Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism

Book Review: The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism

Jul 16, 2023 | Eschatology

One of the most unanticipated of my many red pill experiences of the last seven or eight years was the transformation of my eschatological position, as I’ve explained here previously. When I was born-again, as we called it back then, in the late ‘70s premillennial dispensationalism was ubiquitous, as it continued to be throughout the ‘80s and into the ‘90s. Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians (they were two somewhat distinct groups back then) were obsessed with the rapture and Jesus’ immanent return. Rampant speculation about “end times” events was everywhere, and some were so bold as to predict the exact date when Jesus would return. I recently learned about this book, and while I can’t take the time to read it, the short book review by Joel Looper was interesting because the obsession of those early couple decades of my Christian life has disappeared. I’ve often wondered why, given most Christians are still dispensational. I’ve chalked it up to one too many predictions falling short, and people just getting tired of all the speculation, but there are also scholarly and theological reasons, which you can learn about in the piece.

The reason I’m writing about it, though, is because of what this change says about the nature of Christian and human hope in general. The most exciting thing about embracing postmillennialism is that it gives us ground for optimism and hope in this world, as fallen and dysfunctional as it is. But before I get to this, I want to quote the last two paragraphs of the book review:

The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism obliquely but powerfully gestures toward a hole often found in the gospel that post-dispensationalist evangelicals believe today. “In the wake of dispensationalism’s collapse,” he writes in the epilogue, “the eschatological sight of the American church has blurred.” That means that our hope is less fervent, thinner, colder.

Many Protestant pastors understandably are trepidatious about even alluding to eschatological matters for fear of getting sucked into controversies about numerology, new candidates for the Antichrist, and dating the second coming. Nevertheless, Hummel reminds us, “Christianity is inescapably eschatological.” That is so because faith cannot exist without hope.

Exactly, especially religious faith. All human beings live by faith, be they “religious” or not, and in one of my favorite phrases, there is no such thing as an unbeliever. The same thing, though, applies to hope. As all people live by faith, all people need hope, need something to look forward to, something to give their lives purpose and meaning. Without hope, life is death, as we witness in our hopeless secular age in which close to 50,000 people a year kill themselves.

One of the leftovers of dispensational premillennialism, shared to one degree or another by amillennialism, is a kind of skepticism about this world, that everything is inexorably going to hell in a handbasket, and Jesus will come back soon to save the day. Before embracing postmillennialism 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. As I explain in the piece I linked to above, I was as negative and often depressed as the next Christian and conservative, but found Steve Bannon’s War Room, and he turned me into an optimist. The problem was that I didn’t have the theological, specifically eschatological, framework for optimism. In the book I’m currently finishing, I started it hoping to argue theologically for that optimism, but without postmillennialism it would have been a difficult argument to make. With it we realize Jesus came to earth and now sits at the right hand of God ruling to extend his reign, advance his kingdom, and build his church. I can’t make the case again here, but I will share two passages proving that Christ’s rule is now, in this world, not merely in eternity or only in our hearts. First, Psalm 110:

The Lord says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand
until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”

2 The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,
“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”
3 Your troops will be willing
on your day of battle.

This Psalm is clearly Messianic and refers to Christ, and Paul knows that as he writes these words in 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.

The question on the table for all Christians is this. Does this “reign until” have real, substantive, positive affects in this fallen world, here and now? Or does Satan call the shots, and things will inevitably get worse until like a dues ex machina Jesus returns to save the day and change everything in an instant? I now believe the former is the biblical answer, not the latter, but that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing it because of hope, and why the former gives us incredible hope for this age, as well as the age to come, as Paul tells us of Jesus’ reign in Ephesian 1, and the latter falls short.

Ever since the Second Great Awakening in the 19th century, and the corresponding rise of secularism and dispensational premillennialism, Christian hope has moved its focus almost completely on the world to come, our eternal hope in Christ. I believe as important and powerful as this is, the hope of being saved from our sins and going to heaven one day, as the author of the book review says, makes our hope “less fervent, thinner, colder.” In this take, the only reign of Christ is in the Christian’s heart, and has effect primarily in our sanctification. It’s merely personal. But Jesus didn’t come to solely transform his people’s lives, but that their transformed lives would impact the world for righteousness and his kingdom, as he himself taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.” Jesus didn’t teach us to pray this expecting our prayer would be futile, did he?

