I recently read The Puritan Hope by Ian H. Murray, and we can sure use a lot more Puritan hope in the church today. In it he describes how the Puritans of the 16th through the 18th centuries had a passion for seeing the Great Commission fulfilled in due course because of their efforts. They did not believe the point of preaching the gospel and seeing God save people was so they can merely go to heaven when they die, as is so prevalent today. Their vision was more this-worldly, more transformational of this fallen world, as I pray would become ours. The favorite verse repeated consistently in their writing and preaching was Habakkuk 2:14:
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
And they believed this would happen on this earth, and not only when Christ returned at the end of time. I will address this fascinating verse and prophet below because I believe he has much to teach us in our day.
None of the Puritans were under any illusion this would happen in their lifetimes, but saw themselves as standing upon the word of God in an unending chain of God’s covenant faithfulness to His people. They were also not under any illusion this would be easy, or that the odds were in their favor. They did something we seem to have difficulty with today; they lived by faith not by sight. If God promised ultimate victory in the gospel, that was going to happen no matter what it looked like at the moment.
This was not necessarily new with the Puritans. All through church history, Christians saw their role in the world as transformational and not escapist, as unfortunately too many modern Christians do. For them Christianity wasn’t a fire drill to rescue people from a burning building. This other worldly mentality is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of Christianity as we’ll discuss. Even the monks of the Middle Ages believed they were carrying on Christian knowledge and traditions to the next generations and to the world. And though life, in the famous words of Thomas Hobbes was “nasty, brutish and short,” Christians were invested in this world. In fact, after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was Irish monks inspired by St. Patrick who saved all of the Christian and pagan learning that had previously flourished but was now disappearing because the heathens had destroyed the civilized Roman world.
In the last couple of years one of my favorite metaphors speaks to what should be common among Christians, a multi-generational vision of the faith. As I often say, we are building cathedrals we will never worship in. Can you imagine a church doing a building campaign telling the parishioners they should give generously because the church will be finished in 200 years? That was the mentality of the Puritans, and the Christians who went before them. Why is it not ours? And it is not because we’re modern Americans who want it now, fast food, microwaves and all that. It’s much more profound than that, and a bit of history is in order to find out why.
Pietism and The Great Awakening
I’m not a big fan of Pietism, nor should anyone else be, and if we knew our history we would know why. The Reformation was a heady religious phenomenon with intellectuals leading the way, which by the 17th century had come to be known as scholasticism. For some there came to be a negative connotation associated with the term, and scholastics were considered as dry, cerebral scholars who missed the emotional aspects of Christianity. Germany had become mostly Lutheran for obvious reasons, and those who pushed back against the church’s perceived stress on doctrine and theology over Christian living came to be called Pietists. They began to push the Lutheran church toward a more personal faith, and in due course it’s influence spread throughout Europe into every Protestant Christian tradition, including the Puritans making their way to the New World.
It wasn’t until the 18th century and the amazing ministry of the amazing John Wesley that Pietism started to become the default understanding of the Christian faith. Wesley spent only two years in America (1733-1735), but it changed the course of Protestant Evangelical Christian history. On the harrowing voyage over, Wesley encountered Moravians (modern day Czech Republic) whose passionate personal faith was foreign to him. After a terrible trip back to England, Wesley had what we would later come to call a born-again or conversion experience. He also met one of the most influential men in Christian and Western history upon his return, the great evangelist George Whitfield. Shortly after their meeting, Whitfield went to America where Wesley had failed so miserably, in the state of Georgia. And now you know, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story.
In due course through Jonathan Edwards, Whitfield, and Wesley, and by the power of God’s Holy Spirit, there came a Great Awakening. For our purposes, it was this period of time where the idea of a personal conversion experience made its way into popular Protestant Christianity. We might ask, what’s wrong with that. Nothing per se, but fallen sinful human beings always seem to take good things and turn them into ultimate things. In this case, faith became primarily about a person’s subjective emotional experiences, and not about objective biblical and gospel truth. Both are required for true faith, but the pendulum had swung in the opposite direction from scholasticism, and it would never swing back, at least as far as Evangelical Protestant Christianity in general. The Second Great Awakening in the 19th century established a pietistic personalized subjective faith as the default in Evangelicalism, which in the early 20th century came to be called fundamentalism, the faith I was born-again into in the fall of 1978.
