Christian Western Civilization Should Have Never Happened

Christian Western Civilization Should Have Never Happened

Jul 8, 2025 | Western Civilization

From a merely human perspective Christian Western civilization shouldn’t have happened. The odds of a ragtag crew of manual laborers in a small corner of the Roman Empire eventually turning the world upside down, or should we say right side up, were as close to zero as it possibly gets. From God’s perspective, it was inevitable, baked into the salvific cake. The entire life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus to the right hand of God was the inflection point in human history. Literally everything changed, only it didn’t look like it, at all. We can see the beginning point of Christian civilization in a confrontation Jesus had with his enemies (Mark 12, Matt. 22).

They ask Jesus a question that would land him in hot water with the Jews and Romans; there should have been no third option. Jesus’ reply was completely unexpected, as was much of what he said and did. They asked if the Jews should pay tax to Caesar knowing if he said yes, he would be condemned by Jews, and if no, by Roman authorities. It was one or the other, they thought. But Jesus surprised them by asking whose likeness and inscription was on the coin, which he obviously knew. When they told him Caesar’s, he replied: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” Thus, political reality changed forever in the Western world. Yes, it took the slow outworking of this principle for almost 1,800 years to finally see what the full fruition of this principle would look like in America’s founding, but it started that day.

God and Caesar
At the time there was no and, only Caesar—all things belonged to Caesar. This was true in the Roman Empire, as well as in every other empire on earth whatever the ruler was called. Power ruled, might made right; everyone else would either submit or die. Now Jesus comes along and has the temerity to suggest the ruler must share his rule with God. This was radical, world changing radical, if Jesus was in fact who he claimed to be—he was and is, and thus Christian Western Civilization.

First, Jesus is saying we have certain obligations to temporal authorities, be they Caesars, kings, presidents, or those in any position of civil authority. However, he is also saying something nobody prior had ever said: there are limits to rulers’ power, and the things of God do not belong to them. In effect, Jesus was putting strict limits on political power by limiting the sphere of political sovereignty. Such an idea was inconceivable in the ancient pagan world. After all, Alexander the Great’s teacher, Aristotle, didn’t exactly turn him into a Democrat. Yes, Aristotle thought despotism was bad, whether it was the rule of one (monarchy turns into tyranny), a small number of rulers (aristocracy turns into oligarchy), or rule by the many, democracy (a polity turns into the tyranny of 51%). What he didn’t have was a transcendent authority in which to ground his arguments for the just state of limited powers. Human reason alone, and Aristotle was one of the most brilliant men ever to live, can only get us so far. Revelation was required to tell Caesar, hands off! The seed of this principle was planted by Jesus, and we’ll see how the tree of liberty coming from it grew very slowly, but surely, as the story progresses.

Without the God of Judaism and Christianity, Israel’s covenant God Yahweh revealed in Christ, tyranny is inevitable. Without God, if all we are is lucky dirt, then might makes right; morality is preference like preferring chocolate over vanilla ice cream. The logic of the “will to power” in a merely material world is irrefutable and inevitable. Why shouldn’t the one with the biggest gun, or the biggest army, determine what is right and wrong? The pagan gods offered no defense against this logic because they were basically human beings with more power, which is an especially toxic brew. Ultimately, politics is religious, and history has been a war between two mutually exclusive worldview systems, paganism (its current iteration is secularism) versus Christianity.

Christianity Verses Paganism
The war against paganism in redemptive history also goes back a very long way. This is the same worldview war we fight today, it only looks more sophisticated.

In the first verse of Genesis 12, the Lord says to Abram: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you,” and “all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” In the ensuing 2000 years, God’s plans didn’t appear to be progressing much. The entire history of Israel is the story of one battle after another in this religious i.e., worldview, war. From the beginning of Israel’s identity as a people, they vacillate between embracing the idolatry and paganism of the surrounding nations, or Yahweh and the true worship of God. The story seems to end without an ending in the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, but it points forward to the messenger of the one who would bring ultimate victory over the enemies of God’s people. Four hundred years later John the Baptist turned out to be the messenger.

At the time Jesus appeared on the scene, victory over God’s enemies certainly didn’t appear immanent. Israel was a small backwater province in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire, the Romans being only their latest oppressors. They certainly didn’t resemble the stars in the sky or the sand on the seashore promised Abraham two thousand years previously. That would come through Jesus’ life, death, resurrection, and ascension. After Jesus rose from the dead he explained to his disciples how the entire Old Testament is about him (Luke 24), which would include the promise to multiply Abraham’s seed beyond human ability to count. The geopolitical and cultural implications would take time to become apparent as God’s kingdom advanced, and the church grew like leaven in a very large batch of dough (Matt. 13:31-35).

