Will the Rapture Be September 23, 2025?

Will the Rapture Be September 23, 2025?

Sep 23, 2025 | Eschatology

This was the title of a YouTube video. I was surprised because I thought the failure of dispensationalists predicting the rapture for almost 200 years had put an end to this prediction business. Apparently not. This specific video was of a guy shooting down the prediction, which is like shooting fish in a barrel, given the woeful track record of dispensationalist predictions, not to mention the theological errors inherent in it.

We live in a different eschatological world than I did when I first became a Christian in 1978. That was the decade of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a book popular in a way inconceivable to us now. Published in 1970, it eventually sold over 35 million copies by the 1990s, and talk of the rapture and antichrist and Armageddon was everywhere. And world events at the time seemed to lend credibility to the wild speculation. It was all over Christian radio, and popular culture as well. Prophesy conferences were common, as were sermons about it in church. Rapture speculation was common. I’ll never forget one day right before I graduated from college in May 1982 standing out in front of my dorm at Arizona State University praying for the rapture to come so I wouldn’t have to go out into the real world and deal with real life. No such luck! On January 1, 1988, a former NASA rocket engineer named Edgar C. Whisenant self-published a book with the unfortunate title, 88 reasons Why The Rapture Will Be in 1988. We’re still here, by the way.

The frenzy continued into the 90s with the Left Behind series of books, a collection of 16 Christian fiction novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, published from 1995 to 2007. These were turned into a film trilogy from 2000 to 2005, probably the pop cultural apex of “Rapture theology.” (One of the ironies of recent history is that the star of those films, Kirk Cameron, is now a bona fide postmillennialist!) There was even a Left Behind movie in 2014 with Nicolas Cage, although by that time dispensationalism had pretty much run its course. Saying that I do not mean this eschatological perspective on “end times” has gone away, only that it’s no longer a relevant topic of conversation for most Christians. But having said that, dispensationalism hasn’t gone away, only now it’s become the furniture of the Evangelical mind, the background to life that colors how conservative Protestant Christians see things. It’s the assumed eschatology, not much discussed or debated, except maybe on social media. If you asked most Christians if Jesus is coming back soon, or any moment, or if the world is going to get increasingly worse, they would likely say yes. They are familiar with antichrist, rapture, and 666, but don’t much think about it or come across it in church or Christian culture.

Most Christians also live a kind of dualistic pietistic Christianity which fits perfectly with their dispensational assumptions. Christianity is primarily about saving souls, going to heaven when we die, and personal holiness. All of this is predictable given how modern Evangelical Christianity developed over the last two hundred years as the offspring of the Second Great Awakening and the fundamentalism to which it gave birth. For those who are younger among us, they’ve likely never heard conservative Christians referred to as “fundamentalists,” only as Evangelicals. Here’s a brief history as to why.

The word fundamentalist or fundamentalism today is rarely if ever used to refer to conservative Protestant Christians because of 9/11. The words were regularly used to refer to Islam and Muslims, and the angry “New Atheists” tried to slap that label on us in their short stay in the pop cultural sun, but it didn’t stick. In due course conservative Christians were always referred to as Evangelicals. This was a fascinating development for me because when I became a Christian, fundamentalists were a subset of conservative Christianity because of the modernist-fundamentalist controversies of the early 20th century. Evangelicals were a separate subset. This break came after World War II when a small group of Christian leaders, including Billy Graham, wanted to break out of the cultural and intellectual insularity of fundamentalism. They founded Christianity Today and Fuller Theological Seminary, and would only refer to themselves as Evangelicals. After I discovered Francis Schaeffer in college I was ever thereafter an Evangelical. Now we all are.

Why the Rapture?
As I said, most Christians assume dispensational eschatology, and that we are in the “end times,” but few know where it came from or why it exists. Sadly, Christians are as woefully ignorant of history as most Americans, and dispensationalism is one of the defining theological characteristics of modern Evangelicalism nobody knows about. If you want a solid history of its development and demise, I would suggest Daniel G. Hummel’s excellent book, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. I was only vaguely aware of some aspects of this development, and Hummel filled in all the blanks. Before we get to the rapture, I’ll briefly give you my synopsis.

Hummel doesn’t do this, but I would place the start of dispensationalism with the rise of Pietism among German Lutherans in the 17th century. From there Pietism, a dualistic form of spirituality, spread throughout Europe, especially with Wesley in England and Whitfield in America, as well as the Puritans in the First Great Awakening. In the 1830s out of the dynamics of these religious movements, a group of British and Irish dissenters, the most prominent among them J.N. Darby, came up with a novel idea of biblical dispensations, eventually to be called dispensationalism in the 1920s. Until then they were called the “new premillennialists” because their version of eschatology was very different from what thereafter came to be called historic premillennialism. They were also known as the Plymouth Brethren, after the city in England where they had their biggest gatherings. Probably the first real eschatological pessimists, they believed the church was so corrupted that God’s judgment was coming on the world because of it, and likely soon. Their theology developed over time, but became dominant with C.I. Scofield (1843-1921) and his bestselling Reference Bible.

What really ramped up the growth of dispensationalism were Darby’s visits to America from 1862-1877, seven times in all, encompassing a total of seven years. The new premillennialism made its greatest impact through the great evangelist of the 19th century, D.L. Moody (1837-1899). He and American revivalism would never be pure enough for the pessimistic Darby, but his teachings through the Plymouth Brethren came to dominate American Evangelical Christianity. According to Hummel speaking of Moody:

His premillennialism helped to popularize some of the key points as taught by Brethren and early American converts, including the imminent rapture and heavenly nature of the church.

As a successful businessman, Moody was an organizer, and it was the network he built that moved the new premillennialism to the center of Northern Evangelical culture, which continued into the fundamentalism of the 20th century, north, south, east, and west.

The connection between revivalism and this new pessimistic eschatology can’t be overstated. Hummel states it well:

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 the new premillennialism.

The Civil War played no small part in that. Given the death and destruction and horror, it wasn’t a stretch to believe that Jesus would be coming back soon to rescue his church. Moody’s version of the new premillennialism was a simple one: “Jesus could come at any moment, and you don’t want to be left behind.” For Moody the Pietist revivalist, the details of doctrine were not that important. And doctrine was divisive and only got in the way of what was most important—soul saving. What mattered in life and Christianity was whether you were going to heaven or hell when you died. Then once you were scared into eternal life with Jesus, what counted was living “the higher life” and personal holiness, and victorious Christian living. It was a potent message for me in 1978. In fact, an experience of what I call “drive by evangelism” was instrumental in bringing me to Christ. One evening at a party not long before I was leaving for college, a buddy of mine and I were outside of a party having a smoke, and a VW bug, the old school one in those days, parks across the street, and a guy gets out of the back seat and walks over to us. I think he’s going to shoot us or something, and he says, “If you died right now would you go to heaven?” I did not want to go to hell when I died, so soon thereafter when I went to college I was praying “the sinner’s prayer.”

