The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

The Rise and Fall of Dispensational Premillennialism in American Christianity

Oct 9, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progress and the Spirit of Nineteenth Century America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

Sep 25, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m just askin’.

 

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

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

Sep 18, 2024 | Eschatology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Genesis 49: Jacob’s Farewell Prophecy to His Sons and Christ’s Kingly Reign

Genesis 49: Jacob’s Farewell Prophecy to His Sons and Christ’s Kingly Reign

Jun 26, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

The continuity of the Bible is mind blowing. Sixty-six different books written by 40 or so different authors over 1500 years in Hebrew and Greek, with a little Aramaic thrown in, and yet it is one consistent message. The entirety of redemptive history is found in microcosm in the account of the fall in Genesis 3, and God’s curse on the serpent, and His promise to fix it:

15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will strike your head,
and you will strike his heel.

From there the story plays out in a very crooked line directly toward ultimate victory to Revelation 22 and the total consummation of all things.

This continuity and consistency is a powerful reason I believe the Bible could not have been made up, mere human invention, fiction to one degree or another. Remember, for 300 years, the Bible’s critics have asserted not only could it be made up, but in fact was and could easily be so, and Christians have been on the defensive ever since. Both they and we act as if we’re the only ones who have the burden of proof. Not true. Since they think it would be a piece of cake to make it all up, let them provide evidence it was. Reading or listening to such critics, we’ll quickly realize all they have are assertions based on question-begging anti-supernatural bias, conclusions assumed with questionable justification. The mental gymnastics and pretzel logic they have used over the years is truly impressive. And that people bought it uncritically, pun intended, is quite the feat. For many reasons, secular critical scholars don’t have the credibility they once did, and they never again will, but the bias and assertions remain.

Recently reading Genesis 49 I was reminded of this continuity and consistency. Jacob is about to die and tells his sons what is to come. In verse 1 he says, “Gather around so I can tell you what will happen to you in days to come.” Most English translations say, “days to come,” but the Hebrew literally says last days, the after-part or end. The phrase last days is a common one to Christians. We see it in a variety of verses in the Old and New Testaments, always referring to the Messianic period after Christ. He speaks to all 12, and here is what Jacob says to Judah:

8 “Judah, your brothers will praise you;
your hand will be on the neck of your enemies;
your father’s sons will bow down to you.
9 You are a lion’s cub, Judah;
you return from the prey, my son.
Like a lion he crouches and lies down,
like a lioness—who dares to rouse him?
10 The scepter will not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until he to whom it belongs shall come
and the obedience of the nations shall be his.
11 He will tether his donkey to a vine,
his colt to the choicest branch;
he will wash his garments in wine,
his robes in the blood of grapes.
12 His eyes will be darker than wine,
his teeth whiter than milk.

The picture is one of complete dominance and flourishing of the descendent of Judah.

Remember, what we’re reading here is something that took place 400 years before the Exodus, and it will be a very long time before any descendent of Jacob’s will be anything other than slaves. It will be probably another 700 or 800 years before the nation of Israel will even have a land of its own, let alone any power over other nations. As I often say, God is never in a hurry. But think about how crazy this must have sounded. For hundreds of years Hebrew slaves were told this first official biblical prophecy coming through a man and nothing ever changed. God’s word often sounded crazy to God’s people, and often still does, but His track record is pretty good, so we are compelled to trust Him. Why we can trust Him is specifically because of this dominance and flourishing Jacob predicts, as we’ll explore below.

The Lion of the Tribe of Judah
First, though, I want to look more carefully at the metaphor of Jesus as a lion. As a messianic declaration it is specifically speaking to his divinity. In Isaiah 31:4, the lion metaphor speaks of Yahweh as the warrior for His people:

This is what the Lord says to me: “As a lion growls, a great lion over its prey— and though a whole band of shepherds is called together against it, it is not frightened by their shouts or disturbed by their clamor— so the Lord Almighty will come down to do battle on Mount Zion and on its heights.

In Jeremiah 50, Yahweh is like a lion doing battle for Israel against Babylon, and there are four different references to Yahweh as a lion doing battle for His people in Hosea. There are several other such references in other prophets as well, so in New Testament hindsight, we can conclude the lion Jacob refers to is Yahweh is Jesus the Messiah. The most well-known of phrases related to Jesus as lion comes from Revelation 5 where Jesus is referred to as the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. The context is significantly related to Jacob’s prophecy about this descendent of Judah.