Imagine if we really believed God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit is working now, this very moment, to advance his kingdom through us so his rule of righteousness and peace would in some way manifest itself in the societies in which we live. The problem is we live by sight and not by faith, as if what appears as debacle and defeat is the end of the story. If you read the history of redemption in our Bibles you’ll see things are rarely as they appear on the surface to the finite human beings who haven’t a clue what God is really doing. And we must realize as I say all the time, God is never in a hurry. If in God’s providence we’re to live in a time of defeat, so be it, but we battle (Eph. 6:12) not just for our generation but for generations to come. As the Apostle Paul also says in I Corinthians, our labor in the Lord is not in vain, and thus he exhorts us to give ourselves fully to it!

Micah 4-Swords Into Plowshare, The Last Days are Our Days

Micah 4-Swords Into Plowshare, The Last Days are Our Days

Jul 13, 2023 | Eschatology

The thing I love about reading the prophets is that amid all the gloom and doom rays of light and expectations of hope jump out like the sun peeking through the clouds on a very gray day. You know it may only peak through briefly, but that gives you hope of sunny days to come. This analogy is especially powerful for me since I’ve embraced postmillennial eschatology, except now the sun shines more brightly. It applies to the entire Bible, of course, given it’s all about Jesus (Luke 24), but the contrast in the prophets is startling. Micah 4 is an especially good example. I’ll quote the first part of the chapter to illustrate the point, but when I was a “pan” millennialist (it will all pan out in the end) and an amillennialist I instantly read passages like this assuming it must apply to after Jesus returns and has established the restored heavens and earth he came to save. How could it not! You read it and tell me what you think:

In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
    as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
    and peoples will stream to it.

2 Many nations will come and say,

“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
    to the temple of the God of Jacob.
He will teach us his ways,
    so that we may walk in his paths.”
The law will go out from Zion,
    the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
3 He will judge between many peoples
    and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
    and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
    nor will they train for war anymore.
4 Everyone will sit under his own vine
    and under his   own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid,
    for the Lord Almighty has spoken.
5 All the nations may walk
    in the name of their gods,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord
    our God for ever and ever.

Previously, my knee-jerk reaction to this passage was it had to be in the new heavens and earth; I didn’t even question it. Swords into plowshares? Not in this fallen world! But I was actually wrong. If we look more carefully at this passage we’ll see what’s being talked about is life in this fallen world. If there is still a need for judging and settling disputes “for strong nations,” then sin still exists. If nations are still walking “in the name of their gods,” then sin still exists. No, this passage is very much about the here and now, and it’s obvious. As Micah says, this is “in the last days.”

We are currently living “in the last days.” There are several New Testament verses telling us these days started with the coming of Messiah. In the very first Christian sermon in Acts 2, Peter tells us quoting the Prophet Joel:

17 “‘In the last days, God says,
    I will pour out my Spirit on all people.
Your sons and daughters will prophesy,
    your young men will see visions,
    your old men will dream dreams.

That pouring out started, as we know, with Pentecost. Peter was telling Jews in Jerusalem it was Jesus of Nazareth, risen Lord, who ushered in these last days. The writer to the Hebrews tells us:

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, 2 but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe.

In the Old Testament these days are referred to in various ways that Jews all interpreted to be Messianic. So we must conclude that Micah is referring to today, to our time, to here and now, to how life is lived as the Holy Spirit enables followers of the Savior who is now seated at the right hand of the Almighty “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.” (Eph. 1: 21) For Paul Jesus’ current rule is taken for granted, and we have to be reminded his rule is also for the age to come. Think about that!

