While I very much appreciate my optimistic amillennialist brethren, or what I call practical postmillennialists, it’s important to understand that being optimistic, or not, is not what separates these two eschatological perspectives. It’s more than merely seeing the glass half full. On a surface level that is non-theological or biblical, it can appear the two have much in common, but our eschatological optimism is the result of something much deeper than a desire to see things turn out the way we want. Having an optimistic perspective with a fundamentally pessimistic theology is like running up hill. When you believe things are going to the proverbial hell in a handbasket, one way ticket, it’s tough to maintain a positive outlook.

As those of you who are familiar with my work will know, I was born-again into the Late-Great-Planet-Earth late 1970s, which meant I accepted the dispensational premillennialist outlook on eschatology and the world. Things were getting increasingly worse, quickly, and the Rapture was happening any day, so be ready to go. Such newspaper eschatology got wearisome after a while, and even after my stint in seminary, I wasn’t really keen on eschatology. That lead me to adopt a kind of eschatological agnosticism, what I later heard termed pan-millennialism. Or it will all pan out in the end, as indeed it will, but that’s a copout.

Because I was a recovering dispensationalist, I was convinced God didn’t see fit to reveal much that wasn’t confusing about eschatology, so why bother. But would God really want to confuse us and leave us in the dark about a topic as important as how it all ends? Where everything is headed and how we get there? Sure, every orthodox Christian agrees, that as the creed says, Jesus will come from the right hand of God “to judge the living and the dead.” We know God will usher in a new heavens and earth where sin and suffering and sorrow will be no more, and he will wipe every tear from our eyes. The question is whether it is true that the world is going to hell in a handbasket and Jesus comes back like Batman to save the day. That’s what I used to believe, and what most Christians believe. Or alternatively, did God begin establishing His kingdom at Christ’s first coming, and like a mustard seed and leaven it is slowly and inevitably growing throughout the entire earth to eventually usher in the final sin free and reconciled kingdom on a new heavens and earth when Christ returns. These are the questions which most Christians would never ask, and if you ask it they think you’ve been drinking too much of the funny juice.

My Journey through Amillennialism to Postmillennialism
For whatever reason, God created me as something of an idealist with a kind of ambition where I believed if I worked hard enough I could accomplish anything. Of course that is not true, but when I was young I believed it completely. My dad used to make fun of me. My first obsession being a SoCal boy was surfing, and I just had to have that David Nuuhiwa surfboard and went to the beach to work on my surfing as much as I could. Then I moved on to guitar, and without a doubt I would be one of the greats. Eddie Van Halen had nothing on me! Being from SoCal himself, I saw him as a rival, which is kind of funny. I practiced for hours every day and got pretty good, but not close to Van Halen good. One thing my dad would never let me forget was haranguing him into get me a wawa pedal. For the rest of his life he would say to me, “You just had to have the wawa pedal.” Yeah, dad, then I could play Robin Trower and Hendrix! Then I got diverted into golf, and not only did I want to be great, but in fact the greatest in the world! Sadly, I only had the talent to be the greatest in my family. Yes, delusions of grandeur came naturally to me.

Then I went away to college and got born-again, and the idealism didn’t stop there. I was going to become a missionary and change the world like William Carey, but realized I’m to addicted to the comforts of American life. Then after college it was politics. I’d learned about what it means to have a Christian worldview from Francis Schaeffer, and was determined to apply it to all of life, and I dove into political activism. It didn’t take long to get disillusioned with that. I’d embraced Reformed theology, and went to Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia and Academia was my next rout to change the world. God rescued me from that life because I met my wife to be at Westminster, and we were married and started life together. We got involved in an Amway business, which my older readers will be familiar with, for the decade of the 90s, and that was the next vehicle to change the world, and get rich! That didn’t happen. Then in the late 2010s after I’d gotten disillusioned with politics again, I decided to start a non-profit called The Culture Project because I realized that’s the way we have to change America. That didn’t go anywhere either.

Through all these permutations of my delusions, I still maintained my idealism. Then in 2014 I embraced Amillennialism. I didn’t intend to become a pessimist, but in hindsight I see that’s what it did to me. When I embraced it through the teaching of scholar, theologian, and pastor, Kim Riddlebarger, I was so excited to learn that God actually did have something to say about “end times.” Eschatology wasn’t just a means to confusion and bickering after all. It was only after my embrace of postmillennialism in August of 2022 that I could look back and see what amillennialism did to my idealism that being dispensational and pan-mill could not.

Anyone who it familiar with my story knows it was Roman Catholic Steve Bannon and his War Room podcast after the debacle of the 2020 election who slowly turned me into an optimist. I then started to look for a theological, biblical justification for my growing optimism, and found it in the eschatological position I’d rejected all my life as a joke. I did not see that coming! It was one of the many ongoing effects of the red pill I unknowingly took when Donald J. Trump came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to run for president. It’s kind of amazing to me that at almost the age of 55 I would begin to rethink so many things in my life, and change my mind more often than not. I’m an object lesson to not allow our beliefs to become so ossified that when presented with different ideas and facts and perspectives we won’t change our minds.

