Evil and the Death of Secularism

Evil and the Death of Secularism

Oct 16, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

In a comment on Facebook recently I said, “Secularism is dead,” and I got this not unreasonable response:

Not sure why secularism is dead, but post-modern thinking and critical theory are alive and well.

Looked at as a snapshot of the current historical moment, of course the commenter is right. Secularism in the form of woke cultural Marxism is at the moment of its greatest triumph in Western culture, but this triumph reveals its inherent weakness. Secularism promised a religious free pluralistic Utopia where the strife and conflict caused by religion would disappear. Religion would be allowed to have its place inside a worship building or home, but it has no place in the public square, a neutral place where religious claims are unwelcome.

There are various versions of secularism where religion is allowed some relevance, but only as a competing force with no inherent authority. In its purest sense, God in secularism is persona non grata, unwelcome because the God claimed by Christians was supposedly responsible for the wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries. When Descartes declared in 1637, “Cogito Ero Sum,” I think therefore I am, full blown secularism was inevitable. The Enlightenment, so called, made man’s reason the ultimate source of knowledge, and God’s revelation in creation and Scripture eventually completely discredited. Man was now on his own, and in due course we would we see what he could accomplish without God.

As I argue in my latest book, Going Back to Find the Way Forward, secularism has been weighed on the scales and found wanting. In America, for example, now a thoroughly secular society, some 50,000 people every year kill themselves, and over one and a half million every year try! Americans by the tens of millions take anti-anxiety and anti-depressant drugs. Divorce has decimated the family to the degree that most children grow up in broken families. Fetal genocide has butchered over 60 million babies in their mothers’ wombs, and it is actively encouraged as a moral good by one of our political parties, while the other party treats it as a secondary issue, at best. America’s biggest cities are practically unlivable, with death and violence a common occurrence. One could go on, but secularism clearly hasn’t delivered.

Thus I come to Evil. No, not that evil, the unpleasant reality we encounter in the world as the opposite of good, but a television series with that name. My wife and I recently watched all four seasons on Paramount+. The series first premiered on CBS in September 2019 but later moved to Paramount+ for its subsequent seasons. Unfortunately, that means the F-word started showing up, but that seems to be a requirement for streaming TV shows nowadays. What Evil represented to me was evidence for the failure of secularism as an explanation for the world we actually inhabit. Secularism, remember, is an explanation for reality that doesn’t require God, or any kind of spiritual reality. Charles Taylor in his magisterial work, A Secular Age, explores how reality in the modern world has been “disenchanted,” flattened out, immanentized. That flattened out world is what Evil wrestles with, and I think quite effectively.

Evil and the Poverty of Secularism-No Such Thing as Unbelief
The show has a trio of protagonists, actors you wouldn’t know, but as the series progresses you come to love. The Catholic Church, which we all know, plays a staring roll in the series as the backdrop for the demonic and spiritual war human beings experience whether they acknowledge that or not, and two of the main characters refuse to acknowledge it. One is a scientist, Ben Shakir, a confirmed atheist from a Muslim background, and the other, Kristen Bouchard, a psychologist who goes between atheism and agnosticism. The third of the trio becomes a Catholic priest, Father David Acosta. The dynamic between the three is fun and fascinating to watch.

Evil is often campy, as in the definition of the word, absurdly exaggerated, artificial, or affected in a usually humorous way, but never to make fun of or demean the idea of a spiritual reality we can’t comprehend. On the contrary, the dynamic of the trio plays off of the battle each has to believe in a reality they can only possibly see if they believe in it, and even then not clearly. Oh, did I mention, their day jobs are working for the Catholic church as “Assessors,” to see if cases of apparent demonic possession are really demonic and don’t have some other “natural” explanation. Ben and Kristin use everything they can in their scientific and psychological tool kit to explain away the supernatural, but Father Acosta and the other Catholic characters treat the demonic as a reality that must be dealt with.

The writers do a good job of balancing skepticism with belief, two sides of the coin of belief, but they have a sly way of making the skepticism grow increasingly absurd as the series progresses. I use the coin analogy because there is no such thing as unbelief, and each character struggles with what they believe, be it in the supernatural, like David, or the other two who struggle with their materialistic assumptions. Faith is required for either view. The series, however, leaves no doubt as to which is real, and it isn’t the latter. The demons, in fact, are the chief protagonists in the series, and although they are portrayed as utterly bizarre figures (played all by one actor, amazingly), they are never less than evil. The most evil figure, ironically, turns out to be fully human, played wonderfully by Michael Emerson as Leland Townsand.

As we continued to watch Evil develop, I couldn’t help feeling that the writers were making fun of the secular worldview, showing how shallow it can be as any kind of ultimate explanation of reality. Ben and Kristin end up having an ongoing crisis of faith as much as David does, but David’s faith seems more grounded in what is real because the spiritual realm is real. The writers do a good job of showing everyone does in fact live by faith. There could have been a Christian in the writers’ room who knows something about apologetics, but that’s asking far too much of the current Hollywood. I have an idea. Why don’t we have a discipleship program for screenwriters, and then help them develop their careers writing screenplays that reflect a solid Christian worldview. The current younger generations gets this, while my boomer generation most certainly did not, but I digress.

James K.A. Smith wrote a little book about Taylor’s massive book called, How (not) to be Secular, and in it he explains how “the conditions of belief” have shifted over the centuries. What was once a spiritual taken for granted reality, has become a disenchanted secular reality. This quotation gets to the heart of the struggle we see explored in Evil:

It is a mainstay of secularization theory that modernity “disenchants” the world—evacuates it of spirits and various ghosts in the machine. Diseases are not demonic, mental illness is no longer possession, the body is no longer ensouled. . . . the magical “spiritual” world is dissolved and we are left with the machinations of matter. . . . this is primarily a shift in the location of meaning, moving it from “the world” into “the mind.” Significance no longer inheres in things; rather, meaning and significance are a property of minds who perceive meaning internally. . . . meaning is now located in agents.

This is exactly what Ben and Kristen attempt to do at every encounter of something that they think they can explain from their naturalistic assumptions. As the series progresses, that becomes increasingly pathetic.

The Secular Crisis of Faith and the Great Awakening
Claiming secularism is having a crisis of faith has a strange ring to most people because secularism is so ingrained as our ultimate plausibility structure, religious or not, Christian or not. It affects all of us. As I argued, everyone lives by faith, and all people are “believers,” the question being what they believe in. After 300 years as an experiment of trying to run a society without God, secularism as a worldview is sucking air, showing its age, and I believe on life support. The evidence is everywhere; Evil is just one entertaining piece adding to the beyond a reasonable doubt conviction to come.

Billionaire savior of Twitter and free speech, Elon Musk, has been going through his own red pill experience in real time on Twitter, or X, take your pick. Recently, Musk posted something that tells us his red pill journey is taking a distinctly religious turn. Below is that post, as well as my comment on it on my re-post:

Here is Musk:

 

This is what a Great Awakening looks like in a secular age and post-Christian culture. It won’t look like the First and Second Awakening in what were thoroughly Christian cultures. The plausibility structures are slowly shifting away from a default secularism because it’s a poverty stricken worldview that promises everything and delivers nothing but misery and despair. Elon is on my heathen prayer list, and we will pray he makes it all the way to Jesus.