He who sits on the throne is holding in his right hand “a scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals.” John weeps because no one is found worthy to open it, but an elder tells him this Lion of the Tribe of Judah is worthy. In a counter intuitive move, the Lion becomes like a Lamb who was slain, and he takes the scroll, and all of heaven breaks into joyous worship, singing a “new song”:

“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
because you were slain,
and with your blood you purchased people for God
from every tribe and language and people and nation.
10 You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God,
and they will reign on the earth.”

We will see how this relates to Jacob’s prophecy of over 1500 years before, but this lion as slain lamb’s victory is attained through his slaughter, the shedding of his blood to literally buy the people he will turn into a kingdom and servants of God. And not only is this connected to Jacob’s prophecy, but it goes directly back the Genesis 3 and God’s promise that the woman’s seed would strike the serpent’s head, but he only the heel of the seed. But victory in this cosmic spiritual war came in a way nobody could predict until it happened. The very absurdity of it makes it profoundly compelling as the truth.

At the very moment when the forces of darkness were convinced they had defeated Almighty God, He mocks them. Peter tells us in Acts 4 that Psalm 2 is a picture of the crucifixion and resurrection:

4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
the Lord scoffs at them.
5 He rebukes them in his anger
and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
6 “I have installed my king
on Zion, my holy mountain.”

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron;
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

The resurrection was when the lion of the tribe of Judah started his reign on earth. God had defeated his foe, and Satan was now bound and cast down no longer with any ultimate power to deceive the nations. He would now be slowly defeated as God’s kingdom had come and his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. After 2000 years Jacob’s prophecy was finally fulfilled, and he to whom the scepter belongs had arrived.

Jacob’s Prophecy: For Now or Only for the Life to Come?
At this point, how we view “end times,” or our eschatology, will determine how we interpret Jacob’s prophecy. Unlike for much of Christian history, today most Christians believe the obedience of the nations and Jesus receiving the nations as his inheritance will only happen when he returns, at his Second Coming or Advent. The Great Commission in this understanding is primarily witnessing and seeing the gospel preached. The results of that preaching are not the primary point, though fervently wished for. Most Christians, unfortunately, have not thought through their eschatology in any depth, but if you ask them they will likely say any fundamental transformation of this world will only happen when Jesus returns. Prior to that things would inevitably get worse until Jesus finally comes back to clean up the mess once and for all. This is exactly what I believed until about a year and eight months ago when I embraced postmillennialism.

I hadn’t thought through this in any depth either, but I guess I saw the Great Commission as there being Christian conversions in every nation, and once that happened maybe that means the nations had been discipled. In this view, the making of disciples, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded them is severely constricted to individuals. The effects on the culture and society are byproducts of what happens in the church and in the individual lives as Christians. We are the best Christians we can be and some way this leaks out to the rest of the society, and a Christian nation or Christian culture is the result. As a Christian culture warrior I didn’t even believe this, but I hadn’t thought through it enough to have any firm convictions.

This perspective on the Christian life is the fruit of Pietism. I wrote about this previously, so I will not address it here, but the end result is that we see our faith as primarily personal. Another way to put it is that Jacob’s prophecy has nothing to do with life in this fallen world. It’s as if redemptive history after Christ ascended to heaven and the right hand of God only applied to individuals, and maybe church communities, but the rest of humanity is out of luck. I don’t see it that way anymore, and I’ll give a very brief glimpse here of why.

Now, I read passages like this in Genesis 49, and I’m off to the races! I see connections everywhere, and I could keep writing for a long time, but I’ll control myself. I no longer see Jacob’s prophecy as of passing interest because I believe it refers only to Christ coming to set all things right at the end of time. In other words, I don’t believe its relevance is primarily if not solely eschatological. Prior on a practical level, I saw Jesus as only king in the hearts of his people. He was obviously not king of this fallen world; isn’t that obvious? How could he be king if everyone isn’t obeying him and acknowledging him as king? Those are very good questions, but can’t be answered in any depth in a blog post. But I will answer them as best I can in the space I have remaining based on the passages above form Genesis 49, Revelation 5, and Psalm 2 via Acts 4.

