christian hope through fulfilled prophecy -- a book review

Charles Meeks' Christian Hope through Fulfillfed Prophecy:  An Exposition of Evangelican Preterism is a magnificent attempt to present the future of eschatology for evangelicals.  That future, though, looks nothing like the preterist "last days" of Dispensastionalism.  Instead, it's a future that looks firmly and faithfully toward what God has already done for us and in human history, and lays claim to God in our future as the only hope of the world.

What Meeks offers is a reexamination of the data of Scripture in an effort to reframe and reclaim that faith in God.  Instead of the "doom and gloom" escapism of so much evangelical eschatology, Christian Hope through Fulfilled Prophecy looks to the earliest days of the Church -- to the first century -- to find in Scripture a faith that affirms God's work within human history as the only hope we Christians have.  Instead of looking forward to something God has yet to do, Meeks finds in Scripture a faith that looks at what God has already done.

Make no doubt about it, though, this will be a difficult book for so many to read.  Because it forces us to examine certain deeply held traditions about what Scripture says that are foreign to the biblical text itself.  So Meeks offers, in chapter two, one of the most accessible reads about how preterists exegete the text.

While Meeks and I disagree on whether the biblical text is entirely preterist -- I don't think it is -- this is a book I'll turn to again and again in offering a strong refutations to dispensationalists.  My hope is in the God who has already accomplished ushering in the New Covenant in Jesus Christ -- completed as that was in the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 -- not in being rescued from "the end of the world".

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I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, as part of the Speakeasy book review program, in exchange for my honest review here.