Back in the Saddle (sort of)

Well, I meant to get back into blogging full force today but events have conspired against me. My prime blogging time (early morning) was taken up by snow shoveling. We got about two inches, but it was supposed to be rain. Instead, it was super saturated wet snow, the type that clogs the auger on snow blowers, so I had to do most by hand. The good news is I am going skiing this afternoon, and the higher elevations got some good new coverage.

So I'll save the first formal post from my Sunday School on post-millennialism for tomorrow.

Speaking of school, I'm to be a professor again, although this time will be as an adjunct rather than a tenured prof. I am delighted about this, and by God's grace I can afford to do it, because one does not adjunct for the money, which on an hourly basis (when you add in the lecture preps) earns you less than entry-level at a burger joint. I'll be teaching a class at Daniel Webster College, a small (550 students) private college (very beautiful and New England-ish) close enough to my house that I could jog or bike, weather permitting. I’ll find out what I am teaching today, looks like either Engineering Dynamics or Computational Linear Algebra. Hopefully I will get aphysics course next semester.

I did want to answer one question that came up in the comments, which is what does preterism make of Luke 21:24, They will fall by the sword and will be taken as prisoners to all the nations. Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Gentiles until the times of the Gentiles are fulfilled.

Clearly the problematic part for preterists is the word until, which indeed implies that there is a terminus of the Gentile trampling of Jerusalem. I am not an expert on preterist apologetics, being somewhat of a neophyte, but from what I have read there seems to be no consensus. Some argue that the "times of the Gentiles" are fulfilled at the Second Coming, i.e. it coincides with the end of history.

Another view is that it corresponds to the three and a half years of the Roman response to the Jewish revolt, culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem. I tend to agree with this position, although at the moment must confess ambivalence. The latter view, that the "times of the gentiles" was short-lived (and differs from the "fullness of the Gentiles" (Rom. 11:25) weakens, at least at first glance, (but by no means precludes) the use of Luke 21:24 as part of the preterist argument that the age of the Jews ended in A.D. 70. The complete argument that the Jewish age ended, preterists would say, is based on a critical mass of supporting scripture rather than any single passage.