This is Us, Alzheimer’s and the Programming of Modern Medicine

This is Us, Alzheimer’s and the Programming of Modern Medicine

Apr 2, 2025 | Culture, Uncategorized

My wife and I recently watched a TV series called This is Us, and one of the main characters came down with Alzheimer’s. Given I’ve had a health epiphany because of Covid, I now see portrayals of disease like this differently than I used to. This Is Us was a series that aired on NBC from 2016-2022. I caught the pilot on Netflix, and it brought tears to my eyes several times, as did most episodes, and we were hooked. Even though it’s typically 21st century secular and left, the story lines do a great job capturing the glory and wreckage of fallen people living in fallen bodies in a fallen world, but without God. It’s wonderful and pathetic on so many levels, not least what it reveals about how indoctrinated most people are by modern medicine.

As a baby boomer I was born smack dab in the middle of the age of “experts,” and nowhere were experts more revered and trusted than in medicine. We turned over our health to doctors and the medical profession because certainly they would not steer us the wrong way. In This is Us doctors are never questioned, nor is what caused the disease. For the most part, modern medicine treats disease as a mystery because doctors are primarily trained to treat symptoms with medication or surgery.

My health journey is an ongoing affair, with the learning curve seemingly always going up. Given the complexity of the human body that doesn’t surprise me. I’ll share more of what I’ve learned below, but last year God graciously gave me a bad case of Dermatitis so I could see in full relief the MO of modern medicine. Early in 2024 I started developing dandruff. Soon there was itching on my scalp, and then red itchy spots on my arms and legs which in due course spread to different parts of my body. How fun! Given I’m still clawing my way up the learning curve, I decided I should go to a Dermatologist, a modern medical professional. She said I had some kind of yeast infection, a fungal issue, and proscribed medication for my scalp and a steroid, anti-inflammatory, for my skin. Then she gave me a piece of paper that said the following, and I kid you not:

Dermatitis is an inflammatory response of the body with no known cause.

As I’m reading this in her office maintaining self-control was difficult, but inside I’m thinking, what? Are you kidding me? No known cause? Seriously? I’d learned enough by this point to know everything has a cause, but modern medicine isn’t interested in causes. Lest you think my experience is unique, it isn’t. Casey Means is a doctor who at 31 after five years of surgical residency quit because my experience is all too common. In her book, Good Energy, she relates this stunning fact:

Despite surgically treating inflamed tissues of the head and neck day in and day out, not once—ever—was I taught what causes the inflammation in the human body or about its connection to the inflammatory chronic diseases so many Americans are facing today. Not once was I prompted to ask, Huh, why all the inflammation?

A tragic example of this in practice was a family member of ours in her 70s who went into the hospital in September 2023 with pancreatitis. Any word with “itis” on the end means inflammation. Did the doctors try to discover what caused the inflammation? No. Instead, they treated the symptoms with twelve plus surgeries, and she died horribly spending the final months of her life in a hospital. As we’ll see, these doctors could not see this any other way because that is how they were trained, and how the whole system sees disease. They tried to do the best they could, thought they were helping her, and ended up killing her.

Dermatitis caused me to finally start seriously looking for a wholistic, integrative medical professional. I did my research and eventually decided on a nutritionist because this had to be something diet and lifestyle related, and it was. After a couple tests, she said the problem was gut related, as is so much disease. I had extremely bad fungal overgrowth, which was the main problem, and bacterial overgrowth as well. This caused something called leaky gut which eventually leads to inflammation. This had obviously been developing for a long time, and it finally caught up with me. She put me on a protocol of herbs and probiotics, and tweaked my diet which had gotten pretty good over the last several years as it was. It instantly started getting better, and completely went away. No known cause indeed!

So now when I see a typical portrayal of something like Alzheimer’s on a TV show it ticks me off. For most people, and modern medicine in general, disease is a crap shoot, a matter of luck, or not, of throwing the dice and hoping you don’t get snake eyes. Are there exceptions to the rule, where someone may do absolutely everything right and some disease strikes them? Of course, but that is not the rule. God gave us a creation that can sustain the creatures He created, and that means we live in a cause and effect universe. With certain inputs we can reasonably expect certain results. He’s given us that reasonable confidence as a gift, but we never presume upon his grace. He may have plans for us much bigger than we can imagine. The Westminster Shorter Catechism # 66 says it in its succinct best:

Quest. 66. What is the reason annexed to the fifth commandment?

The reason annexed to the fifth commandment, is a promise of long life and prosperity (as far as it shall serve for God’s glory and their own good) to all such as keep this commandment.

If our good and God’s glory includes our suffering, so be it. We will trust him as best we can. Otherwise we trust the gracious gifts of his creation to do what He intended them to do.