The Apostles and the New Testament Church also didn’t have geopolitics and culture on their minds because they expected Jesus to come back within their lifetimes, this became imperative when, against all expectations, Constantine converted to Christianity in the early fourth century. Emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380 AD. The implications for Christianity on society became even more imperative when in the early fifth century the Goths sacked Rome and overran the Roman Empire. The pagans blamed the Christians and their strange religion for angering the gods and bringing the downfall of the Empire. A robust defense of Christianity was required, and Augustine, the great Bishop of Hippo (northern Africa), mounted one in his erudite tome, The City of God. This influential work would reverberate down through the ages as Christians realized there were no easy answers to the questions posed by those who inhabited a heavenly city and how they would engage with the earthly city. It seemed the pagans, though, would again be the dominant force in Europe, and God’s promise to Abraham delayed yet again.

How the Irish Saved Christian Western Civilization
Each year on March 17th the Western world celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, and maybe one in a million people know why. I didn’t fully know the story of Patrick and his true significance until I read Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. His life was the domino God used to begin the process of growing Christian influence in the West, and eventually the world. Patrick lived during the 5th century and was born in modern England at the end of Roman Rule in Britain. At sixteen he was captured by Irish pirates and brought to Ireland where he spent six years in captivity as a shepherd and converted to Christianity. He escaped, made it back to Britain, and eventually reunited with his family. There he grew in the knowledge of his faith, and had a vision in a dream where he believed God was calling him to return to Ireland as what today we would call a missionary, probably the first since the Apostles. Before he left, he was ordained as a priest and bishop so his ministry would be sanctioned by the church. According to Cahill, Patrick

In his last years could probably look out over an Ireland transformed by his teaching. According to tradition, at least, he established bishops throughout northern, central, and eastern Ireland . . . With the Irish—even with the kings—he succeeded beyond measure. Within his lifetime or soon after his death, the Irish slave trade came to a halt, and other forms of violence, such as murder and intertribal warfare, decreased.

In other words, God’s promises to Abraham are starting not only to be fulfilled in the souls of people, but in how they lived in society.

Learning and the spread of knowledge reflected a significant contrast between pagan and Christian civilization after Rome. When the heathen hoards poured in from the north, they not only brought with them violence, but ignorance, and the destruction of learning, libraries burned, and books turned to dust. These were not your learned classical pagans of Rome and Greece, a world destroyed with Rome. The elite leisured learned class which made learning possible would soon cease to exist, and the books they once paid to have copied by scribes began to disappear. Over time, Patrick’s influence would also bring the light of learning into a Europe enveloped in pagan darkness. For the next two hundred years people from all over Ireland, soon England, and then from Europe came to learn from the monks inspired by Patrick. As monasteries developed into little university towns, scribes took up the great labor of copying all of western literature—everything they could lay their hands on. According to Cahill, “Without the service of the Scribes, everything that happened subsequently would have been unthinkable.”

Except it wasn’t “unthinkable” to Almighty God! This knowledge will in due course bring us to our next glimpse of the inexorable spread of Christendom, and a story of God’s providence every bit as seemingly against the odds as Patrick’s.

How King Alfred the Great Saved what Patrick Started
Though Patrick’s influence was felt far and wide, the heathen barbarians were relentless, which moves us forward to the 9th century and the reign of King Alfred the Great of England (Wessex) from 871-899. Alfred aspired to establish a Christian united England under one king. He’s the only king in English history with the appellation Great attached to his name because he started the process to a united England under the law of God. As I learned about Alfred, I was amazed to learn that Christian Western civilization as we know it hung by a thread during Alfred’s reign, and from a human perspective, a thread might be overestimating the odds.

In Winston Churchill’s A History of the English Speaking Peoples, The Birth of Britain, he calls the period from the late 800s to 1050, the Viking Age, referring to it as a “murderous struggle.” There was no such thing as Viking people. The reference is something like calling them pirates. The Danes were representative and were Alfred’s primary adversaries, but Vikings were Scandinavian seafaring warriors who left their homelands during these years in search of a better life on an Island seeming to promise it. Since the time of Patrick, the Christian church had become the sole haven of learning and knowledge, something that seemed to amuse and perplex the Vikings.