The premise of my book is that God used Donald J. Trump, the most unlikely of unlikely men, to trigger a 21st century Great Awakening. It isn’t Trump himself, mind you, but the utterly irrational reaction to Trump. Nothing like it has ever happened in American history. I would argue the reaction to Lincoln was as intense and obsessive, but it wasn’t irrational. The tyranny Lincoln exercised in the pursuit of the Union was real, whether justified or not is the eternal question. Trump, supposedly the second coming of Hitler, doesn’t have a tyrannical bone in his body, and we had four years of him as President proving that. It was this irrational response to Trump that opened my mind to him in the first place because I was no fan, to say the least. I thought nobody could be that evil, and decided to give him a real listen. The irrationality has only seemed to have gotten worse, which is opening even more people’s eyes to the truth.

This reaction began a red pill experience for tens of millions of Americans all over the political, religious, and cultural spectrum, including me. Covid was the red pill neutron bomb that for many rational people was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The lies in the service of tyranny, and for our good, remember, were just too much, and a huge number of people will never see government or “experts” the same ever again. This is directly related to the secular crisis of faith.

Secular, flattened reality, the perception that the material is all there is, or at least all that matters, is also coming increasingly into question for millions of people. It was the materialism myth born out of the Enlightenment that gave us the hubris of science and the rule of “experts” in the 20th century. This questioning includes some very famous people like Tucker Carlson, and Christian newbie, Russell Brand. Very different people from very different worlds, God broke through the flattened secular delusions of the post-modern world, and both have embraced the only faith that makes sense of everything, including fake pandemics.

You can watch any number of Tucker Carleson interviews and you will see the Great Awakening happening in real time. One is Tucker interviewing Russel Brand, and they pretty much talk about Jesus and faith the entire time. At the end of the interview, Tucker asks Brand to pray, and he gets up and kneels down in front of his chair to pray. This doesn’t happen before the Great Awakening. In another interview, I can’t remember which one, Tucker says how he grew up thoroughly secular, lived in DC for 30 years in a thoroughly secular environment, and God was never a topic of conversation. Now, he said, he’s having these conversations all the time which would never have happened five years ago.

The End of Secularism
One could multiply Great Awakening stories endlessly because secularism has played itself out and has nowhere else to go. There will be no more 19th and 20th centuries where mankind thought their hubris justified. Imagine, for example, going to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and what your reaction would be when they turned on the lights, something that had never happened in the history of the world. Everything was illuminated, instantly! You might be justified in thinking, is there anything with science and technology man cannot do? One would think the disasters of the 20th century made it abundantly clear that infinite progress and building Utopia on earth wasn’t in the cards, but secularism (life without God) hadn’t fully played itself out yet. That would only become apparent in the third decade of the 21st century.

It’s odd that God used Donald Trump, as I argue in my book, or more specifically the reaction to him, to jump start the awakening. I would not have had that on my bingo card. For some reason he broke the left, and the entire Uniparty establishment. He perfectly fits the bill of the bull in the China shop, and he wasn’t afraid to touch third rails like immigration, endless foreign wars, and the globalist elite decimating American industry. What’s even more ironic, is that God used this billionaire real estate developer and reality TV star to spiritually open the eyes of millions of people. This is where secularism comes in. The theme of the last nine plus years is lies. To the left, Trump was and is such an existential threat to their plans that lying was and is justified to accomplish their goal of ridding him as a political thorn in their side. Secularism is also built on lies, specifically that God is unnecessary for building a flourishing society.

The reason I say secularism has played itself out is because there is nothing secular on the other side of secularism. We can date the beginning of the secular experiment to Rene Descartes writing in 1637 “Cogito Ergo Sum,” I think therefore I am, and thus the began rationalism. Instead of God, man and his reason became the starting point of knowing, and over time among Western elites God became increasingly unnecessary, an unwelcome presence in society. It took until the mid-20th century for secularism to completely banish God from Western culture and by the 21st century secularism reigned supreme. Unfortunately for humanity, since secularism is a lie, there has been misery, suffering, and death. And what do our globalist elites tell us? Like the great Saturday Night Live skit, they proclaim, More cowbell! Yes, we need more secularism! That’ll do it! We’ll figure it all out without God getting in the way.

This claim has lost all its credibility, which is why an increasing number of people are turning to God, and specifically to the God in Christ of the Old and New Testaments. Keep in mind we’re almost 400 years into this experiment with secular societal organization, so rolling it back will take time, maybe a long time, but for an increasing number of people Christianity is now the only credible answer, and it’s time for Christians to step up. That means doing the hard work of thinking through and building what Christendom 2.0, as Doug Wilson calls it, will look like, and how it will all be implemented. We have a lot of work to do, but as I always say, work like it depends on us, but pray because it in fact depends on God.

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

Oct 9, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

When I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022, I knew next to nothing about where the most popular Evangelical eschatology, dispensational premillennialism, came from or how it developed. The reason this is important is because eschatology matters. What we think about “end times” will color everything we think about current times. It determines how we interpret the past, present, and future, not just the end of that future, but everything in between now and when the end comes. If we think planet earth is destined for an apocalyptic dystopia guess how we’ll think of current events. I’ll explain why, but I didn’t believe eschatology mattered for most of my Christian life. The speculation surrounding eschatology coming from dispensationalism drove me to become an eschatological agnostic. Or as it’s often called, a pan-millennialist, as in, it will all pan out in the end.

I’ve heard it called newspaper eschatology because it takes headlines and develops predictions from current events that supposedly tell us about when the antichrist will appear and the rapture will happen. These predictions have been going since the mid-19th century, and even though they never turn out to be accurate, that doesn’t seem to diminish dispensationalism’s popularity. At least as it is assumed by probably 90% of Evangelicals to be the truth about “end times.” When I became a born-again Christian in 1978, eschatology was a topic of conversation everywhere. The New York Times even declared Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, published in 1970, to be the bestselling “nonfiction” book of the 1970s.

 

I’ve been learning the fascinating history of how Evangelicalism got to this point in a book I first heard about in this interview of the author, Daniel Hummel by Al Mohler The book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation, has been a revelation for me. Most surprising has been learning that the development of this thinking in the 19th century was a direct response and repudiation of the dominant postmillennialism of the time. I’ll explain why, but I’ve been under the impression it was the horrific disasters of the 20th century that discredited the post-mill position, but that lamentable century was only the final nail in the coffin of its credibility. It was rather the distortion of the concept of progress in the 19th century with the development of knowledge and science. The distortion was a direct result of the secularism growing out of the empiricism and rationalism of the Enlightenment. God was pushed to the periphery of Western culture, and man enthroned as sovereign creator of progress and civilization. As God said of the builders of Babel, they believed “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.”

Speaking of Lyman Stewart, the founder of Biola (Bible Institute of Los Angeles, 1908), Hummel writes:

In his view, amillennialism was a battering ram to break up the postmillennial hold on nineteenth century Protestantism. With the growing popularity of theological modernism, which adjusted Christian teachings to the intellectual climate of the late nineteenth century, Stewart had identified his main rival.