Modern Medicine, How We Got Here: Pasteur, Béchamp and Germ Theory
To understand where we are we have to go back to the nineteenth century and the foundation of modern medicine, germ theory, and the work of two men, Louis Pasteur (1822-1895), who everybody has heard of, and Antoine Béchamp (1816-1908), who few people have. Their titanic battle over germ theory is a microcosm of the same battle in the twenty first century over health and modern medicine. Once germ theory became the only accepted theory of disease, the template for modern medicine set.

If you do an internet search for, “Pasteur, Béchamp, and Germ Theory,” one of the top results you’ll get is a Wikipedia article entitled, “Germ theory denialism.” That’s almost funny. The word denialism will always tell you the accepted cultural elite position on a topic; and it shall not be questioned! During the Covid era it was used a lot. I believe it originated with those questioning the Holocaust, so Holocaust denialism became a thing, and after that anyone questioning the accepted narrative, whatever it might be, was labeled a denier. This, of course, is meant to shut off any debate on an issue. Thankfully because of the Gutenberg Press of the 21st century, the Internet, that is increasingly impossible. Everyone is indoctrinated to believe in germ theory as the unquestioned explanation for disease, and it is extremely difficult to see it any other way.

For 60 years I had been indoctrinated like everyone else to believe disease as something primarily coming from outside of us, that some little invisible thing invades us causes disease. That disease already lived inside me was hard to wrap my mind around, and more difficult to grasp was that I was the one who determined whether that happened or not. Would the little invisible thing invading me have an inviting space to do its dirty work, or not. That was up to me, not the little invisible thing.

Contrary to Germ Theory, Béchamp developed something called terrain theory. In the former germs are what we need to worry about, finding ways to kill them off with some kind of medicine once they get inside us. Terrain theory, by contrast, argues if the body is well and balanced then germs being a natural part of life and the environment will be dealt with by the body without causing disease. In other words, a germ can cause sickness in one person and not another based on the “terrain,” meaning the inner workings of the body’s immune system. A compromised “terrain” means the body’s inner environment makes it susceptible to viruses and parasites, etc. Therefore, it is far more important to work on the terrain of the body than worry about the latest germ or virus.

Pasteur’s victory for germ theory meant modern medicine’s focus on, well, medicine, was a foregone conclusion. There is a reason we call it medicine given we ingest or consume something as a treatment or cure. You’ll see as we talk about medical education, terrain is well down on the list of the modern medical professional’s priorities, as in pretty much invisible.

The Flexner Report and Modern Medical Education
Few people in or out of the medical profession have ever heard of Abraham Flexner and his report, the importance of which cannot be overestimated. The Flexner Report, published in 1910, transformed the nature and process of medical education in America. In 1908 the Carnegie Foundation authorized a study of medical schools in the country, which were visited and assessed based on how medical education was then currently practiced. Flexner then developed criteria on how doctors would be educated and trained and thus made acceptable to the American Medical Association. Both the AMA, which was founded in 1847, and Flexner accepted germ theory without question. By then cultural elites in the West could see the practice of healthcare in no other way. This can be seen in many places in the report, but one quote will be sufficient to understand the fundamental assumptions of modern medicine. Speaking of pathology and bacteriology, he says the goal is “to master the abnormal,” and in the that context says,

Now the agents and forces which invade the body to its disadvantage play their game, too, according to law.

Something outside of the body invades it and causes “the abnormal,” so the entire medical system became focused not on the patient’s health and enabling the body’s immune system to successfully handle the invaders, but on medicine used to defeat it. On the very next page, however, Flexner seems to contradict himself. He writes, the doctor “through measures essentially educational to enforce, the conditions that present disease and make positively for physical and moral well-being.” This and only one other minor reference to a more holistic approach is about it because by that time the assumptions of germ theory were dominant in the medical profession. Science was seen as all powerful, while God’s creation, the human body and the immune system, were victims of forces beyond their control. Man would save the day and defeat disease though his ingenuity.

Henry S. Prichett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, said the report was basically agnostic regarding which kind of healthcare the medical professional practiced, as he claims in the introduction:

In making this study the schools of all medical sects have been included. It is clear that so long as a man is to practice medicine, the public is equally concerned in his right preparation for the profession, whatever he calls himself—allopath, homeopath, eclectic, osteopath, or whatnot. It is equally clear that he should be grounded in the fundamental science upon which medicine rests, whether he practices under one name or under another.

In practice, however, once the “scientific standards” were set by the “experts,” anyone straying from them would be considered a quack not to be entrusted with the license of an educated medical practitioner. To that end, Flexner succeeded in aligning medical schools along the university model as the standard for all medical schools. This orientation had its origins in German medical education as American educators and physicians became enamored with university medical schools in Europe. Thus schools ignored what they considered “outdated and unscientific methods,” so doctors received minimal nutritional education and defaulted to treatments primarily with pharmaceuticals. Flexner writes:

The only authoritative competent to pass on such values are trained experts. The entire matter would be in their hands if the state boards should in every state delegate the function of evaluating entrance credentials to competently organized institution of learning.