The Rapture and Its Predictions
If we’re talking about the Rapture, it will help to know what dispensationalists actually believe about the primary doctrine that defines their eschatology. Hummel here is helpful.

The close of this dispensation will be heralded by the imminent rapture, a sudden taking up into heaven of all true Christians to meet Jesus in the air (based on I Thess. 4:13-17). With the church removed from the earth, God will unleash judgments for seven years as part of the plan for world redemption. God will allow evil to reign and will permit the rise to power of the antichrist, a perversion of Christ’s incarnation that sees Satan fuse with the human dictator of a one-world government. Plagues, geopolitical machinations, and wars will ensue—the earth will be utterly devastated. Israel, God’s chosen people and instrument for world redemption, will be seemingly on the verge of destruction, but a remnant will find supernational preservation. At the climax of the seven years, the battle of Armageddon will see the victorious raptured church, led by Jesus himself, vanquish the forces of the antichrist. Satan will be bound for a thousand years; this is the same span of time that the millennial kingdom will reign in Jerusalem, its realm the entire globe, its rule one of peace and justice. A final confrontation with Satan after the thousand years will dispatch the devil forever into the lake of fire and prompt the final judgment of humanity.

The doctrine of the Rapture, if we can call it that, developed from Darby’s theological assumptions, most importantly his view of the church. First, he saw the church of his day as a corrupted body, and its ruin would be the precursor to the second coming. This was in contrast to what he considered the perversion of postmillennialism that saw organized Christianity ushering in a millennium of peace. Most importantly, he separated ancient Israel from the church. The Hebrews or Jews in ancient Israel were in no way connected to the New Testament church. Christians were citizens of heaven, but the kingdom of heaven on earth, a reign of peace could only ultimately come through Israel.

The details of this theology were worked out throughout the 19th century, but especially with Scoffield and his reference Bible. Old and new premillennialism intermixed in this development, but the rapture was an early feature. As it moved to America even prior to Darby’s visit, the Millerite movement led by Baptist minister William Miller got into the prophecy speculation business, and declared that Jesus would return (often associated with a rapture like event) on October 22, 1844. When it didn’t happen it came to be known as the Great Disappointment, but it would only be the first of many disappointments. Before this September 23 predication popped out of the dispensational rabbit hole, the last modern prediction was from Harold Camping who predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011, followed by a revised date of October 21, 2011, after the initial failure.

It is impossible to know exactly how many of these predictions happened over the years, but once a rapture like event entered the Evangelical bloodstream seeing world events as indicating some kind of apocalyptic end was a common occurrence, even if most Christians didn’t get into the prediction business. This dispensationalism mentality, the pessimistic the “we lose down here” perspective of life on this fallen earth, in the words of John McArthur, is the worldview of almost all Evangelical Christians. To one degree or another, they all share it regardless of their eschatological convictions or knowledge. That was my perspective most of my Christian life until I embraced postmillennialism just over three years ago. Things were inevitably going to get worse until eventually they got so bad Jesus would have to come back and save the day.

The Rapture and Futurism
Fundamental to dispensationalism and the rapture mentality is futurism, or the idea that the prophetic texts in the Bible refer to events in the future, not to any historical proximity in which they were written. There are three basic eschatological assumptions regarding prophecy and timeline, futurism being one. The others are historicism, which correlates prophecy to historical events, so for example, to the Reformers the Pope was the antichrist, and preterism, which says the events of prophecy happened in the past. The most solid biblical case can be made for a mixture of preterism and futurism. Some Christians have decided that it’s either all preterism or all futurism, but those lead to all kinds of problems, as we can see from Darby and the dispensationalism his thought eventually gave birth to.

For most of my Christian life I was a futurist, but I didn’t even know the term, nor had I ever heard the word preterism, which just means past in Latin. I’ll never forget one morning walking into our bedroom as my wife was reading about the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 24 or Luke 21, and understandably confused, she asked me some questions. I remember being just as confused and replied, “Oh well, who knows. God does.” That was typical of my pan-millennialist tendencies, that it will all work out in the end, so why bother with it. Then the most repeated month in my writing happened, August 2022, and postmillennialism dropped out of the sky on my head. For some reason I read this title of a James White sermon on YouTube, “My Journey to Hope for the Future,” and downloaded it on my trusty little MP3 player. Steve Bannon had turned me into an optimist, but I had no substantive theological reason for it, until I heard this sermon.

I hadn’t realized until these last few years that my basic pessemism about the present and future was due to futurism and its assumptions. Kim Riddlebarger, a scholar and pastor for many years, is a perfect example of why. He is not at all a fan of an optimism/pessimism paradigm, as he argues in a piece he wrote some years ago, and part of the reason is his furutistic reading of Matthew 24:

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

This is only true if Jesus is referring to his own second coming at the end of time, not the coming judgment on Israel in AD70 he is in fact talking about. In Matthew 24 Jesus has told the disciples while they were standing on the Mount of Olives looking at the magnificent temple, “Truly I tell you, not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.” That was shocking, so they ask: “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Every futurist, which is the vast majority of Christians, assume the coming Jesus is talking about is the second coming, the end of time and the consummation of all things, and the age is this fallen world system. But Jesus says clearly that is not what he’s talking about: 34 “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” It takes all kind of pretzel logic to claim “this” doesn’t mean “this,” but that hasn’t kept Christians from doing it because they come to the text with their futurist assumptions, like Kim, and have to say it doesn’t really mean “this.” When I was confused, I figured some of what Jesus said referred to the generation he was speaking to, and some didn’t, but that was pretty much arbitrary.

Even though plenty of Christians were futurists throughout Christian history, it wasn’t until Darby and his novel dualisms of the church being heavenly and not earthly, and the church and Israel, that his potent pessimism became a feature of Christianity. His theology informed by his futuristic assumptions enabled rapture theology to blossom into dispensationalism that would eventually envelop almost the entire Evangelical church. Thankfully, there will be no rapture on September 23 because Christ did not call his church to escape the world, but to overcome and transform it. As Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.”

