How would a potential Third Temple be constructed?

[Bono]

Second, I'll assume you're counting Christians as one of the "bitchy groups". This is very stupid as the vast majority of Christians could not care less about the Temple Mount. Like around 95%. Only a handful of nutjobs like jmfcst do.

this is so full of misrepresentations:

1) I have no personal interest in the Temple Mount.  I, myself, along with every other believer filled with the spirit of Jesus Christ, am the temple of God.

2) There is a MUCH larger percentage than 5% of Christians who believe the Jerusalem temple will be rebuilt.  In fact, I would venture to guess that the vast majority of millennialists believe the temple will be rebuilt. (and, as a side-note, millennialism was the norm during the 1st four centuries of Christianity.  It wasn’t until the formation of the Catholic Church that the belief was pushed aside)

Justin Martyr says himself in the Dialogue with Trypho, that while he himself is a premillenialist, there were many other Christians you disagree. That is immaterial anyway. They weren't dispensational premillenialists--their premillenialism was church centered, not Israel centered. I know you never read anyone with which you disagree, but I'm still going to recomend you check the work of George E. Ladd, who is the most known modern proponent of "histoci" premillenialism. Dispensationalism was invented by John Nelson Darby(Peace Be Upon Him), regardless of whatever lineage you might try to claim for it.

[Bono]

Here is "my reaction".

First, Justin Martyr. We find his eschatological views in his Dialog with Trypho, the Jew. There is no dispute that he was a Premillenialist. But a few considerations blunt the strenght of this fact as an argument for the universality of Premillenialism in the early church. First, Justin makes clear that not all Christians agree with him about premillennialism. In Chapter 80 of this work, Trypho, the Jew, is cross-examining Justin about his belief that Jerusalem will be rebuilt as the center of a joyful fellowship of the Christ and his people during the millennium, asking him if he really affirms a doctrine held also by the Jews? Justin replies:

"I am not so miserable a fellow, Trypho, as to say one thing and think another. I admitted to you formerly that I and many others are of this opinion, and [believe] that such will take place, as you assuredly are aware; but, on the other hand, I signified to you that many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise. "

But this is not the only problem. Justin's premillenialism was clearly distinct from modern dispensational premillenialism: one of the great thrusts of Justin's Dialog  is the doctrine that Christians are the true Jews. This is clear when he says in chapter 11:

“For the true spiritual Israel, and descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham…are we who have been led to God through this crucified Christ…”

Moreover, when Justin is speaking of the kingdom for which Christians look, he denies that it is a human kingdom - "you suppose we speak of a human kingdom, whereas we speak of that which is with God." Justin speaks of a general judgment at Christ's second coming, when death "shall for ever quit those who believe on Him and be no more: when some are sent to be punished unceasingly into judgment and condemnation of fire: but others shall exist in freedom from suffering, from corruption, and from grief and in immortality."

From these statements one would suppose there was no room for an earthly millennium in his teaching, yet inconsistently he says elsewhere that there will be a resurrection of the dead and a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged, and "that thereafter the general and, in short, the eternal resurrection and judgment of all men would likewise take place." Justin's millennium would have no special place at all for the Jew, for he tells us over and over that Christians "are the true Israelite race".

I think this does away with any claim dispensationalism can lay on Justin Martyr's lineage.

Irenaeus, too, denied any special Judaic character in the Millenial kingdom. In Book 5, Chapter 32 of Against Heresies, he writes:



He equates Abraham's seed not with Jews, but with those "who are justified by faith". I think this also nails the coffin on the claim that he was some sort of proto-dispensationalist. Moreover, while he does affirm that the Anti-Christ will rule in the second half of Daniel's seventieth week, he is not very clear how "the sacrifice and the libation shall be taken away" during the "half-week," or three and one-half years of Antichrist's reign. Also, he says nothing of the seventy weeks, so we do not know how he placed the seventieth in relation to the former sixty nine.

As for Hyppolytus, I am surprised to seem him quoted as someone to which credence should be given, considering he was a who believed in the notion that the six days of creation were typical of the history of humanity, and as such men would live six thousand years (with each day representing a thousand years) before the millennial sabbath. Keep this in mind, because I'm going to come back to it later.

In the same chapter you quoted, 22 from Book II, but a part which you conveniently left out, when he talks about what the taking away of the sacrifice and oblation means, he writes:

"And when [the antichrist] comes, the sacrifice and oblation will be removed, which now are offered to God in every place by the nations. "

He wasn't talking of a sacrifice in the rebuilt Jewish temple, he was talking about transubstantiation! Ie, he envisions the antichrist persecuting the Church, not the Jews, thus establishing that he, too, was no proto-dispensationalist

More generally, none of this indicates that premillenialism had an origin in apostolic Christianity.

