So basically, you could still be a dispensational premillennialist; you’d just have to accept that literalism isn’t really a functional part of that school’s eschatology. It’s just a poor choice of wording.
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That said, there are of course other, better reasons not to be a dispensationalist or a premillennialist. ;-)

signed,
A Tentatively Historical Premillennialist Slowly but Surely Sliding to the Dark Side (a.k.a. Amillennialism)

there’s my spare change.

But hey, I’m leaning a-mill these days, so what do I know? Seriously, Robert, if you’ve never really given a-mill it’s fair due, please do so. I was left wagging my finger at the pages and saying, “Ah, now that makes sense.” Once I stopped making the Nicodemus-like mistake of reading a physical/literal meaning into thing, it made sense. Once I fully understood the a-mill timeline as they present it (e.g., Kim Riddlebarger in “Case for Amillennialism”) and once I read those verses in that context, things just make sense. It’s like, um, coming to Calvinism and suddenly realizing… well, you know :-)

I am still dispy premil, but probably not for much longer. This post is just one example of why. I keep seeing lots of things that just don’t work.

Phil,

I ask them about locusts and they stammer with, ?oh, um, well, that probably means helicopters or something.? (too much Left Behind, eh?)

Actually, in Left Behind, the locusts were literal demonic bugs that flew around saying “Abaddon” and stinging people.

Seriously, Robert, if you?ve never really given a-mill it?s fair due, please do so.

I’m working on it. I’m hopefully going to do a Sunday School class on different views of the millenium and Revelation, and so this is part of my studying. I want people to understand how one can hold other eschatological viewpoints and still love Jesus and take the Bible literally, so we can look at men like RC Sproul or JI Packer or even Hank Hannegraf and realize they are our friends, not apostate heretics. If we can’t all agree, at least we could try to understand one another.

As I said earlier, I’m leaning postmil right now, but I don’t know enough about amill to say one way or another.

I guess I shouldn’t have tossed in the flippant “Left Behind” comment since I haven’t read the LaHaye & Jenkins treatment of the issue. The incident I had in mind was really a mocknig of some of the responses I’ve heard preached by the Hal Lindsey fans I knew in the days before LaHaye & Jenkins.

As I said earlier, I’m leaning postmil right now, but I don’t know enough about amill to say one way or another.

I’m glad you’re looking amill. To me, the big problem with either literal-millenialist positions is that they’re still premised on a literal 1000 year period of measurable time. This is a *highly* symbolic stretch of verses, and there is certainly Biblical precedent for seeing the phase “thousand years” as simply being metaphorical for a long period of time [ref. Psalm 90:4, 2 Peter 3:8]. Then there are the numerous time-gaps and contradictions involved in the 1000 year reign view.

Read this and see if you like Riddlebarger’s style: http://www.the-highway.com/millennium_Riddlebarger.html

I’m faking trying to crawl back out, but Anthony Hoekema’s “The Bible and the Future” is On Deck in my reading list, and I expect it to nail me in.
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Btw, one attraction of amillennialism to me is how compatible it is somewhat with historical premillennialism (or at least the strongest features of premillennialism). Hoekema, for instance, believes in a future antichrist figure preceding the second coming (as per Paul), etc.
Equating amillennialism with a totally symbolic reading of eschatology is incorrect, IMO.

I have been wondering about the passage in question for a long time. As you point out, it is hard to understand where one could find enough blood to fill a valley that long up to a meter and a half! I do not pretend, at this point, to know the answer. But I shall share a couple of things that may be of some small interest. The first is that in the translations I checked, I found “poured out,” “came out”, and “flowed out.” I would first say that while it is pretty natural to take those, in conjunction with the imagery of being “up to,” or “even unto” a horse’s bridle as indicating a pool of blood a meter and a half deep, but the text doesn’t actually seem to *demand* that imagery. Blood is messy stuff–a good book on the subject is THE EVIDENCE NEVER LIES. I can’t remember the author’s name, unfortunately, but he did a huge amount of work refining how bloodstain evidence is used in criminal investigation, and made me aware that there is more than one sense in which a crime scene can be understood to be covered in blood. The upshot is that a strictly “literal” reading of the passage simply doesn’t offer enough information to know whether we’re talking about a pool of blood, or the hazy after-effects of an army being vaporized by explosive force–or something else. We just know that we’re talking about cataclysmic judgement on a host of people.

My next point is one I’ve made to my Sunday School class many times: prophecy is generally easiest to understand in hindsight. Not being able to understand a prophecy before its fulfillment is not a good indicator of how to interpret it.

I am not, by the way, advocating a strictly literal interpretation of the passage, any more than I would have advocated a woodenly literal interpretation of Daniel’s prophetic visions. Sometimes these things *are* symbolic, sometimes they aren’t. I try to figure them out based on context, and how prophecy has been fulfilled in the past. Sometimes I am still stumped, and there is no shame in that. Daniel had some of the most tremendous visions imaginable, but much of the meaning was shut up to him until the end time.

If you were to ask whether I am pre-mil, post-trib, what have you, I would have to answer that I don’t feel like I have enough data to weigh in with more than an educated guess. I tend pre-mil, but I don’t think of it as exclusively a dispensationalist position.

First off, blood does splatter, so MacArthur may have a point, but something implies blood flowing that deep. So, realizing that it would take a few trillion people’s blood to make this possible is important. But then you have to realize that “God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise” (1 Cor. 1:27a). I mean, yeah there are no clues or hints of anything like this happening, but who’s to say that something like that is impossible when you are talking about a guy who can think you out of existence? Maybe that’s extreme, but the idea of the entire Body of Christ going to heaven at once is a little extreme too. I mean, one man being able to fulfill so many prophecies simply in the way he was born and the way he died is incredible, unbelievable, extreme. I don’t know what the whole postmil premil dispie amil talk was about, but I just know that God seems to do things in ways that no one expects or can see coming, so I have no problem taking this passage literally. I just say, “Well, that kinda sounds impossible to me, but then again, I’m not God, so yeah. God’s power is amazing.”