Monergism.com lets leaky-Canoneers peddle their goods, BUT...

Most of my readers are probably aware of Monergism.com. It's a pretty wonderful site in many ways, offering articles and sermons and lectures from the broad perspective of Reformed theology.

Now I note that they've got actual representatives of the positions defending both "cessationism" and "continuationism." That is, both men who believe that Scripture is complete and sufficient, and that modern claims to revelatory or attesting sign-gifts are fake and sub-Biblical, and those who want to pretty up the modern claims and sneak in some sort of ongoing semi-revelatory dribble — both, I say, are allowed to present and defend their own positions. In their own voices, with their own arguments.

Interesting, eh? Very interesting.

So I'm immediately wondering: will they have got actual representatives of the positions defending both Covenant Theology and dispensationalism? After all, dispensationalism in no way contrasts with affirming doctrines of grace. Further, the vast majority of dispensationalists stand shoulder-to-shoulder with other Reformed believers in adamantly defending the sufficiency and perspicuity and full authority of Scripture — in contrast to the "continuationist" position.

So one would naturally assume that they, too, would be allowed to present and defend their own approach to Scripture.

(This reasonable openness, for instance, would contrast with the silly obscurantism of the second site discussed here.)

That approach would make sense. It is what clear-eyed rational thinking would move one to expect.

But if I were forced to guess, before checking it out? I'd guess "no." They wouldn't dare let dispensationalists themselves actually present their own view, in their own voices, apart from the caricatured (dare I say "slanderous"?) misrepresentations with which so many "Reformed" tranquilize themselves.

Ah, now I see under Doctrine and Theology a whole section on Covenant Theology. It appears to me that all the speakers are advocates of CT, not critics of it. Okay, so, that's one side.

Oh, but wait. Here it is. I found dispensationalism.

Where is it? Next to "Covenant Theology," as another respectable approach to Scripture?

In your dreams, Phillips.

Ah, no. It is under Heresy and Bad Theology — along with Islam, Open Theism, Postmodernism, Emerging Church, Jehovahs Witnesses, Atheism, Roman Catholicism, and the DaVinci code. Ah, I love the smell of "Reformed" humility and love in the morning.

And yep, what a surprise: far as I can tell, all the speakers are critics of dispensationalism. Not one advocate.

Now that is interesting, isn't it? A position — "continuationism" — that is commonly propped up by such historical and exegetical nuttiness, and very frequently directly causes so much ecclesiastical and personal harm, is presented by its own advocates. Adrian Warnock — a brother who displays an unhealthy obsession with desperate efforts to legitimatize charismaticism, who is so "open" that he can't bring himself to criticize its worst and craziest and most harmful manifestations — he gets to propound his own view.

But dispensationalists cannot be allowed that same respect.

And btw, a huge "Reformed" bogeyman is how supposedly recent dispensationalism is. (I.e. a century or so more recent than Covenant Theology; evidently that was a critical hundred years, emptying the Bible of all previously-undetected wisdom or formulations.)

So help me with the math here. Which is more recent? 1830s? Or 1906?

So Warnock and Piper and Storms get to try their level best to doll up "continuationism" and make it sound Biblical.

But the position held and propounded, to one degree or another, by John MacArthur, S. Lewis Johnson, Alva J. McClain, Eric Sauer, (Spurgeon successor) W. Graham Scroggie, J. Oliver Buswell, Allan A. MacRae, and a host of others — file that one under "Heresy and Bad Theology," and assign it to a hit squad or two.

Sigh.

Pathetic.