For my entire Christians life, from the fall of 1978 to August of 2022, I believed the nature of the Christian life in this fallen world was a conflict between good and evil, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. I assumed, but didn’t think much about it, that the conflict was almost between two equal forces. I also believed God is almighty and sovereign, but for some reason allowed the devil the upper hand in our fallen world. I knew this cosmic war into which we were born would eventually be won by the forces of light over darkness, but in this world for the most part darkness wins. There was at least partial victory on a personal level in the process of sanctification, but on a larger societal level victory would have to wait for the Second Coming. Until then things would likely get worse until Jesus returned to set all things right. Most Evangelical Christians see the world pretty much the same way as I did.
Like most Christians, I also believed the gospel would be preached to the entire world, but more people would reject than accept it. In a term familiar to Bible readers of the Old Testament, only a “remnant” would be saved. Jesus seemed to indicate this in his teaching on the wide and narrow gate (Matt. 7):
13 “Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.
This confirmed my basic pessimism about the nature of the spiritual war in which we are engaged. If we’re using a spiritual metaphor of who gets the most points in this game wins, then the devil clearly wins. He gets the most points because he gets the most souls. I learned later to read this passage in its redemptive-historical context, not out of context as if Jesus was speaking about Gentiles and salvation for all of time. No, Jesus was speaking to Jews because he was sent only “to the lost sheep of the house Israel” (Matt. 15:24). Most Jews rejected Christ and judgment came upon them in AD70. The Great Commission would have a very different ending. The gate would now be open wide with the proclamation of the gospel, victory ensured by the power of the Holy Spirit unleashed from Christ with “all authority in heaven and on earth” reigning at the right hand of God.
What I call eschatological pessimism is specifically the fruit of dispensationalism, whether we hold to that eschatology or not, or even know what it is. A pessimistic take on the nature of things just seems obvious and the most realistic. All anyone has to do is open their eyes and they’ll see that righteousness and peace and justice are not exactly marching victoriously throughout the world. Suffering seems to be everywhere, and it appears we’re fighting an uphill battle akin to Mount Everest. I imagine Christians felt that way in the 20th century during the darkest days of World War I and II. Slaughter on that scale had never happened in the history of the world, and not even close. Over a hundred million people lost their lives because of man’s inhumanity to man, because evil is clearly dominant in this fallen world. The 20th century is in fact why the pessimistic perspective came to dominate conservative Protestant Christianity. This is an important part of the story which we’ll explore below.
In my journey I even got to the point of mocking my younger self who believed he could “change the world.” In fact, the entire point of our existence is to “change the world.” But I came to believe that’s a fool’s errand, and only God could do that. Real change would only happen at the end of time when Jesus returned and wiped out evil once and for all. This is true for almost the entire church, that is how deeply engrained eschatological pessimism is. When I embraced postmillennialism a few years back that all changed for me. I was exposed to a completely new way of looking at life. Prior I thought of this eschatology as something of a joke, unworthy of even considering. Now I was eager to learn more because I knew nothing about it.
The Death of Postmillennial Eschatological Optimism
The man who killed postmillennialism lived in the century before it officially died. His name was J.N. Darby (1800-1882), and his aversion to postmillennial eschatology was one driving factor in his development of a completely new eschatology, called at the time, the new premillennialism. Premillennialism, which has been around since the early church fathers, holds that Jesus’ second coming will occur before (pre-) a literal 1,000-year period of peace and righteousness on earth, which is the Millennium as described in Revelation 20:1–7. Darby took this theology of “end times” in an entirely new direction which eventually came to be known as dispensationalism in the late 1920s. I’ve written about that previously, so I won’t get into the details here, but what became dominant because of Darby was eschatological pessimism. No longer was the church marching triumphant through the world, and in fact the church was the problem. It was corrupt and beyond saving.
What drove him was an antipathy to the idea of the church ushering in a “golden age,” something he saw as a secularized perversion of the gospel. The church was a heavenly entity, and it was Israel that would bring heaven to earth in due course. That all would happen only after things got increasingly worse and the church raptured from earth in the great tribulation. Then Christ would return with his people and reign from Jerusalem for a thousand years of peace on earth. That’s skipping over a lot of details, but you get the point. Postmillennialism, therefore, was the enemy.