Prior to Bannon and still embracing amillennialism, I even got to the point where I would mock my younger self for being an idealist. I’m not changing thew world because the world can’t change. I came to believe the world isn’t changing fundamentally until Jesus returns. Sin was too powerful a force in a fallen world filled with fallen people to change, and things would get worse until Jesus returned to clean up the mess. After my “conversion” I tried to figure out why I’d come to believe this so strongly. Mind you, prior to that I still believed in the things getting worse and Jesus coming back to save the day paradigm, but it personally didn’t turn me into a pessimist. Amillennialism did.

Why Most Amillennialists are Pessimists
This is a bit of a sensitive topic because our amillennialists brethren don’t really like to be considered pessimists. I certainly would never have considered myself one of them, especially given my history, but that’s what I became. It goes with the territory. An interesting aside as we discuss this topic is that I’ve found that even though premillennial dispensationalists according to their theology should be even more pessimistic than amillennialists, they often become the most robust culture warriors while the a-mills generally don’t. You would think it might be the other way round. I’m all for theological inconsistency when it comes to this!

One thing you’ll find widespread among a-mills is Christian worldview thinking, but as I argue and have written about here, while it is a requirement for all Christians, a Christian worldview is not enough. The reason is that it is primarily an intellectual exercise rather than a theological imperative rooted in the authority of the ascended Christ at the right hand of the power of God. Things will get better and the influence of Christianity will spread like leaven in bread (Matt. 13), not because people are thinking in a Christian way about things, but because God in His power through Christ is advancing His kingdom, extending Christ’s reign, and building His church. It is not our work that makes the difference, but God working in, through, and for us. What postmillennialism is not, is positive thinking. It is realistic, biblical thinking.

The a-mills don’t see it this way. I’ll give you a couple quotes from a piece written by the man who persuaded me to become a-mill. Referring to the Olivet discourse in a piece at Modern Reformation magazine, he says:

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.

This assumes a futurist perspective on Jesus’ words, that what he’s talking about is his second coming at the end of time, not what a preterist like me believes, that Jesus was speaking to the generation who was listening to his words. As Jesus says just a few verses before his reference to Noah:

³⁴ Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

So just three verses before the passage Kim uses to refer to a generation thousands of years into the future, Jesus says it’s his generation. People try to make his words into something they are not, but in Greek, or English, or any other language you choose, this means this generation, not some other one far into the future. In another passage from the same piece, he says:

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.

This of course assumes postmillennialism’s case for optimism comes more from human than biblical teaching, but it doesn’t. That’s one of the reasons I embraced it, realizing I’d gotten this wrong, and the case for eschatological optimism was thoroughly biblical and exegetical. Kim is not a fan of the optimistic/pessimistic paradigm, and I respond more in depth to Kim in a piece I did previously.

Why Postmillennialists are Optimistic: The Ascension and Christ’s Kingship
It wasn’t but a few weeks after I embrace postmillennialism that I heard Doug Wilson on a video say, “Now you have a theological justification for your optimism.” Bingo! That’s what I was looking for, and God provided it. Amazing. And this optimism had nothing to do with secularism and science and human knowledge that distorted postmillennialism in the 19^th century, but with God’s clear declarations in Scripture of victory in Christ. We see this through all the covenant promises and prophetic declarations in the Old Testament pointing forward to Christ. It’s easy enough to pick out the declarations of judgment, but to me they are overwhelmed by the power in contrast to the declarations of victory of God’s kingdom rule to come. Again, it is the Scriptural proclamation of victory of the plans of God that compelled me to embrace postmillennialism once my mind was opened to it, which previously was shut like a trap door I was convinced was unable to be opened.

Since that is the basis of our eschatological hope “not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1:21), I will end with one passage and how I now see it, and others like it, as applying to Christ’s first coming and not his second as I used to. Reading through Micah I came to these stirring words in chapter 4:

4 In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and peoples will stream to it.

² Many nations will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
³ He will judge between many peoples
and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
⁴ Everyone will sit under his own vine
and under his own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
for the Lord Almighty has spoken.
⁵ All the nations may walk
in the name of their gods,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord
our God for ever and ever.

With my futurist assumptions I automatically saw this, and the many other passages like it, as of course applying to Jesus’ second coming. Swords into plowshares? Not in this fallen world! Now I realize that’s exactly why Jesus came, to bring, as the shepherds proclaimed, peace on earth, good will toward men. If you compare the ancient world into which Jesus was born to the modern world as brutal as it can still be, it is peaceful in comparison, all because of the Prince of Peace. Just because the peace has yet to seep into every nook and cranny of existence, doesn’t mean the peace hasn’t been slowly coming all over the world since the resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. No Christian would deny that peace has come to personal relationships and families, but it isn’t limited to that. The modern world shaped by the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ is utterly different than the ancient world into which Jesus was born.

It is also clear, as it is in many other such passages, that they are speaking of life in a fallen world, not a perfected sinless and restored world. References to disputes among nations imply sin still exists. So does the possibility of being made afraid, or nations walking in the name of some other god. The kingdom’s coming is a painfully slow, mostly imperceptible process until you look in the rear view mirror—it nonetheless transforms wherever it goes. Maybe in a decade, or even a century, it doesn’t look like much transformation is happening, but look back 2000 years and the transformation is as obvious as a volcano in full bloom. Reading the Scripture, especially the Old Testament, with transformation expectations, can bring a new appreciation for what Christ is doing in our day,