UPDATE: This update is being posted AFTER the original article that follows, since I think it is important to encourage people whenever they show honesty and integrity.
Ken Palmer, the admin of the site in question, recently posted this apology:
"I want to extend my sincerest apologies for mishandling certain individuals in which I care very much about, and believe that they too need a place to discuss, contend and reproof theirs, and many of the ideas, circulating through the network of Christianity...My wish is that through their forgiveness, they can come feel at ease coming to Covenant Preterism and reactivate their interest in discussion." -- source
Mr. Palmer should be commended for this rare show of humility among the Hyperpreterist community. Unfortunately as soon as Mr. Palmer posted this unqualified apology (and even used the word "forgiveness" which some people don't do when they "apologize"), another Hyperpreterist soiled the apology by posting this:
"You have nothing to apologise for. Lessons to learn maybe (like the rest of us), but nothing to be sorry for. Like the rest of us you’re on a journey, none of us have all the answers, and never will, and you’re doing your best for where you’re ‘currently’ at (as are we all)." -- source
Really? Can this guy get anymore wishy-washy and syncretic? I mean, this is part of the issue with hyperpreterism in the first place. Its overarching premise is that God failed to sustain truth and the understanding of truth until along comes men like Max King. If we are all really just groping around in the dark hoping we'll trip over truth then what good is a "religion" like that? At this rate, these sites should be renamed Emergent/Postmodern Preterism because that is how it is being presented. Anyhow, although I accept Mr. Palmer's apology and forgive him. I no longer have the desire to interact on that site. I hope Mr. Palmer the best...and by the best I mean him leaving the heresy of Hyperpreterism some day.
In the Hyperpreterist movement, what typically happens is little camps or factions form around a particular teaching or "teacher". This has given us the Max King/Tim King faction with their "
Presence/Transmillennial" website and its humanistic agenda. ("the world is new, thus man is new") This faction mentality has given us the postmodernist/Emergent hyperpreterism promoted by Virgil Vaduva until it more or less died in the early 2000. It gave us the 1st-century rapture faction of Ed Stevens, Walt Hibbard and others. It gave us the pseudo-Reformed faction (until Sam Frost bolted) which is now in a tailspin. And lastly, the "Covenant Creationists" faction of Tim Martin, Jeff Vaughn, Tami Jelinek and others.
These factions are good at banning each other from their various websites. What has happened from time to time is that then those ran off go and start yet ANOTHER site and then hypocritically enough, invoke the SAME exclusionary policies that the administrators of the other hyperpreterist sites used to ban them.
Such a case happened when hyperpreterist Ken Palmer and some of his fellow hyperpreterists were either ran off, banned or left...um..."voluntarily" from hyperpreterist websites that would not allow them to talk about topics like anti-Trinitarianism, cessation of institutional church structures and things like that.