In my previous post about the Postmillennial conference I attended, I remarked how surprised I was by how many families with children there were, and especially the size of the families. That makes total sense when you understand that post millennialism is a positive, optimistic eschatology. Large families and hope for the future go together like, well, love and marriage (Thanks, Frank!). Why would anyone bring children into the world when they think the future offers only misery and suffering? Or if they don’t believe in God. And speaking of misery and suffering, our secular cultural elites embrace and promote a worldview of fear. Everything is a threat, apocalypse just around the corner, dystopian Hollywood fantasies our cultural touchstones. I’m not participating in their pessimism. It’s unfortunate so many Christians do, albeit the catastrophes are of a moral nature.
I must confess that not long ago I was a certified doomer. All I had witnessed for forty years was Christian and conservative cultural and political defeat. Secularism and political liberalism was ascendant everywhere, and all we did was lose. And while the people on our side didn’t appear to want to lose, they seemed to accept it as a foregone conclusion. To them the forces against us, like gale force hurricane winds, are too much to withstand. The tide of history is against us. At best we can defend ourselves and not try to lose too much ground, but hey, if we’re Christians, Jesus is coming back soon, right? I had no idea until recently how eschatology, the study of end times, drives peoples’ view of things, be they religious or secular. Almost all Christians get their pessimism from their negative eschatology.
I’ll never forget the church service where our pastor said those who are focused on the “culture wars” are just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It’s a supreme irony how much Christians complain about the cultural rot all around us, but if we focus too much on “the culture wars” we’re wasting our time. Got it. As an amillennialist, which I was previously, our pastor was doing what they always tend to do, over spiritualize everything. He was preaching on what to him is the most important thing in existence, the spiritual and moral transformation of the individual, as if that is somehow mutually exclusive from Christian cultural engagement. It is not. In fact, everything is spiritual, and participating in the salvation of Christ’s people from their sins (Matt. 1:21) is a required part of Christianizing the culture. Most Christians because of their eschatology, whether they can even articulate what that is or not, have no idea how intimately connected those two things should be. The post-millennial awaking in the church is changing that, and it is a thrilling thing to be a part of.
It may surprise you that until World War I postmillennialism was the majority report in Protestant Christian eschatology. Unfortunately, this was highjacked by a growing Enlightenment secularism infatuation with science (nothing is impossible and everything will get better and better), and liberal Christianity’s focus on man’s moral improvement and the social gospel. These two melded together into what became post-millennialism. That is why I rejected this eschatological position without giving it a moment’s consideration, even though all my theological heroes of the 19th century and earlier embraced it. I thought the actual theological position was the highjacked version; it isn’t! Not even close.
As the lamentable twentieth century progressed, post-millennialism became increasingly discredited in the eyes of most Christians. Not realizing the position had nothing to do with an arrow-like progress through history, they embraced the new eschatological kid on the block, the fundamentally pessimistic dispensational premillennialism, first articulated by John Nelson Darby in the mid-nineteenth century. This speculative eschatology, I’ve heard it described as newspaper eschatology, was what I was born-again into in 1978. This was time of the incredibly popular Late Great Planet Earth (talk about pessimism!) by Hal Lindsey, and The Left Behind series of books that would come later.
I’ve discovered in my short time on this side of the eschatological divide that pre and a-mill Christians believe in large part that suffering is the lot of Christians in this fallen world, and that Satan in some way has the upper hand in the spiritual war that is human existence. The victory Christ won on the cross over sin is a spiritual victory with primarily eternal significance; we are saved to heaven. In this material fallen world, Christians are the losers, and salvation a kind of eternal spiritual fire insurance. Instead of transforming this fallen world with God’s kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven, our desire is to escape it.
Even though this is true of most Christians, they all believe Christ is indeed seated at the right hand of God, and as Paul says in Ephesians 1, is “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” Unfortunately, they do not believe his rule will in any way fundamentally transform life in this world. They miss the implications of his rule for all of creation as God through the Apostle Paul reveals to us in Colossians 1:
19 For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
All things is a lot of things! And notice the implication of the reconciliation of the cross extends to “things on earth.”
Paul is clear: there are material implications of these spiritual realities. The Great Commission Jesus gave the eleven in Matthew 28 is to all nations, in Greek ethnos-ἔθνος, not just all individuals (transformed individuals transform nations!). And they were to first baptize them, and then teach them to obey everything he had commanded them. I challenge any pre or a-mill Christian to carefully go through just the gospels (this “everything” command applies to the rest of the New Testament as well) and tell me that what Jesus commands will not transform and renew cultures and civilizations. It has to
Unfortunately, over the last few hundred years a dualistic Pietism has exerted a huge influence on Evangelical Christianity, with Christians valuing upper story spiritual things over lower story supposedly non-spiritual things. To the contrary, the Bible teaches what the Puritans of old believed, that true Christians are the agents of Christ’s renewing activity for all of life, the family, church, state, business, art, education, every single thing.
In I Corinthians 5:17 Paul points to the salvific transforming power of what Christ accomplished on the cross. He says, “if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new has come.” I always thought of this as just referring to the person who is the new creation, but as new creations we are in a real way renewing this fallen creation because Christ came not just to save us, but the entire world! And we do this with our Lord who reigns over all of it. Paul says in I Corinthians 15:25 and 26, “For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” We are currently living in the “until,” and as his kingdom goes forth, we are his instruments, his body, to put those enemies under his feet. This is why I am optimistic and excited because the victory of God in Christ is guaranteed now and forever!
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