Paganism, Telos, and Re-Establishing Christendom

Paganism, Telos, and Re-Establishing Christendom

Dec 18, 2024 | Western Civilization

As Christians, our understanding of the world goes back several thousand years to the creation narrative in Genesis, and God calling Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, out from his pagan world to become a people of God. Telos, the Greek word for purpose, is critically important for how we understand both creation and history, and both are critically important for our battle against the forces of secularism to re-establish Christendom in the generations to come. I will start with history because it’s easier to grasp, then discuss teleology in creation after we get our biblical historical bearings.

Do you ever ask yourself how we got here? As the late great Rush Limbaugh used to say all the time, most of us think history started when we were born. I hate to break it to you, but none of us are that important. Before I get into a bit of theology and philosophy, I need to establish a Christian understanding of history. That’s not as simple as it sounds. History is stuff that happened, right? Well, yes and no. Most historians agree that certain historical events happened, by they disagree wildly on what those events mean, and why and how certain events lead to other events in the flow of history. All history, in other words, needs to be interpreted, and all interpreters are human beings with limits of knowledge and insight and wisdom. These human beings are also sinners, which brings up fundamental assumptions these people hold about the nature of reality. Such assumptions cannot be escaped, and thus will determine how we interpret history. As Christians, we must interpret history as Christians, which means our assumptions will inescapably be different than non-Christians. Let’s find out just how different.

A Biblical Teleological 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. In September 2022 when Hurricane Ian was tracking toward where we live in the Tampa area, I had to remind myself it is God alone who determines where it goes, not mere “natural” forces. Regarding history, we too must often must remind ourselves God directs all events, past, present, and future. As David says in his great doxology to Yahweh, the Lord, the God of Israel, He is “the ruler of all things” (I Chron. 29:10-13).

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

In Daniel 4, after Nebuchadnezzar’s sanity was restored, this pagan king of Babylon also couldn’t help coming to the same conclusion as Daniel the Hebrew prophet. The Old Testament affirms this continually. When we come to the New Testament, our providential understanding of history should be intensified by the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, Israel’s Messiah and the Savior of the world. 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. 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. We find this in Ephesians 1, the crowning New Testament rationale for the confidence of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar in God’s providence. We cannot overemphasize the theological and providential implications of Christ’s ascension, and Paul tells us why. Speaking of the surpassing greatness of the power for those who trust the Lord Jesus, he 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.

I tended, however, to see this passage eschatologically when Christ comes to consummate all things in him. 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 for present age, as well as in the one to come.

Linear versus Teleological View of History
Once we accept God’s providential control over history, we need to have some idea how it works out in actual history, as in what the implications are for events themselves.

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. One of the most profound changes Jews brought to the ancient world was the conception of time and history. This change started when God called Abram to go from Ur of the Chaldeans to the land of Canaan, by faith he left everything he knew and the world was forever changed. History going somewhere, forward, in a different direction was now possible.

We 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, meaning the end is bound up in the events themselves. History is going somewhere, every event leading to God’s appointed end regardless of what it may look like on the surface. This means there are no throwaway events in history, things that just happen. Every event has teleological significance whether we think we can see it or not. Too often we presume that we can. There are many times looking back in history, or at current events, or even in our own lives, when this is difficult to swallow. The most common question in all of history attests to this, “Why, God?” It just doesn’t make any sense. . . . to us.

As Christians, our fundamental assumption about history is what Jesus revealed in Luke 24 as the ultimate biblical hermeneutical principal—that the entire Old Testament was about him. But it isn’t just the Old Testament. The same hermeneutical principle applies for all history: we interpret it all according to God’s revealed word. Because of this, we can 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, to which we turn next.

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, or purpose, to history. Things happen randomly. If there is no God ordaining and guiding history providentially, we’re forced to conclude it 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. Which brings us to Hegel.

German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) is the father of historicism, which is a teleological view of history without God—well, without a God any of us might recognize. As a child of the Enlightenment, Hegel could not believe in a personal God who ordains history according to His will. Instead, for him God was history itself as the unfolding of a World-Spirit. Hegel’s writing is inscrutable, but it made sense to a lot of other philosophers and intellectuals, including one Karl Marx. Historicism is in effect a bastardization of the Christian idea of God’s providence, and a competing assumption on how we interpret history. The takeaway from Historicism is that it strips human beings of agency, that we can change things and alter the course of history. The World Spirit is impersonal and deterministic. We’re basically cogs in the World Spirit Machine. In the Christian view, human beings have real agency, they can change things even though God ordains and is in control of all things.

While most modern Americans and Westerners are not Hegelian per se, his influence can be seen in their assuming history is the story of inevitable “progress,” an idea baked into the historical cake. A driving assumption is that things just naturally get better because as secularism teaches, we went from ancient superstition and “the dark ages” to Enlightenment and science.

Therefore, we have three options for how we interpret history, the biblical providential view of a sovereign ordaining God, or the two secular options, a historicist view a la Hegel, or chance. That’s it. There are no other options when it comes to interpreting the events of the past, the present, or the future. Agnosticism is not an option. As Orwell said in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” For our purposes, whoever defines history defines the present and the future. These are not just academic questions debated in ivory towers, but questions the answers to which will affect everything about our lives and the generations to come.

The Importance of Telos in Creation
As we’ve seen, our assumptions about history will determine how we interpret history. The same can be said about creation, or what people today refer to as “nature.” I no longer use the word nature because it is loaded with Darwinian assumptions, and as we saw with history, assumptions determine interpretation. So what has telos, or purpose, to do with creation. Only everything!

Way back in the Middle Ages, a brilliant scholar and monk, William of Ockham (1287-1347), developed what in philosophy is called nominalism, and having some understanding of it will help us grasp the importance of telos in creation. These are very deep philosophical waters in which to swim, so we’ll only get our toes wet. Bear with me and its importance will become apparent.

Richard Weaver in his book, Ideas Have Consequences, believed nominalism was “the best representative of a change which came over man’s conception of reality.” He argued the seeds of this move to the subjective (meaning, we think our perspective is reality itself) goes back to nominalism. Ockham rejected the idea of universals, a concept developed by ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Very simply put, nominalism contends that things only have meaning because of the names we attach to them (Latin nomen). What does this mean in practice?

Over time this led to empiricism, or the idea that knowledge can only be attained via sense experience. In due course experience came to be viewed as ultimately authoritative, and as the only thing that really counts. As a result, personal preferences become sovereign, and people tend to deny any authority exists outside of the self. In other words, all meaning exists inside, not outside of them. This connects directly to how nominalism affected our perspective on creation, and in due course destroyed the possibility of telos in God’s created order, what people mean whey they say “nature.