So, what does this look like? How does this differ from the typical doom and gloom Chicken Little Christianity of those just waiting for Jesus to come back any moment to save the day? Micah 4! And according to Micah it will look something like peace and prosperity, where justice is done and people live in safety. I know, it almost sounds prosaic, boring. That’s it? Shouldn’t it be, I don’t know, more spiritual? More miraculous like? Well, what is more miraculous than turning chaos and violence and want into justice, shalom, and plenty? Or people loving one another? Or the fruit of the Spirit! To me one way this is graphically portrayed, to see what it looks like in this world, is in the history of the war of Christianity against paganism in the first millennium of the West. The spiritual war of Ephesians 6:12 is worked out in this history of redemption from Abram being called out of Ur of the Chaldeans four thousand years ago to this very day. It looks very different now, but the battle is the same. This is graphically played out in the ninth century in King Alfred the Great’s battle saving Christian England against the heathen Viking horde from the north.

Alfred was the king of Wessex from 871-899, and he wanted to establish a Christian united England under one king. He’s the only King in English history with the appellation Great attached to his name because he started the process of uniting England under the law of God. Several years ago, my daughter told me about a Netflix series called The Last Kingdom (i.e., Wessex). I was quickly hooked, not only because it was well done, but also because, sadly, I knew absolutely nothing about the history I saw portrayed on the screen. I was amazed to learn Christian Western civilization as we know it hung by a thread during Alfred’s reign, and a thread might be overestimating the odds, from a human perspective. You’ll have to either watch the series or learn the history to know what I mean, but when Christ rose from the dead and sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, the heathens didn’t have a chance.

One of my favorite scenes is in season 1 when Alfred and the Danish leaders Guthrum and Ubba are negotiating. They ask Alfred what the transcribers are writing, and he says, “They are writing what we speak.” He adds, “They are writing history, we are here creating history. People will read of this very meeting.” The heathens didn’t write or create history. They also ask why he seeks peace, and he says, “It is the Christian in me, the will of my God.” Ubba wants to talk of the gods, and Alfred replies firmly, “God, there is only one.” This encounter is a microcosm of two mutually exclusive forces, the two worldviews, and only one could be victorious. Christianity would bring learning and peace, the rule of law, and the advance of God’s kingdom in the world, or the pagans would bring a bloody world of arbitrary power none of us would want to live in. Tom Holland in his important book, Dominion, contends, “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view.”

This impact is what we read of in Micah, swords being turned into plowshares. When Alfred defeated Guthrum, he and his leaders were required to be baptized and become Christians as the terms of peace. Guthrum was allowed to rule peacefully in East Anglia for the rest of his life, and everyone was able to sit under his own vine and under his own fig tree, and no one was able to make them afraid, for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

 

 

By Golly, Lennon Was Right, All We Really Do Need is Love!

By Golly, Lennon Was Right, All We Really Do Need is Love!

Jul 5, 2023 | Eschatology

The three uses of the law is not something most Christians give much thought to, as in not at all. As Protestant Evangelical Christians, if that’s what we are, our relationship to God’s law can be ambivalent and ambiguous. I had been a Christian over five years before another Christian would give me a formal introduction to the law. He told me most Christians ignore the law because of a distorted view of the gospel, as if it set aside God’s law as no longer binding on the Christian. If we think about it for even a moment that is, of course, absurd. God’s law is a reflection of his being, a transcription of his character, and it can no more be set aside than his holiness. Here according the late great R.C. Sproul are the three uses of the law:

The first purpose of the law is to be a mirror. On the one hand, the law of God reflects and mirrors the perfect righteousness of God. The law tells us much about who God is. Perhaps more important, the law illumines human sinfulness. Augustine wrote, “The law orders, that we, after attempting to do what is ordered, and so feeling our weakness under the law, may learn to implore the help of grace.” The law highlights our weakness so that we might seek the strength found in Christ. Here the law acts as a severe schoolmaster who drives us to Christ.

A second purpose for the law is the restraint of evil. The law, in and of itself, cannot change human hearts. It can, however, serve to protect the righteous from the unjust. Calvin says this purpose is “by means of its fearful denunciations and the consequent dread of punishment, to curb those who, unless forced, have no regard for rectitude and justice.” The law allows for a limited measure of justice on this earth, until the last judgment is realized.