The reaction against postmillennialism, however, goes back to the mid-19th century and, Irishman J.N. Darby. The earliest “new premillennialists,” as they were called to distinguish themselves from the old ones, are what we now call dispensationalists. To the new guys on the block, the world and the church were far too corrupt for the kind of progress 19th century postmillennialism promised. However it was Darby bringing his version of “end times” to America in 1862 right in the middle of the Civil War that dispensationalism’s march to dominance in American Evangelical Christianity began. There’s nothing like more than half a million of your fellow countrymen being slaughtered fighting each other to bring into question the very idea of progress. But it wasn’t only the trauma of war. As Hummel points out:

The days of postmillennial consensus ended in the 1860s. The Civil War’s violence and destruction helped shatter the image of the United States as the vanguard of the coming kingdom, but this was just the initial shock. Higher criticism of the Bible and Darwinian evolution, two academic discourses that permeated seminaries and universities after the war, began to unravel the biblical case for postmillennialism.

But as well see, the American obsession with progress would not die easily.

Progress and the Spirit of Nineteenth Century America

It’s striking to look back on this side of the unimaginable suffering and misery of the twentieth century, wars and numbers of dead, to realize just how much progress obsessed post-Civil War America. George Marsden observes that “in a nation born during the Enlightenment, the reverence for science as the way to understand all aspects of reality was nearly unbounded.” This reverence grew out of the heady Enlightenment assumption that science and reason could solve all mankind’s problems eventually. The stunning advances in technology seemed to justify the hubris.

All these changes were part of the industrial revolution after the Civil War transforming the largely agrarian society of America’s founding into a worldwide economic powerhouse. Along with change came problems. Industrialization and growing populations of immigrants flocking to cities along the East coast created deplorable conditions for a significant number of people. Christians thought Christianity provided an answer in what came to be known as the Social Gospel; a significant change in American Christianity was on the horizon. Many nineteenth century reformers, like the abolitionists, were Unitarians having rejected what they considered the illogical concept of the Trinity; their hearts were in the right place, but their theology wasn’t. German biblical criticism and its rejection of the Bible as reliable history and God’s authoritative verbal revelation had a profound effect on Christianity in the growing secular age. The also spreading rejection of orthodox historic Christianity in the mainline denominations, along with the suffering brought on by the industrial revolution, produced the response of the Social Gospel.

This struggle for the soul of Christianity (pun intended) playing out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to be called the fundamentalist-modernist controversies. The new premillennialists (the term dispensationalism didn’t get coined until 1927) were part of the broader fundamentalist movement that eventually came to dominate American Evangelicalism. On the fundamentalist side were an amalgamation of Christians loosely held together by a handful of orthodox beliefs about the historical veracity of the Christian faith, and on the modernist side were liberals who embraced the social gospel and a religion of progress. To say these two were incompatible is like saying water and fire are not compatible.

From the late 1870s to Word War 1, the leadership of mainline Protestant denominations slowly but surely gave up any pretense in believing the Bible was a supernatural document. They accepted the Enlightenment assumptions of empiricism and rationalism, including the inevitable conclusion of German biblical critics’ attacks on the Bible’s veracity. These were the liberals, and conservatives who stood against them came to be called fundamentalists from a series of twelve short books, The Fundamentals, written from 1910 to 1915. Even though he was a conservative, William Jennings Bryan echoed what almost all Christians believed prior to World War I:

Christian civilization is the greatest that the world has ever known because it rests on a conception of life that makes life one unending progress toward higher things, with no limit to human advancement or development.

As George Marsden adds, “evangelicals generally regarded almost any sort of progress as evidence of the advance of the kingdom.” The Great War was used to attack the credibility of postmillennialism, but it was World War II that put the nail in the coffin. The Soviet Union and Mao’s communist China didn’t help.

Dispensationalism’s Eventual Triumph
Regardless of Bryan’s conservative Christian convictions, he embraced a concept of postmillennialism that dispensationalists rightly believed came from liberal Christianity and a distortion of the Bible’s understanding of progress as the providential working of God in history through His people. A postmillennialism based on Enlightenment assumptions could never last because progress is a Jewish and Christian concept the pagans stole and bastardized. It’s almost like thinking a man can become a woman and a woman a man, not that anyone would ever think such a thing. The two versions of progress are as mutually exclusive as the sexes. But why did dispensational premillennialism triumph and become the dominant eschatology of 20th century Evangelicalism?

Before the nail was driven into the coffin by the horrors of 20th century war and death, revivalism and the great evangelist, D.L. Moody, paved the way. According to Hummell:

These two implications of Moody’s ministry—the popularization and fusion of new premillennialism with revivalism—could hardly be separated. They worked together to form a potent and wildly successful message. Moody’s ministry spearheaded an interdenominational evangelical ethos shot through with the influences of premillennialism.

It’s hard to imagine in post-Christian America just how popular and influential Moody was. When he embraced dispensationalism It gained instant credibility, which in due course would influence one of the most consequential Christians of the 20th century, Cyrus Ingerson Scofield. Scofield developed and published his reference Bible in 1909, which arguably became the most influential book molding 20th century fundamentalism which in due course became Evangelicalism. It sold a million copies in less than a decade and became the best-selling book in the history of Oxford University Press. Nothing like Oxford printing a book to give it max credibility.

Scofield systematized the dispensational hermeneutic, and with it as Hummell says, “Scofield transformed the new premillennialism [dispensationalism] into a full-blown religious identity for millions of Christians.” The Scofield Reference Bible was ubiquitous among the baby boomer generation of Christians. When I became a Christian in 1978, I remember it being spoken of in glowing terms, and highly suggested as a reference source. In fact in the early decades of its adoption, “it became a common marker of right belief in Moody movement circles.” This triumph was a long time coming for a new movement. It started with the Pietism growing up in 17th century Germany, made its way into a Brethren movement that eventually influenced Wesley, but importantly for the rise of dispensationalism, Darby, then Moody, then Scofield. His notes established the new premillennialism, revivalism, Higher Life teachers, and what are called Exclusive Brethren concepts as the default for fundamentalist Christians.

This peaked in the 70s with The Late Great Planet earth mentality, and I was born-again embracing every bit of it. For me it couldn’t last, thankfully. Yes, the 90s was the Left Behind decade, but when Kirk Cameron himself becomes post-mill, you know the jig is up.

Dispensationalism’s Pietistic Dualism
Although dispensationalism today has nothing like the credibility and awareness it had in the 20th century, it’s assumptions dominate Evangelical Christianity. It is those assumptions that led to Christianity’s cultural irrelevance in America. One of those is a type of gnostic dualism, a two-story Christianity, in Francis Schaffer’s words, which I learned in 1979 or 80 in his book The God Who Is There.  There are various ways to describe this two-story version of the faith, but it breaks life into two competing realities. Picture a house where upstairs is all the important stuff, the things that are truly meaningful and real, and downstairs is for the servants, the mundane everyday stuff. Even though it’s the same house it appears like two completely different houses, say upstairs is 19th century Victorian, and downstairs 1960s hip modernism. In Schaeffer’s words, upstairs “is above the line of despair.” Everyone without access to the stairs, is stuck downstairs trying to find meaning, hope, and purpose. If you do have a pass, you can go upstairs when you want to access the things that really matter in life.

