Last Days Sanity
The Last Days According to Jesus, by R.C. Sproul
Reviewed by R.C. Sproul Jr.

I believe I came by my earlier panmillenialism naturally, or genetically. While theology was most decidedly a topic of conversation around the dinner table when I was a boy, the end times never came up. In high school, I picked up a copy of Satan is Alive and Well on Planet Earth, Hal Lindsey's sequel to The Late Great Planet Earth. While its style didn't fit what I had learned, its substance (what there was of it) didn't clash—because I knew nothing. In college I heard a lecture on partial preterism, an eschatology which says that much of what many people believe is future prophecy actually happened in 70 AD. I was so excited I ran back to my dorm and called my dad. He told me, "That's preterism; no one believes that anymore."

By the time I got through seminary I had become committed to an optimistic view of the future. And so it is natural that many, upon reading Dr. R.C. Sproul's The Last Days According to Jesus, wondered aloud if somehow I had persuaded my father to adopt a partial-preterist, postmillennial view. Which serves as the theological poster-child for the post hoc ergo propter hoc, or "after this, therefore because of this" logical fallacy. I was both postmillenial and a partial preterist before Dr. Sproul, but I can take no credit—or blame, if we're wrong—for changing his mind on the matter

Credit for this happy change in his thinking should be shared by three men, two of whom are probably in hell. The third, Dr. Ken Gentry, I trust will see glory. Dr. Gentry has done such outstanding work on eschatological issues that it is easy to forget how wide his knowledge is. His work on the dating of Revelation was a big help to my father. J. Stuart Russell was another of the three. His seminal work The Parousia, was the first great exposition of the full preterist position, that holds that all biblical prophecy is already fulfilled (a damnable heresy in my judgment, as it denies the resurrection of the body, among other essentials of the faith.)

But the most important force in shaping my father's thinking on these issues came from a rank liberal, Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer argued that both Jesus and the apostles affirmed a soon return of Christ. If He did not return soon, he rightly argued, then He was mistaken, a sinner, and not the Lamb without blemish. That assault on the authority of the Bible sent Dr. Sproul off on a search for an apologetic to answer that claim. Out of that came an answer for the hope that is in him, The Last Days According to Jesus.

Dr. Sproul is at his best when writing on issues about which his passions run high. Here is one example. But do not think that because of his passions that he was anything less than cautious, gracious, even at times tentative. This book will open your eyes if you think the Bible offers only three options: pre-, post- and mid-trib. And it will encourage your heart if you've already left behind dispensationalism.

Fresh Fruit
Spirit of the Fruit, by R.C. Sproul Jr.
Reviewed by Rick Saenz

Is any part of the Bible more appealing to the Pelagian within us than a list? Give us a list of prohibitions, and we proceed to smack one another over the head with it, or to develop a parallel list of extenuating circumstances that excuses our own shortcomings. Give us a list of virtues, and we begin to labor away at developing the ones that come easy to us, telling ourselves that we'll get on with the more difficult ones just as soon as we have these down.

Perhaps the most deadly of these lists is the one that Paul gives us in Galatians 5:22-23, commonly known as the nine-fold fruit of the Spirit. Paul gives names to these nine facets of the fruit that are easily misunderstood by us citizens of the Republic of Nice, names that have inspired an endless parade of treacly sermons, where preachers rhapsodize about behaviors that bear more resemblance to a 19th century Victorian view of moral excellence than to anything you'll find in the Bible.

Since this path is so eagerly trodden by broad evangelicals, I was a bit surprised when R.C. decided to present a twelve-part series on the fruit of the Spirit—so inspirational! so devotional! But it didn't surprise me at all that during those twelve weeks we walked a path that was very different—much overgrown, somewhat wild, even spooky in places. The journey is filled with novelties, but don't let that scare you; they sound novel only because we have been taught over the years not to raise our eyes from the path and take a look at the beauty and wisdom that surrounds us.

Much of the power of Spirit of the Fruit is due to R.C.'s constant and careful consideration of the context in which this short list appears. Did you ever stop to think that the list appears in Paul's letter to the Galatians, perhaps the least nice of his letters? Or that it appears in a chapter that contrasts the slavery of fleshly life with freedom in Christ? Or that it is directly preceded by another list, one which describes those who will be excluded from the kingdom? Or that the nine virtues are described as being the fruit of the Spirit, rather than the result of any striving on our own part?

These are only a few of the contextual issues that R.C. considers in this series. In addition, he is diligent to challenge the modern cultural understanding of terms such as patience, kindness, goodness, and the rest with a thorough survey of the way the Bible uses these terms. And as usual plenty of attention is paid to the craftiness of the serpent, who continually entices us with his own wax fruit.

Spirit of the Fruit contains two introductory lectures, nine lectures looking at each of the nine facets of the fruit, and a concluding lecture. It is available from Draught Horse Press as two six-lecture sets, either on cassette or on CDs.