The third purpose of the law is to reveal what is pleasing to God. As born-again children of God, the law enlightens us as to what is pleasing to our Father, whom we seek to serve. The Christian delights in the law as God Himself delights in it. Jesus said, “If you love Me, keep My commandments” (John 14:15). This is the highest function of the law, to serve as an instrument for the people of God to give Him honor and glory.

We get the first purpose because we know we are transgressors of God’s law, and that’s what drives us to the gospel. We also in some way get the second but don’t see it as relevant to how entire societies are governed. Since we don’t live in a “theocracy,” the Ten Commandments and the rest of God’s law is not applicable in, for example, America. How’s that working out for us? Secularism is a jealous god which exalts man’s law above God’s law. As in our personal lives so in society, it is either autonomy, self law, or theonomy, God’s law. There is no in between, but that is a topic for another post, many other posts.

 

The third use is what I want to focus on, and why the title of this post and shout out to the also late great John Lennon, and to Doug Wilson in this video for giving me the idea. If you read the reference above to John’s gospel (pure coincidence it’s also a John?), you might see where I’m going with “All you need is love.” Most of us would not equate love with law. In fact, I dare say, we might even say law and love are antithetical, which shows just how programmed we are by our secular Triumph of the Therapeutic age (in the title of Philip Rieff’s 1966 book). Modern people see love in every way but what it really is, the hard selfless often sacrificial work of seeking the benefit of others, the kind of love the Apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 13, that kind of love. Most Christians are familiar with the Greek word for this kind of love, agape-ἀγάπη, or “love which centers in moral preference.” In other words, it isn’t driven by emotion, as in another Greek word for love eros, which we know as romantic love, but by choice. That’s why love is a verb.

This also brings to mind the question the Pharisees asked Jesus when he was proving a conundrum to the Sadducees, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” I imagine like so much of what Jesus did, what he said next was also completely unexpected to the Pharisees:

37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Jesus is of course quoting from one of his favorite Old Testament books, Deuteronomy. He is also connecting loving God with loving neighbor from Leviticus, one of the last books in the Old Testament we might think of as loving. But God’s law is love, and the only basis for true human flourishing, made possible for Christians because of the gospel. Even non-Christians can love because they’re made in God’s image and know to some degree that love is better than self-absorption.

It is instructive to see in the Leviticus passage, right after God commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves He declares, “I am the LORD.” I am not sure why he did this, but maybe loving our neighbor has something to do with who God is. Not exactly the meanie Old Testament God the second century heretic Maricon claimed he was.

This Old Testament biblical theme of love is also perfectly consistent with the New Covenant revealed in Christ in the gospel. Love and law are connected as Paul shows us in Romans 13:

8 Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law. 9 The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery,” “You shall not murder,” “You shall not steal,” “You shall not covet,” and whatever other command there may be, are summed up in this one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” 10 Love does no harm to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

How many of us connect love with law, let alone think love is its fulfillment? We see law as constricting and scary, as in “the long arm of the law.” But life without law is anarchy which is destruction and the antithesis of love. This means God’s justice must be meted out when his law is transgressed and thus also a reflection of his love. The ultimate display of this being God himself in Christ paying the penalty for the sins of His people and the world. Paul also connects the law with the gospel regarding it’s second use in I Timothy 1:

8 We know that the law is good if one uses it properly. 9 We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me.

It is highly unlikely John Lennon has God’s law and the gospel in mind when he sang, “All you need is love,” and he was certainly being sarcastic, but he was more right than he could have imagined (pun intended?).

Fundamentalism, The Ezra Institute, and the CBC Smear

Fundamentalism, The Ezra Institute, and the CBC Smear

Jun 18, 2023 | Eschatology

The reason I wanted to bring this article to your attention, Inside the Fundamentalist Christian Movement: A Response Statement by Joe Boot, the founder of the Ezra Institute, is because of my last post about how much the secular culture despises Christians and brands us as bigots and haters. I’ll explain below, but you’ll see if you read the piece what faithful, orthodox Christians are up against, specifically those who are obedient to Christ and apply Scripture to every single area of life, including the public life of government and law. Secularists are fine with Christianity as long as those who practice it leave their faith in their private lives. They will tolerate us then, but if we claim that Jesus is Lord over all creation, including the state, including rulers and authorities, and that God’s law applies to how societies are run, then Caeser will have none of it. I make this argument extensively in my next book which I’m trying to finish, but all of reality on this earth from a biblical perspective comes down to paganism versus Christianity, and their respective followers. When the Christians in the early centuries of the church declared, “Jesus is Lord!” it was a political statement. Many paid with their lives because of it. The secular state is a jealous God and will have no other gods before it. Boot’s piece explains it well.