This is where the Gnosticism comes in. This philosophy of Greek influence is a kind of secret knowledge which exists in the upper story, and it has little to do with what we experience downstairs. In fact, the stuff downstairs is only relevant as it points to and gets you the pass to the stairs. Then you can leave behind the servants, the Plebes, the hoi palloi, unless they too are given one of the passes, and they will get the knowledge that’s only had in the upper story. I’ve pushed the metaphor far enough, but you get the idea. Gnosticism, a version of Platonism, was a constant threat in the first few centuries of the church. It was the battle against this threat, among others, that forced the church fathers in response to develop the orthodox Christianity of the Nicene Creed we believe today.

After the Reformation, in due course the assumptions from dualism through Pietism, revivalism, and dispensationalism became the dominant worldview of Evangelical Christianity. Spiritual things were the important part of life, and the mundane and material a necessary evil, to be escaped through religious exercises like Bible reading, prayer, and church going. This was my born-again Christianity until I found Schaeffer and began my journey out of an upstairs/downstairs dualism of Pietistic Christianity. It took postmillennialism to finally eradicate it completely for me, but one doesn’t have to embrace that eschatology to escape from gnostic dualistic Pietistic assumptions. It’s just harder to do because these influences are ubiquitous in American Evangelicalism, like oxygen invisible and everywhere.

It’s fascinating to learn how this understanding of Christianity developed in its 20th century version from what came before. It’s impossible to overstate the influence of the development of fundamentalism in the first 30 or so years of the century, and how it’s become the default form of Christianity of almost all Evangelical Christians today. It informs, whether they know it or not, how they see not only the practice of their faith, but how they perceive the culture, including politics. The problem is that because of this Pietistic dualism, secularism completely took over American culture, and Western culture in general. I argued in a recent post that Pietism and secularism are two sides of the same coin. (I’ll put a link in the show notes. It’s ironic because a solid subset of the fundamentalists believed cultural and political engagement was a priority, but they eventually lost to the inherent dualism in their theology.

In the history of Christianity this kind of dualism was rare, although monastic life was a version of it. Reality for people in the Christian West was both material and spiritual. God and the spiritual realm of angels and demons was every bit as real to people in the Middle Ages as the material world they lived and worked in every day. It wasn’t until Pietism and the Enlightenment developed simultaneously in the 17th and 18th centuries, that secularism began its long march to dominance in the West. Christians, including me, often rail against secularism, and rightly so, but it was the dualistic over spiritualized version of Christianity in Pietism that gave secularism the cultural air to breath and grow. Even though Christians up to the early years of fundamentalism attempted cultural engagement, they didn’t stand a chance against the juggernaut of secularism.

To one degree or another Christians became so heavenly minded they were no earthly good. Add to Pietistic dualism an eschatology that sees evil and sin as inevitably growing worse until Jesus comes back to save the day, and you have a recipe for zero cultural influence, which is exactly what has happened. Thus we live in Wokestan. Cultural Marxism made it’s long march through the institutions with little or no push back from Christians and the church, and what pushback there has been, has been ineffectual. To bring Evangelical Christianity down to earth, both Pietism and dispensationalism need to be addressed critically for the inherent dualism they brought to the Christian faith.

A Christianity with cultural influence also requires an optimistic eschatology of victory, whatever you call it. Going into battle believing we’re going to lose is a recipe for getting more of what got us here in the first place. Embracing postmillennialism is what made all the difference for me and many others. It’s worth giving it a look if you have yet to consider it. The battle for the soul of Western culture is only just begun.

 

 

A Conflict of Visions-Reality as It Is or Transform It

A Conflict of Visions-Reality as It Is or Transform It

Oct 2, 2024 | Philosophy

One of the greatest public intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries, Thomas Sowell, a black man and conservative, wrote a book in in 1987 called A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. I point out his race only to indicate that black conservatives, like Sowell and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas among others, are considered traitors to their race. It’s one of the reasons Candace Owens started an organization called Blexit in 2018 as a takeoff on Brexit when the UK declared independence from the EU. Among the many fruits of Trump has been many black Americans declaring their independence from black Democrat groupthink, escaping the plantation, so to speak. A conflict of visions explains this phenomenon and many other things we are experiencing in 2024.

Sowell’s book is one of the most important books of the modern era because it explains the fundamental dynamic at the heart of the perpetual and escalating conflict in America and the West. This conflict is nothing new, going back to the ancient Greek philosophers, specifically Plato and Aristotle, and has worked itself out in Western history to the present day. Respectively, these two philosophers correspond to the two visions Sowell lays out in the book, the unconstrained and the constrained visions. Plato’s work, especially in The Republic, is represented by his desire to create the ideal society or polis, the Greek city-state, ruled by a philosopher king. Aristotle’s philosophy and politics, on the other hand, was rooted in human nature as he found it. The former wants to mold reality to its wishes because its vision can’t be constrained by reality, the latter works with reality as we find it. 

At the core of Sowell’s analysis is his assumption that “ultimate truth” exists. As a conservative Sowell embraces the constrained vision. I’ve written here recently that the dividing line in Western culture is truth. The left stopped believing in truth a long time ago, and now they are fully invested in “the narrative,” a postmodern Nihilistic mentality that only believes in the will to power, their power. Liberals were always part of the larger left, often calling themselves progressives, and a certain percentage of those believe in truth, and reject the lies that masquerade as “the narrative.” Many things awakened them in the age of Trump, but believing in truth separated them from the woke leftists who currently dominate culture and politics in the West. A perfect example is Robert F. Kenney, Jr. endorsing President Trump. Here is a man who believes in Truth. He’s an old school liberal who believes in truth and can’t make common cause with the current Marxist Democrat Party that doesn’t.

Our Anthropology Determines Our Vision
Sowell starts chapter two with this sentence: 

Social visions differ in their basic conception of the nature of man.

To say this is important for how we live among people in society is akin to saying oxygen is important for life. Well, almost. How we view the fundamental nature of man, of what human beings are in their essence, will determine if we live a life of flourishing and God’s blessings, or if we live a life covered with the dust of death.

Anthropology is the study of that nature, who and what man is in his essential characteristics. Ultimately our metaphysics will determine this, how we see the meaning and nature of the universe. If Darwin was right and we’re merely clever animals, that will lead to certain assumptions about reality and man in it. If the God of the Bible is Creator and man his creature, on the other hand, that will lead to opposite assumptions, as in 180 degrees opposite, as in night and day, up and down, right and wrong, and yes, life and death. These assumptions lead logically to certain conclusions about life, what it is, and what it ought to be, and therefore two conflicting visions. Darwin leads inevitably to an unconstrained vision, while Scripture leads to the constrained vision. Let’s take a look from a biblical perspective how these two visions developed in history.

