Back to America’s Providential View of History, the Present, and the Future

Back to America’s Providential View of History, the Present, and the Future

Jun 25, 2025 | Theology

Since the Covid debacle what I call the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, known as the Internet, has proved as transformational as the first Gutenberg Press of the 15th century. The latter was instrumental in allowing the Reformation to sweep like wildfire throughout Europe in the 16th century even as the Catholic church was running around with pales of water trying to put it out. It didn’t work, and Western civilization was transformed. A similar dynamic is happening today and the Internet in large part is making this possible.

 

 

This short video of short video of Pete Hegseth got me thinking about history, God’s providence, and what He’s doing in our time. Hegseth is the Secretary of Defense, and at the Pentagon recently he was proclaiming Christ as Lord and praying for our country. Before the Internet the secular media either ignores this or paints it as a threat to the mystical “separation of church and state.” Now, it can be seen by millions all over the world, unfiltered, and people see that Jesus is no longer persona non grata in American culture and government.

Because of things like this, multiplied many times over, I believe we are in the midst of a Great Awakening. This one, though, is wholly different than the previous two because it’s developing in response to a hostile yet dying secular culture, while the previous awakenings were products of a Christian culture. Sociologists not too long ago were proclaiming the triumph of secularism as inevitable. As science and knowledge advanced, so the thinking went, religion would “wither on the vine.” In fact, exactly the opposite is happening. As science and knowledge have advanced, religion, specifically Christianity, is flourishing because science and knowledge reveal the Creator God. Paul told us a long time ago God is too obvious to miss (Rom. 1:20):

20 For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so they are without excuse.

The “they” refers to godless and wicked people, “who suppress the truth by their wickedness” (v. 18). If the universe is mere matter colliding and we’re just lucky dirt, then do whatever floats your boat, no guilt required. But science and knowledge are making God the Creator way too obvious to ignore.

It isn’t just the created things, the stuff of the material world that makes it obvious, but history. God reveals himself in history. My latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, is about seeing God’s work in history so we can understand the present to make a better future. The definition of history, after all, is right there in the word itself, His story. Theologically we call it redemptive history because after man fell from his glorious estate into ruin, God promised to redeem him, and the day Adam and Eve were kicked out of the garden, His story began. In the Bible we’re given a roadmap of the development of God redeeming a people for Himself, and eventually the entire created order. Once it was all redeemed on the cross, the rest is just details. Those details are what we normally think of as history, what we’ve come to call AD, Anno Domini (Latin for “in the year of our Lord”), or after the birth of Jesus Christ. All of history is defined by Jesus, even as he directs it all. Which brings us to . . . .

A Biblical View of History
Like most Christians influenced by secularism, I’ve tended to see history and events like hurricanes, just happening and who knows which way either will go. When hurricanes are tracking toward where we live in the Tampa area, I have to remind myself it is God alone who determines where they go, not mere “natural” forces. Regarding history, we often must remind ourselves God directs all events, past, present, and future.

A proper Christian providential theology of history is captured by Daniel when God revealed to him Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream. Grateful he and his buddies would not be killed, he proclaims the greatness of our God, the author and director not only of our faith (Heb. 12:2), but of all history:

Then Daniel praised the God of heaven 20 and said:

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever;
wisdom and power are his.
21 He changes times and seasons;
he deposes kings and raises up others.
He gives wisdom to the wise
and knowledge to the discerning.

The Apostles Creed declares our belief in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and then we affirm of the second person of the Trinity:

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended to heaven
and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From there he will come to judge the living and the dead.

We Evangelicals do not pay enough attention to Christ’s ascension. We think it’s the resurrection that really counts, and of course it is. The church was built and grew on that claim, but Jesus went somewhere after he rose from the dead, ascending to heaven and the right hand of the Father. In the ancient world the one who sat at the right hand of the king shared his kingly authority and power. In this case, Jesus has the ultimate position of power and authority in the universe.

The crowning New Testament rationale for the confidence of God’s providence in history is found in Ephesians 1. We cannot overemphasize the theological and providential implications of Christ’s ascension. Speaking of the surpassing greatness of the power for those who trust the Lord Jesus, Paul says:

That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

This is not only the rule and authority of material creation, but over beings spiritual and mortal that exercise rule and authority and power and dominion—over all of them. Many Christians quote Paul’s declaration in Ephesians 6:12: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” But it is critical to quote this in the context of the passage in Ephesians 1. Nothing happens that Christ doesn’t permit or cause to happen; his rule is sovereign and absolute.

Like most Christians, however, I tended to see this passage eschatologically because as Christians we know how the story ends. It’s more difficult to grasp that Jesus has all this power now and is using it in this world, in space and time, for the advancement of his kingdom and ultimately for his church. This has implications beyond the church, though, which is why Paul tells us Jesus’ kingly rule is not just for the age to come, but for the present age as well.

Linear versus a Biblical Teleological View of History
Once we accept God’s providential control over history, we need to have some idea of what the implications are for actual history.

Prior to “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1), all ancient peoples viewed time cyclically, a perpetual wheel endlessly turning going nowhere. Because of this, the Jews were the first people on earth to escape the endless turning, and the possibility of true history began, an actual story being told with a beginning, middle, and end. Many Christians, however, tend to think the contrast to the cyclical view of history is linear, a line going straight in one direction from A to B. That, however, is not the biblical understanding of history.

If we’ve learned anything from thousands of years of recorded history, it’s anything but straight. It zigs and zags all over the place, backward, forward, and sideways. Biblically, the contrast to cyclical isn’t linear but teleological. This word comes from the Greek telos meaning purpose or end. In this understanding of history, every event is leading somewhere regardless of what it may look like on the surface. This means there are no throwaway events, things that just happen. Every event has teleological significance whether we think we can see it or not, including in our own lives. The most common question in all of history attests to our needing to understand all this: Why, God? It just doesn’t make any sense. . . . to us. If we look back through Scripture, we see how often biblical characters felt the same way.

After the resurrection, Jesus explained to his disciples (Luke 24) the ultimate biblical hermeneutical principal—that the entire Old Testament was about him. This is the same hermeneutical principle for all history: we interpret it all according to God’s revealed word who is the Word become flesh. Because of this, we no longer look at the past, present, and future, and all events contained therein, in any other way. They are all ultimately about Jesus in some way, unless we have some other interpretive non-biblical framework for history.