As the quotations from Justin have already suggested, a Christian premillennialist could recognize a remarkable similarity between his own views and those of the Jews at this point. This tends to confirm the view that premillennialism originated within ancient Judaism. Masselink in his polemic work against premillennialism, Why Thousand Years? asked the question:

"What is the origin of this strange doctrine?" The careful study of church history will furnish us with the conclusive answer. Premillennialism is a descent of ancient Judaism. There is a striking resemblance between the offspring and the parent. The old Jewish conceptions of an external Messianic kingdom have found their perfect embodiment in the Chiliastic theory of the millennium. Premillennialism is a relic of Judaism.

Geerhardus Vos in his Pauline Eschatology offers abundant evidence that within pre-Christian Judaism there had grown up an eschatological system which related the idea of the Messianic kingdom to the eternal state by way of making them consecutive phases in God's plan for the end of history. That is to say, the Messianic kingdom occurs before the final judgment at the end of history and the eternal state. That's where Hyppolitus belief comes in. His belief in the day--thousand years equivalent is reminiscent of a similar (not not identical) division in the apocryphal book of Enoch.  Also, in 4 Ezra, for instance, the Messianic kingdom lasts four hundred years at the end of history. It seems likely that early Christians coming out of a judaistic background imported this view into their new faith. Rather than spiritualizing the Messianic kingdom or in some way seeing the Messianic kingdom as already present in the church, they retained the entire Jewish eschatology and placed it at the end of history.

This ancestry of premillennialism is, of course, not conclusive against it. A premillennialist might claim that these views developed in inter-testamental Judaism from Old Testament rootage. Yet, it does provide an explanation for the early Premillennialism which is consistent with rejecting it as the authentic eschatology of the Bible.

I end with a final note on Augustine. The tune was set against premillenialism since the excesses of the Montanists, some of whom (but far from all), held to an extreme form of premillenialism. This was way before Augustine came into play, though even he himself was a premillenialist before coming to his amillenial conclusions. That said, there are clear indications that Augustine believed in a personal antichrist who comes on the scene in the final little season before Christ's return after the thousand years are completed. (Note chapters 13 and 19 of Book 20 of the City of God). I note this to avoid conflating he two issues like you did back there. Many (most?) historical premillenialists, with a perfectly non-dispensational ecclesiology and israeology, believed in a personal antichrist, and so do many amillenialists for that matter.

[Bono]

jmfcst, I think it's you who doesn'tread what others said. I never said they didn't believe the temple would be rebuilt. Hell, Augustine believed that and he was an amillenialist--Catholic doctrine until the Reformation said the same thing, in fact. What I said was:

Justin Martyr says himself in the Dialogue with Trypho, that while he himself is a premillenialist, there were many other Christians you disagree. That is immaterial anyway. They weren't dispensational premillenialists--their premillenialism was church centered, not Israel centered. I know you never read anyone with which you disagree, but I'm still going to recomend you check the work of George E. Ladd, who is the most known modern proponent of "histoci" premillenialism. Dispensationalism was invented by John Nelson Darby(Peace Be Upon Him), regardless of whatever lineage you might try to claim for it.

I didn't say futurism (the belief most prophetic texts in the Bible are yet to be fulfilled, and will be just prior to the Second Coming of Jesus) was invented by John Nelson Darby. I would be an idiot to claim anything like that, because I know perfectly well there have been scores of futurists in Church history. All I was denying was that they were dispensationalist. The same George Ladd I mentioned in that post was a futurist (he's with the Lord now), he just wasn't a dispensationalist.

I also don't see how you expect me to quote the Bible to document post-biblical Church history, but there you go. Ladd surveyed early church eschatology and found no traces of dispensationalism, though he did find a lot of futurism.

To reiterate--I never said some early Christians never believed the temple would not be rebuilt, nor that most prophecies were yet to be fulfilled. I just denied that they were proto-dispensationalists, and none of your arguments disprove that, for you are arguing against something I never said.

[Bono]

To reiterate--I never said some early Christians never believed the temple would not be rebuilt, nor that most prophecies were yet to be fulfilled. I just denied that they were proto-dispensationalists, and none of your arguments disprove that, for you are arguing against something I never said.

Then, I think you've got the wrong car, McFly, for this thread deals with the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple.

But, since you've pulled us off topic...name a single non-Judadizing Christian denomination that doesn't believe in dispensation. 

If you believe that the new covenant did away with the dietary laws of unclean meat, then you are, by definition, a dispensationalist.

Massive red herring. Believing in different dispensations is not the same as believing in the system known as dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is an overarching hermeneutical grid with which to understand scripture. When it comes do dispensations, the main difference about how dispensationalism and covenant theology look at them is that dispensationalism tends to emphasize the discontinuity, and covenant theology tends to emphasize the continuity and see different 'dispensations' as simply different ways of administering the same covenant of grace.

If you care to learn more (which I know you don't, but I'll say it anyway, you can look at this simple comparison chart.

You are more of a Progressive Dispensationalist, though, so you may find that not everything in that chart's description of dispensationalism applies to yet. I just don't know any one chrd comparing prog dispensationalism to covenant theology.