Such institutions accepted the pharmaceutical paradigm which was the inevitable result of germ theory and the rise of science. The “trained experts” believed it was primarily medicine that healed disease. The profit motive, as well, cannot be ruled out given the financial backers of the report were two of the richest men in the world, Carnagie and John D. Rockefeller. While not downplaying their philanthropic motives, they also likely believed they could bring the production model to the medical profession.

The rise of Big Pharma was built into this new university model of medical education. After the report, funding was only given to schools following its recommendations. Without the money, alternative schools of medicine couldn’t compete and disappeared. The challenge with nutritional or holistic healthcare is that there’s no money in it. You can’t patent something readily available from nature like you can something from a lab, which is why I was almost 61 years old before I first heard the saying, “food is medicine.” In addition to the challenge of the profit motive, insurance companies believe they have no incentive to cover anything other than medicine, and they often won’t work with holistic doctors. Keeping people healthy so they don’t need medicine or medical care in the first place is a terrible business model!

Of course, Flexner and those who supported him had the best of intentions, as do those in the modern medical profession, but they were terribly naïve about the monster they were creating. When I read this sentence I had to laugh, sadly, especially in light of the Covid debacle:

Scientific medicine, therefore, has its eyes open; it takes its risks consciously; it does not cure defects of knowledge by partisan heat; it is free of dogmatism and open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.

This was written in 1910 when science was the unquestioned, benevolent, and all powerful god of the age who would never disappoint but only bring untold blessings to all the peoples of the earth. Unfortunately, Flexner and the entire Western cultural elite missed the little fact that science is practiced, and its results applied and implemented, by sinful human beings. Thus it can never be free of “partisan heat” or “free of dogmatism,” and as we saw with Covid, it most definitely is not “open-armed to demonstration from whatever quarter.” In fact as currently practiced, modern medicine is the exact opposite of all these. If, for example, you question the efficacy of vaccines, you are automatically discounted as a “denier.”  Let’s see what this mentality has turned into as medicine is practiced today.

Disease Care and Silo Medicine
Looking at modern medicine, keep in mind this quotation from muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair (1878-1968), the author of the well-known book about the Chicago meat packing plants, The Jungle (1906):

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Human nature is predictable, and money makes human beings as predictable as the sunrise. Reality, however, is a stubborn thing, and in due course reality always wins. Another word for reality is truth, and truth eventually exposes lies because of he who is The Truth. Jesus told his disciples (John 14:6) he is “the way and the truth and the life,” so truth isn’t merely the nature of things but a person who defines existence because he created it all. This is why no matter how messed up things are, no matter how stubborn human nature and human beings can be, we can have confidence our good and God’s glory will always win out in the end. The Covid neutron bomb of truth, as I’ve come to call it, makes this abundantly clear. We saw the modern medical industrial complex in all its malevolent ugliness on full display during that debacle, and it revealed to millions of people all over the world its ruinous business model. And yes, it most definitely is a business.

The fundamental problem with modern medicine is that, according to Casey Means, “every institution that impacts health—from medical schools to insurance companies to hospitals to pharma companies—makes money on ‘managing’ disease, not curing patients.” The evidence to prove this point? “Patients aren’t getting better.” What Casey calls silo medicine is built into the entire medical paradigm. If someone chooses not to be a general practitioner, your basic family doctor, they will become a specialist in a narrow subset of medicine, and doctors are encouraged throughout their education to “stay in their lane.” Doctors thus are not taught to see the body as a system but as isolated parts. If there is a problem with a part, they treat that part. Just like my Dermatologist, doctors primarily treat symptoms within their silo.

Inflammation caused by the body’s immune system appears to be the cause of most disease, yet as Casey points out, the cause of inflammation is never addressed by medical professionals. That is shocking, but as I was told, my Dermatitis “was an immune response of the body with no known cause.” If God had not graciously opened my eyes I would have spent the rest of my life managing my disease as another victim of modern silo medicine. Yes, the medical profession can do incredible things, as when dealing with acute issues like injury or infection, but the entire system is broken and millions of Americans suffer for it. I trust in due course more doctors will wake up and transform the profession so it treats the body and health wholistically. In the meantime, God has provided us everything we need to manage our own health, with knowledge readily available so we no longer have to play the dice game of modern medicine.

 

 

 

 

 

Buchanan, Conservative Pessimism, and the Resurrection of the West

Buchanan, Conservative Pessimism, and the Resurrection of the West

Jan 15, 2025 | America, Uncategorized

I recently finished Pat Buchanan’s, The Death of the West, and it’s been a fascinating experience reading Buchanan’s thoughts about the dying West with twenty-plus years in the rearview mirror. The book was published in 2002, and the Bush administration was in its early days. Given few of us are Bush fans anymore, you’ll be happy to know he was Hitler too. Of course the left now loves him, and the entire Bush-Cheney cabal, because the Uniparty RINOs are just Democrats in sheep’s clothing. The world Buchanan describes, the 90s and turn-of-the-century America, has all the dynamics of the 2020s, with some of the same faces and a few players no longer around, but all playing the same old game. This was before Obama came on the stage to, “fundamentally transform the United States of America,” which turned out to be leftist hubris on steroids. And remember, as the ancient Greeks taught us, hubris always leads to nemesis.

