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It's been hard to keep up with Thomas Ice's huge bulk.
For many years, as the No. 1 defender of what Kenneth Gentry in 1992
described as "knee-jerk, 1950s era dispensationalism," Ice
has been feverishly producing a heavy volume of pretrib-salvaging
rewrites (of articles by himself and others) at machine gun (or
better yet, Tommy Gun) speed. Although I've shared some input on some
of his output (see my internet piece "Deceiving, And Being
Deceived"), it's time to cover the rest of his territory.
In 1989 in House Divided's foreword, Gary North wrote:
"We are still waiting for Professor John Hannah, a competent and
talented church historian [at Dallas Seminary], to go into print and
show from original source documents that MacPherson's thesis is
nothing but a sham. Strangely, he has decided to remain silent."
Perhaps feeling that he could answer my research better than Dr.
Hannah could, Rev. Ice (then pastoring a tiny Bible church that
shared a small building with a Texas saloon!) quickly pulled a 1989
paper out of his holster entitled "The Origin of the Pretrib Rapture."
In it Ice had quotes from five eminent writers that he
said "were not convinced of the Mac-theory" (his term for
my findings): Sandeen (1970), Weber (1979), Reiter (1984), puce
(1975), and Bell (1967). But Ice knew that Sandeen and Bell wrote
before my printed research existed, that Reiter's quote merely
summarized Ian Rennie's tentative reaction, that puce's undocumented
statement that pretrib was "in the air in the 1820s and
1830s" was hardly a scientific conclusion, and that none of the
five included quotes from Margaret Macdonald, Edward Irving, John
Darby, or their contemporaries----and Ice has knowingly and
repeatedly aired these misleading quotes since then! (My readers
already know that Ice's 1989 reproduction of Macdonald's 1830
revelation account sloppily left out 48 words----the same 48 words
that Tim LaHaye left out when he plagiarized Ice's version in 1992!
If mechanics or lawyers or doctors were as careless as Ice, folks
would quickly get rid of them!)
Ice seems to love quoting aberrational and unorthodox
writers as well as unscholarly ones. In his 1989 paper he quoted
Ernest Sandeen's 1970 book The Roots of Fundamentalism which claimed
that Darby "was convinced about the [pretrib] doctrine as early
as 1827." His sources were two Darby letters dated 1863
("Christ coming to receive us to Himself") and 1855
(containing the same thought). (Here Sandeen proved nothing; before
1830 Christians had always used such phrases while expecting a second
advent that was "for" the church as well as "with"
the church.)
Sandeen also wrote that Irving and his followers never
taught anything "resembling the secret rapture." Not only
does my Plot book (pp. 73-80) generously disprove his assertion, but
in the Winter, 1974 Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
eminent evangelical J. Barton Payne, when reviewing my first book,
stated: "MacPherson has once and for all overthrown Ernest
Sandeen's assertions that the Irvingites never 'advocated any
doctrine resembling the secret rapture'...MacPherson has definitely
confirmed conclusions of George Ladd, Robert Gundry, and the present
reviewer that such connections [between "Darby" and
"Irving's church"] did exist...."
And why has Ice covered up Sandeen's apostasy? The
preface in the 1978 Baker Book House reprint of Sandeen's Roots
describes him as "a theological liberal" denying "the
historicity of the resurrection."
Concerning Miss Macdonald, Ice well knew during the
1980's that several of my books had been emphasizing her main point:
that part of the church [partial rapturism] would be raptured before
the revealing of Antichrist. So in his April-June, 1990 Bibliotheca
Sacra article analyzing her revelation he carefully covered up her
emphasis by quoting up to line 55 in her account, deliberately
skipping over lines 58-63 (her main point), and then continuing his
quotation of her while starting again at line 72! (See my internet
article entitled "Deceiving, And Being Deceived" and
observe Ice's perfidious manipulation of Pseudo-Ephraem and other
equally vacuous claims.)
