"Is the Resurrection Already Past? Examining the Full Preterist Claim"
"I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them." (Acts 20:29, 30)
Those words of concern were spoken by the Apostle Paul to the Ephesian elders, warning them that some among their own number would eventually become the source of corruption and division within the congregation.
Those older men who were taking the lead in the congregation of Ephesus had broken free from the snare of pagan religion. They now had the freedom of the Christ. Yet they would end up abandoning that freedom and, driven by pride and ego, they would come up with false ideas and try to replace Jesus by drawing others after themselves.
Since I broke free from the false teachings of a high-control religious group, I've joined with others who likewise have found the freedom of Christ. Yet, sadly, over the years I've seen the very thing Paul feared would happen. Some abandon their freedom and come up with personal interpretations that cause others — weaker ones — to follow after them. "Fierce wolves speaking twisted things to draw away disciples after themselves."
One of the twisted things being preached is the doctrine of full preterism.
"Preterism" comes from a Latin word meaning “past”. A preterist reads biblical prophecy as things that already happened, rather than things still coming.
Most Christians are actually partial preterists without knowing it — they believe Jesus' warnings about Jerusalem's destruction came true in AD 70. That's pretty mainstream.
Full preterism goes much further. It says everything was fulfilled in 70 CE. The second coming of Christ? Done. The resurrection of the dead? Done. The final judgment? Done.
With this view, we're not waiting for anything. History just continues. Forever. With no future return of Christ, no future resurrection, no bodily hope for anyone who has died.
And because it denies those things — which have been at the center of Christian belief since day one — full preterism is considered outside the bounds of orthodox Christianity. Given the abysmal track record of orthodox institutional Christianity, that's part of the appeal of full preterism.
I get it. It's a tight, internally consistent system. It takes the Bible seriously. And it answers some real problems with how a lot of churches handle prophecy. But it goes too far and crosses a line the Bible itself won't let it cross.
The full preterist interpretation is based on four key arguments. Let me walk you through each one.
ARGUMENT ONE: God Always Moves from Physical to Spiritual
Full preterists point out — correctly — that in the Old Testament, physical things pointed toward spiritual realities. The Jerusalem temple pointed to Christ. The sacrificial system pointed to the cross. The promised land pointed to something greater. Paul says in Colossians that those physical things were "shadows" of what was coming.
So full preterists argue: God always moves forward from the physical to the spiritual — never backward. A future physical resurrection would be God going backward, from spiritual reality back to something material. That doesn't fit the pattern.
That's actually an interesting observation. But we'll come back to why it doesn't hold.
ARGUMENT TWO: The Language in John 5
This is their most sophisticated argument, so let's pay special attention to it.
In John chapter 4, Jesus is talking to the Samaritan woman about worship. He uses two phrases: "the hour is coming" — and then — "the hour is coming and now is."
"'Believe Me, woman,' Jesus replied, 'a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. But a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship Him.'" (John 4:21-23 BSB)
Both phrases refer to the same transition: the move away from the physical temple toward worship in spirit and truth. One event, two phrases.
Now jump to John chapter 5. Jesus uses those exact same two phrases again — first in verse 25, then in verses 28–29.
"Truly, truly, I tell you, the hour is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live." (John 5:25 BSB)
"Do not be amazed at this, for the hour is coming when all who are in their graves will hear His voice and come out — those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment." (John 5:28, 29 BSB)
Full preterists say: you didn't split John 4 into two separate events thousands of years apart — so why would you do that with John 5? It must be the same single event there too.
That's actually a fair question. And it deserves a real answer, but we are not done hearing the full extent of the preterist argument.
ARGUMENT THREE: They draw on the vision in Ezekiel 37 of the famous "valley of dry bones."
In Ezekiel, God asks: "Can these dry bones live?" And then the Spirit breathes life into them and they rise.
Full preterists say that passage isn't about a physical resurrection — it's a metaphor for Israel being spiritually restored after the exile. And they argue Jesus is drawing on that same imagery in John 5. So "coming out of the grave" in John 5 means spiritual resurrection, not physical.
That's not a crazy reading of Ezekiel 37. But does it work for John 5? We'll see.
ARGUMENT FOUR: The "Soon" Language
Finally, full preterists make a point about urgency. The New Testament constantly says things like "soon," "the time is at hand," "this generation will not pass away." They argue: if you push the resurrection thousands of years into the future, you're making Jesus and the apostles look like they didn't know what they were talking about. They claim that full preterism is the only system that takes the Bible's own time statements seriously.
That's a real challenge that any honest Bible student has to grapple with.
Here's where the full preterist arguments break down. We'll go through each of them.
ARGUMENT ONE: God Always Moves from Physical to Spiritual
No, He doesn't. Let's start with creation itself.
Hebrews 11:3 reads: "By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible." (ESV)
The word of God is spiritual, but through it the material was created.
Then we have the Incarnation:
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us…" (John 1:14a ESV)
Here's the problem: if God only moves from physical to spiritual, then the Incarnation is a problem. The eternal Son of God — by definition spiritual — took on physical flesh.