We conservatives, however, aren’t in danger of hubris because given we’ve been consistently losing for over half a century, pessimism is our gig. Buchanan strongly tends in that direction as well. For the time, however, he was appropriately pessimistic about the chances of the West, and specifically America, escaping the probable death coming upon it from the ascendence of the Marxist left. His subtitle says what will cause its demise, and it may sound familiar: “How Dying populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.” Even for the most pessimistic conservative in the early 2000s, it would have been difficult to fathom the woke destruction heaped on America during the Biden administration, effectively Obama’s third term. What many pessimists failed to grasp is how the left’s success, spiking the football and going into woke overdrive, hubris, was key to their inevitable demise, the judgment of Nemesis. Americans saw something deeply unattractive and harmful in the woke ideology applied on a national level. No lies could paint over the destructive consequences inherent in leftist, culturally Marxist ideology.

Nobody could have predicted this was how the story would play out, America living through the worst woke nightmare until billionaire real estate mogul and reality TV star Donald Trump dashed in to save the day. If you would have told conservatives in the Bush years this was how God was going to save America, or at least give it a chance to be re-founded on true constitutional principles, you would have been laughed out of polite society. Many people of a conservative religious bent like me despised Donald Trump. I hated everything I thought he stood for. It took me a while to believe his candidacy wasn’t a joke, just some publicity stunt. Surely, Donald Trump is not a serious man, right? I’ll never forget the first debate with all 16 candidates in the 2016 Republican Primary when Trump ripped Bush and the Iraq War. It made me physically uncomfortable. You just don’t do that! Of course as we know now, there is a lot Trump does you just don’t do.

His entire first term, ending in the stolen election and J6, perfectly played into the pessimistic conservative perspective on the current culture war, including mine. From 1980 and Reagan’s election to January 6, 2021, I was a good little movement conservative, always living with a low grade pessimism as one might live with a low grade fever. You’re not sick but you don’t feel quite right. As a Christian conservative I’d gotten used to losing, to seeing the conservative movement, which I now affectionately call Con Inc., as an enabler of liberalism. A long time ago Con Inc. had stopped living up to Buckley’s ringing declaration when he founded National Review in 1955, to stand athwart history yelling, STOP!!! Over time it turned into, please slow down. The state got bigger and more intrusive, the culture more hostile to Christianity and coarse, and it seemed like that was just the way things would always be, a cultural Berlin Wall that would never come down.

God and the Resurrection of the West
Pat Buchanan may tend to pessimism, but he is not a doomer. I use that word to label the complainers I come across who are always predicting impending doom. They make Chicken Little look like Joel Osteen preaching your best life now. For them, the worst is yet to come. You might get that feeling reading Buchanan, but I’m happy to say his Catholic faith and Christian worldview keeps him from embracing his inner doomer. Toward the end of the book he says:

While none of us may live to see the promised land, victory is assured. For we have it on the highest authority that truth crushed shall rise again.

That is because He who is The Truth became a man in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, died on a Roman cross to redeem the world from the curse of sin, and rose again in victory over death. That is why truth will always ultimately prevail because truth is a person, God himself who created everything, is the ground of everything, and ultimately in control of everything. There are plenty of ups and downs, zigs and zags, two steps forward, three back, but ultimately the direction of history and ultimate destination are in His hands. This Christian view of history has implications for how we interpret events unfolding in front of us. My perceptions changing of our current moment in history as I fully embraced this are a good example of how this works. During Trump’s first term, God was slowly building into me something I didn’t realize until the stolen election, and especially J6, that God was giving us an opportunity to win in what seemed like perpetual losing. As the Sovereign Lord of history He can do that. I no longer saw losing because He was giving us an opportunity in the circumstances to win.

My book Going Back to Find the Way Forward was the result of this budding awareness. Up until Trump’s apparent ignominious end in January 2021, all I could see in losing was, well, losing. Then after the election by God’s grace and providence I found Steve Bannon’s War Room, back then on YouTube. As I always say, he got me out of the fetal position, and to mix metaphors talked me off the ledge. Bannon, a Catholic, taught me something I should have known all along, but my pessimism blinded me to: God has given us agency, meaning we can change things, and all it takes is, action, action, action! You can’t get much more biblical than that! Bannon is a nationalist populist, as am I now, adding the words Christian conservative to the description. Bannon is the leader of what he calls “The Grassroots Movement.”

For the four years after the stolen election, he would have average, every day Americans on his show exercising their agency to change things, people who take seriously their responsibility of living in a representative republic of “We the people.” Such activists are the greatest fear of the establishment, America’s cultural and political elite, left or right. They represent Americans in general who will not bow the knee to the supposed “experts.” How dare these people know what’s best for their own lives! Which brings us to the historical significance of Trump.