As for fundamentalism, when I became a Christian in the fall of 1978, I was born-again into a type of fundamentalist Christianity. The term has a specific historical meaning going back to the early twentieth century, but it’s used today as a pejorative term to one degree or another. The secularists use it to brand us as no better than Muslim Jihadists bent on domination and willing to use violence to that end. All the political violence, however, every single bit of it, comes from the secular Marxist left. When I was introduced to Reformed theology at 24, I began to see how the fundamentalist type of faith I practiced was a truncated, narrow, and privatized faith. Coming across Francis Schaeffer early in those years helped me a lot, but Reformed theology was eye-opening on many levels except at the eschatological level for most of my adult life. It wasn’t until I embraced  post-millennialism last summer that I began to learn of the different eschatological positions in the Reformed camp. I knew absolutely nothing about the post-mill position but what I thought I knew about it, and rejected it as unworthy of my attention. Oh how wrong I was!

Joe Boot has been an invaluable learning resource in this almost year-long learning process. It is amazing how over 44 years into this Christian journey how little I know and how much I have to learn. It is thrilling! And we get to do this for eternity, literally. Most Christians, understandably, complain about everything in the current state of our decaying civilization, but when it comes to doing something about it feel helpless. Most default to a defeatist eschatology seeing things are inevitably going to get worse and worse, believing that’s what the Bible predicts, and are just waiting for Jesus to return and save the day. They have no theological category for victory because premillennialism, which influences their thinking knowingly or not, predicts losing in this fallen world. The few that embrace amillennialism like I used to have a similar view that pushes out victory to only when Christ returns.

I used to mock the idea that we could somehow “change the world.” This fallen world, I thought, was unchangeable from it’s sinful dysfunction no matter what we did. We could plug holes in the dyke here and there, but to mix metaphors, Titanic hit the iceberg long ago and it was going to sink no matter what we do. It saddens me to think I ever thought such a thing, and now believe it is profoundly unbiblical. I have become convinced of the exegetical case (i.e., taken “out of” Scripture) for Christ’s victory in history in this fallen world. I’m hoping my book makes the case adequately enough so Christians will at least consider it.

The reason for this post, though, is Boot’s description of fundamentalism, which is one of the best I’ve come across. When I was introduced to Reformed theology I learned there was a word for the type of Christianity I was practicing, Pietism. The word doesn’t mean piety or pious, but historically comes out of German Lutheranism of the seventeenth  century, and means a faith that is primarily personal and focused on so-called spiritual things, like prayer, Bible reading, church, evangelism, etc. Christianity, however, is not primarily personal at all! If it was, the Christians of the early church would have never paid for their profession of Christ’s lordship with their blood. As I said above, Caesar then, and the totalitarian secular state now, will have none of it. It’s bow down and worship it and its dictates, or you will be made to pay. Notice the “Great Reversal”:

Yet Fundamentalism as a movement in the USA quickly became associated with a rejection of the social implications of evangelical faith, an abandonment of efforts at cultural transformation, and a withdrawal from distinctly Christian political engagement in terms of biblical principles. In what missiologists call ‘The Great Reversal’, evangelical fundamentalists (with notable exceptions) largely rejected the historic reformed Protestant vision for national moral reformation found in men like William Wilberforce and the optimistic eschatology of late nineteenth-century Princetonians like Benjamin Warfield and Charles Hodge, and so evacuated the public space to focus on personal piety and winning ‘souls,’ with an increased fixation on end-times prophecy within Dispensational theology. In this respect, the vision and work of the Ezra Institute and those who share our theological outlook is at odds with the once-popular notions of American ‘fundamentalism.’

