Review for Themelios

In case anyone’s interested, I’ve reviewed A Case for Historic Premillennialism: An Alternative to “Left Behind” Eschatology (edited by Craig L. Blomberg and Sung Wook Chung) for the latest issue of Themelios.  You can read the review here.

Here’s my concluding analysis for the review:

Although CHP addresses many important issues relating to nondispensational premillennialism and does an adequate job of refuting its rival, overall the work fails to make a clear, comprehensive case for historic premillennialism. As one might expect (given its origin), the feel of the book is more that of a series of papers presented at a conference on historic premillennialism, than of a monograph intended to present a cohesive case for that system (as its title suggests). While several of the articles are excellent and make a strong positive contribution to the overall case, others, although good in their own right, contribute very little to the actual case for nondispensational premillennialism. The result is a work that offers many good arguments in favor of historic premillennialism and provides a helpful critique of “Left Behind” eschatology, but that never really defines either in a way that makes their fundamental differences clear (outside of their differing views of the timing of the rapture) or that advances a cohesive, systematic case for its preferred premillennial scheme. Perhaps the best way to summarize my impression of CHP is that I found its essays helpful and informative, but overall the book failed to deliver what its title had led me to expect.