There are numerous deleterious implications of a nominalist perspective, but one is that we no longer see the created world imbued this its own meaning and purpose, or telos. Nature, as we see it through a secular lens, no longer has an end to which it works. It just is. We’ll use the most common of things in human experience, dogs, to illustrate this. Since nominalism rejects universals, there is no such thing as “dogness,” only things that have dog qualities we call dogs so we don’t confuse them with cats, for instance. Think of a dog like you think of puffy clouds that take the shape of a dog. it may look like a dog, but we know it’s only a bunch of moisture particles condensed in the air that just happened at that moment to take the shape of a dog. Nominalism does the same thing with atoms of matter. There really is no such thing as the universal dogs, only matter that by chance just fell together and there were these things we call dogs for convenience, so we don’t confuse them with other animals.

Again, as I said, these are deep philosophical waters, but we in the modern world are drowning in these waters, and God is throwing us a life raft called telos in creation. Once Darwin came along, evolutionists rejected any kind of telos or purpose in nature, in matter itself. Matter just fell together without any guidance from an outside source, and out popped dogs! And everything else. There’s nothing behind the matter but . . . . more matter. In my favorite metaphor, there are only puzzle pieces and no puzzle, so no bigger picture, universals, to give the pieces, the particulars, any meaning. Here’s the takeaway: the individual pieces can only be given ultimate meaning from the bigger picture. If we only see pieces in isolation, we will get a distorted picture of everything. Welcome to the modern world in 2024! No wonder we are in the middle of a Great Awakening. People are tired of nominalism, so to speak, tired of the puzzle pieces without the big picture, and the resulting confusion. They’re exhausted.

To show the practical implications of this concept, let’s finish this with an example as simple as it is relevant; human sexuality. If human beings are merely a collocation, an arrangement, of atoms or matter and that is all, then male and female don’t actually exist. Simply put, the concepts of maleness and femaleness are malleable, can be changed on a whim by rearranging some of the matter. Same with sexual organs. If bodily orifices are just so much matter with no inherent telos or purpose, then we can do whatever we want with them, pleasure and preference is all. If homosexuality floats your boat, knock yourself out. If, on the other hand, God’s creation is filled with the purpose he gave it at creation, then we look at it all completely differently. We try to find the meaning outside of us, in the things themselves, to discern their purpose, which leads to human flourishing because we’re using things as they were designed to be used! It’s incredible how simple it is, yet sinful rebellious humans want to “be like God” and call the shots. Telos says, they . . . . don’t . . . . get . . . . to!

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Dec 11, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

When I started writing my latest book in early 2022, I knew it would be about the Great Awakening happening all around us, and along the way it also became about the re-founding of America. I didn’t realize until a little later into the journey, specifically after I embrace postmillennialism in August of 2022, that Making America Christian Again was the only way America could truly be RE-founded. The book is an historical analysis of how we got our post-Christian 21st century secular America from our founding as a deeply Christian enterprise with a ubiquitous Protestant Christian culture. Without Christianity again becoming the dominant ethos and plausibility structure of the nation, a re-founding will not happen. Which means without America rejecting secularism and embracing its Christian roots, it cannot be the constitutional republic conceived in liberty it once was.

I first heard Joshua Haymes of the Reformation Red Pill Podcast use the phrase, Make America Christian Again, and it perfectly encapsulated in a Trumpian way what I’d been hearing among my new post-mill compatriots. This gets into discussions of the divisive phrase, Christian nationalism, and the even more divisive concept of theonomy, or God’s law over the nation. But those are meaningless concepts and useless discussions without a Christian culture undergirding them. We must work on parallel tracks as we seek to rebuild a Christian America, studying and debating and thinking through exactly what this will look like, but developing a Christian culture is a prerequisite if a Christian America is to even be a possibility.

It’s All About Culture
Culture is a people’s religion externalized. However a people answer ultimate questions of life and death, purpose and meaning, will affect not only how they live, but how they perceive everything in the lives they live. American culture, and the West in general, is secular, God is persona non grata, unwelcome at the societal table. He may or may not exist, but either way He is an invisible, unimportant God, irrelevant to everyday life. This is the driving assumption underlying the secular worldview, and it’s doleful consequences are everywhere. In The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, Vishal Mangalwadi puts this succinctly:

Every civilization is tied together by a final source of authority that gives meaning and ultimate intellectual, moral, and social justification to its culture.

The final source of authority in a secular culture is man and his reason, the poisonous fruit of Enlightenment rationalism. Unfortunately, Christianity played along with the rise of secularism in Western culture through the influence of Pietism, a German Lutheran movement in the 17th century, which was a not unreasonable response to a dry, scholastic theology coming out of the Reformation. It was also a perfect example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. What made Pietism the ultimate disaster in the demise of Christendom was an over spiritualized Gnostic dualism it created in practice. All this means is that most Christians today effectively live in a two story reality (dualism). Upstairs is the important, spiritual stuff, like prayer, church, evangelism, Bible reading etc., while downstairs is every day mundane life, which is not as important, and above all, not “spiritual.”

The is a profoundly unbiblical and destructive take on Christianity, one that has allowed secularism to grow and dominate the culture, which is why I’ve argued that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. Most Christians see the purpose of Christianity as being saved so when we die we go to heaven, and while on earth practice and grow in personal holiness. This is a terribly truncated, narrow, and distorted view of Christianity. Before we see why, let’s take a look at culture, what it is, and why it’s so important. As Christians, we must think about culture biblically, as opposed to sociologically or anthropologically. In other words, how do we as Christians define culture differently than non‑Christians. 

A Biblical Take on Culture
Christians start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture somehow existing 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 the Genesis 1 and 2 creation account, we find something we now called the “cultural mandate.” Human beings are commanded to govern God’s creation:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

But it is the prior two verses that gives the cultural mandate its true power:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

The significance of the Imago Dei (the image of God in man) for the Christian worldview cannot be overstated. 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, practical, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture. God commands Adam and Eve to act (be fruitful, fill, subdue, rule), and these commands define the essential purposes of human existence. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame had this to say in a lecture on Christianity and Culture:

Why did God give this command to Adam and Eve? Well, for the same reason, ultimately, he does everything else: for his own glory. God’s glory is that beautiful, intense light that shines out from him when he makes himself visible to human beings. [He] wanted Adam’s family to spread that glory through the whole world. Adam was not to rule merely for himself, but for God, glorifying God in all he did. So culture is based on a divine command. Adam must develop culture because that is God’s desire. Culture is for God’s sake. So it is subject to God’s commands, God’s desires, God’s norms, God’s values. 

I will add that this God orientation is the only way culture and the people in it can truly flourish.

I may create a beautiful piece of art or music, or build a magnificent building, or tell a moving story in words or film, or plant a garden, or do any number of mundane things, but all of these reflect the glory, greatness, power, and knowledge of the living God! All human creations ultimately point back to him. Obviously the efficient cause, i.e., me, deserves recognition, but the point is that every created thing, whether in the natural world or culture, reflects God himself. Nothing is trivial. It doesn’t matter if the person or people doing a thing are Christians or not, for they too are made in God’s image. Just because they are blind to his glory, try to suppress His knowledge and take the glory for themselves, doesn’t mean God is silenced.