The Secular View of History
Those who don’t have a biblical and thus providential view of history will by default have a secular one. Even though there are variations on the secular view, a strictly God-less interpretation of history means there is no overarching narrative, no telos to history—things happen randomly. If there is no God ordaining and guiding history providentially, we’re forced to conclude history is but chance and agree with Macbeth at the death of his wife:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale|
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Typical of Shakespeare, it could not be said any better. However, given we cannot escape living in God’s created universe no matter how hard sinful humanity insists otherwise, chance has never proved a satisfying explanation, for anything. We also live with thousands of years of the influence of Judaism and Christianity, so the teleological view of history can’t be completely escaped.

The default secular option comes to us from German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who gave us the concept of historicism, a teleological view of history without God—well, without a God any of us might recognize. His God was history itself as the unfolding of a World-Spirit. I’ve always been fascinated by the history of ideas, and how ideas inscrutable to normal people, like most of what Hegel wrote, make their way into the culture and influence history. On that count, Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of the modern world. Historicism is a bastardization of the Christian idea of God’s providence. In the Christian view, human beings have real agency, they can change things even though God ordains and is in control of all things. The most common way historicism is embraced is historical determinism, which downplays human agency and accountability. As the word determinism implies, human beings are just along for the ride, cogs in the wheel of history who ultimately have no say where any of it goes. Marx used Hegel to teach the inevitable rise of communism, and north of a 100 million people were butchered in the 20th century because of it.

America’s Providential View of History
The biblical providential view of history has been an important part of the American experience.  America’s peculiarity, what some have called American exceptionalism, appears to have divine footprints all over it, and most Americans believed that until the mid-20th century.

While not all of America’s Founders were Christians, all of them had a biblical worldview to one degree or another. None of the Founders, as is often claimed, were truly Deists, believing in a clock-making God who sets creation going and doesn’t intervene in its history. And none of them were secularists. A view of reality devoid of divine providence would have been as foreign to them as divine providence is to modern secularists. The Founding generation embraced Christianity as a positive good for society without which it couldn’t survive. The Christian God of the Bible was an integral part of the founding of the republic, and they believed His providence was instrumental in allowing it to happen. The final words of the Declaration of Independence make this clear:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

This theology of the Declaration of America’s independence from Britain was written by one of the least orthodox Christians of the bunch, Thomas Jefferson, and supposedly one of the most Deist. Yet Jefferson’s God did not appear to be Deist at all but was intimately involved with his creation. He starts the document with a reference to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, phraseology that was not uncommon in the 18th century. He next declared those familiar words, that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The God of the Bible was the God of America’s Founding. I could multiply quotes from America’s founding generation. It’s clear they all believed in the God of the Bible and that His providential ordering of events was required for the success of their experiment in Republican government. But it wasn’t just the founding generation who embraced God’s providence.

Given Christianity was the dominant worldview, God was an important consideration for all presidents and political and cultural leaders in the 19th into the mid-20th century. Lincoln believed in God’s providence prior to the Civil War, but also in the midst of it. After two-and-a-half years of a bloody war, he declared a national holiday of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863. The proclamation is an inspiring read because it is the opposite of gloom and doom, which so many are given to when all hell breaks loose. The blessings of the bounties America enjoyed, he said, came from the “ever watchful providence of Almighty God.” All the many gifts he outlines “are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

A simple Internet search will find how American presidents regardless of the depth of their own personal faith, believed God, the Bible, and Christianity are inseparable from America as founded and sustained. In 1911 Woodrow Wilson, the first progressive president, in an address called, “The Bible and Progress” stated this in no uncertain terms:

The Bible is the one supreme source of revelation of the meaning of life, the nature of God, and spiritual nature and needs of men. It is the only guide of life which really leads the spirit in the way of peace and salvation. America was born a Christian nation. America was born to exemplify that devotion to the elements of righteousness which are derived from the revelations of Holy Scripture.

Franklin Roosevelt, who gave us the New Deal and took the progressive approach to governance to the next level, agreed with Wilson:

We cannot read the history of our rise and development as a nation, without reckoning with the place the Bible has occupied in shaping the advances of the Republic. Where we have been the truest and most consistent in obeying its precepts, we have attained the greatest measure of contentment and prosperity.

Roosevelt’s successor Harry Truman in a 1950 address stated:

The fundamental basis of this nation’s laws was given to Moses on the Mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings we get from Exodus and St. Matthew, from Isaiah and St. Paul. I don’t think we emphasize that enough these days. If we don’t have a proper fundamental moral background, we will finally end up with a totalitarian government which does not believe in rights for anybody except the State!

From 2025 these words appear prophetic. The next president, Dwight Eisenhower, said it even more forcefully:

Without God there could be no American form of government, nor an American way of life. Recognition of the Supreme Being is the first, the most basic, expression of Americanism. Thus, the founding fathers of America saw it, and thus with God’s help, it will continue to be.

Jimmy Carter even became president declaring himself a born-again Christian, driven by the conservative Evangelical revival of the 1970s.

As ironic as it may be, it’s taken Donald J. Trump, brash billionaire New York real estate developer and reality TV star to bring America back to a providential view of history. Trump peppers his speeches with God and his providence. I’m confident some or all of his speechwriters are Christians, as are most of the people in the administration. The providential icing on an almost tragic cake happened on July 13th in Butler, Pennsylvania. Even the most skeptical had to admit something “spiritual” happened that day. It did. God didn’t want Donald Trump dead, and he wanted the world to know it. The rest is, as “they” say, providential history.

 

 

 

 

 

Christ and Culture Revisited

Christ and Culture Revisited

Jun 18, 2025 | Culture

Way back in the mid-1980s when I was introduced to Reformed theology, my theological and intellectual mentor introduced me to an influential book I’d never heard of by H. Richard Niebuhr called, Christ and Culture. The Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold (1892–1971) and H. Richard (1894–1962), were prominent American theologians and ethicists. Reinhold was the more well-known of the two, but Richard’s Christ and Culture became a classic that put him on the mid-20th century intellectual map. Written in 1951, it analyzes five broad approaches Christians have taken to their interaction with culture in church history. For me it was significant because when I was introduced to the gospel in college at the ripe old age of 18, engaging culture was not a thing for the Christian group I was involved with. When I discovered Francis Schaeffer a couple years later I learned that Christians should indeed bring their faith to bear upon the culture, which expanded my vision of Christianity greatly. Niebuhr’s book explores how Christians thought about and practiced cultural engagement in the past, and what that might mean for us today.