 

Why Critics Misunderstand and Distort Postmillennialism

Why Critics Misunderstand and Distort Postmillennialism

Sep 17, 2025 | Eschatology

I’ve written here and there about how woefully misunderstood postmillennialism is, but I’ve never given it the full blog post treatment. There are deep historical and theological reasons for the typical knee-jerk reaction that will be fascinating to explore given Christians live in profound eschatological tension, the already and the not yet. The question and the debate always has and always will come down to the scope and extent of what N.T. Wright calls inaugurated eschatology. In other words, what will be fully realized at the end broke into our world at Christ’s first coming, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. The moment the tongues of fire came down on the 120 disciples in that upper room in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit was unleashed in His redemptive power to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. What does that all mean? What are the practical results in this still fallen world from Christ’s accomplished work? Therein lies the debate.

John Murray, the great Scottish theologian who helped found and for decades taught at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote a book called Redemption Accomplished and Applied, the title of which captures the essence of this debate. He writes primarily about soteriology and the order of salvation, or how we are saved, but salvation is not limited only to our own personal saving from the guilt and penalty of sin. Salvation is much bigger than just us, as we learn from the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved.

Our salvation is literally cosmic in scope. That means creation in all its manifestations will be redeemed and renewed, starting with the apex of God’s handiwork, man, who will become fully human through everything it means for him to be a human being. Paradise lost will become paradise restored, slowly but surely in this life, then completely at Christ’s return.

Aristotle in his Politics said man is a political animal, not exactly a biblical way to put it, but yes, human beings are intuitively driven to organize with others in developing societal structures, be it family, church, business, or government. Christ’s redemption is applied to all these spheres, specifically under his kingly rule from the right hand of God. This is why before he ascended to that ultimate position of power in the universe he told his disciples:

18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Notice Jesus says all authority to all the nations. One would think given the clarity of Christ’s command, along with the clarity of redemptive history in God’s revelation, the scope and extent of the church’s mission would not be a point of contention, but it is. Jesus even used a Greek word we translate in English as nations, and not a comparable Greek word for individual. His charge was to disciple people groups as corporate entities, not merely as isolated people in their personal lives. This was accepted by all Christians regardless of their eschatology until the Second Great Awakening in the mid-19th century when soul saving became evangelicalism’s raison d’etre, or reason for being. Conservative Protestant Christianity became about saving souls so we can go to heaven when we die and personal holiness. Cultural transformation now became, at best, the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth, not as Christ seems to be saying one of its primary purposes. It took a while in the form of fundamentalism in the 20th century for our version of Protestant Christianity to completely turn in on itself. But by the middle of the century Christianity in America had become culturally irrelevant and the Great Commission had changed. The charge had become to save as many as we can from a sinking ship while the world goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

How the Enlightenment and Dispensationalism Took Down Postmillennialism
It seems my favorite bogeyman has to make an appearance in all such discussions, and this one is no different. The Enlightenment, a period of Western history starting in the mid-17th century, gave birth to the philosophical concept of rationalism. Man, so it was thought, via his reason could discern all truth without any reference to revelation. This process slowly progressed through the 18th century, but by the late 19th as Friederich Nietzsche said, God was dead and Western intellectual man had killed him. This entire period coincided with the Scientific Revolution and a remarkable increase in knowledge that inspired sinful man’s Babel like tendencies that he could accomplish anything. Given the Western world at the time was known as Christendom, it was inevitable that Enlightenment rationalism would make its way into Christianity.

The first consequence we see develop among Christians in the late 18th century is the heresy of Arianism, a rejection of the Trinity. Ironically, what came to be called Unitarianism grew out of Puritan churches in New England that in due course would come to be known as the mainline churches in the 20th century. The abolition, feminist, and temperance movements were filled with such Unitarians, people who still embraced Christianity but rejected Christ as God. For them, and the liberal Christianity they birthed, Jesus was a great moral teacher and example, but not the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. At the same time as this liberalizing tendency was taking over large parts of more intellectual and activist Christianity, the Second Great Awakening burst onto the cultural scene in response. This revivalist movement was anti-intellectual and anti-theological, and out of which would come dispensationalism. These two streams of Christianity would flow in opposite directions both of which would end up discrediting postmillennialism in the eyes of all Christians.

Into the 1800s Christ’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” was something all Christians believed was the mission of the church. Even Monastic movements prior to the Reformation sought to transform this fallen world with the righteousness of Christ, as did the Pietistic movements inspired by them after the Reformation. What united all Christian visions of transformation prior to the 19th century was a dependence on the Spirit of God. These were not Babel building projects of man’s hubris, but God working through His people to crush Satan under their feet (Rom. 16:20). Once orthodox Christianity was thrown under the bus, the spirit of Babel merged with a growing secular confidence that nature itself could be conquered by human ingenuity and will. The “new premillennialism” developed by the Plymouth Brethren and J.N. Darby in Ireland in the 1830s was a response to this secularizing tendency in the church. They saw corruption everywhere, and the convoluted eschatology of dispensationalism was the result.

Largely because of the Enlightenment and the growing secularism it spawned, Christianity encountered a fork in the road in that fateful century. Down one road was a this-world, man-centered hubris, down the other was an other worldly over spiritualized piety of escape. Biblical postmillennialists who affirmed a rigorous orthodoxy would not take either road. They would, however, after World War I, be tarred with the Babel label. The collective insanity of the Western World known as The Great War, the war to end all wars, would cement pessimistic eschatology into the minds of Evangelicals for the rest of the century. Postmillennialism would be discredited as the perversion of unbiblical secular progress, man thinking he could usher in the kingdom of God based on his own efforts and ingenuity. That is exactly what I thought it was until August of 2022. I was actually shocked that a biblical case could be made for an optimistic eschatology.

Optimism or Pessimism: The Parable of the Wheat and The Tares
In addition to postmillennialism having the baggage of being secular progress, critics contend its optimism is biblically unwarranted. I thought so myself. When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 I found over time that it turned me into a pessimist. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, or weeds, Jesus tells of the kingdom being like a man who sowed good seed in his field. An enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. Jesus says the weeds should not be pulled up before the harvest lest the wheat gets pulled up with them, so the weeds and the wheat will grow up together until the end.

Both pre- and A-mill see this as the metaphor for life in our fallen world. Sin and righteousness are in constant conflict and in due course the weeds win. Pastor and theologian Kim Riddlebarger, who convinced me initially to embrace amillennialism, puts it this way:

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

You can see in his comment two of the straw men I discussed above. One is that postmillennialism is a product of the Enlightenment and not Scripture, and the other is that it teaches that we usher in the kingdom of God through human effort. Neither of which resembles the truth in the least.

