The Highway Forums General Discussion Open Forum Progressive Parallelism

Beale and Smalley and Johnson for that matter, flesh out more thoroughly the progressive parallelism advocated by Hendricksen

However, none of these authors manages to give a textual reason for the theory of repetition they all espouse, made especially difficult for them when you consider John’s constant use of conjunctions to tie each section together. It’s an imaginative theory; but I think it is incumbent on them to prove from the text itself that their method is valid, especially considering that they do not treat any other book of the bible (even the apocalyptic ones) in the same manner. And it seems to me that they are much too reliant on divisions of John’s letter that are not obvious in the original text. In other words, they rely on the rather random chapter and verse divisions, of which John’s First Century audience would have been completely unaware.
Anthony Hoekema, one of the leading proponents of the Progressive Parallelism view, understood where the “fatal flaw” was in his theory. In his book, The Bible and The Future, Hoekema wrote, commenting on Revelation 20:1-6:
“The premillennial interpretation of these verses understands them as describing a millennial reign of Christ on earth which will follow his Second Coming. And it is true that the Second Coming of Christ has been referred to in the previous chapter (see 19:11-16). If, then, one thinks of Revelation 20 as setting forth what follows chronologically after what has been described in chapter 19, one would indeed conclude that the millennium of Revelation 20:1-6 will come after the return of Christ. As has been indicated above, however, chapters 20-22 comprise the last of the seven sections of the book of Revelation, and therefore do not describe what follows the return of Christ. Rather, Revelation 20:1 takes us back once again to the beginning of the New Testament era.” (pp. 226-227)
In other words, Hoekema admitted that if chapter 20 continues chronologically on the heels of chapter 19, the thousand years described therein would occur after the return of Christ. However, because such a conclusion runs contrary to his system, Hoekema dismisses the idea of chronology and argues for the consistency of the system rather than the consistency of the text. He gives us no grammatical or exegetical evidence for the idea of parallelism; he just assumes it and charges forward….