It so happens he picked the right century to begin to discredit the eschatology that had dominated the church for most of its history. As much as Christians experienced suffering over the centuries, they all believed in ultimate victory on this earth. If not, what did Christ come for? Pietism, which started developing in 17th century Lutheran Germany, would eventually lead to an answer: escape. In this view that eventually developed through first and second Great Awakenings, and eventually into dispensationalism and fundamentalism, the purpose of Christianity was to go to heaven when we die, and while we’re here, personal holiness. The effect of the gospel on society became increasingly less important until in the 20th century it became completely irrelevant.
The 19th century saw the full flowering of several forces that would in due course make Christianity, almost, the non-entity it became in the modern world. The Enlightenment had been growing in influence, and it seemed one of its primary goals was to discredit the Bible and Christianity. In that, it was doing a very good job. Along with this growing influence was the scientific revolution which almost seemed to make God unnecessary. Progress became an obsession for Western man, and he seemed to be doing a rather good job of it. Two other forces developed in the church. One was the Pietism I mentioned, which turned the eyes and priorities of Bible believing Christians to heaven and away from earth, and the other was a liberal version of Christianity that embraced the assumptions of the Enlightenment. Throughout the century these two grew increasingly apart, until the early 20th century when the fundamentalist-modernist controversies erupted. You can easily guess which side won.
Various versions of postmillennialism were dominant into the 20th century given the incredible march of science and technology. It seemed man could accomplish anything he set his mind to, and because the Western world was still culturally Christian, the biblical notion of progress was secularized but retained some Christian terminology. That was soon to come crashing down, and along with it the credibility of postmillennialism. I place the beginning of the end with the sinking of RMS Titanic in April 1912. That was a cultural blow akin to a 9/11, but the enemy was an ice berg. Even the name of the great ship implied indestructibility, but destructible it was. A crisis of cultural confidence was on the horizon, but nobody could imagine it would include a war the horror of which was beyond imagination. Then just a decade later a Great Depression, and a decade after that a war far worse than the supposed “war to end all wars.” Amid all this was the rise of communism which would kill tens of millions more, and that golden age postmillennialists were promising looked like a nightmare instead. By the middle of the 20th century postmillennialists were harder to find than a conservative professor in a college humanities department.
The problem with this assessment of postmillennialism as a failure is that it never addresses the biblical case for it. It is always assumed that what it teaches is a notion of the advance of God’s kingdom is only in one direction, forward. It doesn’t seem to occur to the critics that a hundred years in God’s plans proves nothing. It is clear from Scripture that our God is never in a hurry. He, for example, promises Abram that through his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed, and it takes 2,000 years for that offspring to arrive! When he finally arrives, accomplishes his mission, then leaves and promises to return, another 2,000 year has passed and he hasn’t returned yet. So presuming we can interpret God’s intentions from historical events is unwise, not to mention unbiblical. His intentions are perfectly clear from Scripture, and now to me about eschatology. I’d rejected postmillennialism without even knowing anything about it, and now I was going to rectify that. Which brings us to the other perspective.
The Biblical Idea of Conquest Over Sin
The first book I read about postmillennialism was The Millennium by Loraine Boettner. I had gotten it seminary but don’t ever remember reading it. After being born-again into the Late Great Planet Earth hysteria of the late 70s, I wasn’t much interested in eschatology at the time. He introduced to me to the idea that the biblical testimony is one of conquest over sin, not mere conflict with it. And most importantly, this conquest is not just for our personal lives but for the entire world of human beings living in societies. Jesus’s Great Commission was to disciple nations not merely individuals within nations; how had I missed that all these years? My eschatological assumptions and the influence of Pietism.
I previously understood Christianity primarily as a personal affair, and whatever effects it had on society was a spillover from Christians living Christianly. Thankfully, Boettner, began changing my perspective, and that when Jesus said nations, he actually meant nations. The point of the gospel isn’t just that individuals would be saved from their sin and go to heaven when they die, but that Christians within a nation would transform it by proclaiming King Jesus and his authority over every area of life within that nation. Scripture proclaims, “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Prov. 14:34), and, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people he chose for his inheritance” (Ps. 33:12). And what people did He choose for his inheritance? When God chose Abram he specifically promised that through him all peoples, all nations, would be blessed through him. In Psalm 2 we learn the nations will belong to the Messiah:
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.”