Something became quickly apparent to me. Almost from the beginning, Christians have disagreed on how they ought to interact with the culture. One of the great church fathers, Tertullian, wrote a work called Prescription Against Heretics, in which he gave us one of the most famous rhetorical questions in church history, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” He was questioning the value of Greek philosophy about which there was much disagreement. In Niebuhr’s phraseology, Tertullian would be Christ against culture. The culture in which the church was born was a thoroughly Hellenized culture with Greek influences everywhere, which some embraced, others rejected, and most were in between if they thought about it at all. We can file this under the more things change . . . .

Many Christians think cultural engagement, or what some pejoratively call, “the culture wars,” is a waste of time and a distraction from the important work of the gospel, as if the gospel had no implications for the culture. They’ll point to the New Testament and say, see, there are no exhortations of commends to “engage” or “transform” the culture, and they’ll say it dismissively as if it’s too obvious to need an explanation. Duh! They miss the salient fact that the New Testament church was only newly born into an exceedingly hostile world, and it would take some time to figure out how to interact with it. These culture engagement critics treat the early church as if it were a middle age career family man who has life pretty much figure out. In fact, none of those early Christians even thought they would reach middle age. Jesus was coming back soon, and they had better be prepared.

After the Apostles died, and the first turned into the second century, it became apparent Jesus wasn’t coming back so soon after all, and people like Tertullian realized they had to figure out how Christians and the culture were going to interact. All of the things the New Testament didn’t address, like politics and economics and law and art and architecture and education and entertainment had to be addressed from the Christian perspective—disagreements have been going on ever since. I can’t explore Niebuhr’s five categories in any depth in a blog post, so if you’re interested I would highly suggest the book.

Before he gets to those, his first chapter of introduction tells us there are no easy, obvious answers to what he calls the “enduring problem” of Christ and culture. Christians disagreeing about culture is nothing new because Christians disagree about everything all the time, always have and always will. Sinners, even saved ones, are finite creatures with limited knowledge who get as much wrong as they get right. That will never change. It’s good to know as you survey Christian history the bickering in our time is nothing new. God knew agreement for sinners would be rare, which is one reason the greatest commandment is love. The problem endures. But before we assess Niebuhr’s take on our interaction with culture, it might be good to define what culture is.

What Exactly Is Culture?
At its most basic level, culture is whatever human beings create. Culture is also an amorphous set of influences. Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, states that, “culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations,” and that, “culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on.” Culture affirms certain values and propositions, while it denies others, embraces certain beliefs, while it eschews others; culture is never neutral. Our modern concept of culture derives from a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi.” In Latin, cultura literally means cultivation. We could say culture cultivates.

This seems obvious, but most people don’t realize how culture shapes not only what they believe, or what they like, or how they behave, but literally shapes who they are. Unfortunately, many Christians fail to think in a discerning way about the culture we inhabit; they are reactive rather than proactive. Culture is something we cannot take for granted or escape, so we must consider its effects, not only for us and our families and friends, but for everyone culture impacts.

As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians because we start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture that somehow exists independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In Genesis 1 and 2 we learn of God giving Adam and Eve the cultural or dominion mandate. He tells Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply to fill this earth, but also to subdue it, to rule over everything He has created. Most importantly for culture making and interaction, man is made in God’s image, male and female He created them. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect His likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture.

There is much more that can be said and that has been written on culture, an endlessly fascinating topic, but the takeaway for Christians is that we must realize culture and its influence is inescapable. We must as Christians cease to be reactive and become proactive, meaning a constant awareness of cultural messaging through the variety of ways it communicates to us. None of this messaging is neutral, so we have to learn how to interrogate the culture, like a skillful seasoned prosecutor in a courtroom drilling a defendant. What do these lawyers do? They ask questions, a lot of them, and we must be skilled prosecutors of the culture. Let’s get to Niebuhr.

Christ Against Culture—This might be the most intuitive of the categories, but the least justified. In this perspective, antipathy to culture makes sense in light of how fallen this world is and the people in it are. Niebuhr Identifies the first letter of John as “least ambiguous presentation of this point of view.” These well-known verses from chapter two make his point:

15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16 For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. 17 The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

This is an uncompromising either or, the world or the will of God. As Niebuhr says, “a clear line of separation is drawn between the brotherhood of the children of God and the world.” Culture is “the world” in John’s terms, and it is seen as a threat, something to be avoided or escaped. Christians are a separated people and must live like it. However, the number one rule of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics, is context determines meaning, and I John comes in the context of the entire Bible. We can only determine John’s meaning in light of the rest of Scripture.

When I first became a Christian in college I was exposed to a kind of fundamentalist Christianity that didn’t expressly teach “Christ against culture,” but it was sense I got, Christianity on one side, the world or the culture on the other. This “against” dynamic in American culture developed with the rise of so called liberal Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th century. A movement of fundamentalists pushed back against the liberals with a vigorous defense of supernatural Christianity in what are known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. The modernists won, and fundamentalism became a cultural backwater of Christians who were determined to separate themselves from a decaying culture. Nieburh identifies this mindset going back to Tertullian, and it expresses itself throughout church history, but the fundamentalists embodied the most well-known against culture Christian approach of modern Christianity. This was how I saw culture in my early Christian years, but came across Francis Schaeffer in college and moved more into other categories.

Christ of Culture—Rather than avoid it or see it as hostile, this approach embraces and accommodates Christianity to culture. As Nieburh says, “They feel no great tension between the church and the world,” the complete opposite of the against culture Christians. The liberal Christianity of the early 20th century and the once dominant mainline denominations fit this approach. In effect, liberal Christians, what we call progressive Christianity today, gets swallowed up by the dominant secular culture, and its values determined by it.

The next three are what Niebuhr calls “the church of the center” because they fall between the extremes, and this is where almost all Christians fall. Theologically, in assessing cultural issues, these three positions affirm Jesus Christ as Lord, and God the Father through the Holy Spirit as the Creator of all things. As such, creation reflected in cultural human products can’t be the “world” and the realm of godlessness because the “world cannot exist save as it is upheld by the Creator and Governor of nature.” All agree “about sin’s universality and radical character,” and to some extent “the primacy of grace and the necessity of works of obedience.” The “three families” as he names them, are “synthesis, dualists, and conversationists.” You, dear Christian, fall in one of these “families” whether you know it or not.