The Bible tells us man is constrained because he’s a created being living in God’s world. Man, male and female God created them, was created good, but in his rebellion man marred God’s image in himself and all his progeny. The fundamental fact of this story leads us to conclude that man is a flawed and limited being accountable to his Creator, but we need to inquire as to the nature of man’s fundamental flaw, and why it drives him in due course to this unconstrained vision. We learn about this flaw in Genesis three and the familiar story of Satan tempting Eve to disobey the direct order of God. This story is so familiar to us that we fail to realize how utterly unique it is. No other religion or philosophy tells us why human beings are so screwed up, so they have no answer for man’s fundamental problem; he is in rebellion to his Creator and needs to be reconciled to Him.

In this history of Christianity there is something the enemies of the faith have used to attack it called “the problem of evil.” This supposed problem asks the question: if God is good and all powerful why is there evil? The conclusion is, if he’s good he shouldn’t allow it, and if he’s all powerful, he should be able to prevent it. Since there is evil, God is neither good nor all powerful. If he exists at all, he can’t be trusted. This so called problem got its start in Western culture from French philosopher Voltaire in his 1756 poem titled, “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, Or an Examination of the Axiom, ‘All is Well.’” The poem was Voltaire’s response to the horrific Lisbon earthquake where an estimated 40,000 people died. Let me read you a piece of Voltaire’s sardonic wit, worthy of the New Atheists:

Unhappy mortals! Dark and mourning earth!
Affrighted gathering of human kind!
Eternal lingering of useless pain!
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, “All’s well,”
And contemplate this ruin of a world.
Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,
This child and mother heaped in common wreck,
These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts–
A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,
Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,
Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,
In racking torment end their stricken lives.
To those expiring murmurs of distress,
To that appalling spectacle of woe,
Will ye reply: “You do but illustrate
The iron laws that chain the will of God”?
Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:
“God is avenged: the wage of sin is death”?
What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceived
That lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?
Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of vice
Than London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?

Voltaire, in C.S. Lewis’s famous phrase, put “God in the dock,” and man became His prosecuting attorney. Instead of man having to answer to God, now it was God who must answer to man. Of course, there is no answer that would satisfy sinful, rebellious man, so God was declared persona non grata in Western culture which slowly secularized because of it. We call the 17th century in Western culture the Enlightenment, but in fact it turned out the lights, and Western culture has been groping in the dark ever since.

Why the Unconstrained Vision?
The unconstrained vision got its start in Genesis 3 with the fall, but it broke out in steroids in the 18th century with Enlightenment rationalism, or the idea that reason is all we need to figure life out and solve all our problems. We’ll remember the essence of Satan’s temptation to Eve:

For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.

There it is, in one haunting sentence, the delusion that man could be God, he could call the shots, that he could mold reality to his wishes. This is further fleshed out in Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel where the people of God’s creation decided to build a tower “that reaches to the heavens” so they could make a name for themselves. In response, God confused their languages and scattered them over the face of the earth or, He said, “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” There it is, the vision that drives the left side of the political-cultural spectrum in Western culture, and the desire to create Utopia on earth by man’s own will and power. This word first occurred in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia which he published in 1516. More made up the word as a compound from the Greek words for “not” (ou) and “place” (topos) and thus meaning “nowhere” which eventually turns into Nihilism, a word coming from Latin meaning nothing, a gift to Western culture given by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nowhere leads to nothing, leads eventually to despair, and ultimately death. This is the vision of Western elites who don’t know Latin and believe they can be God.

If we go back to the so-called problem of evil, the unconstrained vision sees Utopia as something that is attainable by human effort and thinking. The fundamental assumption of this vision is that man is fundamentally good because there is no such thing as original sin if we’re merely material beings and a product of chance. Thus what corrupts man is external to him in society. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher friend of Voltaire’s, believed back in the mists of time man was a noble savage who lived in an Edenic paradise that was uncorrupted by the influences of civilization. Man was innately good. Thus the answers to the problem of evil, of man’s fundamental dilemma, is found in molding reality to his liking. If the right circumstances can be created, humanity can be made right. It is assumed reality is malleable to man’s wishes, and thus Babel is a real possibility and “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” Or so they think. In their presumption of divinity, Enlightenment man thinks he is in fact God, and he alone determines what is good and evil. The utopian mind has led only to evil, misery, and death wherever it has been tried. Sadly the Utopians never learn their lessons, as we see in our day as the Democrats have embraced a Marxist version of Utopia; they are the unconstrained party.

But God in his mercy scattered the inhabitants of Babel so the misery could be constrained, not to keep his creatures from creating great things. God’s goal and purposes for humanity was always for his creatures to flourish. We see this in the dominion mandate prior to the fall, but post fall given we live by sight not faith, most people have a difficult time believing God still wants humanity to flourish. We know the truth of the matter because He revealed this to us in the very next chapter, 12, where he picks one man, Abram, out of all the Godless heathens in the world to create His very own people. What does he declare His purpose is for His people? He tells us in his promise to Abram:

2 “I will make you into a great nation,
    and I will bless you;
I will make your name great,
    and you will be a blessing.
3 I will bless those who bless you,
    and whoever curses you I will curse;
and all peoples on earth
    will be blessed through you.”

Why the Constrained Vision?
The key theme from these verses is “blessing for the nations.” God is specifically establishing his covenant with Abram so through him and his offspring the nations will be blessed, all of them. We might say the foundation of God’s revelation to man is the theme of the first book of that revelation, blessing, used over 65 times. I heard someone once define blessing as empowerment. When God blesses people He empowers them to do a wide variety of things, as he put it, “God empowers people to flourish.” God wants to bless His people. That’s always been the plan. Secularists, by contrast paint Christianity as repressive and intolerant, but what it represses and doesn’t tolerate is sin! Sin destroys everything it touches and makes true flourishing impossible. It is by definition dis-empowering. Jumping forward two thousand years, Jesus says the same thing (John 10:10):

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.

Through the Israelites, God gave humanity the law with the express purpose of allowing His creatures to flourish in obedience to it. God’s law is the means of his blessing the nations. Through Israel we learn that sinful humanity is incapable of obedience to the law and thus being blessed, so God enabled that obedience by becoming a man himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth to pay the penalty for that disobedience, and sending His Holy Spirit to enable obedience in His people. The law fences in fallen man’s unconstrained tendencies, and it is wise to head the words of one of the great wordsmiths of the modern age, G.K. Chesterton:

 Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

God has given us His law-word specifically through His people, His church, to place the boundaries of constraint in which we are empowered to flourish for our good and God’s glory.

Thus the constrained vision developed in Western history as God revealed Himself to the world through this people, but also confirmed it through what C.S. Lewis called in his little masterpiece, The Abolition of Man, the Tao. This also came to be known as the natural law, which is revealed in every religion to some degree, but only seen in fullest degree in the face of the Lord Jesus Christ. The constrained vision began working itself out in Western history by God bringing three cultures together in what Paul said was “the fullness of time” (Gal. 4), the Greeks, the Romans, and the Jews. God in His providentially sovereign ordaining power broke into fallen history to establish His kingdom on earth, to change cursed history to a blessed future. The radical nature of this breaking in is often missed by Christians because they assume it only has to do with them personally, or at most the church, the body of fellow believers. But I believe God has something much more profound in mind having to do with the entire created order. Here is how Paul puts it speaking of the ministry of reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5:

17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

The NIV translation has this right. Some translations taking their que from the context insert a “he,” so it reads, “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” But the Greek simply has the adjective, new, describing the noun, creation. So the way I read it, each person who makes the journey to “in Christ,” at that moment they don’t become a new creation so much as inhabit one. Their history and the history of the world is fundamentally altered because the kingdom of God is now ascendent in their life and in the world. The fall and the curse of sin is being pushed back in everything they do as they “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” knowing if they do that, all the blessings of life will be added as well (Matt. 6:33).