There are significant apologetics implications (i.e., evidence for the veracity of Christianity being true) for a proper biblical understanding of culture which play a critical role in re-Christianizing the culture. The importance of cultural apologetics (culture is the evidence) cannot be overstated in its implications for re-Christianizing and refounding America on its foundational principles. There isn’t space to get into this in detail, but contrary to the doomers who bemoan the debauchery of the hostile secular culture, the culture is our best friend. In my first book, The Persuasive Christian Parent, I have a section with exactly that title, and show how I used our non-Christian secular culture to ground our children’s faith. The reason has to do with culture being a reflection of man made in God’s image, and the topic we turn to next. 

Culture and The Fall
Six times in Genesis 1 God says his work was good, and caps it off with a “very good.” When we engage culture, we aren’t simply making meaning, but responding to meaning woven into creation. We are taking that meaning‑filled creation and reshaping it in our hands, or responding to others who have, thus culture is fundamentally a religious pursuit. This means there is no neutral position relative to ultimate meaning as we interact with the culture. As I said above, culture is a people’s religion externalized. Because of the fall, man mars culture even as his distorted products of culture glorify God. This reflection of the disease of the human heart, i.e., sin, suffering, and death must be explained. As I’ve often said, if all we are is matter, merely lucky dirt, then life is basically a Woody Allen movie. His is always in a futile pursuit of meaning, hope, purpose, and fulfillment outside of Christ, and he expects the vacuum in his soul to be filled by created things rather than the Creator. All his movies end in resignation, and you can see this futile pursuit etched in his sad face.

So, an example like Woody Allen shows how all human works can be distorted by man’s disobedience to God. This is the tension that exists in all culture, but God doesn’t leave man in his sin. Immediately after the Fall, God promises redemption (Gen. 3:15). Adam and Eve realize they are naked, and they are ashamed. So taking things into their own hands, they try to sew fig leaves together to cover themselves. And when God comes calling “in the cool of the day,” what do they do? They hide. Their covering didn’t do the job. After they get through with all the excuse making, and God shares with them the promise that the woman’s offspring “will crush” the serpent’s head, we have what is possibly the first sacrifice in history. “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.” From that moment on, all history is one long story of human beings furiously sewing fig leaves to try to cover themselves from God’s wrath and judgment, and earn his favor; it doesn’t work. Instead the Lord sacrifices himself because no other sacrifice will do the job! Human beings reflect this salvific drama in everything they do, including in the stories they tell, and in whatever they make.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s seminal work Christ and Culture is a good overview of the ambivalence Christians have had with culture since Pentecost. He looks at certain Christians through the ages, and how they thought Christians should interact with culture. He divides them into five broad types or approaches:

  • Christ against Culture
  • Christ of Culture
  • Christ above Culture
  • Christ and Culture in Paradox
  • Christ Transforming Culture

Christians have negotiated their interaction with a fallen world in a variety of ways, and maybe all these approaches in some way at the same time. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, conservative Protestant Christianity in America, however, slowly came to embrace a version of the Christ against culture approach. With the rise of a truly biblical postmillennialism in the 21st century, in contrast to a secular progressive postmillennialism of the 19th and early 20th century, Christ transforming culture is again becoming the dominant view among Protestant, especially Reformed, Christians. If we are to make America Christian again, we must recapture the Reformation and Puritan vision of Christ the transformer of culture.   

Professions of Cultural Influence, Plausibility Structures, and MACA
If America is to become Christian again, that will be fundamentally a cultural change. As conservatives were finally starting to understand the primacy of culture, as the late great Andrew Breitbart famously said, politics is downstream from culture. Politics and the laws of a country in its own way creates culture, but the politics and laws of a country will never fundamentally contradict the dominant cultural ethos of the people. In 21st century America, that cultural ethos is thoroughly secular. Too many Christians either ignore this or don’t understand the power of it. Whatever that cultural ethos is, is that culture’s plausibility structure, and understanding this concept is critically important.

What is plausible is what seems true and real to us, and the societal structures we inhabit determine for us what is plausible or not. For those who uncritically navigate the culture, their perspective is assumed to be just the way things are. It is the fundamental plausibility structures of culture that must eventually be changed if we’re to ever redirect the massive ship of American culture to true north, i.e., Jesus, God’s word and Law. I will address two issues related to this, abortion and homosexuality. Both of these issues are accepted as normal in a secular culture, and rejected as sinful in a Christian one.

If we are ever to get there, we must understand professions of cultural influence. When I first became aware of the power and dominance of culture in 2007, conservatives were still obsessed with politics thinking somehow if we got the right people elected, the culture would become more conservative as well. It doesn’t work that way. It is a two way street, but fundamentally, culture drives a nation’s laws and how it is governed. So the question is, how do we change the culture? It will not come primarily from changing the laws, even as we attempt to change laws. This is why John Adams, no raging Evangelical, famously said,

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

The Founders believed it was the Christian religion and Christian morality of a providentially ordaining God that made the American experiment possible. To them, a secular America would have been a contradiction in terms.

This brings us to professions of cultural influence, something conservatives have basically been clueless about. James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, argues that,

[T]he deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of the world‑making and world‑changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. This capacity is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and among certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well‑developed networks and powerful institutions.

These networks and institutions include, but are not limited to, education, Hollywood and entertainment, and the media. These three broad areas are the most powerful worldview and plausibility structure generators. As Hunter states further, cultural change, or influence for our purposes, “is most enduring when it penetrates the structure of our imagination, frameworks of knowledge and discussion, the perception of everyday reality.” Shaping reality happens primarily from the top down, not the bottom up, and as long as a secular worldview dominates the profession of cultural influence, Christians are spitting into the wind if the think the moral framework of our laws will change.

Too many Christians, unfortunately, seem to think spitting into the wind is a strategy. On Twitter I come across Christians often who declare that abortion is murder and women should be prosecuted as any other murderer would be. Or they declare sodomy should be illegal, some going further say homosexuals should be executed. Such sentiments in the real world are meaningless, not to mention unpersuasive to most people, because we live in a representative republic. That means we have to persuade our fellow citizens that Christianity and God’s law is the only source of true human flourishing, and then elect legislators who will pass laws that will be signed by the state’s or country’s chief executive.

If we truly want to make America Christian again, we need to understand it is a complex, multifaceted, difficult, and generational enterprise. It will only happen if we play the long game. As Christians we have something to learn from the history of cultural Marxism and the rise of woke in our day. Their “long march through the institutions” started in the early 1920s, and it took almost a hundred years for their perverted vision to dominate the culture. As we contemplate the future I say to my fellow Christians, we need to be as patient, persistent, diligent, and determined as the Marxists. We are building cathedrals we will never worship in, and planting trees the fruit of which we shall never eat. Thus we work as if it depends on us, and pray because it depends on God.

 

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Dec 4, 2024 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

I bet you never thought cannibalism and Nietzsche would go together, but they do, quite nicely. I might never have put those two together, but I heard Gary DeMar discuss his book, Why It Might Be OK to Eat Your Neighbor, on his podcast. This subtitle gives us the apologetics focus of the book: If Atheism is Right Can Anything Be Wrong?