We see in the English-Viking encounters two mutually exclusive forces, two worldviews that had been at war for almost 3,000 years, and only one could be victorious. Christianity would bring learning and peace, the rule of law, and the advance of God’s kingdom in the world, or the pagans would bring a bloody world of arbitrary power none of us would want to live in. Tom Holland in his book Dominion reminds us, “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.” Because of secular progressive education, the influence of Christianity to most people is invisible. Without the eyes of faith, which Alfred had in abundance, England could very easily have become Daneland, and heathen, paganism the dominant religion. It was as close, as I said, as a thread.

Wessex was the last Anglo-Saxon kingdom not to fall to the Vikings. By 875, they decided Alfred and Wessex would be next, the last kingdom in Britain yielding to the inevitable onslaught to come. Unlike the Scandinavians, Alfred didn’t have a large professional standing army to call on, but mostly depended on militias called fyrds, farmers who fought, then went back to their farms. Danish leader Guthrum looked to have the advantage, Wessex would fall, and Christian England lost to history. Prepared to deliver the final blow to Alfred, Ubba, another Scandinavian warlord king, sailed south with many Viking ships and many thousands of warriors to join Guthrum west of Wessex.

In one of the great “coincidences” of Christian Western history, a freak storm destroyed the fleet and Guthrum retreated back north. According to Churchill, “A hundred and twenty ships were sunk, and upwards of five thousand of these perjured marauders perished as they deserved. Thus the whole careful plan fell to pieces . . .” Alfred believed the storm was divine judgment on the heathens, but they were not done. In early 878, Wessex, during a surprise attack, suffered a defeat at the hand of Guthrum and the Danes. Alfred fled hiding for several months as a fugitive in marshlands with just a few hundred followers, hardly anyone in Wessex even knowing if he was still alive. The marshlands ended up not only saving Alfred, but Christian England from paganism.

When news went out in Wessex Alfred was indeed still alive, all his fighting men came back for what turned out to be a culminating battle for Alfred and Christian England at Ethandun (now Edington). We might say this was Alfred’s last stand. If the heathens had won, Christian England would likely never have existed and arguably neither would Christian Western civilization. There would have been no Magna Carta, no Glorious Revolution, no Pilgrims or Puritans, or America. It was Alfred who conceived and accomplished the beginnings of a united Christian England. His grandson, Athelstan, finished the work and would be known as “King of the English.”

Magna Carta to the Glorious Revolution and the Rule of Law
The next period in English history on the way to America in the never-ending war against the centralizing spirit of Babel is Magna Carta (1215) to the Glorious Revolution (1688).  Alfred was given the appellation Great for many reasons. Not only was he a warrior king who saved Christian England from the heathen hordes, but he was also a scholar king in ways almost unimaginable after the fall of Rome. In addition to promoting scholarship and general learning among the people, he was committed to the reign of Christ and the rule of God’s law over England. His vision was to establish a Christian England. His most important accomplishment to this end was building on previous kings to establish his Law Code built on the foundation of the Ten Commandments, and thus beginning the slow growth of English common law, and how law is practiced in America today. Understanding this development is crucial in the war against Babel because the only thing keeping power from absolutizing is the rule of law, something nonexistent anywhere in the world until its development in England. Magna Carta, also called the Great Charter, is a milestone in Christian Western civilization and English constitutional history.

Prior to this time there were no legal limits on the authority of the sovereign. What the king decreed was law. By declaring the sovereign to be subject to the rule of law and documenting the liberties held by “free men,” Magna Carta provided the foundation for individual rights in English law. This is remarkable when you realize in the thousands of years of recorded history previous to this fulcrum moment, the will to power of one man, or a small group of men, was law. Might made right. Outside of England, the Holy Roman Empire (basically greater Germany) and France were governed by Roman law, and therefore by the maxim that “what pleases the prince has the force of law,” thus allowing absolute government. Nonetheless, English kings would not give up their power easily.

When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, the era of the Tudor monarchy ended, and the tumultuous reign of the Stuarts began. This eventually leads to the English Civil Wars in mid-century, to the reign of parliament under Puritan Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) called the government of the Commonwealth which lasted until 1660. Another Catholic king instigated the events leading to the Glorious Revolution and the end of the reign of the Stuarts. In February 1689, Parliament offered the crown jointly to William and Mary, provided they accept the Bill of Rights, which “placed the royal prerogative and the monarchs themselves unambiguously under the law.” The change of dynasty creating a constitutional monarchy is what is known as the Glorious Revolution partly because it was bloodless.

