the enthroned Messianic King Himself, dispensing those very benefits for which the Father has exalted Him.

Conclusion

With this final piece in place, my transition from Traditional to Progressive Dispensationalism was complete. The four authors most responsible for it, in the order they shaped me, were Vlach, Blaising, Saucy, and Bock.