I’ll start with my own question. What sets Christianity apart from every other religion and worldview and philosophy on earth?

The answer is as simple as it is profound: It is true, and everything else is not.

If it is not true, as Paul says about the resurrection, we are to be pitied more than all people. That I believed Christianity is the ultimate truth about the nature of reality is the only reason I became a Christian way back in the fall of 1978, exactly 46 years ago as I write this. At the time I couldn’t tell you why I believed it was true, but God seemed entirely too obvious to dismiss. Growing up Catholic I was, thankfully, given a Christian worldview, and the reality I experienced as a teenager for me confirmed that worldview. So, when I was presented the gospel in a college Dorm room in Best Hall at Arizona State University, I believed it immediately. It would be a couple years before I would get my introduction to apologetics, or the defense of the Christian faith.

If you’re not familiar with that term, you should be. We live in a post-Christian thoroughly secular culture that tells us in ways big and small, overtly and covertly, that Christianity is not the truth, but one spiritual option among many and all of them are valid. Well, no they are not, which I’ll get to in a moment. First the word, apologetics. We get the word from Peter in chapter 3 of his first epistle:

15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect . . . .

The word for defense in Greek, apologia-ἀπολογία, means “a verbal defense (particularly in a law court).” This means Peter is commanding his readers, and by extension every Christian throughout all time, to not only know what we believe, but why we believe it. Apologetics, as the theological discipline of defending the veracity of Christianity is called, is not just for certain Christians of an intellectual bent. If you can’t tell your friends or family members why you believe Christianity is the truth, then you need to get to work and invest some time in figuring that out. The resources today online are endless, as are books and articles easily available. Before I get to Nietzsche, I came across a short clip on Twitter that is a great illustration about why apologetics is so necessary even as it is so rare among Christians.

Kid Rock was on Joe Rogan’s podcast which is viewed or listened to by 10 to 15 million people, and Rogan asks the Kid if he could go back in history where he would go, and Rock says, “Jesus.” Rogan asks him why he believes it and Rock says . . . . faith. We need to get Kid Rock some training in apologetics because he obviously he believes in Christianity for the exact same reason I did and do, it’s the truth, but all he could say is, faith, that he just believes it. There is so much evidence for the veracity of Christianity, historical, textual, philosophical, archeological, that Rock could have spent hours telling Rogan exactly why he believes Christianity is the truth.

The Nature of Faith
Which brings us to faith. Many people today in our secular world think of faith as a specifically religious word for believing in something just because you want to, but that is a shallow modern definition of faith. In fact, faith is something we use every day of our lives or we wouldn’t get out of bed. I define faith as trust based on adequate evidence, thus faith is not a specifically religious concept. Faith basically means trust, and when we exercise faith we generally do it with justified warrant. That is, there is enough evidence to justify putting my trust in something or someone.

Think of driving down a two‑lane road going 50 miles per hour, and another car coming toward you at the same speed. That’s a closure rate of 100 miles per hour. If the other car swerves into your lane, there will be a lot of damage. And maybe death. How do you know that car will stay on its side of the road? You don’t; you have faith that it will. What evidence do you have for such trust? You know that people generally stay on their side of the road. You trust that the person driving the vehicle has a license and got adequate training to operate several thousand pounds of metal at high speed. You trust that the state does a good job of policing its roads. And so on. Do you know any of this? Nope. How about the food you eat? Will it kill you? Do you know it won’t? Nope. How about the dentist or doctor you see? Do you know they won’t harm you? Nope.

This is a discussion about epistemology, or the study of knowing and knowledge. I challenge a specific definition of knowing: that to “know” a thing is to be absolutely certain about it, and that we can only “know” via our reason. Rene Descartes (1596‑1650) was the philosopher who introduced the poison of equating knowledge with absolute certainty in Western thought. If you’re familiar with my work, you’ll know Descartes appears often, maybe too often, but he was a fulcrum point of Western culture from Christian to post-Christian secular culture. It would take several hundred years for this bacillus to infect the entire culture, but in the 21st century secularism is the default worldview. So to average Westerners, like Kid Rock and Joe Rogan, faith equals religion because it’s not something that can be known with absolute certainty, like science or the laws of nature, math, etc., things you can observe and measure.

I’ve noticed over the years many Christians are the mirror image of atheists in this regard. They tend to think absolute certainty is necessary to justify their beliefs, and thus they deny what is obvious: they are finite. It almost seems silly for me to write that sentence. Who would not admit they are finite, limited in every way imaginable? Daniel Taylor writes about the downside of demanding certainty in his book, The Myth of Certainty:

Ironically, the insistence on certainty destroys its very possibility. The demand for certainty inevitably creates its opposite—doubt. Doubt derives its greatest strength from those who fear it most. Unwisely glorified as the primary way to truth by many secularists, it is equally unwisely feared by many in Christendom as truth’s mortal enemy.

Such an unhealthy fear of doubt is what happens when you base your epistemology on a false anthropology and psychology, i.e., that human reason is capable of achieving knowledge of an absolute sort. There is only one being who has such knowledge and certainty, and He would be the Creator of it all.

The implication of this is that there is no such thing as an unbeliever, and thus everyone lives by faith. One of my pet peeves is Christians calling people believers and unbelievers. The word “believers” is all over Acts, but Luke and those he was writing to and who read it knew exactly who he was talking about, Christians. We, on the other hand live in a post-Christian secular culture so using the phrase believer/unbeliever allows secular people, like Joe Rogan, to think faith is just a religious thing. As of yet he can’t muster up the faith to become a Christian, not realizing he’s a person of faith every bit as much as a Christian. Which brings us to . . . .

 

It’s a cookbook!!!

Since all people live by faith, the only reason cannibalism doesn’t exist anymore is faith, specifically the Christian faith. Secular people fail to realize moral values, what they consider right and wrong, come from faith, come from some belief of some people somewhere. Of course, most people never give this a second thought, it just is. As an easy example, they think obviously slavery is wrong. They think, isn’t it obvious owning another human being is evil? Well, no, it’s actually not obvious at all. In fact, for all of recorded history until very recently (the 19th century), slavery was a common fact of everyday life for people all over the earth. The reason there is nothing in the New Testament about the evils of slavery and calls for its abolition is because it was obvious to everyone at the time that slavery was a normal part of human existence. Paul implies it is good for slaves to get their freedom, but never indicates slavery is a moral wrong.

That only happened in due course because as it became apparent Jesus wasn’t returning as soon as Christians had hoped, church leaders and Christian thinkers realized they had to grapple with the implications of the Christian faith for society. These implications were profound because the competing moral system of the day was paganism. In fact, even as enlightened and brilliant as the ancient Greeks were, they were still polytheistic pagans. Aristotle, for example, believed women and slaves were inferior beings and deserved their lesser status in life. To say to any ancient person prior to the diffusion of Christianity throughout the world that all human beings were ontologically equal would have been considered absurd. Very few modern people in the West (which is most of the world at this point), have any idea their entire moral value system of liberalism is built upon Christianity and would not have existed without it. They are fed lies through their secular education and media that this value system is a result of the Enlightenment, but the Enlightenment only came into being because of Christianity.