The Obedience of the Nations Shall Be His Through His Body
The reality and idea of nations and God dealing with them as nations is common throughout Scripture. As post-Enlightenment secular Westerners (most Christians are secular, the opposite side of the coin of Pietism) we see the world through a personal and individual lens. Everything that happens is interpreted for how it affects individuals, not families, communities, groups, or nations, but God never deals with individuals apart from the larger context in which they live.

Think about your reading through the Old Testament. Early on God dealt with people groups like those spoken of in Genesis 15:19-21: “the land of the Kenites, Kenizzites, Kadmonites, Hittites . . . .” As time went on nations became more well defined by geographical boundaries, like the Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, and Babylonians, but nothing like the modern Westphalian nation-state with permanent boarders. For example, when God called Jonah to go preach his word of judgment to “the great city of Nineveh,” that city eventually repented and turned from their evil ways, God relented and didn’t bring his judgment on the city. The judgment or blessing was to fall on the entire nation. The purpose of God’s covenant to the Patriarchs is to bless the nations, not individuals.

This is clear from Jacob’s prophecy, and it’s direct connection via Acts 4 to Psalm 2. At the moment of the resurrection, Jesus was installed on God’s holy mountain, and the nations at that moment became his inheritance and possession. He did not have to wait until he returned at the end of time. When he ascended to the right hand of God to take all authority in heaven and on earth and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost, that actual slow, step-by-step process of taking possession of his nations to bless them per God’s covenant promises began. Too many Christians don’t seem to understand that God is never in a hurry. We’re 4,000 years into this thing, and we think it has to be close to over. What if it’s not? What if we’re not even half way through God extending Christ’s reign on earth and building his kingdom through expanding his church, His people?

We’re in this for the long haul, brothers and sisters. We need to stop this obsession among conservative Christians of whining about it being so bad Jesus must be coming back any day, and get to work building the kingdom. We’re his body, his hands and arms and legs, and this is how it is done, through us. When we read in Revelation that Christ purchased us “to be a kingdom and priests to serve our God” and that we “will reign on the earth,” we need to start acting like it. Doing nothing and cowering in fear as if the works of the devil and the power of sin is greater than our God and Christ and his righteousness, is dishonoring to Almighty God who so loved the world He gave himself up for it.

Secularism and Pietism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Secularism and Pietism: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Apr 10, 2024 | Culture, Eschatology

As I’ve been thinking and reading about Christ’s reign being extended throughout the world and God’s kingdom advancing, I’ve realized that secularism and Pietism are two sides of the same coin. That might seem strange given the former is completely anti-religion and the latter is passionately religious, but both lead to the same thing: a secular society devoid of Christian influence. The realization I’ve had, and learned from others who’ve thought through these things for a lot longer than I have, is that because of the influence of Pietism, secularism triumphed as Christianity became primarily inward and personal.

Secularists love Christianity as long as it stays inside the four walls of the church or home, in the proverbial closet. Religion cannot be allowed to mar the sacred secular public space. I use the word sacred purposefully and ironically because secularism is a religion, another form of paganism whose gods just look different. The problem is that Christians who effectively embrace Pietism, as do most Evangelical Christians in our day, believe their faith belongs within those four walls and not in public. Therefore, secularism has free reign to dominate society and culture just as it has since World Word II in the once Christian West.

I’ve been thinking along these lines since my “conversion” to postmillennialism. The critical component of this optimistic eschatology is that it teaches us from Scripture, not speculation, that Christ did not come only to save our souls so when we die we go to heaven, nor to add personal holiness to that. His mission was far more expansive and far reaching. Specifically, he came to address the curse of sin for his fallen people, and the effects of sin on, in, and through us. For me, that latter preposition was what I didn’t get or discounted my entire Christian life until my “conversion” a year and a half ago. I heard a young Christian Twitter friend of mine, Joshua Haymes, say becoming postmillennial was like a drop of ink in a clear glass of water. It looks pretty cool and psychedelic for a bit, then in due course it colors every drop of water. Postmillennialism is like that; it colors everything I see because Christ came to win, here, now, in this life in this fallen world.

