Probably the most popularised framework these days is Goldsworthian Biblical Theology (GBT). But GBT depends very heavily on Covenant Theology (CT) (though that doesn’t seem to be explicitly explained much that I’ve seen.) The key, and controversial, point of CT is the Covenant of Grace, an ahistorical “covenant” between God and all his people. It means that there can be only one group of God’s people, so it makes no sense to talk about both the Jews and the Church as God’s people now, hence the illogicalness of premillennialism.
But amillennialism is equally nonsensical to dispensationalists, who believe that God has related to people in up to 8 essentially unrelated ways over history. I don’t really know much about hardcore dispensationalism, but to deny the millennium would be seen as denying God’s faithfulness, as they sincerely believe he has unfinished business with the Jews.
There are people who reject both CT and Dispensationalism. Probably the most well known would be New Covenant Theology. I’m not sure if I agree completely with it, as it really is very American and deals more with American versions of CT, rather than the Australian versions that I’m familiar with (like GBT.)
Here’s what I currently believe. Understand that it’s a hermeneutic still in its infancy ;)
CT is very old, and came about long before Meredith Kline’s work on Suzerain–Vassal treaties. Kline himself believed CT and his work provided a lot of depth to the study. But I think that he, and other CTs, haven’t let their beliefs be reformed enough by his research. Understanding Deuteronomy and the other covenants in the Ancient Near East context is so foundational, but from that understanding, I don’t think the Covenant of Grace should be considered anything like a covenant. It’s ahistorical, there were no witnesses, the parties are vague, the requirements on each party are vague. I believe that all the benefit of the Covenant of Grace can be kept by simply saying that God’s Modus Operandi is grace.
This then frees us from saying that there must be one homogeneous group called God’s People. I believe that each covenant should be approached on it’s own terms: God makes the covenant of Genesis 9 with all land life, including animals. Many of the other covenants include all of the Hebrew people, but some (Phinehas, David) involve just one subsection of that. Some covenants are unconditional, others are very very conditional. You’re a part of some covenants genetically, but other covenants you must deliberately join. CT flattens all of this out, but I think we should embrace these differences.
What this means is rather than just looking at a Bible passage and asking “People? Place? Rule?” we can ask more nuanced questions. Sometimes it might be more work to study passages, but I think it’s worth it. All of the Bible after Gen 9 involves people under Noah’s covenant… which probably isn’t relevant, but it’s still worth considering. More important is Abraham's and the Sinai/Deuteronomy covenants. Rather than flattening them to one set of promises we ask how does a Bible passage (perhaps something about the exile for example) relate to God’s unconditional and eternal promise of Abraham’s descendants occupying the promised land? But how does it also relate to God’s conditional promises of blessing and curses in Deuteronomy, conditional on their behaviour?
I think all eschatological positions would agree that the solution to these kinds of questions lie in the “remnant”, for within the conditional covenant of Deuteronomy, God made the unconditional promise that he would always preserve a remnant. The differences in understanding come with the identification of the remnant. The Covenant of Grace requires there to be only one people of God, and so the remnant must be identified with the church. Dispensationalism says the remnant must be some portion of the original biological descendants of Abraham. I think it’s neither and yet both...
God acts in more wonderful, and more complex, ways than simply through one overarching Covenant of Grace. It is to his credit and glory that he fulfils the many different promises he made to different people through history, especially when to a human they would seem impossibly contradictory at times.
