“My first argument against the preterist view of Romans 11 is that it is necessarily pretty bleak. The words of the promise are glorious, and fill us with hope. ‘Life from the dead.’ ‘Fullness of the Gentiles.’ ‘All Israel shall be saved.’ ‘God will turn away ungodliness from Jacob.’ To be told that this has already been fulfilled in history, and in such a way that nobody noticed it, or remarked on it, or wrote it down, and that it made no kind of a dent at all, is kind of small beer fulfillment. It really is thin soup. It is profoundly anticlimactic. It is as though a preacher read out this glorious text from Isaiah—‘And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wine on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well-refined’ (Is. 25:6)—in order to present his argument that this was to be fulfilled at the first introduction of the chocolate fountain for the Sunday brunch at the Golden Corral. It makes me think of that old Gahan Wilson cartoon, with a group of men standing around in nondescript robes, with halos stuck on the backs of their heads, a whiskey bottle on the ground, plaster falling off the wall, the E of HEAVEN over the gate fallen over—and the caption was, ‘Somehow I thought the whole thing would be a lot classier.’”
American Milk and Honey, pp. 127-128