The gospel constrains to bless. God says through Jeremiah (31) that in this New Covenant in Christ,  He will put His law in our minds, and write it on our hearts; and He will be our God, and we will be His people. No longer will we have to be like God, determining what is good and evil. No longer will we presume to mold reality to our wishes, but we will seek to understand reality in His law and created order, and share this “constrained” vision with the entire world. When Jesus commanded the disciples in Mathew 28 to make disciples of all nations because he’d been given “all authority in heaven and on earth,” he meant it. This wasn’t a command in futility, but a command to victory in his power and authority and will. Our vision is exciting and inspiring and it has the extra added benefit that it is true and works because it is true!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Numbers 13-14: Exploring Canaan and the Case for Christian Optimism

Numbers 13-14: Exploring Canaan and the Case for Christian Optimism

Sep 25, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

God communicates his redemptive story through a real people in history as a living metaphor for realities he would bring to pass in due course, a very long course. As I say, God is never in a hurry, and this took 2,000 years from its announcement in the calling of Abram in Genesis 12 to Christ. So as we read the Old Testament, the stories point forward to an ultimate fulfillment of those stories. Theologians call certain parts of those stories shadows and types of a reality to come. We only know this in supernatural hindsight because it took the Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth, to tell us so in Luke 24 after the resurrection. In this passage we learn from the word of God himself the ultimate Scriptural hermeneutics, or how the Bible is to be interpreted.

In this passage familiar to most Christians, two disciples left Jerusalem and were heading to a town called Emmaus, which is about seven miles from Jerusalem. They were undoubtably aware of the entirety of Jesus three-year ministry, and as they walked they were talking “about everything that had happened.” Jesus was once in a generation drama. In fact, the Jews had been waiting 400 years for their Messiah to come and rescue them from oppression. As I said, God is never in a hurry. As they were talking about the drama, Jesus came upon them but Luke tells us, “they were kept from recognizing him.” Jesus asked what they were talking about and they tell him:

They stood still, their faces downcast. 18 One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you the only one visiting Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?

They tell him about this prophet Jesus of Nazareth, “powerful in word and deed,” and about the crucifixion and an unfathomable report the tomb was empty and he’d been seen alive. Jesus didn’t seem to care that a crucified and resurrected Messiah was, literally, beyond the ability of Jews to fathom, and he rebukes them:

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.

I laugh sometimes when I read or think about this passage because how in the world could they have understood something they could not conceive? It’s almost like him gently rebuking Peter because he couldn’t walk on water. Really? Does anybody but the Son of God not sink? I like the Greek word Luke uses here for foolish. The extended meaning from Strong’s Concordance:

properly, non-thinking, i.e. not “reasoning through” a matter (with proper logic); unmindful, which describes acting in a “mindless, dense” way (“just plain stupid”).

I think we can pull out Jesus’ meaning from the rebuke considering how obvious he is saying the meaning really is, so obvious that you’d have to be a moron to not get it! Being God, he fully understands that no Jew prior to his encounter with the disciples on that road would have understood that everything in the Old Testament was about the coming Messiah. Certain prophecies, certainly, but everything? Yes, everything. We can now see with perfect 20/20 hindsight how it teaches us about the Messiah, this young man named Jesus from Nazareth, and he wants us to continually mine the depths of this teaching so that with the Apostle Paul at the end of Romans 11 after he’s laid out this redemptive history, we proclaim:

Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!
    How unsearchable his judgments,
    and his paths beyond tracing out!

In modern parlance from my boomer upbringing in the 60s and 70s, it’s mind blowing!

The Exodus as Metaphor for Christ’s Work on the Cross
Before we get to Canaan, we have to go backward to understand the picture God is painting as he saves his people from bondage and slavery in Egypt. We know from Genesis 1-3 that man, male and female he created them, was created good, but rebelled in disobedience to God’s command and fell into sin and death. God, of course, had a plan revealed to us in Genesis 3:15. The seed that will strike the serpent’s head in perfect biblical hindsight is Jesus, and the rest of Israel’s history helps explain exactly who Jesus is and what he came to accomplish.

The next significant step in the story comes in Genesis 12 with the calling of Abram, not discounting what came in chapters 4-11. God promises to make him into a great nation, and that all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him. In chapter 15 God begins to fill in the contours of the story promising Abram an heir even though he is childless at 75 years-old, and his wife is barren at 65. We then see a bizarre ancient Near Eastern legal ceremony through which God declares he will unilaterally accomplish all that He is promising Abram. He then tells Abram his descendants will be enslaved in a foreign country for 400 years, but that He will rescue them, “and afterward they will come out with great possessions.” That foreign country is Egypt and the next significant step in the story is how God rescues them.

Near the end of the 400 years, God raises up Moses to lead his people out of slavery. He does this dramatically by killing all the firstborn of Egypt and instituting the Passover where the shedding of blood covers Israel so they don’t suffer God’s wrath as the Egyptians do. The Pharaoh is finally willing to let them leave, and by mighty acts of God they are led through the sea to eventual safety in the desert where they wander for 40 years. Prior to entering the land God promised Abram in the bizarre ceremony I referenced above, we learn that land is Canaan on the other side of the river, the west side. Before we get to there, though, let’s take a short theological look at where the story has taken us so far.

Israels’ slavery in Egypt is obviously analogous to our slavery to sin. God makes it very clear that as it took divine supernatural power to rescue the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt, so it takes His divine supernatural power to rescue us from our bondage to sin. In both, he takes the initiative and we respond because He wants to make clear what he proclaims through Zecheriah, “Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit,” says the Lord Almighty (4:6). This truth of God’s almighty sovereign power and control over all things is a reality on both sides of the river, what we theologically call justification, rescue from Egypt and sin, and sanctification, taking over the land.

Wonderings in the Desert and Living by Faith
The story of the Israelites spending forty years wandering in the desert before they enter the promised land is familiar to every Christian. The why of the wanderings is probably not so well known. The Israelites made a beeline from Egypt to the border of the land God planned for them to inhabit. In Numbers 13, God picks twelve men, one from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan. It was a scouting mission so the leaders of the tribes would know what they were going to encounter when they entered the land. It is wisdom 101 to never go into any project without knowing what we’re getting into and what we will likely encounter as we engage it. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.

All reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were clearly obstacles to them taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as obstacles to taking the land. One of the other two didn’t see it that way:

30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”

That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:

31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel:

6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”

Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day the explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.

I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. My constant prayer comes from Isaiah 26:3:

You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.

If it ain’t perfect, we aren’t trusting God.