The conflict of sin and righteousness, good and evil, is what informs the worldview of most Christians, as it used to do with me. If you think this way and simply look at the world in all its misery and suffering, it’s almost impossible not to be a pessimist. If we live by sight and not by faith, we will inevitably see the weeds as the ultimate winners in our fallen world. But, as I found out, if we live by faith it’s a completely different story. Instead of seeing conflict everywhere like two heavy weight fighters pummeling each other for 15 rounds, we can begin to see the struggle in terms of conquest. It is difficult to convey how transformational this shift in perspective was for me. I’ll never forget what I heard Doug Wilson say only a few weeks after I embraced postmillennialism:

Now you have the theological justification for your optimism.

Bingo! I’d already started becoming more optimistic for a variety of reasons, but it had nothing to do with theology. I was looking for a biblical justification for it, and the very last place I thought I’d find it was in postmillennialism.

In my pessimistic phase, when I thought we lose “down here,” I didn’t realize the field into which the weeds are sown is a wheat field. It is a field primarily of wheat, not weeds! In any wheat filed weeds are a nuisance, but when harvest time comes there is always more wheat. I always missed that. I also missed that the next parables Jesus tells are of the mustard seed and leaven (yeast). I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a coincidence, Jesus putting these parables together, and in this order. I believe he did it to give us the context for how to see the parable of the wheat and tares. I’ve written about this in depth, so I won’t do that here, but the parables teach us about the extension and scope of the progress of the gospel. The kingdom of God and Christ’s righteousness will inevitably be like the largest tree in the garden, and the leaven will go through the entire batch of dough. Everything, every single thing, will be impacted, influenced, and transformed by the power of God, far as the curse is found.

The Greatness of the Great Commission
This is the title of a book I recently read by Ken Gentry which raises a question: What makes the Great Commission Great? Is the greatness limited to the salvation and transformation of individual lives and the personal relationships they have? I’ve listened to hundreds of testimonies over the last handful of years, and I hear supernatural greatness in every one of them. Transformed lives are one of the great evidences of the truth of Christianity, but so are transformed civilizations. In the foreword of the book, Gary North puts it well speaking of the grace and restoration made possible in the healing power of the gospel:

Nothing is to be excluded from Christ’s healing: not the family, not the State, not business, not education, and surely not the institutional Church. Salvation is the salve that heals the wounds inflicted by sin; every type of wound from every type of sin.

One could expand his list to include art and architecture, law and entertainment, agriculture, science, and health. The scope of God’s transforming power in Christ is as expansive as God’s creation. This was man’s task, dominion, before the fall, and the gospel calls us to exercise that dominion through the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-49). That is what I argue makes it great, the discipling of entire nations and everything contained therein. This has only become my perspective, and conviction, since August of 2022.

Prior to that date, to my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed salvation was primarily for saving the souls of individual people, and the real, substantive transformation of the world would have to wait until Christ returns and makes all things right. I believed we should apply a Christian worldview to all of these things, but the basic structure of it would be wheat and tares struggling it out on a level playing field until the end of time. That won’t change until Christ returns; weeds win, I guess.

I came across a perfect example of how I used to think about this from the magazine of my alma mater, Westminster Seminary. The issue is about global missions, and in one of the articles the author states what he sees as the mission of the church of Jesus Christ: “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” Prior to my “conversion” I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, but now my response was, “No, He’s calling us to disciple the nations! To see them transformed by the gospel!” If our mission is calling people “out of” every nation, then we’re not teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded his disciples.

If we look back through the corridor of time it becomes easier to see the greatness of the Great Commission. And I mean way back in time. Four thousand years ago, God called one heathen man out of all the people on earth, Abram, to create a people for Himself. He promised that all peoples on earth would be blessed through this man. All was darkness until God himself lit this small candle. The history of Israel, from a human perspective, can be described as Thy kingdom stalled on earth, fits and starts, seeming to go nowhere for 2,000(!) years. That’s a long period of futility. After all those years God’s kingdom had made its mark in one little plot of land in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. Then came Jesus of Nazareth, the most unexpected Messiah. The blessing God had promised Abram all those years before was about to break out, only it didn’t look like it, at all. The odds of this fledgling little religious movement within Judaism going anywhere was between slim and none, and the Roman government and Jewish leaders made sure slim had no chance at all. Not only did it go somewhere, but it also eventually came to dominate the civilization that was bent on destroying it.

Now looking back 2,000 years we can see the civilizational power in the Christian message, and it goes well beyond what most Christians consider “spiritual.” A non-Christian historian named Tom Holland wrote a book whose title says it all: Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World. An historian of the ancient world, Holland realized what he believed, how he lived, and how he saw the world, was nothing like the ancient pagans he’d studied for so long. What changed? Jesus of Nazareth! Christianity in what we’ve come to call Christendom changed everything. Specifically, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. The great 20th century English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it in his own inimitable way:

The Man on the Cross dying to ribald shouts and mockery is validated, and seen to have guided and inspired through the Christian centuries all that is most creative and wonderful in human life.

From my new postmillennial perspective, I now see these 2,000 years as the fulfillment of Yahweh’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago, that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him. As I always say, God is never in a hurry, which is why I think we may have a while to go before the final enemy will be destroyed, death (I Cor. 15:26). Until then Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (15:25). He will do that by the power of the Holy Spirit through his people, his body, the church. What makes the Great Commission great is that it brings God’s blessing in Christ to everything human beings do, not just their “spiritual” lives. And at the end of the day everything creatures made in God’s image do is spiritual. That is our mission field.

 

 

The Redemptive-Historical Significance of AD70

The Redemptive-Historical Significance of AD70

Sep 10, 2025 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

Until August of 2022, the year 70 AD was just another year in ancient history to me. It held no special significance other than I knew that a Roman army destroyed Jerusalem, and Jews and Christians were scattered throughout the empire. I could infer God’s purpose of separating Christianity from Judaism once and for all, but in terms of His salvific plans, I didn’t see any connection. And I don’t ever remember being taught in over four decades of my Christian life that there was any redemptive-historical significance to the horrific fall of Jerusalem. And horrific only begins to describe it. The ancient historian Josephus describes it in disgusting, often stomach turning detail. I’m sure I learned something about it in seminary, but whatever it was, it wasn’t memorable.