Christ above Culture—This approach affirms a synthesis of Christ and culture, that the two cannot be completely separated. Culture isn’t fully corrupt, but must be informed by revelation. They affirm “both Christ and culture as one who confesses a Lord who is both of this world and of the other.” The synthesis sees culture as “both divine and human in its origin, both holy and sinful, a realm of both necessity and freedom, and one in which both reason and revelation apply.” Nieburh puts it very well when he writes, we can’t say “’Either Christ or culture,’ because we are dealing with God in both cases.” The greatest representative in church history of this approach is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the most influential philosopher and theologian of the Middle Ages. His influence today is as great as it was in the 13th century.

Christ and Culture in Paradox—The dualist differs from the synthesist in that Christ and Culture are in perpetual tension. Culture is a battle between sin and Grace, a holy God and sinful man, law and gospel. Sin pervades all human works, so while God’s creation is embraced as good, there can never be a synthesis that isn’t tainted by sin. In other words, any attempt at synthesis is a fool’s errand. Nieburh writes:

The dualist Christians differ considerably from the synthesists in their understanding of both the extent and the thoroughness of human depravity. As to extent: Clement, Thomas, and their associates note that man’s reason may be darkened, but is not in its nature misdirected; for them the cure of bad reasoning lies in better reasoning, and in the aid of the divine teacher.

For the dualist, however, the only hope is not in reason but in divine grace. We could use the phrase made popular by the rise of Calvinism in the 16th century—the total depravity of man. This corruption is inescapable in all human works of culture, so skepticism is the right approach to engagement with those works. The accommodation of the synthesist is effectively seen as compromise. The debate between the synthesists and dualists goes on strong and heavy today, especially among Evangelicals.

Nieburh believes Paul fits in here, but I think judging Paul’s approach to culture in the specific first century context is an anachronism; it doesn’t fit this historical context because the newly born church didn’t have the luxury of thinking critically of its interaction with a concept that hadn’t even been invented yet. A better representative is Luther; the man God used as the torch to set the reformational blaze in Medieval Europe. He says Luther has “a double attitude toward reason and philosophy, toward business and trade, toward religious organizations and rites, and well as toward state and politics.” Which makes sense when you believe in God’s good, created order, but also in the profound power of sin corrupting all things.

Christ the Transformer of Culture—For most of my Christian life I fit squarely between synthesis and dualist, ambivalent and often confused. When I first read this section of the book I wasn’t sure what to make of it because Nieburh isn’t clear about exactly what transforming means. I’ve always been for Christ transforming culture, at least since I found Francis Schaeffer in college, but I had no theological justification for it. It’s interesting to read this chapter from my relatively new perspective of postmillennialism, and see that Niebuhr got it more right than wrong after all. The point of the gospel isn’t just to change individuals, but to permeate, thus transform, everything they put their minds and hands to. Christ’s righteousness isn’t just to be imputed to Christians, but to be lived out and brings its influence everywhere sin has distorted God’s good, magnificent creation. Christ is King, and “culture is under God’s sovereign rule, and the Christian must carry on cultural work in obedience to the Lord.”

He calls these the conversionists, as opposed to the synthesists and dualists, although they would side with the latter in their understanding of the seriousness of sin, except they have a more hopeful attitude toward culture. What the dualist misunderstands, is that the transformation of culture while done by Christians active in cultural pursuits, is all about “the creative activity of God and of Christ-in-God,” and our actions are “under the rule of Christ and by the creative power and ordering of the divine Word.” The critics of postmillennialism, conversionists through and through as we are, are always claiming we think transformation comes merely through our own activity, as if we, without the power of the Holy Spirit, could transform anything—we cannot!

A key word that distinguishes the dualist from the conversionist is corruption. Human nature has become corrupted, but “it is not bad, as in something that ought not to exist, but warped, twisted, and misdirected.” Taking from Augustine, a primary example of the conversionist, the loves given man at creation are disordered, as in they are no longer ordered correctly, thus corrupted. “Hence his culture is all corrupted order rather than order for corruption, as it is for the dualist. It is perverted good, not evil; or it is evil as perversions, not badness of being.” Although not a conservative Evangelical as we would understand it today, he perfectly captures what we postmillennialists believe, that “The eschatological future has become for him an eschatological present. . . . Eternal life is a quality of existence in the here and now.” The conversionist is focused on “the divine possibility of a present renewal.” The “transformed human life in and to the glory of God” can now transform culture. To me that’s the point of the gospel, not merely to go to heaven when we die, but to bring heaven to earth here and now.

I will finish this with a long quote that perfectly captures the hopeful, optimistic theology that brings the end of all things into the here and now until the end:

The life of reason above all, that wisdom of man which the wisdom of God reveals to be full of folly, is reoriented and redirected by being given a new first principle. Instead of beginning with faith in itself and with love of its own order, the reasoning of redeemed man begins with faith in God and love of the order which He has put in all His creation; therefore it is free to trace out His designs and humbly to follow His ways. There is room within the Augustinian theory for the thought that mathematics, logic, and natura l science, the fine arts and technology, may all become both the beneficiaries of the conversion of man’s love and the instruments of that new love of God that rejoices in His whole creation and serves all His creatures. . . . Everything, and not least the political life, is subject to the great conversion that ensues when God makes a new beginning for man by causing man to begin with God.

Amen!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Response Post: Kim Riddlebarger Against the Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm

Response Post: Kim Riddlebarger Against the Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm

Jun 11, 2025 | Eschatology

I was born-again in the Jesus Revolution era of the late 1970s and it seemed dispensational premillennialism was what every Christian believed about “end times.” I had no reason to question it, so I waited expectantly for the rapture to happen at any time. In due course this “newspaper eschatology” got tiring because the disasters, and the rapture, never happened, and I checked out and got on with real life. I learned about other eschatological positions in seminary, but by that time I was eschatologically burned out and didn’t care anymore. I became an eschatological agnostic, or what I would later come to call it, a pan millennialist, as in, it will all pan out in the end. I thought “end times” stuff in the Bible was a confusing jumble of esoteric references beyond our understanding, so why waste the time.

Then in 2014 a friend told me about a teaching series Kim Riddlebarger did on amillennialism, I listened to it, and was hooked. I was thrilled because I was learning the Bible did indeed have something to say about “end times.” It was exciting, and not least because Kim is a tremendous teacher. If his name is new to you, Kim was the long-time pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, an original co-host of the White Horse Inn radio program in the 1990s into the 2000s, and a scholar. So I went along my merry amillennial way until August 2022 when much to my surprise I embraced postmillennialism in one day. I wrote a piece in November of that year explaining my “conversion,” and I will quote myself to give you the premise for my interaction with Kim in this one:

I didn’t realize how our theology of “end times” determines how we interpret everything about the times in which we live, whether negatively or positively.