Trump as the Pivot Point in the Resurrection of the West
This would not have been on my bingo card prior to Trump coming down the escalator. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine overcoming conservative inertia and the penchant for losing without Trump. Bannon calls them the controlled opposition, and that’s exactly what they are. As I said above, the conservative movement is an enabler of liberalism, but it’s worse than that. I’ve come to call them liberals in skirts. They are not conservative in any sense of the term, unless you say their job is conserving the liberal, progressive, statist gains of the last hundred plus years. The reason is because of something we now call the “post-World War II consensus” (PWC), a contentious phrase embraced by liberals, including good “conservatives” and despised by populist-nationalists. Against true conservatism, PWC is secularist, globalist, and corporatist. Throw in perpetual war and you have the perfect recipe for a culture war against America and anything truly conservative.

 

This elite dynamic is the way God ingeniously utilized Trump to undermine it. It’s incredible when you look back on how it all played out, and is still playing out. It wasn’t Trump, mind you, but the reaction to Trump that changed everything. The entire Uniparty elite was exposed for the grift it was. I was initially going to title the book, “Trump the Great Revealer” because that’s exactly what God has used him to do, to reveal the rot and spiritual darkness at the heart of American cultural and political life. Being a developer and builder, Trump turned out to be the guy who pulled the siding off the societal house revealing teaming throngs of termites underneath. God always seems to use unlikely people, as a read through redemptive history in the Bible makes abundantly clear, primarily to make it known: “’Not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit’ says the Lord Almighty’” (Zech. 4:6). He is the Sovereign Lord of history. This applies not only to the redemptive history revealed in Scripture, but to all history, which is redemptive, God’s plans working in time and among people to His ultimate glorious ends. God has used this most unlikely man to spark a Great Awakening.

This awakening will be nothing like the Great Awakenings of the past, or like the Billy Graham revivals of the 20th century with stadiums full of people walking down the isle to “Just as I Am.” It is happening on multiple levels, and is thus several great awakenings, not just in people’s religious lives. It is cultural, political, economic, health, as well as spiritual. It’s all spiritual anyway because the Christian faith and view of reality is all encompassing, as is any other faith be it secularism, Marxism-Communism, Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Paganism, Animism, whatever. The benefit of Christianity over the others is that it happens to be the ultimate truth about the nature of reality, and true human flourishing and blessing can only happen living according to that reality.

Looking at the political angle because that’s where God used Trump the Trigger, and as the pivot point to resurrect it, the perspective change from Con Inc. to Trump was night and day for me. The Uniparty was given its name because most Republicans were effectively Democrats, and “the establishment” has one overarching goal: sustaining their own power. That’s why many Republicans would talk a good game, get our votes and hopes up, and then inevitably cave to Democrats. Trump would have none of that. When he said during his first election we would win so much we would get tired of winning, that was truly something new under the sun for conservatives. Was winning that much even allowed?

Clear and Present Opportunities
If it wasn’t for Trump and his willingness to stand against the entire Uniparty establishment in Washington, it’s likely Buchanan’s pessimism about the West would likely have proved correct. Circa 2002, he laid out four “clear and present dangers” that will inevitably bring death if they are not addressed. Trump was the one God raised up to turn these threats into opportunities and give us a realistic chance of victory over three of them.

  1. Dying population.
  2. Mass immigration of people of different colors, creeds, and culture changing the character of the West forever.
  3. The rise to dominance of an anti-Western culture in the West, deeply hostile to its religions, traditions, and morality, or cultural Marxism, what we now call woke.
  4. The breakup of nations and the defection of ruling elites to a world government, thus the end of nations, or globalism.

The only thing Trump can’t do is to make people have more babies. That gets to the heart of the matter. As Buchanan says, the culture war is ultimately a religious war, and religious people have more babies than secular people. Christians are going to have to save the West from demographic doom by once again being obedient to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

As for 2-4, what happened since Trump came down the escalator and the left went crazy is something Buchanan could not have predicted then. In God’s providence, allowing the election to be stolen was the brilliant strategy of providence, God making it the fundamental factor in the process of exposing the left. With Trump apparently finally vanquished, especially after the deep state PSYOP of J6 when Trump and all of MAGA were finally discredited, they could now get on with Obama’s “fundamental transformation of America.” It turns out Americans are not so fond of Marxist fundamental transformations. And I don’t use the word Marxist frivolously. In the               , Marx and Engles identify four enemies of communism that must be abolished, and they perfectly align with the four “clear and present dangers” laid out by Buchanan. That is not a coincidence. They are:

  1. Private property
  2. The family
  3. The nation-state
  4. Religion, i.e., Christianity

Everything the Democrat Party of Obama-Biden stands for, Marx would applaud because their policies effectively abolish all four of these. The sexual revolution starting in the 60s effectively abolished the family and contributes to dying populations and demographic apocalypse. Again, Christians will have to lead the way in obedience to God’s command to be fruitful and multiply.