But we won't stop there: Jesus was resurrected as a life-giving spirit according to 1 Corinthians 15:45 — physical to spiritual — but in that state he took on flesh and appeared to over 500 of his disciples — spiritual to physical. He was not a ghostly apparition. Luke specifically says he ate fish after the resurrection. Thomas was invited to touch the wounds. That's not a metaphor.
We can't restrict God as to what he does. We can't say, "Sorry, Yehovah, but you can only move from physical to spiritual, not the other way around."
ARGUMENT TWO: The Language in John 5
Here's the thing: if you read John 5 carefully, Jesus actually flags the transition himself. Right before he introduces verses 28–29 — the part about graves and coming out — he says: "Do not marvel at this."
You don't say "do not marvel at this" before just repeating what you already said. That phrase is a signal. It's Jesus saying, now I'm about to tell you something that goes beyond what I just described. He's deliberately making or marking a shift.
There's also a grammatical difference that John almost certainly intended. In verse 25, Jesus says "the hour is coming and now is" — present tense, already happening. In verses 28–29, he drops the "and now is." He just says "the hour is coming." In a gospel as carefully written as John's, that's not an accident. The second hour is future.
Verse 25 is speaking about those who through spirit anointing pass from death to life, even now in their sinful human bodies. Having the assurance of life through the spirit, they may die physically, but what awaits them with unchanging certainty is eternal life. This fits with what Jesus told Martha shortly before he resurrected Lazarus.
"Jesus said to her, 'I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. Do you believe this?'" (John 11:25, 26 BSB)
Lazarus did die physically, but he was alive spiritually, and so will be resurrected just as Martha had faithfully expressed to Jesus:
"I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day." (John 11:24 BSB)
ARGUMENT THREE: Ezekiel's “Valley of Dry Bones”
Here's the fatal flaw in this argument: Ezekiel 37 is self-interpreting. God doesn't leave the metaphor open. He tells Ezekiel directly, in verse 11: "These bones are the whole house of Israel." The text decodes itself. That's why we're confident it's not about literal exhumation.
John 5:28–29 contains no such key. Jesus doesn't say "by those in the tombs, I mean the spiritually dead." He gives no signal that the language is figurative. When a text uses concrete imagery — tombs, voices, coming out — without telling you it's a metaphor, you can't just assume it is one.
Now we come to the question full preterism can't answer. This is where the system breaks.
Jesus says in John 5 that "all who are in the tombs" will hear his voice and come out. Not some. Not "the spiritually dead who are still alive in the first century." All. Including everyone who lived and died before the gospel ever reached them.
Full preterism has no place for those people. Their system accounts beautifully for the spiritually dead person who hears Christ and comes alive. But it has nothing to offer the person who died in hope before Jesus was even born — or before a Christian preacher ever arrived in their corner of the world.
Jesus doesn't leave those people out. The full preterist reading does. And that's not a minor gap — it's the whole reason that passage exists.
ARGUMENT FOUR: The "Soon" Language
Full preterists are right that "soon" means soon and "this generation" means this generation. I'm not going to wave that away. Those are real time statements and they mean something.
But here's the thing: when something happens and what kind of thing is happening are two separate questions. Urgency language tells you about timing. It doesn't tell you whether an event is physical or spiritual, local or cosmic.
And the full preterist reading creates its own pastoral crisis. If the resurrection was completed in 70 CE, then for the last two thousand years, for every person who has buried a child, a spouse, a parent, the comfort Paul offers in 1 Thessalonians 4 has been meaningless. Paul told the grieving, "We do not mourn as those who have no hope." If the resurrection was a first-century event that's now closed, that hope expired within a generation of Paul writing those words.
That's not the gospel Paul was preaching to people standing at graves.
WHAT THE BIBLE ACTUALLY TEACHES
So what's the alternative? Let me give you a picture that I think fits the whole of what the New Testament is saying.
The faithful who die are described throughout the New Testament as falling asleep. Not ceasing to exist. Not suffering. Sleeping. And that metaphor is actually quite instructive. When you sleep, you're still alive — but your sense of time stops. Hours pass like nothing. You step out of time.
The person who dies in Christ steps through a doorway. From their perspective, it will be like stepping directly from that doorway into the resurrection morning — no waiting, no gap felt. The centuries of human history that pass in between are, for them, no interval at all.
Now Jesus spoke of two resurrections. Paul also refers to two resurrections that even the Pharisees believed in, though they did not fully understand that hope.
Paul said:
"I have the same hope in God that these men have, that he will raise both the righteous and the unrighteous." (Acts 24:15 NLT)
The resurrection of the righteous is the hope referred to throughout Scripture, from Daniel through the Gospels through Paul through Revelation.
But even the unrighteous have a resurrection.
As to the details of each, we must wait. As to those making up the resurrection of the righteous, John tells us:
"Dear friends, we are already God's children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is." (1 John 3:2 NLT)
As for the resurrection of the unrighteous, we can only assume they will return as they were, in the flesh, because God's purpose was to have the earth filled with human children, and what He proposes must come to be.
"God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'" (Genesis 1:28 NIV)
But for us, with the knowledge of Christ, eternal life begins now. Full preterists are right about that. What they're not right about is that the present exhausts the promise. The promise is larger than that. It reaches back to every person who ever lived and died in hope — and it reaches forward to a morning that none of us has yet seen.
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