Christ’s Victory Over the Devil
Just as he frustrated the devil in the wilderness (Matt. 4), Jesus has been frustrating him for 2,000 years through His people whom he came to save (Matt. 1:21). I never knew that Isaac Watts’ Christmas hymn, Joy to the World was postmillennial:

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.

There is a lot of wonderful theology in those words! Just as the curse is ubiquitous, so are the blessings that flow through us to overcome the effects of the curse. Every square inch of reality is Christ’s, and he has commissioned us to take it back from the devil.

We sell Jesus’ victory over Satan and evil short when we think it is solely for the consummated state when he comes again to judge the living and the dead. I used to believe Satan and evil had the upper hand down here in this fallen world. I thought, isn’t it obvious? But it’s not obvious at all for those with eyes to see beyond the obvious. I use that word three times to highlight how easily we interpret reality by what we see and feel, rather than by the word of God. For example, we’re told Jesus came to reign and rule until he has put all his enemies under his feet (I Cor. 15:25), the last enemy being death which will happen at the resurrection. Who and what are his enemies prior to the resurrection? Anything that is contrary to the law-word of God. That’s happening whether you think you can see it or not, and in due course it will become obvious too. We’re playing the long game here, pushing back the curse not just for now, but for generations to come.

Unfortunately, we give far too much credit to sin and the devil. God told us in Genesis 3 that the seed of the woman would strike or bruise the serpent’s head. We may think the devil is a formidable foe, but every scheme he can conjure up in that head of his will fail. Jesus (through his church, us) is in fact frustrating him; he cannot frustrate Jesus. And no matter where the curse is found Jesus is conquering it, pushing it back, transforming what the devil intends for evil into good. If we think this process of conquering evil is only for the church, or only to be done inside the church or our houses, we are missing the mission of God in Christ, why he came: to redeem and restore all creation by the nations being discipled. That indeed is a Great Commission!

I recently relistened to the James White sermon that initially cracked open my closed mind to postmillennialism in August of 2022. In it he said there are far more professing Christians alive today than people living on earth in the first century. Could anyone alive then have imagined such a thing? Now we need to help more of these Christians escape from the clutches of Pietism and bring King Jesus to every area of their lives to disciple their own nations.

Why Pietism Came to Dominate the Modern Church
As with any movement among peoples and cultures there are a variety of complex factors that cannot be neatly packaged as a cause. The same is true with these two isms, and it is important to realize how they grew symbiotically together as a poisonous weed in Christian Western culture.

Initially, Pietism was a response to a type of dry scholasticism that grew out of the Middle Ages tending to make faith a merely intellectual exercise. The early Reformers were products of that scholastic culture, and as such were profoundly intellectual. The Reformation was built on those intellectual efforts, but over time some saw those efforts as tending toward a dry formalism. Pietists were specifically looking for a more dynamic, experiential faith, and built a contrasting, non-intellectual version of Christianity. This developed initially among German Lutherans in the early 17th century. In due course through some strains of Puritanism and the First and Second Great Awakenings, it made its way into American fundamentalism, and became the default faith of modern Evangelicalism.

Needless to say, God made us in his image, therefore our intellect is not in any way opposed to or contrary to our feelings or emotions. God made us so our emotions primarily flow from our thinking, and our thinking not dominated by our emotions. This orientation of the rightly ordered man started to change in Western culture as the two isms made their way into the modern world. An excellent explanation of what this means is in C.S. Lewis’s classic book, The Abolition of Man. He starts with a withering assessment of a book intended for, “boys and girls in the upper forms of schools.” Keep in mind the book was written in 1943, some three hundred years after the two isms had come to dominance in Western culture, but not enough to dominate. That would come in what we affectionally call, “The ‘60s.” The authors of the textbook are addressing a work by English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). The authors address a depiction of two tourists discussing a waterfall. Lewis quotes from the textbook:

“When the man said, That is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall. . . . Actually . . . he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings. What he was saying was really I have feelings associated in my mind with the word ‘Sublime,’ or shortly, I have sublime feelings.’ Here are a good many deep questions settled in a pretty summary fashion. But the authors are not yet finished. They add: “This confusion is continually present in language as we appear to be saying something very important about something: and actually we are only saying something about our feelings.”