One un-scholar that Ice leans on is Frank Marotta who,
like R. A. Huebner, is an aging, obscurantistic, pretrib-defending
member of the Darbyist pethren. (Huebner is the person Walvoord
leaned on heavily in the 1970's when opposing me even though Huebner
never attended seminary, college, or even Bible school!) Like
Huebner's, Marotta's writing has numerous copying errors when quoting
others! Both Marotta and Ice, echoing fellow un-scholar John pay,
continue to promote an 18th century pastor, Morgan Edwards, as a pretrib.
Both know that they have to twist or cover up Edwards'
historicism (the belief that the tribulation has long been occurring
during the church age) in order to pass Edwards off as a futurist
pretrib. Marotta's 1995 booklet on Edwards was aware that Edwards
viewed the Turkish Ottoman Empire (which was then already four
centuries old) as Rev. 13's second beast while also seeing a future
aspect of that empire. So what did Marotta do? He did what any
unscrupulous pretrib promoter would do. He covered up the past aspect
of that empire that Edwards noted and discussed only the future
aspect that Edwards also saw!
Ice knew that Marotta's pief, one-sided discussion of
that empire was potentially dangerous because researchers could
easily be drawn to it and then discover Marotta's pazen twisting of
facts. So when Ice reproduced Marotta's comments in his Jan.-Feb.,
1996 Pre-Trib Perspectives under the title "Dave MacPherson's
The Rapture Plot: Weighed and Found Wanting," Ice played it safe
and deleted Marotta's entire empire section!
Marotta and Ice have drawn support for their
anti-Macdonald crusade from even Columba G. Flegg, an ecumenical
Greek Orthodox priest in England whose work 'Gathered Under Apostles'
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1992) dishonestly portrays pretrib development
among those in the early Irvingite orbit. Although he admits (p. 423)
that Irvingism taught a "translation before the great
tribulation," his anti-Macdonald bias shows as early as pp. 4-5
where he mentions my 1975 book The Incredible Cover-up and adds:
"The conclusions reached in this work and the rationale behind
them are hardly convincing."
On p. 45 Flegg discusses John Cardale's account in the
Dec., 1830 issue of the Irvingite journal The Morning Watch of his
visit to a Port Glasgow prayer meeting. A woman present that Cardale
identified as Macdonald prophesied that "the coming of the
Lord" would deliver the church from future earthly
"judgments"----a coming interpreted as pretrib by Irvingite
observers of Macdonald who returned to London and soon echoed her
distinctive teaching in the same journal. Two pages later Cardale
again identified Macdonald as the same prophetess. But Flegg's
readers are kept in the dark concerning her because although he does
include her prophecy, he describes her as merely "one of the
women present"! (Similarly, Darby's 1853 book, when plagiarizing
the details Cardale had published of the same meeting, at least
acknowledged Macdonald as the prophetess even though he carefully
omitted the escapist coming that she prophesied. Even though Darby
and Flegg have covered up different aspects of that meeting, the
effect has been the same!)
In Pre-Trib Perspectives (Feb., 2002) Ice told of the
"discovery" of another pretrib teacher in the early 1300's
in Italy that has great (I'm sarcastic here) documentation. The
culprit was a pother Dolcino, but unfortunately his writings don't
exist! Long after his death an anonymous writer wrote a secondhand
history of Dolcino's writings which declare no time length for
Antichrist's reign which follows Dolcino and his followers being
"transferred to Paradise," after which reign Dolcino will
become the pope! Ice also knows that this "discovery" was
edited several times between the 1300's and the 1900's! If this
"doctrine" came from anything other than too much wine
drinking, the anonymous history doesn't say. Obviously this
"discovery" died with Dolcino.
This is just a taste of the massive fantasy and
dishonesty in pretrib circles. The whole sordid story is documented
in my 300-page book The Rapture Plot (see armageddonbooks.com or call 800-967-7345).
As an American, Ice believes in majority rule. But
when it comes to rapture views, maybe he and other pretrib desperados
can explain why they don't follow the only rapture view held by the
majority (easily 99 percent by even Ice's standards) of Christians
before 1830!
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