Then in that fateful month very much to my surprise, as those who read me often will know, I embraced postmillennialism. Up to that day I thought it was a completely discredited eschatological position. I found out I had rejected it for the same reason most others do: I was completely ignorant of what it really taught. If there is a way to know less than nothing about a topic, I knew that much. Yet I thought it was some kind of joke, until I learned it most certainly is not. I’ve learned since then that whatever critics think they know about it is always wrong, and I mean one hundred percent of the time. I have not found one single solitary steel man among those criticizing it. What I find is an abundance of straw men, question begging, and non sequiturs. That’s a lot of logical fallacies! And for whatever reason, postmillennialism lends itself to that. Before we get into the meat of the significance of AD70, let me tell you why I rejected the post-mill position, and every critic I’ve encountered seems to do so for the same reasons.

The Rejection of Postmillennialism
After my Christian youth when I was born-again into the thoroughly dispensational premillennial environment of the late 1970s, I eventually became pan-mill, as in it will all pan out in the end. Up to that point I engaged in “newspaper eschatology,” and all of the predictions about future events supposedly contained therein. Eventually it just came to seem like futile guess work and conjecture. Because of that I came to assume we can’t really know anything definitively about how things will end, so we just need to trust God who apparently didn’t to see the need to communicate that stuff clearly. Oh, how wrong I was! But we learn, hopefully.

Then in 2014 I was exposed to a solid case for amillennialism, and saw that just maybe God did communicate these things more clearly than I had realized. Unfortunately, this perspective on “end times” seemed to make me more pessimistic about the human race and life in this fallen world. The a-mill position teaches that the wheat and tares (weeds) grow up in the field of this fallen earth, and that good and evil are in perpetual conflict until the end. Given the seemingly ever present suffering and misery we see in the world, it’s not surprising I turned into a pessimist, as do most a-mills I’ve encountered. They, like our premillennial and dispensational brothers and sisters, see things growing increasingly worse until , as David Chilton puts it, “Christ returns at the last moment, like the cavalry in B-grade westerns, to rescue the ragged little band of survivors.” That’s basically what I believed because that’s what I thought these positions taught, and what I still think they do.

In studying postmillennialism, I learned something powerful that completely changed my perspective. Lorraine Boettner in his book, The Millennium, contrasts this idea of a conflict between good and evil, with the conquest of good over evil. It didn’t take long for him to convince me the latter is the biblical take on the nature of reality in our fallen world. Christ did not come to earth, die, rise again, ascend to the right hand of God, and send his Holy Spirit, to just pluck a few embers out of the burning fire of fallen humanity. Rather, he came to conquer the sin that destroys everything in His creation. That not only has profound effects on individuals saved from sin, but also in the communities they build, starting with families and extending out from there into society and cultures. Isaac Watts in the great Christmas hymn Joy to the World put it poetically best:

No more let sins and sorrows 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.

The entire hymn is about Christ’s rule and reign on earth, not just in the hearts of his people or in the church, but over everything!

Unfortunately, until I learned what it really was, I thought postmillennialism was a late 19th and early 20th century version of liberal Christian and secular progress. Man in his hubris with the light of science and technology would conquer the world and usher in the kingdom of God. It was clear from my pre, pan, and amil perspectives, science and technology could never overcome sin in the heart of man, so postmillennialism was a delusion. William Jennings Bryan echoed what many Christians believed prior to World War I, and what many equate with postmillennialism today:

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.

After he said this, in the 20th century some hundred million people died or were killed in the name of progress, and postmillennialism was tarred with the Bryan version of “progress.” That, however, has nothing whatsoever to do with a biblically rigorous postmillennialism.

Futurism, Preterism and AD70
Unfortunately, because of the perversion of postmillennialism at the hands of Christian liberals and secularists, the fall of Jerusalem in AD70 eventually turned from being a profound redemptive-historical pivot point, to an historical curiosity.

The growth of the “new premillennialism” of J.N. Darby and the Plymouth Brethren would in the 20th century turn into the dominant Evangelical eschatology of dispensationalism. This eschatology necessitated a futuristic interpretation of the Olivet discourse (Matthew 24:1–25:46; Mark 13:1–37; Luke 21:5–36) and the Book of Revelation, meaning the events that Jesus and John spoke about would not happen in the first century Jewish-Roman context, but at some time far off into the future. Amillennialists believe the same thing because when I embraced that eschatology for eight years that’s what I was taught and believed. Now it seems abundantly clear to me from a postmillennial perspective that a preterist interpretation makes the most sense of the texts and the historical facts on the ground.

The events Jesus spoke about, and most of the events John refers to (called partial preterism), have already happened. The word preterist comes from the Latin word for past, so this view is a contrast from the futurist view. Learning about the preterist view can almost cause one a case of intellectual whiplash. It makes my neck kind of ache just thinking about it given how unexpected it was after four plus decades as a Christian.

The debate about Revelation relates to the dating when John wrote it. For most of my Christian life I accepted “the consensus” of a later date, in the 90s AD, because the “experts” all seemed to believe that. I didn’t realize their motivations for deriving that perspective were primarily driven, known or not, by their eschatological assumptions (I wrote a piece last year about this, Eschatological Assumptions and AD70). If one takes a futuristic view of Jesus’ teaching in the Olivet Discourse, then it makes sense to see Revelation in the same way. So whatever evidence there is for the late date becomes dispositive, meaning it’s basically a slam dunk. Then last year I read Before Jerusalem Fell by Ken Gentry on the dating of the Book of Revelation, and I was shocked at how weak the evidence for the late dating was. I suppose a plausible case can be made, but to me the internal evidence, the actual content of the book itself, what John wrote, is dispositive, and slam dunk would describe it well—like a Michael Jordon tongue out in your face dunk. I was kind of shocked, really, not least because I had so easily accepted the later dating all these years.

The debate about the Olivet Discourse turns on how one chooses to interpret this verse in Matthew 24:

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

The debate is over what Jesus meant when he told them that all the things he was describing, not some of the things, would happen in “this generation.” It seems pretty straight forward, that it was the generation of the people he was speaking to when the words came out of his mouth. It’s a stretch to say Jesus meant “some generation in the far off future when these far off future events are going to occur.” It’s crazy to me that very serious people actually try to make that case, but they do and it’s what most Christians believe because of their eschatological assumptions. These people admit some of what Jesus was speaking about happened in the first century, but Jesus doesn’t give us that option. He says clearly, “Until all these things have happened.” So it’s either all in the past, or all in the future; there is no other option. Reading it the way Jesus intended, and his hearers would have understood, points to AD70, no pretzel logic required.