Lewis then shreds this perversion of thinking in his own indomitable way, but it doesn’t take having the towering intellect of C.S Lewis to realize what a disaster this shift entails. Here’s my take: Feelings are what count, what is important, and sublimity or beauty doesn’t exist objectively in God’s created world. The saying, beauty is in the eye of the beholder became absolute. As the 20th century showed us, ugliness could now be proclaimed beautiful.

Lewis called such people, “men without chests.” That is the title Lewis gives to the third section of his little book. In the classical understanding of anthropology, human beings are made up of three parts, the head, the chest, and the bowels. The head is the seat of the rational, the bowels the emotional, and the chest negotiates between the two. If the head through knowledge and faith doesn’t train the chest to manage the bowels, you get, well, the modern world, which is a feminized world where feelings and emotions through empathy dominate rather than rational calculations of the tradeoffs necessary to living in a fallen world more common to men. God created man, male and female he created them, that their two natures would compliment each other toward true human flourishing, or in biblical terms, blessing.

How do We Escape the Two Isms?
This is the question confronting every Christian in our time. It’s not difficult to convince Christians they need to escape secularism, but if you tell them they need to escape Pietism, they’ll wonder what you’ve been drinking. Unfortunately, most Christians are as ignorant of history as most Americans, so they will think Pietism just means being pious. They need to be educated about the 17th century German Lutheran movement of the name, and its influence on how they live out their faith in the modern world.

The fundamental fact Christians must learn is that Pietism has made their faith irrelevant to the culture in which they live. The church effectively has zero impact on Western culture, and that must change because it is that to which we have been called. The Great Commission and the Lord’s Prayer make it abundantly clear the “culture wars” are not an option. Some Christian leaders think they are, and worse, are a distraction. I’ve heard more than one say, being involved in the “culture wars” is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. And we wonder why American culture is such a hell hole.

Few people understand the culture is simply a people’s religion externalized. Because secularism is the dominant religion of the West, we have a secularized culture that treats Christianity as a threat to societal order. Aaron Renn says we are now in “negative world.” In an influential January 2022 article in First Things called, “The Three Worlds of Evangelicalism,” Renn argues that we’ve come to negative world through positive and neutral world. Prior to the 1990s, Christianity was seen in American culture as a positive thing. In the 1990s that changed, and the culture treated Christianity as neutral, neither good nor bad. Now, our cultural elites see Christianity as a threat to all that is decent and good, like abortion, homosexual “marriage,” and transgenderism.

I believe the issue is theological, specifically eschatological. What we think about how things will end determines what we see as our mission as Christians today. That is, we are his body to bring everything in submission to his kingship, including the nations. From the very beginning, God’s covenant promises of salvation were to the nations, a word used well over 600 times in the Bible. In the Old Testament, it is clear he blesses nations as nations who honor and obey him, and curses, even destroys, those that don’t. America was blessed because as founded its leaders and most of its people believed their success as a nation depended on honoring God as a people, as a nation. And Jesus said plainly, nations are to be discipled. I will end with a verse, 2 Chronicles 7:14, that applies to every nation on earth:

If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.

The context is the dedication of the temple by Solomon and the people of Israel. God’s people now inhabit every nation on earth, and we are called to pray for God to heal our lands. The temple no longer resides in Israel and belongs to one people, but Jesus is now the living temple of God as we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. This promise of God healing our land if we pray, seek him, and walk in his ways, is to us! It is why I pray most mornings for our land, America, what I call “the four R’s”: for Revival that will lead to Renewal to Restoration and finally Reformation. The goal isn’t just saved souls, but transformed people who will transform everything they put their hands to.

 

What Does “the gates of hell” Mean?

What Does “the gates of hell” Mean?

Mar 20, 2024 | Eschatology

All my Christian life, now north of 45 years, I misunderstood the phrase “gates of hell.” What comes into your mind when you read Jesus’ resounding declaration:

And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades (hell) will not prevail against it.

You’ll remember the scene from Matthew 16. Jesus asks the disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” After they tell him what others think, he asks the most important question in the history of the world: “But what about you? Who do you say I am?” And Peter gives the right answer: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus replies that it is not flesh and blood that has revealed this to him, but his Father in heaven, and declares to them (and us) this immortal phrase about the gates of hell.