It seems Dr. Riddlebarger doesn’t much like this framing of how we postmillennialists think of eschatology. When I first came across this piece I’ll be responding to, I was not at all surprised.

As an amillennialists I found myself becoming increasingly pessimistic about the world and the Christian’s role in it. In fact, I came to mock my younger self for thinking I could “change the world.” How absurd. Sin isn’t going anywhere until Jesus returns, and we’ll just have to muddle along until Jesus returns and cleans this whole mess up. Then Trump. No, Donald Trump did not persuade me to become a postmillennialist. That was James White in a sermon entitled, “My Journey to Hope for the Future.” I’d become increasingly optimistic since I found Steve Bannon’s War Room after the compromised 2020 election, and was looking for a biblical justification for my optimism. I found that in postmillennialism, as will anyone who believes Jesus didn’t teach us to pray in vain, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Kim, however, believes we have a “rather embarrassing shortage of biblical passages in the New Testament that teach such a view.” He’s aware that the Bible is made up of both a New and Old Testament, and speaking of the Old, Paul tell us, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). I became a postmillennialist specifically because I found it so exegetically grounded, both in the New and Old Testaments.

This assertion comes in the second paragraph of his piece, so you can see we’re not getting off to a good start. The article is from a 2011 issue of Modern Reformation magazine called “Eschatolog y by Ethos.” The magazine comes from the White Horse Inn guys, which includes Michael Horton, who I interacted with in my last post. I learned a lot from them over the years, but slowly realized much of their perspective on the faith wasn’t sitting right with me, especially as Trump came on the scene and contributed to so many of the red pill experiences I’ve had in the last decade.

Before I get started, I want to mention and define the two logical fallacies we’ve seen in the previous two pieces I’ve critiqued, and in this one. One is begging the question which means assuming the premise without arguing for it. The writer will make assertions about something without seeing the need to prove it, just like Kim did about the supposed exegetical problem with postmillennialism. We’re just supposed to agree with him because he asserted it. The other is the straw man fallacy. In this, the writer creates a distorted, exaggerated, incorrect, or invalid version of what the other side believes, and then refutes that and not the actual position. There are a lot of both of these fallacies in this piece, and it’s good to be aware of them as you read.

The Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm
Right out of the gate he makes two inaccurate assertions about postmillennialism. I’ve already addressed one, and the second comes shortly after that. He says we determine the “soundness” of our “eschatological position using the optimism/pessimism paradigm.” This follows logically from his first assertion, that postmillennialism isn’t biblically exegetical, so of course he thinks we’re using something other than the Bible to establish it’s “soundness,” and he believes it’s this paradigm. I can assure you it is not. Since he assumes these two things, everything he says from here about postmillennialism will necessarily be inaccurate. He rightly says no Christian wants to be identified as a “pessimist,” and given we know who “wins in the end,” we shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t address how we regard what happens in this “present evil age” (he’s quoting Paul in Gal. 1:4).  Did you catch the assumption in this reference? What Paul means, supposedly, is that evil in this age can’t be overcome because this age is evil, and optimism is not “the best category to use in identifying the essence of one’s eschatology.” Who said it was! Do you see how that works? It’s begging the question at its best.

Mind you, when someone does this, they aren’t intending to be deceptive. They simply believe what they’re saying is so obvious that the readers will of course see what they mean, and most importantly, agree with them. If you are not aware of assumptions and how they work, it’s easy to fall into their trap. If you read through the piece, you’ll see this everywhere, which is the reason it was such a frustrating read for me. I kept saying, “That’s not what we believe!”

Then we get to one of Kim’s fundamental assumptions coloring everything he says. That would be his amillennial eschatology, and a futurist understanding of eschatological passages. There are three options for reading a time frame into these passages. We can see them as happening in the past, preterist, during the course of history, historicist, and happening in the future, futurist. We can see here Kim is in the latter:

Jesus himself speaks of world conditions at the time of his return as being similar to the way things were in the days of Noah (Matt. 24:37-38)—hardly a period in world history characterized by the Christianizing of the nations and the near-universal acceptance of the gospel associated with so-called optimistic forms of eschatology.

He again thinks his readers agree with him without seeing the need to establish that Jesus is talking not about what he in fact said he was talking about, that generation he was speaking to. He makes that clear in verse 34:

Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

The you in Greek is the second person plural, so all the people he is speaking to, and “this” is the same in any language, a pronoun indicating the lifetime of those people. But to the futurist, Jesus wasn’t speaking about people in the first century and events they would encounter, as he seems to be saying, but about events that will happen far into the future. Preterists, on the other hand, believe Jesus was speaking of events that we know happened in the run-up to AD 70 and the destruction of the Temple. So Kim’s sarcasm about “so-called optimistic forms of eschatology” depends on a view he assumes is true but sees no need to prove, or at least acknowledge others see differently.

In the very next paragraph he presents Straw Man # 1 and a complete distortion of what postmillennialists believe:

Aside from the fact that many contemporary notions of optimism have stronger ties to the Enlightenment than to the New Testament. . . the New Testament’s teaching regarding human depravity (i.e., Eph. 4:17-19) should give us pause not to be too optimistic about what sinful men and women can accomplish in terms of turning the City of Man into a temple of God.

He doesn’t identify who these “contemporary notions of optimism” belong to or what they are, but since they are tied to the Enlightenment they are if not anti-biblical at least not biblically justified. Where these “notions” come from makes them problematic, but also the presumption of Christians thinking they can by their own power transform the products of sinful humanity into something holy. This is a common criticism among critics of postmillennialism and “optimistic eschatology,” that we think we can change things by what we do without the supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point is that we believe God by the power of the Holy Spirit is building His kingdom, extending Christ’s reign on earth, and building his church, and He does that through his body, the church, you and me, because he has no choice. That’s how it works. God has always used fallen, sinful, imperfect people to bring His kingdom to earth. Without God doing the accomplishing our efforts are in vain.