An important book for Christian apologetics in the 21st century was written by a non-Christian, British historian Tom Holland. It’s called, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. His story is a fascinating one. He always loved history, and found as he grew up and became a scholar he wanted to learn everything he could about the ancient Greeks and Romans. For various reasons the ancient world appealed to him, but as his career progressed something happened. As he studied the ancient world he realized he had nothing in common with them. In his own words:

It was not just the extremes of callousness that unsettled me, but the complete lack of any sense that the poor or the weak might have the slightest intrinsic value. Why did I find this disturbing? Because, in my morals and ethics, I was not a Spartan or a Roman at all. . . . Assumptions I had grown up with—about how a society should properly be organized, and the principles that it should uphold—were not bred of classical antiquity, still less of ‘human nature’ but very distinctively of that civilization’s Christian past.

Almost every person in the world today fails to realize we’re not cannibals, to use the most extreme example, because of Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a Roman cross, was buried, and whose followers claimed rose bodily, physically from the dead. As Holland adds:

So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.

As in completely invisible.

The Moral Argument Simplified
Have you ever asked yourself the question, why is anything right or wrong, good or evil? The simple answer is God. In fact, the only answer is God. If atheistic materialism is true, as absurd as that is to contemplate, there can be no right and wrong, good or evil. The reason? If the material is all there is, if all we are is lucky dirt, you can’t get moral values from dirt. Another way of saying it is, you can’t get ought from is. In other words, I cannot infer cannibalism, or slavery, or murder, or adultery, or homosexuality, or lying, or theft, etc., are wrong just from material reality. Certainly, they are unpleasant, or delude us for a time, but we only know they are wrong, and ultimately lead to disaster, because God has revealed it to us, primarily in his word, but also in the created order and our consciences.

If, on the other hand, there is no God, right and wrong, good and evil, are mere preferences, like my preference in ice cream, or which sports teams I support. I once asked my brother-in-law if what we consider good or evil are mere preferences, and he said yes, like almost all modern secular would. So I asked him if Hitler butchering six million Jews was a preference, like whether he liked vanilla or chocolate ice cream. He got kind of a sick look on his face. He immediately intuited that no, choosing to commit genocide on a race of people isn’t like preferring one flavor of ice cream over another. We all know it is morally repugnant, pure evil, because God said so. He declared in the Ten Commandments, “You shall not murder.” Prior to the entire world being Christianized, killing was the preference of the powerful over the weak, and might made right.

And that is the final implication of the moral argument. If there is no God, we cannot escape might makes right, the one with the biggest stick or the biggest gun, or whoever is the strongest, determines what is right and what is wrong. If dirt is all we got, there can be no other appeal. This is why over time Tom Holland became repulsed by the ancient world. If there was no Jesus of Nazareth, nothing would have changed. In fact, as you study the rise of Christianity and the West, you see clearly through the development of the rule of law in England, that the political liberty enjoyed by much of the world today developed only because of Christianity. Because there is a transcendent moral standard, the king and the government were eventually forced into submitting to God through the law. It began with Magna Carta in 1215, eventually reaching fulfillment in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and developed fully in the founding of America in 1776.

It’s an incredible story, and the moral argument providentially developed in history through the almighty power of the Sovereign God of the Bible turning it into reality. We must build on what God has provided as we battle God-less secularism and raise up Christendom 2.0. from the ashes of the Enlightenment. I’ll finish with the C.S. Lewis quote I use all the time because it says it all:

I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen, not just because I see it but because by it I see everything else.

 

 

The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian

The Importance of Both the Inner and Outer Body for the Christian

Nov 27, 2024 | Theology

Since I got active on Twitter in early 2024, I often come across comments like this as people debate spirituality and physical fitness:

From by what I can gathered and have observed by those who predominantly post about masculinity, not all but some, focus more on outward appearance than the inward man. Being physically in shape is great but being spiritually minded is far greater.

This is undoubtedly true, not least because Paul tells us this exactly in I Timothy 4:8:

For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

If that was all there was to say I wouldn’t be writing or talking about this, and given I’ve had a massive red pill experience regarding physical health because of Donald Trump and then the Covid scam, I have a very lot to say about it.

When I say because of Donald Trump, it wasn’t so much about Trump per se, but the reaction to Trump when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Even though I was not a fan of Trump, and in a way despised him and everything I thought he stood for, the reactions to Trump were so unhinged I thought, nobody can be that bad. So I started to take him seriously, and a year later in the Illinois primary I begrudgingly voted for him over Ted Cruz, and not with a little guilt. I never looked back, though, because the lies of the media, the Democrats, and NeverTrump Uniparty Republicans made me actually begin to appreciate the guy. I thought, he must be a singular threat to their grift to engender this much hatred, and it’s only gotten worse. They’ve even driven the Republican Party to become the Trump party,

something unfathomable just a couple years ago. What has this all to do with health? As it turns out, Everything.

Covid, The Neutron Bomb of Truth
Not too long ago this phrase popped into my mind as a metaphor for how powerful Covid was as a societal red pill about health, and other things as well. Theoretically, a neutron bomb is a weapon that kills by irradiation killing everything that lives while sparing property. So when this particular bomb exploded around the world in 2020, it effectively killed lies about health and modern medicine that had developed in the previous hundred years, while at the same time sparing the property, so to speak, of our every day lives. No longer could those of us affected by it see anything related to our health in the same way. This included the modern medical industrial complex, Big Pharma, and those things that contribute to feeding the beast while destroying our health, like Big Food and Big Ag.

When my cousin told me in March 2020 that Covid was a scam, I was nonplussed, a word that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; to perplex or bewilder someone; to confound or flummox. The “experts,” the CDC, the WHO, governments and media organizations everywhere on earth treated Covid as if it was akin to the Bubonic plague, aka, the Black Death, a real pandemic that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. A rough estimate is that 25 million people in Europe died from plague during the Black Death, and the population of western Europe would not reach its pre-1348 level for 250 years. I don’t remember seeing anything during the Covid years like Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s, “Bring out yer dead.” All I remember is masks, masks, everywhere masks. I wouldn’t wear one. Initially it was intimidating, but I learned, for example, to enjoy going to the local Walmart and being the only person in the entire store without a mask, virtue signaling of another sort. I kind of miss those days.

My cousin also started me on my health journey, giving me reading suggestions, while I started searching out resources online about the history of medicine, and how we got to the place where modern medicine seemed to be getting it all so wrong. I learned that modern medicine isn’t so much health care as disease care, the focus on treating symptoms. Like everyone else, I believed it was medicine that healed us. After several years of this journey, and slowly making changes in eating and exercise habits, I had a final red pill experience that in effect confirmed everything I’d been learning since the bomb dropped.