When Biden took office, he immediately opened the boarder which means the end of the nation-state, and effectively globalism. So called “free trade” and the dominance of major corporations is an assault on private property, as is global finance and fiat currency. Lastly, woke went into overdrive which is a direct assault on Christianity and the family, and you have the perfect Marxist storm for the death of the West. But therein lay our opportunity for those with eyes to see. The woke globalists were building a fragile papier-mâché Berlin Wall culture that would come tumbling down as the lies were being exposed. Everything the left does, however, is built on lies, and an empire of lies cannot stand. With Trump as enemy number one, the left completely lost their minds and normal Americans woke up and said we’ve had enough. Trump’s “loss” in 2020 was the best thing that could have happened to America and the West.

Not only have Americans, as Steve Bannon says, had a belly full of it, but Trump and the entire MAGA movement have learned a lot in these last four years. The entire apparatus of the administrative deep state is now exposed, and Trump has a mandate to take it on. The dream team he’s assembling will take no prisoners, but as we’ve seen, the establishment will not be handing out the welcome mat for the dissolution of their power. It will be hand-to-hand combat, sometimes like World War I trench warfare, an inch at a time, but the cover of darkness is no longer available to the swamp. Limiting the size and scope of government might for the first time in my life be a real possibility, but MAGA and true conservatives must be persistent, determined, and downright belligerent at times to make sure the ball moves forward, even if it’s two yards and a cloud of dust.

What’s most exciting for me is that Christianity is once again being seem as a positive force for human flourishing. This is especially true among the youngest generation who moved in a conservative direction in a most unexpected way in the election. Young people just don’t do that because, well, they’re young and stupid, and that’s what you do when you’re young. Not this generation. They’ve lived with the lies of secularism, grown up with woke and Covid, and they want nothing to do with it. It’s actually cool for the first time in my life for young people to be conservative! And Christians are able to be “loud and proud” about their faith, instead of homosexuals or feminists about their perversions. The Great Awakening is happening, and it is a thrilling time to be alive. And we’re only just getting started.

 

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Culture and Making America Christian Again

Dec 11, 2024 | Culture, Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Biblical Take on Culture
Christians start with the Bible, God’s story about his relationship with the human race, and not with something called culture somehow existing independently of His story. The Bible has no word for culture, thus, no definition of it, but we can say culture is the imprint human beings put on God’s creation. In the Genesis 1 and 2 creation account, we find something we now called the “cultural mandate.” Human beings are commanded to govern God’s creation:

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

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

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

The significance of the Imago Dei (the image of God in man) for the Christian worldview cannot be overstated. We are God’s visible representatives on earth! We reflect his likeness and attributes in every aspect of our human faculties, be it moral, intellectual, relational, practical, etc. All of these attributes contribute to creating culture. God commands Adam and Eve to act (be fruitful, fill, subdue, rule), and these commands define the essential purposes of human existence. Reformed theologian and philosopher John Frame had this to say in a lecture on Christianity and Culture:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Nietzsche and Why It’s OK to Eat Your Neighbor

Dec 4, 2024 | Apologetics, Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

It’s a cookbook!!!

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

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

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

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

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

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

As in completely invisible.

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Eschatological Assumptions and AD70

Eschatological Assumptions and AD70

Nov 20, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Why Eschatology Matters

Why Eschatology Matters

Nov 6, 2024 | Eschatology, Uncategorized

If you had asked me for most of my Christian life if eschatology mattered I would have said no, not at all. I was a committed eschatological Agnostic. It was a waste of time, speculation heaped upon speculation about verses in the Bible that seemed to have a variety of contradictory interpretations. I apologize for anyone who’s familiar with my story because I’ve repeated it here numerous times, but I must do so again because it is critical for making my case why eschatology matters and why so few Christians think it does. In fact, recently on Charlie Kirk’s show, which I often watch during the day as I work, he made this point. He said he’s heard Christians defend all the positions, pre, A, and post-mill, and said in so many words, it’s basically irrelevant and we just need get down to fighting the battles in front of us. Indeed we do, but how we see “end times,” an inaccurate description of what eschatology is about, determines not only what we do, but how we perceive the doing and the expectation of results, or the lack thereof.

Born again in the fall of 1978, exactly 46 years ago as I write these words, it was right in the middle of Last Days Madness, in the title of a book by Gary Demar. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, a massive best seller, was a common topic of conversation among Christians. The Middle East was in turmoil, and there was talk of antichrist and the immanent rapture. In fact, it was ubiquitous, virtually inescapable. Even though I’d read Lindsey’s book, I could no more defend the dispensational position than I could defend the hypostatic union (Jesus being both God and man for the theologically challenged), but I completely bought it. One day in the spring of 1982 just prior to my graduation from Arizona State University , I was standing out in front of my dorm, Best Hall, and prayed fervently that the rapture would happen so I wouldn’t have to graduate and figure out real life. No such luck.