He says “once-popular,” I think, because few Evangelicals today refer to themselves as fundamentalists. When I became a Christian there seemed to be a well-defined Christian cultural divide between fundamentalist and Evangelicals. The latter term has historical meaning as well, going back to the Reformation, but in the twentieth century a group led by Billy Graham and other founders of Christianity Today decided to separate themselves from the anti-cultural engagement and anti-intellectual fundamentalists. George Marsden’s Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism, is a great history of exactly how this split took place. After I discovered Francis Schaeffer somewhere around 20, I never referred to myself as a fundamentalist.

I want to further comment on Boot’s conclusion, but that will have to be for another post.

 

Christianity is Now Hate and Bigotry, and the Hope that Brings

Christianity is Now Hate and Bigotry, and the Hope that Brings

Jun 16, 2023 | Culture, Eschatology

In case you weren’t aware of it, if you’re a conservative Christian, believe the Bible is God’s actual word of revelation to mankind and the truth about human sexuality, you’re a bigot filled with hatred for “sexual minorities.” Yes, no better than any garden variety racist. No better than the Klu Klux Klan burning crosses in your black neighbor’s yard. I’m sure this is not news to anybody. But among our cultural “elite” and the lunatic left (those currently running the United States government, all the organs of culture and corporate America) it is commonly accepted. The word Christian slips off their lips with a condescending smear, and to them we are second-class citizens in our supposedly enlightened queer nation. Leftists (what almost all liberals have become) started out playing the victims. Then they asked for tolerance, and got tolerance. Next they demanded acceptance, and got acceptance. Finally, they demanded celebration, and those who refuse to celebrate will be made to pay by the alphabet mafia. Welcome to 2023 America! And what a grand place it is.

I saw this clearly coming during the runup to some unelected judges in black robes on the highest court in the land re-defining marriage in 2015. A large section of the less diplomatic and careful left branded those who didn’t support gay “marriage” as bigots and haters. Those pushing this perversion of marriage at a legal and PR level on an ambivalent population we’re much more careful. They told blatant lies sweetened with honey that went down easily with the unsuspecting and ignorant. It’s all about tolerance, just letting homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals. How could anybody be against that? The more prescient knew it could never stop there, and once marriage was redefined and homosexuality completely normalized, the transgender insanity circa 2023 was inevitable.

I was reminded of this unpleasant reality not only because it’s so called “pride month” (which God says goes before destruction) and daily shoved in our faces, but also because I read this article about a women who was a big name in Hollywood, thus appropriately left wing most of her life, and who became a conservative and Christian and now “has her friends mystified.” That’s almost funny, and speaks to how insular the woke left is. They live in an echo chamber only ever encountering people exactly like them and dismiss as unworthy ideas they disagree with. Such people are also deeply self-righteous and judgmental. Anyone who doesn’t think like them is unclean and unworthy of respect. Conservative Christians are modern lepers to them, and it is such people who hold almost all positions of cultural and government power in America today.

All of this is stunning, but completely unsurprising to anyone who knows the history of Enlightenment rationalism that in due course rid the world of God and His word. Once that started happening it led inexorably to the suffocating secularism of the modern world with the help of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud, et al. The 20th century gave us progressivism, cultural Marxism a la the Frankfurt School, “the 60s” and the sexual revolution, so called, radical feminism, no fault divorce, and eventually it had to get to homosexuality and their “rights.” Marx’s two primary goals of perpetual revolution and his communist Utopia was to be realized by the destruction of the family and religion, i.e., Christianity. The woke left in our day, the cultural Marxists, are his progeny, and even though he would be surprised the economic version of Marxism he predicted failed, he would be pleased as punch at the cultural version that hasn’t. It’s creating all the chaos, confusion, suffering, pain, and misery he could have ever hoped for, the conditions for communism’s perpetual revolution.