Earlier this year I came down with an unpleasant case of dermatitis, with itchy red splotches all over my body. It started when I noticed white flakes, lots of them, coming out of my hair, and I’ve never had dandruff. It got so bad, gross really, that scabs were appearing on my scalp and I was losing small chunks of hair. That will freak you out! I had been thinking of finding an integrative or holistic doctor for some time, and this was the opportunity to do that. But initially I went to a dermatologist, a skin doctor that I knew was your typically modern medically educated professional. I learned this was Seborrheic dermatitis. They prescribed some medicine and gave me a paper explaining the condition, and on it were these words I could hardly believe I was reading: “Dermatitis is an immune response of the body with no known cause.” What? Are you serious? Talk about nonplussed; I was shocked. And the more I thought about it the more ticked off I got.

The medicine was a steroid cream and some anti-fungal shampoo and some other medicine for my scalp. Not too many years before, pre-Covid, I would have continued to use it, and since it only treated symptoms would likely have had to use it for the rest of my life. What a depressing thought knowing what I now knew. Looking at these ugly red splotches on my arms and legs and the terrible itching was the final motivation I needed to find a holistic, integrative medical professional to figure this out. I found a local nutritionist who had me take several tests, and discovered I had severe fungal and bacterial overgrowth in my gut which led to something called leaky gut. She put me on a protocol of herbal supplements, a specific strain of probiotic, and helped me tweak my diet, and by golly the dermatitis went away! No more ugly red splotches, no more itching. My body like God intended healed itself, no medicine required. Talk about mind blowing.

This doesn’t mean medicine doesn’t have its place, but even when it’s appropriate it isn’t what heals us so much as it allows the body to heal itself. That was the paradigm shift, that God created our bodies, and the ridiculously complex immune systems he gave us, to heal themselves. After six decades of believing the former, it was not an easy transition to fully embrace the latter, but dermatitis sealed the deal. I was automatically conditioned, like everyone had been prior to Covid, to run to the doctor whenever anything was wrong. I now look back with 20/20 hindsight and realize God had been leaving health breadcrumbs throughout my life to help me begin to see that he’s provided everything we need in creation to live healthy and well-functioning lives. Prior, like most others, I believed health and disease was a crap shoot, a matter, for lack of a better term, of luck. Now I know better. We are responsible for our health, or lack thereof.

The Apostle Paul and Bodily Exercise
For much of my Christian life I mocked those who were obsessed with health and exercise. I wanted to be healthy and exercised, but I assumed the people who obsessed about it were deluded, thinking they could live forever. Then Covid. I slowly came to believe our health isn’t merely something that’s nice to have if we’re fortunate, and something to be wished for, but something we have control over. It’s not a crap shoot, a mere roll of the dice. If we just happen to get the wrong number, bad luck, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, whatever. That is what we’ve been programmed to believe by a well-meaning medical establishment that is blind to their own indoctrination. Thankfully, with the explosion in knowledge and the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, distributing it to anyone who wants it, the indoctrination is slowly being revealed for what it is, false information, also known as lies, about human health and disease.

Living 2000 years ago when the average lifespan was probably 30 or 40 years old, and knowledge about disease and health was guesswork, Paul couldn’t imagine what we know now. I would like to believe if he were writing to Timothy today, he might write something like this:

For physical training and your health is of great value, but godliness has even more value and for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

Paul and people in the ancient world in general did have some idea what they did had some effect on their health. He even implies in chapter 5 that Timothy’s ill health is bad for his ministry and that he should do something about that:

23 Stop drinking only water, and use a little wine because of your stomach and your frequent illnesses.

Think about what he might say if he had our knowledge about the human body and could suggest more than wine. Or what he might say about how much value physical training and our health has if the choices we made allowed us to live productive, healthy lives into our 90s. Let’s look at this theologically and get a big picture perspective on these issues.

God has chosen to reveal himself to us in two ways, one through His creation, and the other verbally through His word, Scripture, in Greek, graphé-γραφή, the writings. In Matthew 4, Jesus tells us that “man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Here Jesus is telling us both are required for life, physical substance from the earth and spiritual substance from God’s word. Without either one we die. Regarding the former, God’s material created order, Paul tells us this in Romans 1:

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.

We can see the maker of matter through His matter, the Creator of all things from His creation. Through it He is “clearly seen,” no ambiguity, no guesswork whatsoever. And since all knowledge has it origin in God, we gain knowledge of God through His creation. In the Middle Ages, Christians came to see these as two books, the book of nature and the book of Scripture.

Related to both, is the concept of progressive revelation. As we can see in Scripture, God doesn’t pull up the dump truck of revelation and unload it all at once. Rather, he slowly, painstakingly slowly (God is never in a hurry), revealed Himself and knowledge about the nature of reality over 2000 years to give us our Bibles. When the canon of Scripture was closed, that didn’t mean God stopped revealing himself. The Bible itself being the revelation of God is a bottomless ocean, the depths of which can never be fully comprehended, but He’s also revealing Himself slowly but surely in creation. Knowledge grew slowly through the first 1500 years of so of the church, but when the scientific revolution started this process picked up speed. People who lived at the turn of the 20th century were dumbfounded at the growth of technology and knowledge. A hundred years later that had multiplied exponentially, and in the third decade of the 21st century, human knowledge is mind boggling. All of it is revelation from God, including knowledge about the human body and our health.

Our Health, Our Responsibility
When we lived in Illinois, the Chicago area, we went to a large church, and because we’re not fans of modern praise music, we attended the traditional service, which meant there were a lot more older people there. Many times I would see some old guy with a cane or something hunched over hobbling down the isle to his seat, and I would tell my family, I don’t want to be that guy. Yet I really didn’t believe I had control of whether I became that guy or not. Sure, to some degree I did, but I still bought into the crap shoot mentality of health and illness. Knowing better now, I see Jesus’ words in the parable of the master and the servant in Luke 12 as relevant for this discussion:

47 And that servant who knew his master’s will but did not get ready or act according to his will, will receive a severe beating. 48 But the one who did not know, and did what deserved a beating, will receive a light beating. Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more.

Related to health and the body, we can’t pretend the last 2000 years didn’t happen, specifically that there has been an explosion of knowledge about the human body, disease, food, exercise, and optimal health. Nor can we pretend that we don’t have agency, and that the choices we make have implications for our health, nor that all this is a gift of God to be utilized for his glory and in service to others. To whom much is given applies here as much as to any of the other gifts of life God has graciously granted us. We’re also taught by Jesus in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 that he expects us to invest what he’s given us to multiply it and not bury it in the ground.