As we all know, the rapture didn’t happen, and by the grace of God I’ve done a middling job figuring out life. In the immediate decades to come, the obsession with “end times” didn’t subside. The 90s was the decade of Left Behind in popular culture, and antichrist and rapture speculation only accelerated. The problem with such speculation, however, is if predictions and expectations don’t come to pass, people become jaded and skeptical. So most Christians in the year of our Lord 2024 are where I ended up not too many years after college, pan-millennialism, as in what Charlie Kirk basically believes; it’s not worth worrying about because it will all “pan out in the end.” Well, yes it will, but I must rebuke my younger self with being a cop-out, although it’s completely understandable. With all the “end times” hype proving untrue, newspaper eschatology as I’ve heard it called, disengaging is a perfectly reasonable response, but God won’t so easily let us off the hook.

Eschatology Matters Because God Says So
I will quote Paul in a verse familiar to all Evangelical Christians from 2 Timothy 3:16:

16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.

This should settle the matter, but we’re stubborn little sinful creatures, so it won’t, but I’ll do my best to contribute to the settling. If what Paul says here is true, then all Scripture, including eschatology, is profitable for His people in these ways, and my disregarding it for a large portion of my Christian life is basically telling God that it’s not. That’s not good. So if we can agree on this, let’s first look at what eschatology is and why it is profitable.

Eschatology comes from the Greek word ἔσχατος (éskhatos) meaning last, and ology means study, so it’s the study of last things, not “end times.” And although most pastors don’t preach with an eye to “last things,” it’s all over Scripture, and not just in the most obvious places. Those would be Revelation, Portions of the synoptic gospels where Jesus speaks to the destruction of the temple, Daniel, portions of Ezekiel and other prophets. The other passages, while not so apparent, are Messianic in nature. For example, take this passage in Genesis 49 that is clearly Messianic when Jacob is blessing his sons, and he gets to Judah. I won’t quote the whole thing, but just one verse in the middle:

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.

Nobody questions whether this applies to the Messiah, even Jews, but for Christians the question is whether Jesus started accomplishing this at his first coming, or will only accomplish it at his second.

After I embraced postmillennialism, I realized that for my entire Christian life, at that point almost 44 years, I’d read every single Messianic passage in the Old Testament as being fulfilled in Christ’s second advent. Which proves the premise of this piece, that eschatology matters. My assumptions about “end times,” starting with the dispensationalism I was born again into in 1978, very much mattered in how I interpreted Scripture. If you’ve ever been to a doctor’s office where you sit on the exam table and they take out a hammer and tap on the front of your knee, you’ll know where the saying “knee jerk” got its meaning. That was me: Messianic text, knee jerk, second coming. I could write for days giving you examples, but a few will have to do. Here are two verses from Psalm 2:

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.”

With my dispensational, pan-mill, or A-mill assumptions, of course this will only happen when Christ returns. Isn’t it obvious? The earth’s a hellhole, and Satan obviously has the upper hand “down here.” Well, that’s one way to look at it, but are those assumptions justified? Or take these verses from Psalm 110:

5 The Lord is at your right hand;
he will crush kings on the day of his wrath.
6 He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead
and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.
7 He will drink from a brook along the way,
and so he will lift his head high.

This certainly looked to me like it could only be true of the day of Jesus’ return when he declares the final victory over all his enemies, but the context of the Psalm is clearly not for the final consummation of all things. And Peter uses both these Psalms in Acts 2 and 4 as being fulfilled at Christ’s first coming with his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God as the currently reigning Messiah. The Apostles did not see Christ’s Messianic reign for the spiritual life of Christians, but for all of reality. Paul says as much in Ephesians 1 when he declares of Christ that God,

seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.

I love the way Paul says this as if Christ’s complete and total rule over all things is in this present age is obvious, and then has to add if anyone is unsure, also in the age to come.

Eschatology Matters Because Christ Changed the Course of History
Which brings us to one of the major problems with the church in the modern age: it has no vision of history. This is the direct result of Pietism, which narrows the faith down to personal salvation. In my early born-again years, I believed the extent of the gospel was about our going to heaven when we die and our own personal holiness. I hate to put it this way, but this completely trivializes the Christian faith. The Apostle Paul has a cosmic vision of the faith as we learn from 2 Corinthians 5:17:

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

This translation from the NIV is spot on. The subject isn’t so much the salvation of an individual, which of course is included, but the entirety of the created order! When Christ was resurrected from the dead, death itself was put on notice; you are no longer calling the shots! At the very moment he escaped the clutches of death, history was forever changed, a literal U-turn in all things diametrically opposed to the fall and curse of sin.