I didn’t know this at the time, but this dominant version of Evangelical faith had certain unique historically determined traits. In addition to being more subjective and turned inward, it was anti-theological, ahistorical, and anti-intellectual, as I learned when I was introduced to Reformed theology in early 1984. This was also a time when dispensationalism was hugely popular, with Hal Lindsey’s 1970 book The Late Great Planet Earth selling a zillion copies. Even though the catastrophes never bring the end, people still believe the premise: things are getting worse and will until Jesus comes back to save the day and rescue us from doom. Sadly, what this “end times” perspective does is inculcate a persistent pessimism into Christians so doom and gloom are the order of the day. When we say eschatology matters this is why, positive or negative; how we view the end will determine how we interpret the present.
It’s All About the Kingdom of God
Puritans, by contrast, even though living in much more challenging times, were anything but doom and gloom. They were gritty realists, but believed in God’s covenant promises to advance His kingdom in this world, thus the consistent affirmation of Habakkuk 2:14. Prior to embracing postmillennialism, I believed the fulfillment of this verse would only happen in the consummated kingdom when Christ returned. Considering my eschatological perspective I could not think otherwise, given both pre and a-mill see sin having the upper hand in this world. I believed that. Now I have more in common with the Puritans because I believe God’s kingdom came at Christ’s first coming, slowly al la the parables of the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13 ) until it fills the entire earth.
Prior to my eschatological awakening, I conflated the kingdom of God and the church, thinking they were one on the same. I’ve written about this here before, so I won’t explain it in detail, but there are 116 references to kingdom in the synoptic gospels, and only three to the church, all in Matthew. Jesus came preaching “the good news of the kingdom” not the good news of the church. The church and the Christians in it are the kingdom builders, bringing that good news, but they go out into the world to build and advance it.
When Jesus taught us to pray, thy kingdom come thy will be done, he meant now, in this world, not waiting for the next. It is an other worldly spiritual kingdom that has material implications in this fallen world. In bringing the kingdom we are pushing back the fall, the curse of sin, here now, to take back territory, so to speak, the devil won in the garden. When the devil confronted Jesus in the wilderness (Matt. 4), the kingdoms of this world were his to give, but Jesus defeated him on the cross and in the resurrection, taking back the world he created from the one whose mission is to destroy it. Now through the church, his called out ones, his body, he is taking back territory lost in the fall, and that means in every area of life, every single square inch of reality.
This Puritan vision, sadly, has been lost on much of the church. As Pietism’s influence developed over time, it wasn’t until the early 19th century that the break between this world and the next happened in the life and ministry of Irishman John Nelson Darby. In the 1830s he developed several theological innovations that were new in the history of the church. One of these was a new type of premillennial eschatology that was especially doom and gloom. He and those he influenced came to believe that Jesus was coming back soon because it was getting so bad, with many predicting dates. People predicting the immanent return of Jesus was nothing new in church history, but this was different. Over time an entire theology of doom was built around it that came to be known in the 20th century as dispensational premillennialism. It is out of Darby and this movement that the idea of a rapture made its way into the Evangelical mind. Even though dispensationalism is no longer taken seriously on a scholarly level as it once was, it is still the eschatology of most Evangelical Christians. That just won’t do.
Habakkuk and the Argument for Optimism
I came to my optimism, as I explain in my recent book Going Back to Find the Way Foward, before my eschatological awakening. It wasn’t until after that when I heard Doug Wilson say these words, “Now you have a theological justification for your optimism.” Bingo! That’s it! This isn’t wishful thinking. Nor is it what much of the 19th century postmillennialism was, a confusion of secular progressivism and liberal Christianity with eschatology. It’s biblical! I think Habakkuk two gives us a hint that it is.