Lastly, who wouldn’t rather be healthy than sick? If God has given us the knowledge and technology to be the former rather than the latter, why wouldn’t we do that? And further, if being healthy allows us to more effectively and for more years be part of God’s glorious effort of bringing his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, shouldn’t we do that? Think about the implications of this. Effectively, it means physical training and our health has great value not only for this life but for the one to come. There are spiritual, eternal implications for the choices we make regarding our health, including how much we exercise, what we eat, how much we sleep, and how we handle our stress. No more do we need to play the physical off the spiritual, as if somehow they were either in conflict or mutually exclusive. They are both oriented to the same end; the telos, purpose, of each is the glory of God, our good and the good of others. Because of this, the Apostle Paul would tell us:

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

What I’ve learned and what I’m sharing here is that physical health and it’s connection to spiritual reality is part of the 21st century Great Awakening. As a convinced postmillennialist, I now believe that what Isaiah tells us about the “new heavens and earth” in chapter 65 is becoming a reality it our time.

20 “Never again will there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not live out his years;
the one who dies at a hundred
will be thought a mere child;
the one who fails to reach a hundred
will be considered accursed.

What an exciting time to be alive! And remember, God has chosen us to be here, you, me, and everyone one else, to be alive at this very moment, as Paul tells us in Acts 17:26:

He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

Onward Christian soldiers!

 

Eschatological Assumptions and AD70

Eschatological Assumptions and AD70

Nov 20, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

From early in my Christian life I knew Jerusalem was completely destroyed, decimated, by the Romans in AD70. However, before I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I didn’t realize the significance of that event both eschatologically and theologically. I also didn’t understand the importance of assumptions, and how they inevitably determine how we interpret everything, literally, including eschatology and theology. We are assuming creatures. Presuppositions are built into our worldview, how we see and think we know things. That is called the discipline of epistemology. Having presuppositions means we assume certain things, we pre‑suppose them.

Most people know what assumptions are, but few have any idea of the role they play in how they view the world, how they understand, process, perceive, and interpret reality. In fact, most people don’t believe they assume anything at all! But they do; all human beings do because technically we can’t “prove” anything. Ask someone how they know what they assert or claim. More often than not you will reveal they don’t know something, but simply assume it. For example, the assumption behind “True for you, but not for me” is that thoughts are their own justification. People assume that nothing outside their own thoughts or feelings can determine whether what they believe is true or false. Of course, just because someone thinks a thing is true, doesn’t make it so. Such an assumption can’t be proved and there is no evidence for it; it is merely assumed as if it is true. Uncovering hidden assumptions is one of the most powerful tools in our truth armor, and also a cause for epistemological humility, something in short supply among sinful human beings, Christian or not.

I’ve learned when we come to eschatology that assumptions are baked into the cake. We can’t read any eschatological text in the Bible without bringing certain assumptions to the table, and few Christians are even aware their assumptions determine how they interpret the text. Given most pastors never teach or explain what I just said, and also given most Christians have not been educated to the degree we all wish we could have been, assumptions are mostly invisible, as if they didn’t even exist. This is especially true when it comes to eschatology. Which brings me to AD70 and the fall of Jerusalem.

Preterism, Futurism, Historicism, or Idealism?
These are four approaches to eschatology, and I’ll briefly explain each one.

Preterism – The word comes from the Latin preteritio, meaning “a fact or condition of being in the past.” So preterists believe biblical prophecy already happened in the past, especially the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24; Mark 13) as referring to the Roman army’s destruction of Jerusalem and the temple in A.D. 70. Preterists also argue that the Apostle John wrote the Book of Revelation before A.D. 70 and that it describes Nero Caesar’s persecution of the church. The references to judgment on Babylon refer to Israel, not Rome. We’ll discuss this in more detail in a moment because since I’ve embraced postmillennialism I’ve become a preterist (partial for those who know what that means).

Futurism – In this position as it implies, biblical prophecy is about the future, post AD70. So the events Jesus and John refer to will happen well after the first century, and in fact haven’t happened yet. Premillennialists and dispensationalists are futurists, and they tend to believe Revelation was written after AD70.

Historicism – From gotquestions.org: “In theology, historicism is an approach to eschatology and prophecy in general. In historicism biblical prophecies are interpreted as representative of literal historical events. Historicism looks at the whole of Bible prophecy as a sweeping overview of church history, from Pentecost to the end times. This approach involves interpreting symbols or figures in the Bible as metaphors for actual events, nations, or persons of history. Historicism was especially popular during the Reformation, when it was used to suggest that the Catholic Church was part of the end-times apostasy, with the pope as the Antichrist.”

Idealism – This approach differs from the others in its reluctance to identify any particular historical events, institutions, or people with the visions of the book of Revelation. Revelation to idealists is a portrayal of the church’s struggle throughout the entire period between the first and second comings of Christ.

I was a pan-millennialist (eschatological agnostic) for most of my Christian life, but when I embraced amillennialism in 2014 I embraced idealism. It made sense to me because I assumed that eschatology was so difficult a topic to grasp that a general application of the basic ideas throughout time seemed to fit the text. I’d rejected dispensationalism a long time ago because it was basically newspaper eschatology driven by headlines and predictions that never came to pass, and I knew absolutely nothing about postmillennialism so that was never an option, until it was. I thought I knew it was a completely discredited position and unworthy of seriously considering even though, like I said, I knew nothing about it. Until, that is, it dropped out of the sky on my head in August 2022. Now preterism makes total sense, and even more so the more I learn about it.

Back to assumptions. We will interpret eschatological passages depending on our assumptions based on these four positions. Given premillennial dispensationalism is the dominant position held by the vast majority of Evangelicals, whether they could articulate that or not, most Christians are futurists.

Before we get to discussing the date of John writing Revelation, I will briefly mention why preterists feel the need to use “partial” as a qualifying adjective. Preterists believe Jesus came again, as I’ll explain, in judgment against Israel in AD70, and for some of them that’s it. That’s Jesus’ second coming and there will be no other. Needless to say, that’s the extreme minority report in Christianity historically, and considered heresy. Non-heretical (partial) preterists believe Jesus came in judgment then as well, but also believe there is some futurist elements to the prophetic witness as in the creed that, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.”

Before Jerusalem Fell
This is the title of a book by Ken Gentry I recently read that made a compelling case for John writing Revelation before AD70. I had no idea given the post-AD70 position is by far the most popular in Christianity today, that the pre-position was so strong. In fact, I was under the impression that the post position was beyond if not question, then beyond a reasonable doubt. However, anyone reading Gentry’s book will have to conclude there is very much a reasonable doubt. Whatever conclusion one comes to having studied the evidence, it has to be acknowledged that the pre-AD70 position is credible and worthy of consideration. For me, it’s beyond a reasonable doubt, but I also bring my postmillennial assumptions to the evidence, so I want it to be written before Jerusalem Fell. I can’t look at it any other way because those are my beliefs and deeply held convictions.

Since we can’t completely escape our assumptions, we need to at least be aware we have them. This allows us to see how Revelation and the Olivet discourse are interpreted with the various approaches to the text. As I said, almost all Evangelical Christians are futurists, so it’s easier for them to believe Revelation was written after Jerusalem fell even if the evidence doesn’t support that. Exactly what is the evidence? There are two types of evidence, and Gentry goes into great detail on each one. I’ll explain them briefly, but before I get there we must come to some agreement on why John wrote Revelation. These are the two choices:

  • Post AD 70 during the reign of Domitian (reigned 81-96)
  • Pre during the reign of Nero (reigned 37–68)

Of the various ways to interpret the text of Scripture, what we call hermeneutics, the most important is authorial intent. In other words, what was the intention of the author who wrote the words. The second most important is what the author’s audience would have reasonably been expected to believe. To put this in laymen’s terms, context is everything in interpretation.