The article I mentioned above is definitely worth reading because it’s instructive of just how deeply ingrained this pathology is on the secular left, and it is important to realize the threat they pose to everything that is godly, good, and right. The goal of their push for sexual perversion, and that includes any sex outside of a married man and woman, and erasing biological sex, is and always has been the destruction of the family. You can look at the writings of leftists since the 1930s and it’s all there. The difference today is that all vestiges of Christian leaven that once made Western civilization flourish and prosper and held back wickedness are gone. In addition, we have a generation of leftists in cultural and political power today who are effectively woke zombies who can’t help themselves. They are compelled by generations of very effective brainwashing to silence or destroy any who get in the way of cultural revolution, their greatest enemy being Bible believing conservative Christians. If you’re also white and male, you get to the top of the list.

This is the bad news which we all know. The good news that most fail to appreciate is that because zombies aren’t subtle, normal people, which is the vast majority of the population, are waking up to just how pathologically evil and abnormal all this is. For Christians, this reminds us of the fundamental irrationality of evil, and that it is built and sustained on the pretzel logic of lies. God’s created reality, as for God Himself, cannot be mocked, people reap what they sow. Sooner or later it will bring the consequences of God’s judgment which happens whenever His law is transgressed. But God’s judgment isn’t an end in an of itself—it is revelatory as well. In such an environment the ugliness of sin and man pretending he can be God contrasts powerfully with the beauty of God’s law and the gospel of His grace in Christ. We have the answer to all the chaos and misery! And it goes through the cross.

We have something to sell that’s attractive and it works! All of Christian history proves it. And it doesn’t just work in our private lives or in churches, but it works for entire civilizations. Many Christians, and all secular people, don’t realize that what turned the ancient pagan world where, in Thomas Hobbes words, life was nasty, brutish, and short, into the modern world where it generally is not, was Christianity. Without God’s word, and God’s law, the gospel and the Holy Spirit, there would be no rule of law, no hospitals, no human rights, no universal education, no science or technology, no capitalism and wealth, and all the blessings that can bring, and much more. Secular culture, however, paints Christianity and God’s law as constricting when it is the most liberating thing that’s ever existed, in fact the only thing!

I’m currently reading a wonderful book that makes this case by an Indian named Vishal Mangalwadi, The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization. If you’re wondering what it is we’re trying to do in the so-called culture wars (and politics and everything else), you’ll find what that is in this book. We’re not just trying to save souls so people can go to heaven when they die. Rather, we’re part of Christ’s charge and mission to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Before Jesus ascended into heaven to the right hand of God, he said all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to him, therefore go and make disciples of all nations, not just people. And this means, he says, teaching them everything he had commanded them. We need to get busy!

 

Post-Mill Optimism and the Victory of God in Christ

Post-Mill Optimism and the Victory of God in Christ

May 25, 2023 | Eschatology

In my previous post about the Postmillennial conference I attended, I remarked how surprised I was by how many families with children there were, and especially the size of the families. That makes total sense when you understand that post millennialism is a positive, optimistic eschatology. Large families and hope for the future go together like, well, love and marriage (Thanks, Frank!). Why would anyone bring children into the world when they think the future offers only misery and suffering? Or if they don’t believe in God. And speaking of misery and suffering, our secular cultural elites embrace and promote a worldview of fear. Everything is a threat, apocalypse just around the corner, dystopian Hollywood fantasies our cultural touchstones. I’m not participating in their pessimism. It’s unfortunate so many Christians do, albeit the catastrophes are of a moral nature.

I must confess that not long ago I was a certified doomer. All I had witnessed for forty years was Christian and conservative cultural and political defeat. Secularism and political liberalism was ascendant everywhere, and all we did was lose. And while the people on our side didn’t appear to want to lose, they seemed to accept it as a foregone conclusion. To them the forces against us, like gale force hurricane winds, are too much to withstand. The tide of history is against us. At best we can defend ourselves and not try to lose too much ground, but hey, if we’re Christians, Jesus is coming back soon, right? I had no idea until recently how eschatology, the study of end times, drives peoples’ view of things, be they religious or secular. Almost all Christians get their pessimism from their negative eschatology.