History now became the outworking of the story of what Paul in this passage calls the “ministry of reconciliation,” that God in Christ was reconciling the world to Himself. Paul uses the Greek word cosmos, meaning the entire ordered system of the universe as God created it. And this reconciling of it all, every square inch, every single thing, started when Christ rose from the dead. Fifty days later he ascended to the right hand of God, the place of ultimate authority in this created order, visible and invisible, as we saw in Ephesians 1. This, brothers and sisters, is not a recipe for defeat or failure! And God forbid we should think, like I did for most of my Christian life, that real victory was only meant for when Christ returned to earth for a second time. In fact, in 2 Corinthians 2:14 Paul declares this ministry of victory:

14 But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. 15 For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing,

That smells like winning! And everyone smells it, lost and saved. And who doesn’t want to be on the winning team!

We also know not every minute of every game looks the same, so it may appear for the moment that we are on the losing side, but we know who wins in the end! Not every battle in a war appears the same to the participant, but there can only be one victor. Every game, though, has a palpable direction, a kind of momentum everyone can feel, and we’re on the side of the one who conquered death. Which brings up the issue at hand. Is this victory only for the end? Or is victory intended by God through Christ for here and now? Is this reconciling happening in a substantive way in history, or are our reconciling efforts basically futile until Christ returns? How we answer these questions proves eschatology matters. Here’s Paul’s answer in I Corinthians 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. 27 For “God has put all things in subjection under his feet.”

There are two phrases here that function in time, “until he has put,” and “The last enemy to be destroyed.” That means going from A, the Asension, to Z, Christ’s second coming, we don’t skip B to Y, and every letter in between, lower and upper case. This is the “triumphal procession” Paul is talking about. I love the extended meaning of procession from Strong’s:

properly, to display triumph openly; publicly exalting the victor who leads a victory-procession – and putting the conquered on display (exhibition, as “totally defeated”).

This is what Jesus accomplished on the cross and resurrection. Satan doesn’t have the upper hand “down here,” although sometimes it looks like it when we live by sight and not by faith. Paul says elsewhere (Col. 2:15) that Christ:

having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

Eschatology Matters Because of the Teleology of History
History is going somewhere. There is a purpose, a telos, or end goal to which it is pointing and unfolding. As Christians we believe God providentially ordains all things toward his perfect ends. What are those ends? We learn these from God’s promises to Abram, that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed. From that moment, what we call redemptive history commenced and zigged and zagged for 2000 years to the fulfilment of God’s covenant promise, which is to “bless the nations.” When we talk about eschatology, or “last things,” those started at Christ’s first coming. The blessings from what he accomplished in conquering sin by paying the ultimate price for it, would now flow, not only to individuals, but through them to the entire created order. For God so loved the cosmos that whosoever believes tells us that the salvation of the individual is ultimately connected with God’s created order. This is massively different than being saved to go to heaven when we die.

The Apostles realized this, but they could never have imagined in a “mere” 300 years Christianity would become the official religion of the Roman Empire. And when Constantine the Great converted, he began the process of changing the Empire from bloodthirsty to blessing. He abolished crucifixion in 337 specifically because of Christ, and he started the slow process of gladiatorial contests to the death being completely outlawed within the next 150 years. We can see that an empire or nation ruled by Christ is completely different than one ruled by Pagans. There wasn’t a Christian leader or layman who could conceive of a Christianity that didn’t affect the conduct of how a nation was ruled or the culture of its people. They wouldn’t even have known what we were talking about if we said Christianity is mainly about going to heaven when we die and personal holiness. It wasn’t until the 19th century, some 1800 years after the resurrection that this radical narrowing of the faith became common place.

With Pietism the Christian church eventually lost the idea of the purpose of Christ’s unfolding of his kingdom rule on earth. We substituted the Four Spiritual Laws for Thy kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, not on earth after Christ returns, but on earth here, now. We went from blessing nations corporately to merely blessing individuals within nations. In the West we went from Christendom to secularism, to acknowledging God’s law and Christ’s kingship over the nations, to making Christianity a personal preference, one among many in a religiously pluralistic society. A large number of Christians, unfortunately the majority it seems, are okay with this because eschatology matters. For them the telos of God’s purposes in salvation are, like I used to believe, ultimately only for the end of time and the consummation of all things. That was my view of “end times,” so I was a defeatist and generally pessimistic. I even made fun of my younger idealist self for thinking I could actually “change the world.”

By contrast, my new postmillennial self understands the purpose of God in Christ is exactly that, to change the world! If we’re new creations, and part of a church of new creations against which the gates of hall shall not prevail, then the very purpose of our corporate lives is to change the world! Every day we get up, we are light pushing back darkness, fighting the fall and the curse of sin with righteousness, bringing order out of chaos, beauty out of ugliness, truth from lies, peace from conflict, love from hate. We all know who wins in the end, but why do we believe evil is destined to win here, now? Eschatology. Scripture doesn’t teach us things will get increasingly worse until Christ comes back to save the day, but if we do believe that it will affect our teleology of history. Rather, Scripture teaches us Christ’s reign and victory over sin’s effects are for this world. Often mustard seed slow, they are yet relentless and inevitable, until the last enemy, death is destroyed forever.