Catholics and Protestants disagree on what Jesus intended when he used the word rock, and specifically what this rock is. For Catholics the answer is who, Peter himself. They argue that when Jesus changed his name from Simon to Cephas, which in Aramaic means rock (the Greek translation being Peter), so the rock is Peter. We Protestants, by contrast, do not believe Christ’s church (his called out ones in Greek) would ever be built on a sinful human being. Rather, believing God’s word inscripturated in our Bibles as our ultimate authority, Sola Scripture in the Reformation phrase, we take Jesus to mean the rock is Peter’s declaration itself, that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

On the gates of hell, however, almost all Christians of whatever theological persuasion agree. Down here in this fallen world, Satan is on the offensive, and we Christians and the church are on the defensive. I know I always believed this without ever giving it a second thought. Of course Satan is on the offense and we’re on defense. I mean look around you. Isn’t it obvious? Satan clearly has the upper hand in this spiritual war on earth. Well, that depends on what our eyes see. But before I get there, last year I read a book about postmillennialism, and the author pointed out something that seems so obvious to me now that it shocks me I never thought about it, or ever heard anyone else in over four decades as a Christian mention it. And what is that?

In the ancient world gates were defensive mechanisms.

It’s that simple. Because the divine Son of God came to redeem the world from sin, and accomplished it, Satan is the one now on the defensive. As we’ll see, he is bound. We no longer have to assume he has the upper hand and he is winning. Christ won, and He is now exercising that victory through his body, the church. The problem is, it doesn’t seem we are victorious, sometimes in our personal lives, but most definitely not on a societal level. Our misunderstanding is primarily a theological one.

Christology, The Key to Understanding Eschatology
I consistently make the following point, and it will determine whether you can ever embrace postmillennialism, an eschatology of victory and hope. I’ll put it in the form of a question: Why did Jesus come to earth? I used to believe, like most Christians, that Jesus came to save my soul so that when I die I go to heaven. That was his primary mission, along with my personal holiness. We also believe because of Scripture that God so loved the world that he came to save it, but any real and substantive change in this fallen world of sin would have to wait until Jesus returns and completes redemption in a new heavens and earth. This will happen at the resurrection of the dead and the end of time as we know it. I believed our hope is primarily in the future, and not for the here and now. Sin is a force that can be incrementally defeated in our personal lives, and even somewhat further out, but on a societal level we are powerless to defeat it.

When I was younger and naïve, I thought it could “change the world.” In fact, it was not too many years ago, in 2010 to be exact, the year of my 50th birthday when I was obviously still naïve, that I read a book by sociologist James Davison Hunter called, To Change the World. I got something I wasn’t expecting, frustration; I should have taken seriously his subtitle. The dude clearly didn’t believe we could change the world. How dare he! Now I understand why, which I’ll get to shortly. Over time as I saw the world clearly not changing, or so I thought, I realized thinking I could change the world was ridiculous, a fool’s errand. I could and did, as all Christians do, push back against “the dark force,” but it was clear to me we are powerless to change the basic direction of the sinful fallenness all around us.

What Hunter, and I at the time, didn’t have was the theological categories to believe we could in fact change the world. Which brings me back to the question of why Jesus came to earth, and the topic of Christology, or the doctrine of the person of Christ, his being and mission. Did he come so we could go to heaven when we die, and work on personal holiness while putting up with the tragedy of this fallen world? I would suggest it’s far more than this, and much grander in its implications. It isn’t for nothing that God’s promises to Abraham and the Patriarchs are to the nations and not just individuals. When we learn from Scripture that Christ came to save the world, that says something about who he is as Savior and Redeemer. He came, as we’re told, to reconcile to himself all things, not just some things. Paul tells us this in Colossians 1:

15 The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16 For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. 

All of this is mediated through individuals, then families, then communities, then nations. This reconciliation touches all things human beings do, and while the ultimate fulfillment will happen at his second advent, it started at his first. He specifically said he came to bring the kingdom of God or heaven to earth. As he was fully God and fully man, he had absolute authority over his creation. He indicated this during his earthly ministry in his power over his creation in healing and nature, but fully brought its reality through his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God to the position of ultimate authority in the universe. It is in these last days that he is exercising this authority through his people, his church, his body. We see how this is done in a parable of how this spiritual power is lived out among Christians every day.