I’ll never forget the church service where our pastor said those who are focused on the “culture wars” are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s a supreme irony how much Christians complain about the cultural rot all around us, but if we focus too much on “the culture wars” we’re wasting our time. Got it. As an amillennialist, which I was previously, our pastor was doing what they always tend to do, over spiritualize everything. He was preaching on what to him is the most important thing in existence, the spiritual and moral transformation of the individual, as if that is somehow mutually exclusive from Christian cultural engagement. It is not. In fact, everything is spiritual, and participating in the salvation of Christ’s people from their sins (Matt. 1:21) is a required part of Christianizing the culture. Most Christians because of their eschatology, whether they can even articulate what that is or not, have no idea how intimately connected those two things should be. The post-millennial awaking in the church is changing that, and it is a thrilling thing to be a part of.

It may surprise you that until World War I postmillennialism was the majority report in Protestant Christian eschatology. Unfortunately, this was highjacked by a growing Enlightenment secularism infatuation with science (nothing is impossible and everything will get better and better), and liberal Christianity’s focus on man’s moral improvement and the social gospel. These two melded together into what became post-millennialism. That is why I rejected this eschatological position without giving it a moment’s consideration, even though all my theological heroes of the 19th century and earlier embraced it. I thought the actual theological position was the highjacked version; it isn’t! Not even close.

As the lamentable twentieth century progressed, post-millennialism became increasingly discredited in the eyes of most Christians. Not realizing the position had nothing to do with an arrow-like progress through history, they embraced the new eschatological kid on the block, the fundamentally pessimistic dispensational premillennialism, first articulated by John Nelson Darby in the mid-nineteenth century. This speculative eschatology, I’ve heard it described as newspaper eschatology, was what I was born-again into in 1978. This was time of the incredibly popular Late Great Planet Earth (talk about pessimism!) by Hal Lindsey, and The Left Behind series of books that would come later.

I’ve discovered in my short time on this side of the eschatological divide that pre and a-mill Christians believe in large part that suffering is the lot of Christians in this fallen world, and that Satan in some way has the upper hand in the spiritual war that is human existence. The victory Christ won on the cross over sin is a spiritual victory with primarily eternal significance; we are saved to heaven. In this material fallen world, Christians are the losers, and salvation a kind of eternal spiritual fire insurance. Instead of transforming this fallen world with God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, our desire is to escape it.

Even though this is true of most Christians, they all believe Christ is indeed seated at the right hand of God, and as Paul says in Ephesians 1, is “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.” Unfortunately, they do not believe his rule will in any way fundamentally transform life in this world. They miss the implications of his rule for all of creation as God through the Apostle Paul reveals to us in Colossians 1:

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 things is a lot of things! And notice the implication of the reconciliation of the cross extends to “things on earth.”

Paul is clear: there are material implications of these spiritual realities. The Great Commission Jesus gave the eleven in Matthew 28 is to all nations, in Greek ethnos-ἔθνος, not just all individuals (transformed individuals transform nations!). And they were to first baptize them, and then teach them to obey everything he had commanded them. I challenge any pre or a-mill Christian to carefully go through just the gospels (this “everything” command applies to the rest of the New Testament as well) and tell me that what Jesus commands will not transform and renew cultures and civilizations. It has to

Unfortunately, over the last few hundred years a dualistic Pietism has exerted a huge influence on Evangelical Christianity, with Christians valuing upper story spiritual things over lower story supposedly non-spiritual things. To the contrary, the Bible teaches what the Puritans of old believed, that true Christians are the agents of Christ’s renewing activity for all of life, the family, church, state, business, art, education, every single thing.

In I Corinthians 5:17 Paul points to the salvific transforming power of what Christ accomplished on the cross.  He says, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new has come.” I always thought of this as just referring to the person who is the new creation, but as new creations we are in a real way renewing this fallen creation because Christ came not just to save us, but the entire world! And we do this with our Lord who reigns over all of it. Paul says in I Corinthians 15:25 and 26, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” We are currently living in the “until,” and as his kingdom goes forth, we are his instruments, his body, to put those enemies under his feet. This is why I am optimistic and excited because the victory of God in Christ is guaranteed now and forever!