This period of English history had a significant influence on America’s Founders, leading to the most enduring constitutional republic in history. That day in ancient Israel when Jesus answered his enemies’ question.  then through God’s providential sovereign ordaining of history, the blessings of limited government made their way into the founding of America. The tyranny of Caesar was effectively ended, and a self-governing people, a representative Republic was made possible. From a human perspective the odds against this happening were enormous, but in God’s eternal plans it was inevitable.

 

 

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

What Exactly is Replacement Theology? And Is It Biblical?

Jul 2, 2025 | Theology

Back when we lived in the Chicago area my wife listened to Moody Radio, and she told me how they often spoke disparagingly of something called Replacement Theology. I’ll never forget one time hearing Janet Parshall sneeringly say those words as if she was spitting out some horrible tasting medicine. Knowing Moody, both evangelist DL in the 19th century and the empire he built in Chicago today, are committed to dispensationalism this didn’t surprise me. What did was the vitriol, as if the very idea was an insult to any right thinking Christian. Having gotten active on Twitter early last year, the eschatology wars are a common occurrence. A dispensationalist and I started a conversation, mostly respectful, and he suggested I read this book, Has the Church Replaced Israel? By Michael J. Vlach.

The question of the title is something I couldn’t really answer because I’d never studied the relationship of Israel and the church in any real depth. I’m reading slowly through John Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah, and he always calls Old Testament Israel the church. This isn’t common in Evangelicalism, but most Evangelical Christians who are not committed dispensationalists tend to believe the church is the fulfillment of Israel, even if they couldn’t articulate exactly what that means. Historically as Vlach acknowledges, so called “replacement theology” was the default position of the church. I’ll explain what exactly this means below because it’s a new theological category that only developed in the last two hundred years. It would not exist if not for the also new eschatology of dispensationalism.

When I first heard this phrase I intuitively didn’t like it. Ever since I embraced covenant theology as part of Reformed theology in my 20s, I never saw the church as “replacing” Israel, as if we were throwing them out like unwanted trash. In my mind, the church doesn’t “replace” Israel, but is the fulfillment of Israel, of God’s redeemed people. Those two concepts, replace and fulfill, have completely different meanings. To re-place means to “put in place of,” so Israel no longer exists because the church has been put in her place. It’s kind of like replacing a struggling pitcher. The starter is not getting the job done, and the coach replaces him with a pitcher from the bullpen, a reliever, who saves the day and the team wins the game. There are two different people, two different pitchers, and the only thing they have in common is throwing a baseball to batters. In the minds of dispensationalists, that is “replacement theology.” To fulfill, on the other hand means “to bring to completion.” God’s promise to Abram that through his seed all nations on earth would be blessed through him meant God’s covenant promises were starting with Abraham and Israel, and would ultimately be fulfilled in Christ and his body, the church.

Eschatology and the Importance of Assumptions
A favorite theme of mine is the importance of assumptions, mainly because we tend to be unaware of how they affect our thinking. Everyone assumes (there I go again!) they’re objective and don’t assume anything at all! We all do, all the time, or we couldn’t think anything at all. It’s part of the deal of being a finite creature with limited knowledge. I was happy to see Professor Vlach admit that up front. On the very first page of the introduction he states an indisputable fact:

As will be shown, one’s hermeneutical assumptions will largely determine where one lands on the relationship between Israel and the church.

I would say totally determines. The assumptions we bring to the interpretation of Scripture, our hermeneutics, determine our interpretation. For example, in the 19th century as skeptical German higher criticism developed, biblical scholars came to the text with an anti-supernatural bias. They rejected the supernatural because they embraced Enlightenment naturalism. So, whenever the Bible mentions miracles, those miracles couldn’t have happened, so they searched for other “scientific” explanations. This is an obvious example of how assumptions affect our conclusions about Scripture, but everyone brings certain assumptions to their reading and study of the Bible, some more obvious than others. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we think of Israel and the church.

The first thing I noticed about Vlach is that he assumes the burden of proof is on those who, according to dispensationalists, believe the church replaced Israel. These are called supersessionists. It seems to me the newer position, dispensationalism, should have burden of proof, but he believes his position is so biblically obvious the bigger burden is on those he disagrees with.