Expanding the Field of Trust: The Entire Earth is our Canaan
It is obvious the message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life, I now believe this perspective, the victory which we are to expect because of God’s promises and commands, applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. Isaac Watts wrote the great Christmas hymn Joy to the world in 1719 and paints the picture of the Christian’s field of trust. The first two stanzas he wrote let the earth receive her king and the Savior reigns. Here are the final two to get us in the Yuletide postmillennial mood:

No more let sins and sorrow grow
Nor thorns infest the ground
He comes to make His blessings flow
Far as the curse is found
Far as the curse is found
Far as, far as, the curse is found

He rules the world with truth and grace
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness
And wonders of His love
And wonders of His love
And wonders, wonders, of His love!

Even though I’ve been a culture warrior since I discovered Francis Schaeffer in the early years of my Christian faith, and believed all truth is God’s truth, and that a Christian worldview applies to every square inch of life, deep down I was a pessimist. In the land we are to conquer, the entire world, all I could see were the giants. I believed we didn’t really have a chance, and it’s all gonna burn in the end anyway.

That mentality, thankfully, was prior to my embracing postmillennialism in August 2022. I had a typically Evangelical perspective of the Israelites wanderings in the wilderness as a picture of the sanctification in the personal life of the Christian. Those 40 years were a wandering, as is ours in this wilderness of a fallen world, so we have a lifetime of mostly futility because even though we can grow in personal sanctification, Satan has the upper hand “down here,” or so I believed. After all, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Phil. 3:20), a verse completely misinterpreted as meaning what really matters is heaven and the afterlife. Sadly, I bought the misinterpretation, which meant I was stuck in the wilderness until I die . . . .  then victory! That was the crossing of the Jordan river into the promised land, a figure of heaven. I no longer see it this way. Crossing the Jordan into the promised land was when the battle really began.

The tragic constricting of the gospel only to the Christian’s salvation and personal life only developed recently, in the mid-19th century with the rise of dispensational premillennialism. Those who developed it believed the world and the church were hopelessly corrupt, so they proclaimed the gospel should be preached and as many people as possible saved from the sinking ship because Jesus was coming back soon. In fact, dispensational premillennialism grew as a rejection of a secularized and liberal Christian view of postmillennialism that viewed it as the inevitable progress of science and knowledge. That position was completely discredited by the disastrous 20th century with only a few stalwarts willing to espouse and defend it.

Thankfully, that started changing in the last twenty years, and especially in the last ten. There has been a revival of postmillennialism, and I encourage you to join us. Once you buy the Scriptural argument, it’s a much more inspiring way to live because God in the reign of Christ is taking back the world from Satan one square inch at a time. As he promised the Israelites victory in the land of Canaan if only they would trust him and fight, so He’s promised this world to His Son, and we are his body to accomplish the task by the power of His Holy Spirit.

Read Psalm 2, Psalm 72, and Psalm 110 back to back, and ask yourself these questions . What if these truths apply not just to when Jesus returns to bring heaven to earth a la Revelation 21, but apply to his first coming when he accomplished his mission of God reconciling the world to Himself? Could it be that it is we, his Church, his people, who are to bring heaven to earth as he taught us to pray? That it is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church?

I’m just askin’.

 

God’s Promise in Habakkuk to Fill the Earth with the Knowledge of his Glory

God’s Promise in Habakkuk to Fill the Earth with the Knowledge of his Glory

Sep 18, 2024 | Eschatology

I recently read The Puritan Hope by Ian H. Murray, and we can sure use a lot more Puritan hope in the church today. In it he describes how the Puritans of the 16th through the 18th centuries had a passion for seeing the Great Commission fulfilled in due course because of their efforts. They did not believe the point of preaching the gospel and seeing God save people was so they can merely go to heaven when they die, as is so prevalent today. Their vision was more this-worldly, more transformational of this fallen world, as I pray would become ours. The favorite verse repeated consistently in their writing and preaching was Habakkuk 2:14:

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.

And they believed this would happen on this earth, and not only when Christ returned at the end of time. I will address this fascinating verse and prophet below because I believe he has much to teach us in our day.

None of the Puritans were under any illusion this would happen in their lifetimes, but saw themselves as standing upon the word of God in an unending chain of God’s covenant faithfulness to His people. They were also not under any illusion this would be easy, or that the odds were in their favor. They did something we seem to have difficulty with today; they lived by faith not by sight. If God promised ultimate victory in the gospel, that was going to happen no matter what it looked like at the moment.

This was not necessarily new with the Puritans. All through church history, Christians saw their role in the world as transformational and not escapist, as unfortunately too many modern Christians do. For them Christianity wasn’t a fire drill to rescue people from a burning building. This other worldly mentality is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of Christianity as we’ll discuss. Even the monks of the Middle Ages believed they were carrying on Christian knowledge and traditions to the next generations and to the world. And though life, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes was “nasty, brutish and short,” Christians were invested in this world. In fact, after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was Irish monks inspired by St. Patrick who saved all of the Christian and pagan learning that had previously flourished but was now disappearing because the heathens had destroyed the civilized Roman world. 

In the last couple of years one of my favorite metaphors speaks to what should be common among Christians, a multi-generational vision of the faith. As I often say, we are building cathedrals we will never worship in. Can you imagine a church doing a building campaign telling the parishioners they should give generously because the church will be finished in 200 years? That was the mentality of the Puritans, and the Christians who went before them. Why is it not ours? And it is not because we’re modern Americans who want it now, fast food, microwaves and all that. It’s much more profound than that, and a bit of history is in order to find out why. 

Pietism and The Great Awakening
I’m not a big fan of Pietism, nor should anyone else be, and if we knew our history we would know why. The Reformation was a heady religious phenomenon with intellectuals leading the way, which by the 17th century had come to be known as scholasticism. For some there came to be a negative connotation associated with the term, and scholastics were considered as dry, cerebral scholars who missed the emotional aspects of Christianity. Germany had become mostly Lutheran for obvious reasons, and those who pushed back against the church’s perceived stress on doctrine and theology over Christian living came to be called Pietists. They began to push the Lutheran church toward a more personal faith, and in due course it’s influence spread throughout Europe into every Protestant Christian tradition, including the Puritans making their way to the New World.

It wasn’t until the 18th century and the amazing ministry of the amazing John Wesley that Pietism started to become the default understanding of the Christian faith. Wesley spent only two years in America (1733-1735), but it changed the course of Protestant Evangelical Christian history. On the harrowing voyage over, Wesley encountered Moravians (modern day Czech Republic) whose passionate personal faith was foreign to him. After a terrible trip back to England, Wesley had what we would later come to call a born-again or conversion experience. He also met one of the most influential men in Christian and Western history upon his return, the great evangelist George Whitfield. Shortly after their meeting, Whitfield went to America where Wesley had failed so miserably, in the state of Georgia. And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.

In due course through Jonathan Edwards, Whitfield, and Wesley, and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, there came a Great Awakening. For our purposes, it was this period of time where the idea of a personal conversion experience made its way into popular Protestant Christianity. We might ask, what’s wrong with that. Nothing per se, but fallen sinful human beings always seem to take good things and turn them into ultimate things. In this case, faith became primarily about a person’s subjective emotional experiences, and not about objective biblical and gospel truth. Both are required for true faith, but the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction from scholasticism, and it would never swing back, at least as far as Evangelical Protestant Christianity in general. The Second Great Awakening in the 19th century established a pietistic personalized subjective faith as the default in Evangelicalism, which in the early 20th century came to be called fundamentalism, the faith I was born-again into in the fall of 1978.