That is what postmillennialists actually believe, and thus our optimism is not in our strength or power, but solely in God and what He can do. We believe the point of Christ coming to earth was to establish his kingdom rule in this fallen world, to defeat the devil, to bind the strong man (Mark 3), and reclaim ground the devil took through lies and deception. It is in fact a reclamation project. What separates postmillennialists from other eschatological perspectives is that we believe Christ began reclaiming what is his, this earth and everything in at, at his first coming. He didn’t come and suffer and die and rise again and ascend to the right hand of God to leave his people to suffer in futility as they fight for righteousness, to “lose down her” while they wait for ultimate victory to come at the end of time and Christ’s return. We believe with Paul about Christ (I Cor. 15):

25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Christ reigning “until” is not him sitting on his throne just observing while the world and sinful man goes on its merry way in sin and misery to destruction. And the word all in this case does mean all, as in each and every one. It’s not merely the enemies in our personal lives, but enemies everywhere in God’s created order. The other positions I reference also believe Christ is reigning, but his rule is limited to Christians and the church. Outside of that, the devil reigns and there isn’t much we can do or accomplish in the “City of Man.”

Why Optimism/Pessimism Is the Apt Description of Modern Eschatology
In the next section of his piece, Kim discusses the rise of optimism versus pessimism in eschatology with the book An Eschatology of Victory by J. Marcellus Kik, published in 1971. Kick comments on a variety of verses that speak to the victory of God in Christ in the messianic kingdom during the millennium (the period between Christ’s ascension and Pentecost and his second coming). Then he says, “We do not glorify God nor his prophetic word by being pessimists and defeatists.” So if postmillennialism is an eschatology of victory, then the other positions are eschatologies of defeat, thus optimism and pessimism, and Kim doesn’t like that.

Unfortunately, he has a distorted perspective of postmillennialism, thinking our optimism is determined by what we can do to the exclusion of the work of the Holy Spirit, but that is a straw man and not our actual position. The big bogeyman for him and people like him is cultural transformation, which he thinks is at best a distraction from the real purpose of Christianity. This, he argues, developed with the publication of two other books after Kik’s, R. J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1977). With these books the concept of theonomy, or rule by God’s law, made its way into the Reformed conversation. The problem with that word and its variants is that nobody can agree on exactly what it means, and no two people agree on how it should be applied in a nation. Other than that, it’s great! God’s law must be the ultimate foundation of a nation’s laws, but that’s a (huge) conversation for another time, but regarding transformation he says:

With the publication of these volumes, a new form of eschatological optimism made its way into the Reformed bloodstream—one closely tied to the transformation of culture.

On the printout of the article next to this I wrote, “It wasn’t new!” It can only be new to him because of the assumption he makes about the purpose of the gospel, and how Christians prior to the 19th century understood it. For all of Christian history, the purpose of Christ’s first coming was to transform this fallen world into a less fallen heavenly world. Bring heaven, as Jesus taught us to pray, to earth, God’s kingdom come, His will be done. Of course that is going to affect everything, from politics and governments to families and how they live in their communities, which means everything Christians put their minds and hands and effort into. That’s not just part of a Christian worldview and its influence, but bringing Christ’s kingdom reign over all things, a la Ephesians 1 and his reign at God’s right hand in this age, and the Great Commission (Matt. 28), Christ having all authority in heaven and on earth.

By contrast, for people like Kim, Mike Horton, and Carl Trueman, who I interacted with in my last two posts, their two kingdom Pietistic assumptions limit the extent of the gospel’s influence in the world and is a byproduct not a purpose of faith. Any transformation outside of the walls of the church has nothing to do with its true purposes, which are primarily “spiritual,” and thus about salvation of individuals and their personal holiness. Culture, as we’ve seen from Truman and Horton, is at best a distraction, and at worst a deceptive idol. Here is how Kim sets up his straw man. For “theonomic postmillenarians”:

“Optimistic” Christians are not only to evangelize the world, but they also must engage the surrounding culture with the goal of transforming it. Transformation of culture becomes the church’s mission.

In my printout I circled the word, “the,” as in “the” mission. Something can be part of something without becoming the primary thing, but in his mind it became that. The reason, as I’ve referred to it, is in the next sentence,

Transforming culture is no longer understood to be the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Exactly. The word incidental means it’s unplanned, so if influencing the culture for Christ because of the gospel is your conviction, you have now, according to Kim, made cultural transformation “the” church’s mission. How can people living together in society be incidental to the purpose of the gospel? And Christians never thought transforming what people do in relationship to each other in society was incidental to the spread of the gospel, but that is what he’s implying Christians have always believed. That is called historical revisionism.

If God decided the ultimate end of things, the wiping out of sin and suffering and death, was to be introduced into the world at Christ’s first coming, how can we not be optimistic? N.T. Wright calls it inaugurated eschatology. In other words, 2000 years ago God formally commenced bringing all the blessings to earth that will be fully realized at Christ’s return. John the Baptist and Jesus introduce his ministry with the exact same words, “The kingdom of God has come near.” And Jesus taught us two parables about the inevitability of the growth and influence of the kingdom, the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13). It would be slow and steady exactly because it is God’s kingdom, and he’s the king!

Most premillennialists and amillennialists, to one degree or another, believe sin in “this evil age” will always have the upper hand, and our efforts to combat it will be futile until Christ returns to transform everything in an instant. For them, the growth of the kingdom a la Matthew 13 only happens within the church walls. That’s what the gospel for them is about, transforming and discipling people, not nations, even though Jesus expressly states in Matthew 28 it is the nations, the ethnos, not individuals who are to be discipled. And this gets at their biggest distortion about postmillennialism. They think we believe it is our efforts to change culture that is of primary important, not the message of salvation in Christ. No postmillennialist believes the nations will be discipled without the power of the Holy Spirit working through the gospel in God’s people, and as Paul says in Ephesians 1, in this age:

19 and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength 20 he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, 21 far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come. 22 And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

There is much more to say along these lines in Kim’s article for anyone interested in learning more about what postmillennialists don’t believe.

Response Post: Mike Horton and Culturally Irrelevant Christianity

Response Post: Mike Horton and Culturally Irrelevant Christianity

Jun 4, 2025 | Eschatology

In my last post I responded to Carl Truman and what I called two kingdom Pietists. These thinkers are every bit as dualistic as Gnostic Pietists, but with an intellectual bent. Mike Horton is another unfortunate example of this mentality and worldview. Horton is a professor at Westminster Seminary in California and author of numerous books. He’s influential in the Reformed community, but has written books for more general Evangelical audiences, so it is important to engage his thinking where he falls into the same trap as Carl Truman.