As I was reading The Puritan Hope and seeing the verse, 2:14, quoted so often, I had to look it up and read the context. It had been a while since I’d read Habakkuk. What I found was unexpected, although I should know by now not to be surprised by the elegance of God’s revelation of His truth. As we know, the job of prophet in ancient Israel was a tough one. Speaking God’s truth to people who don’t want to hear it is a risky business, so you see throughout the prophets their lamenting and complaints. How many Christians can relate to Habakkuk’s lament with which he opens up the book:
2 How long, Lord, must I call for help,
but you do not listen?
Or cry out to you, “Violence!”
but you do not save?
3 Why do you make me look at injustice?
Why do you tolerate wrongdoing?
Destruction and violence are before me;
there is strife, and conflict abounds.
4 Therefore the law is paralyzed,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked hem in the righteous,
so that justice is perverted.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. The most common question in human history? Why God? That’s Habakkuk’s struggle, and ours. He knows God is true, that His covenant promises through the Patriarchs to bless Israel and the nations is assured, but as Paul says in Romans 3:4, let God be true and every man a liar. It just doesn’t look good.
Chapter 2 is the Lord’s response to Habakkuk’s complaint, nineteen verses of judgment against the wicked. And right there in the middle of unrelenting negativity is one verse, a sparkling jewel that doesn’t seem to belong in such a messy setting, verse 14. You ask yourself, incredulously, what in the world is that doing there? God doesn’t expand on the vivid picture of this victory of the earth being filled with the knowledge of His glory as the waters cover the sea. But that is a lot of water! And a lot of glory! About 71% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, with the oceans corresponding to about 96.5% of all Earth’s water. But what does this mean, and why did God see fit to put it right in the middle of all the hostility to sinful humanity? That’s the $64,000 question (in today’s dollars that would be over $1.3 million!). Get it right and you’re rich! Metaphorically speaking.
As I said above, I thought this could only be fulfilled at the second coming of Christ, but if you take God’s metaphor seriously, it can’t be. Notice this knowledge doesn’t cover the entire earth. If it were the new heavens and earth, God’s glory would cover the earth entirely, but here it’s not. It will, however, cover the earth as massively as oceans cover the earth, and that is a lot! This means there will be no “golden age” we might mistake for the heavenly city of Revelation 21 coming down out of heaven, but it does mean substantial victory for the kingdom of God and God’s people. It means the Puritans were right, that we must live by faith, by trust in the power and promises of God that the victory is ours not just eternally, but here and now. And this means Jesus is king and ruler now at the right hand of God over every square inch of existence, over everything and every one, whether they acknowledge his lordship or not. It also means to bring our Christian faith and worldview to every single thing we do as well, and yes, including politics and how societies govern themselves.
The question is, will we give in to pessimism living by sight, or trust God and His promised victory in Christ regardless of the circumstances or the news of the day. The last three verses of chapter three that end this short book are a testimony to trust, to living by faith not sight. They’ve brought tears to my eyes more than onces.
16 I heard and my heart pounded,
my lips quivered at the sound;
decay crept into my bones,
and my legs trembled.
Yet I will wait patiently for the day of calamity
to come on the nation invading us.
17 Though the fig tree does not bud
and there are no grapes on the vines,
though the olive crop fails
and the fields produce no food,
though there are no sheep in the pen
and no cattle in the stalls,
18 yet I will rejoice in the Lord,
I will be joyful in God my Savior.
19 The Sovereign Lord is my strength;
he makes my feet like the feet of a deer
he enables me to tread on the heights.
That is trust, and the trust we’re called to in Christ because we may not get to worship in the cathedral we’re building. To me the power of verse 14 of chapter two is that it tells us the judgment of God is not an end in itself, just a way for God to avenge his holiness and dispense justice. It is rather a means to lead many to repentance because until it gets really bad, people tend to be willfully blind. All the stuff happening around us that makes us shake our head is happening for a reason, and it is as I argue in my book, to bring a Great Awakening, and for that I daily pray.
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