We know whether it was written in the 60s or 90s, persecution was the context. Historians are in agreement that the Neronic persecution in the 60s was more intense than any persecution under Domitian. Nero didn’t start out as the horror he became, but when he decided Christians were the enemy, he went all in. Christians were thrown to the lions in arena for sport, covered with tar, put up on poles and burned alive. It was so horrific that Romans began to feel sorry for them, especially because Nero seemed to be doing it to blame the Christians for the great fire of Rome in July 64. Nero even had the two great leaders of the early church, Peter and Paul, killed. Imagine living in that time, and the abject fear you live with every day that you could be next. This kind of mindset filled with foreboding would not have been present in the 90s under Domitian. Eusebius in his Church History provides the first reference to Domitian persecuting the church writing over two centuries later in the early fourth century. Speaking of the context of Revelation, Gentry writes:

Revelation has two fundamental purposes relative to its original hearers. In the first place, it was designed to steel the first century Church against the gathering storm of persecution, which was reaching an unnerving crescendo of theretofore unknown proportions and intensity. A new and major feature of that persecution was the entrance of imperial Rome onto the scene. The first historical persecution of the Church by imperial Rome was by Nero Caesar from A.D. 64 to A D. 68.

In the second place, it was to brace the Church for a major and fundamental re-orientation in the course of redemptive history, a re-orientation necessitating the destruction of Jerusalem (the center not only of Old Covenant Israel, but of Apostolic Christianity and the Temple).

If Revelation was written in the 60s that will necessitate a rethinking of the futurist interpretation, but if it was written in the 90s, then the futurist interpretation of the prophecies to the distant future is more plausible. A lot rides on dating the writing of Revelation. Few Christians, unfortunately, are aware of the arguments one way or the other, and even as well-read as I am, a seminary graduate no less, I knew nothing about any of this until I read Gentry’s book. The two types of evidence are external and internal, and we’ll look at the former first.

External Evidence
I never knew exactly why the consensus was a late date, and Gentry does an extensive survey of the scholarly opinion because scholars have been wrestling with this question for a long time. The evidence for the late dating of Revelation depends completely upon the external evidence, that is evidence coming from comments in the writings of the early church fathers of the first three centuries of the church. All scholars agree whatever their opinion of the dating, that John was banished to the barren, virtually deserted Island of Patmos, as John himself tells us in the first chapter:

I, John, your brother and partner in the tribulation and the kingdom and the patient endurance that are in Jesus, was on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus.

To put it bluntly up front, the external evidence for the AD90s writing of Revelation is weak. Yes, my assumptions as a preterist make me inclined to believe this, but you judge for yourself, and a short blog post is not going to convince you one way or the other. Reading Gentry’s book is a good start, but I will briefly lay out the case here.

The late date external evidence rests most heavily on the church father Irenaeus (130-202), and he wrote about it in Book 5 of his work, Against Heresies, written in 180-190. The context is in a passage where he’s commenting on identifying who “666” might be. Here is the passage:

We will not, however, incur the risk of pronouncing positively as to the name of Antichrist; for if it were necessary that his name should be distinctly revealed in this present time, it would have been announced by him who beheld the apocalyptic vision. For that was seen no very long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign.

Apparently for many scholars that settles it, but not so fast. Gentry says, “there are several considerations that tend to reduce the usefulness of Irenaeus for late date advocacy,” and then he goes into exhaustive detail on each one.

The first issue is the translation of the Greek, and while it’s impossible for me to address the issues in short order here, let’s just say there are enough questions to raise reasonable doubt as to the meaning of the text. There is also the issue of Irenaeus writing almost a hundred years after the events, and questions about his chronological understanding of the history he writes about. Gentry reviews other church fathers who comment on John and Domitian, but most of them depend uncritically on Irenaeus. Gentry concludes, “A bold ‘thus saith Irenaeus,’ cannot be conclusive on the matter.”

Internal Evidence
To me the internal evidence, i.e., the content of the book itself, as they say in a court of law, is dispositive, which is “an adjective describing something that resolves a legal issue, claim or controversy.” In court it gets us beyond a reasonable doubt, and I am confident if you studied the internal evidence, you too might get beyond such doubt. I can only briefly review it here.

I will refer to the thoughts of others, but I start with the most obvious “proof” to me coming from the very first words of the book:

The revelation from Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place.

The late date advocates and those not disposed to the preterist position have to explain away “soon.” For the futurist, I have to believe “soon” really means thousands of years into the future, and for the historicist it is also hundreds if not thousands of years in the future, and for the idealist it isn’t any time at all. I think it’s best to take words in their plain meaning, and take soon to mean, well, soon, just as I take Jesus in Matthew 24 when he says “this generation will not pass away until all these things come to pass” to mean, that very generation of people he was talking to.

Gentry gives us the “major lines of evidence” from various scholars, each of which he then explores in detail, but here I will just list them to give you a flavor of why the internal evidence for an early date (pre AD70) can be so compelling.

  1. The peculiar idiom of Revelation indicates a younger John, before his mastery of the Greek language evidence in his more polished gospel from a later period.
  2. The existence of only seven churches in Asia minor (Rev. 1) indicates a date before the greater expansion of Christianity into that region. (I would add John addressing “the seven churches in the province of Asia,” with the definite article indicates there were in fact only seven at the time, while 40 years later in the 90s there would have been considerably more.)
  3. The activity of the Judaizing heretics in the Church (Rev. 2, 3) should be less conspicuous after a broader circulation of Paul’s anti-Judaizing letters.
  4. The prominence of the Jewish persecution of Christianity (Rev. 6,11).
  5. The existence and integrity of Jerusalem and the Temple (Rev. 11) suggests the early date.
  6. The reign of the sixth emperor (Rev. 17) must indicate a date in the AD 60s.
  7. There is lack of internal evidence for a late date.
  8. The nearness of the events had no fulfillment beyond the dramatic events of AD70.
  9. It is easy to apply Revelation’s prophecies to the Jewish War.

Lastly, I’ll mention two points he addresses from scholar F.J. A Hort. First, the language of Rome and the Beast fits the dreadful last days of Nero and following in the late 60s, not the local and short reign of terror under Domitian. Hort further claims, “Nero affected the imagination of the world as Domitian . . . . never did.” Second, the tone of Revelation fits much better with the tumultuous time after Nero’s death much better than the stability of the time of Domitian.

Wherever we come down on the dating of Revelation, what happened to Jerusalem and the temple in AD70 was the redemptive and covenantal turning point in history, definitively from old to new, separating Christianity from Judaism once and for all. God’s judgment on the Jews led to the salvation of the world, and in due course the Jews too.