The piece I’m responding to, written in 2010, is called, “Transforming Culture with a Messiah Complex,” which gives you a hint of what’s to come. This is longer than Truman’s article with a plethora worthy of comment, but I will only be able to scratch the surface of what I think is aweful. Once you learn to see how the assumptions of the two kingdom Pietists work, you’ll learn to question everything they say. Let’s start in the first paragraph when he addresses those Christians who are talking about “transforming the culture.” This sounds good, but to Horton it is not:

The trouble is, these movements can conceive of the church as a substitute for Christ, shifting the focus of Christians from his promised return to your best life now.

The phrase, “your best life now” is a favorite whipping boy for Horton. By it he implies an undue worldly focus on the here and now which is incompatible with a truly spiritual and heavenly focused life. Or something like that. You can see here the distortion of Pietism, the dualistic overly spiritualized tendency to play this life off against the next. Like all forms of Pietism, the Christian life is primarily about going to heaven when you die and personal holiness. If you want a good life in this world, then you are guilty of compromise. When I see that phrase I think, what, am I supposed to want my worst life now? And I guess we’re supposed to be so focused on Jesus’ return, that this life becomes an afterthought or less important. As with Truman, these things are never fully defined or explored, just stated as if we all knew what they meant.

Confusing Liberal Christianity with Cultural Transformation
Horton spends the next several sections doing what most two kingdom Pietists do when criticizing cultural engagement or postmillennialism: comparing it to the liberal Christianity of the 19th and early 20th centuries. As with most of these critics, Horton is adept at distorting what people like me believe, setting up straw men, then refutes something that doesn’t even exist. For example, he compares today’s Christians focused on cultural engagement to the Pelagians of the Second Great Awakening, like Charles Finney, and other moral reformers of the time. Here is one such assertion:

True to their pragmatic and self-confident instincts, American Protestants did not want to define the church first and foremost as a community of forgiven sinners, recipients of grace, but as a triumphant army of moral activists.

This was most certainly true of the liberal Christians of the time who rejected the supernatural foundations of God’s word, but is a slander against modern Evangelicals who believe cultural transformation is a biblical imperative. We used to have a pastor like Horton at a Presbyterian church we attended. In a sermon he said those focused on the culture wars are basically rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. That did not make me a happy camper. Our pastor, and Horton, have a lot in common with D.L. Moody, the great 19th century evangelist, who eventually embraced the dispensational premillennialism of J.N. Darby. Horton writes:

Although he was initially representative of Charles Finney’s social activism, Moody became increasingly pessimistic about the extent to which earthly empires could become the kingdom of God. “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel,” he would later write. “God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ‘Moody, save all you can.’”

Most Christians, unfortunately, accept some form of this societal pessimism, as I did to some degree until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022. Then, according to Horton, I became a “social reformer.” Yet ever since I came across Francis Schaeffer when I was a 20 year-old college student, I’ve believed like he did that Christian cultural engagement is not an option, but like Horton I rejected postmillennialism because I thought it was just a repackaged liberal Christianity obsessed with secular progress. It most certainly is not. Horton just digs the hole deeper in continuing this comparison by comparing the left and the right, as all two kingdoms Pietists tend to do:

As George Marsden has documented in various places, both the Christian Right and the Christian Left derive from this late nineteenth-century evangelicalism. It is this quite recent train of thought (or, more precisely, activism), rather than the profound reflection of Augustine and the reformers, that guides contemporary evangelical activism. . . . The agenda for moral reform may have divided in liberal and conservative directions, but both owe their origin to the revivalism of Charles Finney.

Actually, the left owes its activism to Karl Marx, big difference. Attributing a moral equivalence between left and right is rampant among two kingdom Pietists, as we saw with Carl Truman. And notice the false choice Horton presents to us. Either you have “contemporary evangelical activism” or you have “the profound reflection of Augustine and the reformers,” but by golly you can’t have both! This dualism is so deeply ingrained among such thinkers that anyone who is an “activist” or believes in Christian cultural transformation is to them not spiritually serious. That is blatant calumny, or in a word more modern people would know, slander.

Far from being anything close to the liberal Christianity coming out of the 19th century, modern cultural transformationists are solidly conservative Bible believing Christians. Such Christians, like me, have the temerity to believe the Christian faith was meant to have an impact on every area of life in everything human beings do.  We believe the purpose of Christ coming to earth was to bring God’s kingdom and its heavenly influence into this fallen world, just as Jesus taught us to pray it should. This isn’t merely for the church, or for Christians in their personal lives, as the modern Pietists would have it, but for the entire earth, in biblical terms, for the nations who God through Abraham and the Patriarchs promised to bless 4000 years ago.

The Centrality of the Ascension Misunderstood

Then Horton gives a strange explanation of Christ’s ascension to justify his cultural apathy, one that I’ve never seen before. He titles it, “Under-realized Ascension, Over-realized Eschatology.” As he describes what must be a fully realized ascension, it will sound familiar from what all such two kingdom Pietists believe. Here’s how he puts it:

The time that the church thus occupies because of the ascension is defined neither by full presence nor full absence, but by a eucharistic tension between “this age” and “the age to come.” The church is lodged in that precarious place of ambiguity and tension between these two ages, and it must live there until Jesus returns, relying only on the Word and Spirit.

His concern is Christians replacing the absent ascended Christ with the church, and displaying an unrealistic triumphalism in the worldly or cultural matters in which it is engaged. In practice, this “precarious place” he describes means sin and evil triumph over righteousness in this fallen world, and victory is only meant for the world to come when Christ returns.

Then he makes a move all two kingdom Pietists do, where Christians do the “spiritual” things of “relying only on the Word and Spirit,” or, we have to conclude, they rely on themselves. This false choice, which I’ll dissect below, is a pernicious lie. Like all of these thinkers, Horton assumes we know what he means by “relying only on the Word and the Spirit.” We’ll notice he does two things without having to assert them because he assumes them. First, his self-righteousness is evident because anyone who disagrees with him about cultural engagement doesn’t rely solely on the Word and the Spirit, but he sure does. All two kingdom Pietists look down their noses in their supposed spiritual and moral superiority on we cultural engagers who are presumably not “relying only on Word and Spirit.” Only is a small very big word. Second, he makes these mutually exclusive. Either you agree with him and live in this “precarious place of ambiguity and tension,” and thus stop believing God’s kingdom can transform the kingdoms of this world, or you don’t rely on God. It’s like a spiritual Berlin Wall, and if you want to get out you’re basically a traitor.