I would encourage anyone who wants to come to their own conclusions and not just take another’s word for it to read Gentry’s book, and for the Olivet Discourse and AD70 I would suggest two other books. The first is a little book from the early 19th century called, The Destruction of Jerusalem by George Peter Holford. He lays out in exacting detail how the historical record proves the preterist interpretation. The other is a book by R.C. Sproul called, The Last Days According to Jesus. Skeptics who have been trying to discredit the Bible for well over 200 years have argued that Jesus was predicting all these events, and since they didn’t happen Jesus was not who he claimed to be. The futurist position is one way to deal with it, but we don’t have to distort the text or Jesus’ words to address the critics’ lies. Preterism will do that nicely. Now let’s move on to some theology.

The Judgment of AD70
Unfortunately, because of the futurist focus on “end times” prophetic passages, the theological significance of the destruction of Jerusalem gets lost in the shuffle. That event, however, was a profound turning point in the history of redemption, of God’s plan to redeem His people and his entire creation. It took me a while on my postmillennial journey to figure this out. Theologically this has to do with God’s judgment upon His people, and what that meant for His redemptive plans.

In the discourse, everything turns on the meaning of the disciples’ question, “what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” People often take the Greek word for age, aión-αἰών, to mean world, so Jesus was telling the disciples about the end of the world. What comes into our minds when we hear that phrase? Likely a dystopian hell we’ve seen in a thousand movies. If one reads Revelation futuristically with that mindset, it certainly appears that way. But that is not what Jesus is referring to. I have a critically important question most Christians seem to miss. To whom was Jesus sent? And for whom was Jesus’ ministry? It was first the Jews, and only after that Gentiles, the rest of us.

The first passage confirming this message comes in Matthew 10 when Jesus sends out the 12.

5 These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.

Jesus confirms this in Matthew 15. The headline of the passage in our Bibles says, “The Faith of a Canaanite Woman.” God is using a heathen woman from a people with a lot of historical baggage for the Jews to make a theological point. She is screaming out for Jesus to heal her daughter of demon possession, and Jesus makes his mission clear:

24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

Notice Jesus says “only.” It’s news to most Christians that the gospels are not about us! They are about God coming to His people, sending His anointed one to them, their Messiah. Only when he was rejected did the message extend out to the Gentiles. If you read through the Old Testament, but especially the prophets, this dual message is clear. Yahweh is consistently declaring blessing and judgment on His people, but eventually that blessing is to extend to the nations as he promised Abraham and the Patriarchs. It seems the blessing would not break out to the rest of the world until judgment came.

That judgment to come, what we see happen in AD70, was declared by John prior to the Baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3.

7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. 9 And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. 10 The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Given my futurist eschatological assumptions, I completely missed that John is clearly declaring judgment to come upon the Jews. I thought John was mistaken like many Jews were about Jesus. His first coming wasn’t in judgment, but in mercy and grace. Judgment was for his second coming. That’s how I read the Olivet discourse as well, but Jesus is clearly speaking of Jerusalem where “not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.”

Yahweh was in a legal covenant relationship with His people with the stipulation of blessing for obedience, and curses for disobedience. We see this laid out in detail in the Pentateuch, and played out in Israel’s history, declared in excruciating details in the prophets. Reading Jesus’ words in the Olivet Discourse from a preterist perspective is not at all a stretch, but in fact fits the entire flow of the historical narrative perfectly.

The Theological Significance of AD70
The Jews were promised salvation from sin and death from the very beginning when God told Adam and Eve the woman’s seed (offspring) would strike or bruise (crush in the NIV) the serpent’s head. When the covenant is revealed to Abraham, Paul confirms this seed refers not to offspring in general, but to Christ (Gal. 3):

 16 The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say “and to seeds,” meaning many people, but “and to your seed,” meaning one person, who is Christ.

All through Israel’s history, God communicated his redemptive plans in signs and symbols, or types and shadows as the theologians put it. These were concrete illustrations of the forgiveness of sin to come pointing beyond themselves to a greater truth, to the one who is The Truth in which redemption is found. When he came to fulfill all the promises, the Jewish religious leaders who represented the nation rejected the fulfillment for the types and shadows as if they were the thing, as if the blood of bulls and goats could do anything. The entire book of Hebrews was written to convince first century Jewish Christians of the superiority of the New Covenant. In chapter 8 quoting Jeremiah 31, the writer says:

13 By calling this covenant “new,” he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.

This could be considered a prophecy of the coming destruction of the temple. Hebrews was written while temple still stood because the writer was trying to convince Jewish Christians not to go back to the Old Covenant way of doing things. That was a possibility at the time he wrote. It seems the Jewish nation, including Jewish Christians, would not get the message that a new and superior way of salvation had appeared until God made the message clear. AD70 and the utter destruction of Jerusalem made it undeniably clear.

From that moment the Jewish religion changed completely. It was no longer the Mosaic religion of atonement for sin in sacrifice, but a moralistic religion of works. Jewish Christians now had to realize the former way was dead, over and gone forever; they could never go back. It was either Judaism or Christianity, the law or salvation by grace through faith, man’s works of futility or God’s transformational power in Christ in the human heart. God’s kingdom had now come in a completely different way than any Jew had foreseen. After Jesus had risen from the dead he told his disciples in Luke 24 that the entirety of Israel’s history found in Scripture, our Old Testament, was about him. Once the temple fell, God declared his covenant had been fulfilled in his Son, his kingdom come, His will now being done on earth as it is in heaven. Israel’s futility was ended, and in Christ alone would be found this good news of God (I Cor. 1):

30 It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, sanctification and redemption.

Now with God’s law put in His people’s minds and written on their hearts (Jer. 31), God’s kingdom would no longer be limited to a tiny point of light in the Middle East. We read these prophetic words from Habakkuk 2:

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

 

 

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

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

Jun 11, 2025 | Eschatology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Response Post: Mike Horton and Culturally Irrelevant Christianity

Response Post: Mike Horton and Culturally Irrelevant Christianity

Jun 4, 2025 | Eschatology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Centrality of the Ascension Misunderstood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means

What Our Citizenship is in Heaven Really Means

Feb 5, 2025 | Eschatology, The Gospel

When I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, born-again as we used to say, it was into the kind of Christianity described by three words: Pietistic Gnostic dualism. It was a campus ministry where I imbibed what I now see as an over spiritualized version of Christianity. I look back at the time fondly, living among a group of young people who took their faith seriously, but eventually I realized they saw the important things in life being the spiritual, like Bible reading, prayer, church, evangelism, and the like, and everything else being less important. It was implicitly a bifurcated take on reality, something divided into two separate spheres, some things are in the sphere of the spiritual and thus important, and other things in the sphere of the material and mundane, and thus not so important. I say implicitly because I’m not sure this was ever overtly taught, but I started to see reality through a Christian lens perfectly described by these three words.