Then of Israel he assumes they are an entity God will continue to deal with in the same way throughout history. He refers to “the nation Israel,” Israel as “the group,” and Israel as a “people.” Isarel as a nation, a distinct people with a distinct geographic boundary, is fundamental to the dispensational paradigm because they assume God’s promises in the Old Testament to Israel necessitate a literal one-to-one correspondence in the New Testament church age. Based on his assumptions, he states the fundamental issue clearly in this passage:

I have no trouble with the designation replacement theology because with the supersessionist view there is a taking away or transferring of what national Israel was promised to another group. One can use fulfillment terminology as some prefer, but in the end the result is the same—promises and covenants that were made with the nation Israel are no longer the possession of national Israel. Israel’s promises and covenants now allegedly belong to another group that is not national Israel. This other group may be called the “new” or “true” Israel, but this does not change the fact that what was promised to one people group—national Israel—is now the possession of another group to the exclusion of national Israel.

As you can see clearly here, his assumptions determine his position. For his position to be true, or truly biblical, God needs to have intended all his “promises and covenants” to be specifically, literally, for the entity of the nation-state of Israel and its people, which will always be a distinct, independent, and self-contained object of God’s plan. There is no way for him to prove God’s intentions, or at least in any persuasive way, which is why supersessionism has been the predominant position in the history of the church.

The History of Supersessionism
First let’s clarify that word. It originated from the Latin term supersedere, meaning “to sit above” or “to take the place of.” It is formed from super- (“above” or “over”) and sedere (“to sit”). It emerged in the theological scholarship of the 19th and 20th centuries specifically to indicate “replacement theology” as a system of thought or doctrine. Once dispensationalism got its start with J.N. Darby in the 1830s, and Israel as a nation-state entity became theologically relevant again, there needed to be a descriptive way to refer to what had been until then the historical position of the church. Vlach quotes theologian Lorraine Boettner:

It may seem harsh to say that “God is done with the Jews.” But the fact of the matter is that He is through with them as a unified national group having anything more to do with the evangelization of the world. That mission has been taken from them and given to the Christian Church (Matt. 21:43). (Italics added.)

The phrase, “unified national group” is an apt description of the heart of the matter. For all of church history until Darby, the position of the church was that God was no longer dealing with Israel as a “unified national group.” God’s covenant and promises that came through Israel were now fulfilled in the church consisting of both Jews and Gentiles.

According to Vlach there are three variations of supersessionism in the history of the church.

  1. Punitive Supersessionism – In this perspective, because of Israel’s disobedience and God’s punishment, He is displacing Israel as the people of God with the church because they have forfeited that right. Vlach says this was common in the Patristic era, and Luther with his anti-Jewish views held it as well.
  2. Economic Supersessionism – This is where I and most non-dispensationalists fit. As Vlach explains, “it focuses on God’s plan in history for the people of God to transfer from an ethnic group (Israel) to a universal group not based on ethnicity (the church). In other words, economic supersessionism asserts that God planned from the beginning for Israel’s role as a people of God to expire with the coming of Christ and the establishment of the church.” I have a saying I heard somewhere and have used over the years: God’s covenant promises are about more than a plot of land in the Middle East. Vlach argues that it is exactly what they are about.
  3. Structural Supersessionism – Simply, this is an interpretive approach to the Bible that discounts the Old Testament history of Israel, and skips right to the New Testament age and focuses upon the church. He is right in that most modern Evangelical Christians ignore the history of Old Testament Israel, and use it primarily for moral lessons. Even as well-read as I am, and a seminary graduate at that, I still didn’t have a solid and detailed grasp of Israel’s history until the last handful of years.

This doesn’t mean we supersessionists don’t hold that there is a future for Isreal and the Jews as a people. Vlach calls this moderate supersessionism, and most Christians have held this position in the history of the church. He distinguishes between salvation and restoration. Moderates do not believe the nation-state of Israel as a “unified national group” will be restored, but we do believe per Paul’s argument in Romans 9-11 that God is not done with the Jews, and that many Jews will come to believe in their Messiah and be saved. We call those today Messianic Jews. The church is the new Israel made up of saved Jews and Gentiles, and supersessionists do not see “any special role for Israel apart from the church.”