This is how he perceives this strange idea of an “under-realized ascension.” I guess if you fully realized it, you’d give up these silly notions of God’s kingdom pushing back the effects of the fall and sin in the world, which means you have an “over-realized Eschatology.” What exactly does that mean? The word means the study (ology) of the end or final things, ἔσχατος-eschatos in Greek. It can also mean what the result will be at the end, so after Christ’s second coming. That’s the way Horton is using it. He’s accusing we cultural transformationists of thinking we can bring the final fulfillment of God’s kingdom to the here and now by our own efforts. And we do this by not just leaving Jesus alone up there sitting at God’s right hand, but dragging him down here to get involved in our futile culture wars.

As a convinced postmillennialist who believes cultural transformation is another phrase for discipling the nations, or the Great Commission (Matt. 28), I believe bringing the eschaton into this fallen world is exactly what we’re called to do. It’s crazy to think Christ came to earth, was tortured and shed his blood via Roman crucifixion, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven to leave the world exactly the way it is, but that appears to be what Horton and two kingdom Pietists believe. To them, such transformation is a possibility in the church and in our personal lives, but that’s it. If it breaks out of the church walls, that’s gravy, unintended consequences of being like Jesus in our everyday life. By contrast what I and all postmillennialists believe is that the purpose of the gospel and Christ’s first coming was to bring the kingdom of God to earth, as I mentioned above. To put it another way, the kingdom of God is as all-encompassing as sin. Think of what that means for the kingdom’s influence on this fallen world. Wherever sin has had its miserable effects, the righteousness of God in Christ lived out through His people will reverse those effects, not just for the church, or in our personal holiness, but in everything we do as human beings made in God’s image. It’s a glorious vision for God’s people on earth. Here, by contrast, is the depressing vision of the two kingdom Pietists:

Yet we must wait for the restoration at the end of the age. We hope and act in the present not in order to save the world or build the kingdom of God, but because “we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken” (Heb. 12:28).

Ugh. We’re supposed to be like the disciples when Jesus was taken up before their eyes, and just look up waiting for him to come back. That’s the Christian life to Horton. Get out the lawn chairs, pour some ice tea, and wait for Jesus to return. Yet the angels mocked them, “why do you stand here looking into the sky?” In effect saying, get to Jerusalem so you can receive the Holy Spirit like Jesus said, then you can get about saving the world and building the kingdom!

The False Choice of the Two Kingdom Pietists
Horton spends the rest of the piece attempting to convince us this dualistic understanding of reality is the true Christian understanding. He wants to assure us that all of life is not “kingdom work.” He tell us what is:

proclaiming the Word, administering baptism and the Supper, caring for the spiritual and physical well-being of the saints, and bringing in the lost are kingdom work. Building bridges, delivering medical supplies to hospitals, installing water heaters, defending clients in court, holding public office, and having friends over for dinner are “creation work,” given a pledge of safe conduct ever since Cain under God’s regime of common grace. In this work, Christians serve beside non-Christians, as both are endowed with natural gifts and learned skills for their common life together.

 

Only when Christ returns in glory will the kingdoms of this world become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. Until then, the New Testament does not offer a single exhortation to Christianize politics, the arts and sciences, education, or any other common grace field of endeavor.

The false choice is always one between the “spiritual” and the rest of life, as he calls it our “common life together” with the heathen where we interact on a field of “common grace.” Horton, like all two kingdom Pietists, believes the Great Commission has invalidated the creation mandate given to Adam and Eve. The former as he says here is for Christians doing “spiritual” things, and the creation mandate will only be fully realized when Christ returns. Let’s remind ourselves what this mandate was. In Genesis 1 after God created man, male and female he created them, He commands them:

28 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.”

Sometime after this sin entered the world through man’s rebellion and ruined everything. God then declares curses on the man and woman, and on the ground itself, because of sin, and instead of blessing and flourishing in God’s created order, we’ve had hell on earth ever since. According to Horton and all two kingdom Pietists, that’s not going to change. Jesus came to pluck the embers out of the fire and not push back the effects of the fall and make his blessings flow “Far as the curse is found,” in the words of the great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World.

To put this in words most Americans might understand, in Horton’s Christianity there is a strict separation between church and state. Inside the walls of the church is where all the action is, where the kingdom is built, redemption happens, and the curses of sin are overcome by Christ’s righteousness and kingdom reign. Outside is a wasteland of sin, although we have the created order in common. These two kingdoms are completely separate and have nothing to do with one another. Yes, he says, Christians bring their Christian “worldview” to bear upon the common stuff, but as I’ve argued here in detail, a Christian worldview is not enough. Why? Because Jesus is King and has given us the Great Commission to disciple the nations, which means, as Jesus says, to teach them to obey everything he commanded them. Not some things, not most things, but everything. And the word in Greek is nations not individuals. Two kingdoms advocates explain this away. It doesn’t really mean entire nations, just individuals within those nations. Christianity comes down to individual salvation and personal holiness, a narrow, truncated, and limited view of Christianity which claims to be the biblical view, but effectively renders Christianity impotent outside the walls of the church. This is why the once Christian West became the totally secular West. The devil got the culture because Christians were doing the important “spiritual” things and didn’t think it worth fighting for.

The New Testament, according to this view doesn’t offer us, as he says, “a single exhortation” to “Christianize” outside of the Church, as if that was dispositive, as if that settled the matter conclusively. It doesn’t! This is the worst kind of biblicism, as if something isn’t expressly addressed in the New Testament, God has nothing to say about it. The Apostles and the New Testament church didn’t have anything to say about “politics, the arts and sciences, education, or any other common grace field of endeavor,” because those things didn’t exist! Life in the first century Roman Empire was a bit different than life in 21st century America. None of the early Christians expected I would be writing this, and you would be reading it 2,000 years later, so of course they didn’t address issues that took centuries and millennia to develop.

Thankfully, we don’t have to chop up reality because there is only one king, and his name is Jesus. As he told us, he has been given all authority in heaven and on earth, and that means here and now. Paul confirms this in Ephesian 1 when he tells us God raised Jesus “from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” Paul had to remind his first century audience that Jesus would also have all power and dominion in the age to come because everyone took it for granted Jesus was king in this age, in this fallen world, over all the nations, and everything and everyone in them. One kingdom, one King over all.