The Binding the Strong Man
Jesus and the Pharisees had a problematic relationship. Jesus always seemed to be picking fights with them because their conceptions of Judaism were diametrically opposed to his. This wouldn’t become fully apparent until Jesus rose from the dead, and his followers learned the entire Old Testament and history of Israel were about him, their Messiah as God himself come in human flesh to save them from their sins. As I argue in Uninvented, first century Jews do not make up a Messiah like Jesus because he was completely unexpected. As I call him in the book, the conundrum that was Jesus. Nobody expected a divine, healing Messiah. In fact, one of the few Old Testament prophets who did miracles, Elijah, was supposed to introduce the Messiah (Malachi 4) who would conquer their enemies, specifically the Romans. But all Jesus seemed to do was heal people and preach, then get himself killed.

Which brings us to the parable of the binding of the strong man. I didn’t realize the episode in which Jesus tells it had far more to do with his kingdom rule than just casting out demons during his ministry. The kingdom of God or heaven is a debated topic in eschatology. When John was introducing Jesus’ ministry to the Jews, he declared:

Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near! (Matt. 3)

Matthew then quotes Isaiah saying John was one crying out in the wilderness to make way for the Lord. Nobody could conceive the Messiah being Yahweh himself, Israel’s God. In other words, the bringing of the Kingdom wouldn’t be just a messenger for Yahweh, as everyone thought, but the eternal Creator God Himself personally bringing his kingdom reign and influence into the fallen earth. John was saying, literally, everything was about to change. Jesus in Matthew 4 after having endured the temptations in the desert of the then current king, Satan, echoed the Baptist:

17 From then on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!”

Both say, “come near,” because the kingdom won’t arrive until Jesus completes his mission and is seated at the right hand of God after his ascension. He isn’t until he sends his Holy Spirit at Pentecost that the King through his church, his body, will reign and destroy the works of the devil. When Christ completed his mission, Satan was no longer king of this world; he lost his authority to call the shots over the nations. Remember, prior to the gospel there was only one tiny obscure nation in the world that worshiped the true God, and even they were slaves to Roman power. After Christ the nations as nations could now be discipled.

The reason this could happen is that Satan was bound and his power limited by the authority Christ had been given because of the success of his mission. We read of this binding in the Synoptic gospels. In Matthew 12, Jesus had been casting out demons, and the Pharisees said it was because of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that he was able to do this. He basically says it would be absurd for Satan to drive out Satan because a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. Then he tells them:

28 But if it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

And then addresses the strong man:

29 Or how can someone enter a strong man’s house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man? Then indeed he may plunder his house.

Satan is the strong man, and he has now been bound because the kingdom of God has come. Since the resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, we are in the plundering phase of history. John tells us as much in Revelation 20 when he says:

2 He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.

Those who are amillennial and postmillennial believe the thousand years is not a literal number of years, as premillennialists do, but the period of time known as the last days, the period between Jesus’ first and second coming. It is the time, as Jesus taught us to pray that the kingdom of God would come and His will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Do We Live by Faith or by Sight?
For most of my Christian life when it came to how I interpreted life in this fallen world, I lived by sight. It sure seemed like Satan wasn’t bound at all. Yet Scripture told me he was. So I had to decide, was I going to believe God or my lyin’ eyes. Going back to the gates of hell, if I believe God, then Satan’s kingdom is the kingdom on the defensive. Prior to embracing postmillennialism that was impossible for me to believe. In fact, it never even occurred to me! What’s so exciting about my new optimistic eschatology is that it is rooted in reality. We’re in a war! A spiritual war to be exact, as Paul tells us in Ephesians 6:12.  But the context of the war is Ephesians 1:18-23, and Christ having all authority over every power that exists in the spiritual and material realms, in this life as well as the life to come.

As in any war, people have different roles, privates, sergeants, Lieutenants, generals; there is also army, navy, Airforce, marines; there are victories, there are defeats. As in any war there are strategies and tactics. But one thing is certain: the superior force is primarily on the offensive, and the weaker on the defensive. Over time it becomes apparent which is which. Sometimes the grunts just have to trust the generals even when it looks really bad. The superior force will always win in the end, and we as followers of the King of the universe are the superior force! We win, and not just in the end, at Christ’s second coming, but here, now. We are part of the King’s army establishing his rule on earth, daily assaulting the gates of hell with the fruit of the Spirit against which the gates of hell don’t have a chance.