Vlach then does a deep dive into the history of supersessionism in the church from the church fathers through the Middle Ages, the Reformation and Enlightenment eras, into modern times. He rightly points out that it is no longer the dominant view, but doesn’t tell us why. He wants us to believe it’s because the biblical case for God restoring national Israel is so obvious, even though it’s not as church history indicates. Supersessionism is no longer dominant because of the rise of dispensationalism in the last two hundred years, and it having completely taken over the Evangelical church. That goes back not only to the Plymouth Brethren and Darby, but to the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of fundamentalism against the liberal modernism of the early 20th century. Once Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth hit the bookstores in 1970, it was all over but the shoutin’! Then to put the dispensational icing on the cake, the Left Behind novels (16 of them!) exploded in the 90s, and the movies only added to the dominance of Evangelicals seeing national Israel continuing as part of God’s plan. Not to mention the unlikely event of Israel becoming a nation in 1948.

Hermeneutical Assumptions Determine Our Perspective on Israel and the Church
Having started the book admitting the importance of our interpretive assumptions regarding the Bible, he spends several chapters explaining what those are. This is the heart of the matter, more than the theological justifications he explains later, which we will not have space or time to get into. There are three primary assumptions:

The doctrine of supersessionism is largely controlled by three interrelated beliefs: (1) belief in the interpretive priority of the NT of the OT. (2) belief in the nonliteral fulfillments of OT texts regarding Israel, and (3) belief that national Israel is a type of the NT church.

He then implies that there are two mutually exclusive approaches to interpreting the redemptive history we find in our Bibles. For him these are either/or:

Can one rightly use a grammatical-historical-literary approach to OT passages? Or should the student interpret the OT primarily through the lens of the NT?

The answer to these questions is yes. If you’re not familiar with what a grammatical-historical approach is, simply, it looks to interpret biblical texts by focusing on their original context, language, and literary features. The first thing it asks is what is the author’s intended meaning for the original audience, which can only be understood in the context of the historical and cultural setting.

I was born-again at 18 years old, and I would not learn of this approach to biblical interpretation for over five years. Prior to that it was either implied or expressly taught that the Bible was written to me not for me, that it was God speaking directly to me. When He wanted me to understand something, God would zap! a metaphorical little wire coming down out of heaven into my brain, and I would understand the text for me. That was the primary interpretive grid of the kind of Pietistic Christianity I encountered as a new Christian and a recipe for interpretive distortion. I’m not saying by the power of the Holy Spirit God doesn’t use specific texts to us in unique ways, only that the text has one objective meaning in its historical context, and our objective is to understand that meaning. The phrase I learned that helped me quickly understand all this was “authorial intent,” or what did the author intend as he was writing the text, and related to this is what his readers would have been expected to understand.

The other question he raises is how we use the lens of the NT to interpret the OT. For me the ultimate hermeneutical principle is found in Luke 24 after Jesus is risen from the dead. He makes it clear that he himself is that principle. To the two disciples on the road to Emmaus:

25 He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow to believe all that the prophets have spoken! 26 Did not the Messiah have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” 27 And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

According to the risen Jesus, God himself in human flesh, all the OT Scriptures, from Genesis to Malachi, is about him. In the following quote we get to the heart of the issue for dispensationalists, literalism:

Closely related to the supersessionist view of NT priority over the OT is the belief that the NT indicates that there are nonliteral fulfillments of OT promises, prophecies, and covenants related to Israel.

For Vlach and all dispensationalists there are OT texts that “appear to predict a time when Israel will fully possess its land and have a special place of service among the nations.”

The crux of the issue between dispensationalists and supersessionists is literalism, a basic assumption of the former is that certain texts must be interpreted literally. The problem with literalism is that it is impossible to apply consistently. Even in the book giving examples, Vlach doesn’t apply it consistently himself. He agrees that some texts merit typological interpretation, which means there are patterns or “types” in the OT seen as foreshadowing or prefiguring events or themes fulfilled in the NT. So who determines which are literal and which are types? In fact, something can be literal in one context, and a type in the ultimate fulfillment in Christ in another context.

Because of this, his critiques of these three hermeneutical principles of supersessionism (NT priority over the OT, nonliteral fulfillment of texts, and typological understanding of the OT story), is not persuasive; it’s his dispensational assumptions verses supersessionist assumptions. Neither of these approaches can technically be proved, and he admits “the hermeneutical issue of how the NT uses the OT is a difficult and complex topic.” Ultimately, as I said above, your hermeneutical approach and understanding of Israel and the church will be determined by your eschatology. The new eschatological kid on the block, dispensationalism, has gotten a very lot wrong in its less than 200 years, so they shouldn’t get the benefit of the doubt regarding the status of national Israel in God’s redemptive plan. I’ll be sticking with supersessionism, the historically solid position in the history of the church.

 

 

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.