I didn’t know this at the time, but this dominant version of Evangelical faith had certain unique historically determined traits. In addition to being more subjective and turned inward, it was anti-theological, ahistorical, and anti-intellectual, as I learned when I was introduced to Reformed theology in early 1984. This was also a time when dispensationalism was hugely popular, with Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth selling a zillion copies. Even though the catastrophes never bring the end, people still believe the premise: things are getting worse and will until Jesus comes back to save the day and rescue us from doom. Sadly, what this “end times” perspective does is inculcate a persistent pessimism into Christians so doom and gloom are the order of the day. When we say eschatology matters this is why, positive or negative; how we view the end will determine how we interpret the present. 

It’s All About the Kingdom of God
Puritans, by contrast, even though living in much more challenging times, were anything but doom and gloom. They were gritty realists, but believed in God’s covenant promises to advance His kingdom in this world, thus the consistent affirmation of Habakkuk 2:14. Prior to embracing postmillennialism, I believed the fulfillment of this verse would only happen in the consummated kingdom when Christ returned. Considering my eschatological perspective I could not think otherwise, given both pre and a-mill see sin having the upper hand in this world. I believed that. Now I have more in common with the Puritans because I believe God’s kingdom came at Christ’s first coming, slowly al la the parables of the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13 ) until it fills the entire earth.

Prior to my eschatological awakening, I conflated the kingdom of God and the church, thinking they were one on the same. I’ve written about this here before, so I won’t explain it in detail, but there are 116 references to kingdom in the synoptic gospels, and only three to the church, all in Matthew. Jesus came preaching “the good news of the kingdom” not the good news of the church. The church and the Christians in it are the kingdom builders, bringing that good news, but they go out into the world to build and advance it.

When Jesus taught us to pray, thy kingdom come thy will be done, he meant now, in this world, not waiting for the next. It is an other worldly spiritual kingdom that has material implications in this fallen world.  In bringing the kingdom we are pushing back the fall, the curse of sin, here now, to take back territory, so to speak, the devil won in the garden. When the devil confronted Jesus in the wilderness (Matt. 4), the kingdoms of this world were his to give, but Jesus defeated him on the cross and in the resurrection, taking back the world he created from the one whose mission is to destroy it. Now through the church, his called out ones, his body, he is taking back territory lost in the fall, and that means in every area of life, every single square inch of reality.

This Puritan vision, sadly, has been lost on much of the church. As Pietism’s influence developed over time, it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the break between this world and the next happened in the life and ministry of Irishman John Nelson Darby. In the 1830s he developed several theological innovations that were new in the history of the church. One of these was a new type of premillennial eschatology that was especially doom and gloom. He and those he influenced came to believe that Jesus was coming back soon because it was getting so bad, with many predicting dates. People predicting the immanent return of Jesus was nothing new in church history, but this was different. Over time an entire theology of doom was built around it that came to be known in the 20th century as dispensational premillennialism. It is out of Darby and this movement that the idea of a rapture made its way into the Evangelical mind. Even though dispensationalism is no longer taken seriously on a scholarly level as it once was, it is still the eschatology of most Evangelical Christians. That just won’t do. 

Habakkuk and the Argument for Optimism
I came to my optimism, as I explain in my recent book Going Back to Find the Way Foward, before my eschatological awakening. It wasn’t until after that when I heard Doug Wilson say these words, “Now you have a theological justification for your optimism.” Bingo! That’s it! This isn’t wishful thinking. Nor is it what much of the 19th century postmillennialism was, a confusion of secular progressivism and liberal Christianity with eschatology. It’s biblical! I think Habakkuk two gives us a hint that it is.

As I was reading The Puritan Hope and seeing the verse, 2:14, quoted so often, I had to look it up and read the context. It had been a while since I’d read Habakkuk. What I found was unexpected, although I should know by now not to be surprised by the elegance of God’s revelation of His truth. As we know, the job of prophet in ancient Israel was a tough one. Speaking God’s truth to people who don’t want to hear it is a risky business, so you see throughout the prophets their lamenting and complaints. How many Christians can relate to Habakkuk’s lament with which he opens up the book:

2 How long, Lord, must I call for help,
    but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
    but you do not save?
3 Why do you make me look at injustice?
    Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
    there is strife, and conflict abounds.
4 Therefore the law is paralyzed,
    and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
    so that justice is perverted.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. The most common question in human history? Why God? That’s Habakkuk’s struggle, and ours. He knows God is true, that His covenant promises through the Patriarchs to bless Israel and the nations is assured, but as Paul says in Romans 3:4, let God be true and every man a liar. It just doesn’t look good.

Chapter 2 is the Lord’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint, nineteen verses of judgment against the wicked. And right there in the middle of unrelenting negativity is one verse, a sparkling jewel that doesn’t seem to belong in such a messy setting, verse 14. You ask yourself, incredulously, what in the world is that doing there? God doesn’t expand on the vivid picture of this victory of the earth being filled with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea. But that is a lot of water! And a lot of glory! About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, with the oceans corresponding to about 96.5% of all Earth’s water. But what does this mean, and why did God see fit to put it right in the middle of all the hostility to sinful humanity? That’s the $64,000 question (in today’s dollars that would be over $1.3 million!). Get it right and you’re rich! Metaphorically speaking.

As I said above, I thought this could only be fulfilled at the second coming of Christ, but if you take God’s metaphor seriously, it can’t be. Notice this knowledge doesn’t cover the entire earth. If it were the new heavens and earth, God’s glory would cover the earth entirely, but here it’s not. It will, however, cover the earth as massively as oceans cover the earth, and that is a lot! This means there will be no “golden age” we might mistake for the heavenly city of Revelation 21 coming down out of heaven, but it does mean substantial victory for the kingdom of God and God’s people. It means the Puritans were right, that we must live by faith, by trust in the power and promises of God that the victory is ours not just eternally, but here and now. And this means Jesus is king and ruler now at the right hand of God over every square inch of existence, over everything and every one, whether they acknowledge his lordship or not. It also means to bring our Christian faith and worldview to every single thing we do as well, and yes, including politics and how societies govern themselves.

The question is, will we give in to pessimism living by sight, or trust God and His promised victory in Christ regardless of the circumstances or the news of the day. The last three verses of chapter three that end this short book are a testimony to trust, to living by faith not sight. They’ve brought tears to my eyes more than onces.

16 I heard and my heart pounded,
    my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
    and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
    to come on the nation invading us.
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
    and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
    and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
    and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
    I will be joyful in God my Savior.
19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
   he makes my feet like the feet of a deer
   he enables me to tread on the heights.

That is trust, and the trust we’re called to in Christ because we may not get to worship in the cathedral we’re building. To me the power of verse 14 of chapter two is that it tells us the judgment of God is not an end in itself, just a way for God to avenge his holiness and dispense justice. It is rather a means to lead many to repentance because until it gets really bad, people tend to be willfully blind. All the stuff happening around us that makes us shake our head is happening for a reason, and it is as I argue in my book, to bring a Great Awakening, and for that I daily pray.