What does verse 9 sound like to you? Conquest! Decisive, unequivocal conquest. That, brothers and sisters, is what makes the Great Commission great, not plucking a few souls out of the nations while good and evil duke it out. The Apostles affirm this when Peter preaches the first Christian sermon in Acts 2 and quotes from Psalm 110, a Messianic Psalm and the most quoted and referred to in the New Testament:
“‘The Lord said to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand
35 until I make your enemies
a footstool for your feet.”’
That Psalm too proclaims conquest over the nations:
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.
This crushing and dashing is not for the end of time, as I used to think, butt began when Christ ascended to the right hand of God. A couple quotes from The Millennium explains this perspective well. Quoting my theological hero, B.B. Warfield, he writes:
As emphatically as Paul, John teaches that the earthly history of the Church is not a history merely of conflict with evil, but a conquest over evil: and even more richly than Paul, John teaches that the conquest will be decisive and complete.
And in his own words:
How long the conquest continues before it is crowned with victory—we purposefully use the word “conquest,” rather the “conflict,” for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it—we are not told. . . . This progress is to go on until on this earth we shall see a practical fulfillment of the prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth.”
One of the great biblical metaphors is Israel’s entry into the promised land.
The Great Commission in the Conquest of Canaan
Most Christians are familiar with the story of the spies exploring Canaan prior to the Israelites entering the promised land. Coming out of Egypt, they had made a beeline to the border of the land God prepared them to inhabit. The Lord commanded twelve men, one leader from each tribe, to explore the land of Canaan (Num. 13). It was a scouting mission. The men spent forty days exploring the land before they came back and reported to Moses, Aaron, and all the people what they had found.
They all reported that indeed it was a land flowing with milk and honey just as the Lord promised, but there were significant obstacles to taking the land and enjoying its fruits. They reported that “the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.” This was the report from ten of the twelve men who saw these as insurmountable obstacles to taking the land. The other two didn’t see it that way:
30 Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.”
That’s called positive thinking! But the ten focusing on the obstacles wouldn’t see it that way:
31 But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. 33 We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”
Given sinful human beings tend toward the negative anyway, this didn’t go over well among the people. They decide to rebel against Moses and Aaron, even saying it would have been better for them to die in Egypt or the wilderness than to go into the land and get slaughtered and enslaved by these giants. But the two who saw things differently implored them not to rebel (Num. 14):
6 Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes 7 and said to the entire Israelite assembly, “The land we passed through and explored is exceedingly good. 8 If the Lord is pleased with us, he will lead us into that land, a land flowing with milk and honey, and will give it to us. 9 Only do not rebel against the Lord. And do not be afraid of the people of the land, because we will devour them. Their protection is gone, but the Lord is with us. Do not be afraid of them.”
Of courses they don’t listen, and God says they will spend forty years in the wilderness, one for every day they explored the land. Then He also struck down the ten who caused the people to rebel.
I facetiously called what Caleb and Joshua were doing positive thinking, but it actually has nothing to do with that phrase coming from the modern self-help movement. The question before the Israelites and before every one of us is, will we trust the word and track record of the living God, or our lying eyes. Our eyes, or how we interpret the events in our lives and in the world, will always lie to us unless they are informed by faith, by trust in God’s goodness and love, His promises, power, and plans. The essence of sanctification, of becoming more holy and set apart to God is this struggle of either trusting God, or not. It’s binary as we say nowadays, either/or, we do or we do not. Joshua and Caleb trusted God and his promise, and the ten did not. They were the only two of that entire generation who entered the land of promise.
The obvious message from this story is that our lives should be reflected by Caleb and Joshua, the joyful warriors, not the ten who grumbled and complained about the impossible odds of taking the land God had promised. And unlike where I was most of my Christian life when all I saw was giants, I now believe this perspective applies not only to our sanctification or personal holiness, but to everything in life as far as the curse is found. The entire world is our Canaan, the land of promise the Lord Jesus calls us to conquer in his name, and victory is ours to expect because of God’s promises and commands. In fact, in the gospel the victory is already won. We fight from victory, not to it. It is we who are to slay the giants and to cultivate the land, to be fruitful and multiply for generations to come, to subdue the earth and have dominion over it as Christ extends his reign, God advances His kingdom, and builds His church.
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