Because of this, I want to consider Philippians 3:20 & 21 and how my young Christian self interpreted this passage, and how most Christians do so today as well.

20 But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so they will be like his glorious body.

Back then, my citizenship being in heaven obviously meant heaven is my home, where I belong, where I feel most comfortable. I don’t belong to this messed up old fallen world which, after all, belongs to Satan. As we’ll see, it doesn’t mean that at all, but it sure sounded to me like it did. From a Pietistic Gnostic dualism perspective it made perfect sense. The old hymn says it best while getting it exactly wrong:

I’m but a stranger here,
Heav’n is my home;
Earth is a desert drear,
Heav’n is my home;
Danger and sorrow stand
Round me on ev’ry hand;
Heav’n is my Fatherland,
Heav’n is my home.

The hymn was written by Henry Bateman in the mid-19th century when the concepts from these three words were coming to dominate the Evangelical church in light of the Second Great Awaking. As dispensational premillennialism and fundamentalism began to dominate the church in the 19th century, all but taking it over in the 20th, the words of this hymn became axiomatic. Of course heaven is my home! Verse 20 would bring others to mind like I Peter 2:10, where Peter calls Christians foreigners and aliens, or sojourners, the idea being someone residing in a strange country, just passing through. This idea appears to be confirmed in Hebrews 11, the great hall of fame of faith. Speaking of Abraham, the writer says:

10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Clearly, that’s not the city I now live in on this earth. The writer seems to make it even more clear, using the phrase like Peter that these heroes of faith “were aliens and strangers on earth,” and then telling us:

16 Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

That settles it! This earth is not our home, which is off somewhere else not here, a spiritual heavenly home, and the point of the Christian faith is that when we die we get to go there. Jesus even told us in John 14:2:

My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?

Clearly, Jesus is telling us this place is off somewhere else, not this earth, and this place is where we’ll go when we die.

Then if we combine all this with passages in the New Testament telling us this world belongs to Satan, it has to be an open and shut case. For example, Paul calls Satan “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4), and “the ruler of the kingdom of the air” (Eph. 2:2). The Apostle John tells us, “the whole world is under the control of the evil one” (I John 5:19), and he also makes a strong contrast between “everything in the world,” and those who do the will of God (I John 2:15-17). As horrible as the world can be, it seems kind of obvious it fulfills the phrase often ascribed to some of it, a hell hole.

Looking back I can see why all of this this would have made sense to me, but I’ve come to realize it’s a distortion of the biblical message of the kingdom, in fact an upside down distortion. Jesus came not that we might escape this world for heaven, but that we might be part of him bringing heaven to this fallen world through us. God in Christ is making this world our home because God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son for it. It’s a package deal, us, the people he came to save (Matt. 1:21), and His creation, which as Paul says is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth,” (Rom. 1:22,23) itself to be redeemed with our bodies at the resurrection. This process of making it our home started at Jesus’ first coming, and will ultimately be fulfilled at his second. The big disagreements in the church are about what happens between these comings and what it all means.

The Biblical Orientation of the Christian Life
As we consider the dominant other worldly perspective of most Evangelical Christians today, the question before us becomes one of the proper, biblical orientation of the Christian life, whether our focus is this life or the life to come, and even what these concepts mean. The are two reasons these verses in Philippians are so important to the Christian life in the 21st century. One is the improper interpretation, and the other is the contrasting proper interpretation which completely changes the orientation of the Christian’s life. The contrast is powerful and instructive. In the improper interpretation, it’s like we’re living in a foreign land where we don’t speak the language or know the customs, and we’re constantly longing to go home where we belong, to the familiar, the beloved, the comfortable. In the proper interpretation, we are home in this world, living where we belong, among the people we know and a culture of familiar sights and sounds and feels, even as we seek to improve it and make it a better, more heavenly place to live.

Because of Pietism, these verses tend to be interpreted by most Evangelical Christians in a dualistic way, in effect making us so heavenly minded we become no earthly good. That’s overstated, but it’s imperative we understand the point. In Francis Schaeffer’s image, modern Christians live in a two story reality where upstairs is the important spiritual stuff, that which is related to faith, and downstairs the mundane, material, not so important stuff, and everything not related to faith. I’ve heard this version of Christianity compared to red double decker buses in England, with the spiritual and important stuff on the upper deck, and the not so important mundane and material stuff on the lower deck. Thus we get the term dualism, or the idea of two separate parts or ideas determining how we understand and live our lives. I add the qualifier Gnostic to dualism because we’re seeking a kind of secret knowledge about that other spiritual life apart from this world. Whether we think about any of this consciously or not, it does affect all of us.

The correct orientation gives us an exciting fundamentally transformational and engaging vision for our lives, while rejecting an escapist two-story Christian mentality. Think about it. If we view this life, this world, like a sinking ship eventually going down, or a burning building, our instincts are going to be to get the heck outta here! If we see our efforts to save the ship or the building as futile, how motivated are we going to be to put in the effort to transform it? This is the reason a few years ago I stopped praying for revival. I know what you’re thinking. I’m so earthly minded I’m no heavenly good! Actually, I decided I needed to expand that prayer, so now I pray not just for revival, which Christians tend to view as people being saved so when they die they can go to heaven, but also for renewal, restoration, and reformation as well. I call it praying the four Rs. Notice I don’t pray for revolution because the objective isn’t change into something new and different, but a fulfillment of God’s created order toward its perfect ends. Notice each of the additional Rs don’t seek metamorphosis, a worm into a butterfly, but transformation into fulfillment of what God always intended his creation to be, very good.

This is what God has done in redeeming and reconciling His creation to himself, reversing the effects of the fall “far as the curse is found,” in the words of Isaac Watts’ great Christmas hymn, Joy to the World. The four Rs are a prayer, but it takes more than prayer. We must add our efforts inspired by those prayers to bring to fulfillment God’s grand design in the cultural or dominion mandate given to Adam in Genesis 1:

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

We are to fulfill the mandate in the second or last Adam (I Cor. 15:45) where the first failed, which is an exciting vision for the Christian life, especially in contrast to the escapist, we belong somewhere else version of Pietistic Christianity. The question is which vision or version is Paul communicating in these verses.

Citizenship in the Ancient Roman World
The history of the Ancient city of Philippi is central to how we should understand our Christian mission in a fallen sinful world. A city in Macedonia (modern day Greece), Philippi was originally founded in 360 BC and named Krenides which means springs. Shortly thereafter it was conquered by Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, who renamed the city after himself. He saw its potential commercial importance due to neighboring gold mines and its position along the great royal trade route running east to west across Macedonia. The Third Macedonian War (171-168 BC) marked the end of its Hellenistic period when Philippi was conquered by the Romans, and continued to develop its significance in the Roman Empire.

Because of that significance, one of the most important battles of antiquity took place there in 42 BC. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44, his heirs Mark Antony and Octavian, called the Second Triumvirate, confronted the forces of his killers, Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, outside the western walls of the city. In effect, it was the end of the Roman Republic, as both Brutus and Cassius committed suicide in a losing cause. The battle was part of a long series of civil wars in the Roman Republic that would eventually turn into the Roman Empire ruled by one man, a Caesar. In the decades following, Octavian and Antony released some of their veteran soldiers to colonize the city, and in 27 BC when Octavian was proclaimed as Emperor Augustus, he reorganized the colony and established more settlers there. Philippi was now developed as a colony of Rome, administratively modeled on the Empire’s capital, governed by two military officers, the duumviri appointed directly from Rome. It can also be seen in the city’s layout and architecture as a colony resembling a “small Rome.” Phillipi is also indicative of how Rome developed regions into the larger Roman Empire to extend its influence.

The military and political history of Philippi is the contextual metaphor for Paul’s words to the Philippian Christians in these verses. The Apostle visited Philippi in 49-50 AD on his second missionary journey. As Paul and his companions were traveling they intended to take a turn and visit Asia, but Paul had a vision of a man begging them to come to Macedonia, so they went left to Europe and forever changed Western history. Luke tells us (Acts 16),

12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.

We learn through their visit about the highly valued status of citizenship in the Greco-Roman world, conferring rights, privileges, and responsibilities within a city-state or the Empire itself. Without it, a person had no rights or recourse to abuse by the state. We see this play out in Paul’s experience as the city’s magistrates give him and Silas their version of non-Roman citizenship justice. They are both in fact citizens of Rome, so we can see the stark contrast of how Roman citizenship confers benefits not offered to non-citizens.

Paul became a Roman citizen at birth because his parents were citizens, and he used that to his advantage when he had to, as we see here in Philippi. A slave girl had been following Paul and his companions for many days, harassing them to the point where Paul had finally had enough and exorcised her. She lost her money making power to predict the future, resulting in Paul and Silas being arrested, “severely flogged,” and thrown in prison. As the men were singing hymns to God at midnight, there was an earthquake and the prison doors flew open. Thinking the prisoners escaped, the jailor was ready to kill himself, but Paul told him not to harm himself because none of the prisoners had escaped. He famously asked what he must do to be saved, and he and his family became the second converts in Europe after Lydia and her family.

The next morning Paul and Silas were told they were allowed to leave, and that’s when Paul played the citizenship card:

37 But Paul said to the officers: “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.”

The city magistrates got nervous when they heard this because punishing and putting a Roman citizen in prison without a trial could be capital offense. Trying to appease Paul, they escorted them from the prison and asked them, nicely I gather, to leave the city.

Citizenship in Rome and in Heaven
From this story and the history of Philippi, we can see the dynamic at work Paul had in mind when he used the phrase, “our citizenship is heaven.” Here is what he did not mean. You citizens in Philippi, your real home is Rome, Italy, itself, and your goal as a Roman citizen is to go back there. You’re only here in Philippi for a short time, so don’t get used to it because you will only really belong when you get to Rome. Here, in contrast, is what he did mean. As citizens of Rome, you are creating in Asia Minor a little Rome, bringing all the dynamics of Roman civilized society and order to an outpost that knows nothing of the blessings of Roman citizenship. In that way, the Roman Empire and its influence and blessings will flow well beyond the city’s borders.

Notice Paul also says, “we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ,” and not we eagerly await going to heaven to meet our Savior there. It would be the same as saying we eagerly await Caesar to come from the capital of the Empire to visit the outpost we’ve been building so he’s just as at home in Philippi as he is in Rome. He will be looking to see how successfully Philippi has been in replicating Rome as an outpost of the First City.

The first thing we need to know and then be continually aware of is Christ is King. In Matthew 4 after his baptism in the wilderness and at his most vulnerable after fasting 40 days and nights, Satan comes to tempt him in various ways.

8 Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. 9 “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.” 10 Jesus said to him, “Away from me, Satan! For it is written: ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only.’”

Prior to Christ accomplishing his mission, Satan was the king of the world, the earth and its kingdoms belonged to him. The most radical and momentous moment in human history was about to happen, and nothing would ever be the same after. Only without the eyes of faith do we not realize the radical revolution that took place only a few short years after this cosmic confrontation. In Acts 17 when Paul and Silas were in Thessalonica, the words of the Jewish leaders captured well the consequences of what Christ accomplished when they say in exasperation, these men “have turned the world upside down.” More like right-side up!

Christ officially became King, experienced his coronation, at the ascension, something we read about in Acts 1. If you happened to see the coronation of King Charles III of England in May of 2023, you’ll get a small sense of what the coronation of Jesus must have been like when he ascended to heaven. We read about it 500 years before it happened in Daniel 7:

13 “I saw in the night visions,

and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
14 And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.

Many Christians believe this is a future event that will happen at Christ’s second coming, his Second Advent, but Paul in Philippians 1 doesn’t allow us that interpretation:

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.

The conclusion from the plain text of Scripture and supported by the entire history of redemption, is that Christ became King of this world, dethroning Satan, at his first coming. Further, his rule and reign started then, not just over the hearts of Christians, but as both these passages proclaim, over every single thing, every single person, and every single power spiritual and temporal. I’ve always loved how Paul seems to be saying his rule in the present age is so obvious, so accepted by Christians, they have to be reminded his rule is also for the age “to come.”

This absolutely essential aspect of Christian theology is all but ignored in Evangelical Christian churches. For most of my Christian life, the ascension never stood out to me as an indispensable theological foundation of the Christian life. From this foundation we live our lives in confidence, optimism, and the hope of victory both in this life, as well as in the one to come. That age to come will be in a resurrected body on this earth, redeemed, renewed, and reconciled to its Creator. In that hope we “eagerly await a Savior from there” when Jesus not only comes to visit this earthly colony of heaven, but because we have made it a “little heaven,” he will make heaven of the entire earth!