I was born-again in the Jesus Revolution era of the late 1970s and it seemed dispensational premillennialism was what every Christian believed about “end times.” I had no reason to question it, so I waited expectantly for the rapture to happen at any time. In due course this “newspaper eschatology” got tiring because the disasters, and the rapture, never happened, and I checked out and got on with real life. I learned about other eschatological positions in seminary, but by that time I was eschatologically burned out and didn’t care anymore. I became an eschatological agnostic, or what I would later come to call it, a pan millennialist, as in, it will all pan out in the end. I thought “end times” stuff in the Bible was a confusing jumble of esoteric references beyond our understanding, so why waste the time.

Then in 2014 a friend told me about a teaching series Kim Riddlebarger did on amillennialism, I listened to it, and was hooked. I was thrilled because I was learning the Bible did indeed have something to say about “end times.” It was exciting, and not least because Kim is a tremendous teacher. If his name is new to you, Kim was the long-time pastor of Christ Reformed Church in Anaheim, California, an original co-host of the White Horse Inn radio program in the 1990s into the 2000s, and a scholar. So I went along my merry amillennial way until August 2022 when much to my surprise I embraced postmillennialism in one day. I wrote a piece in November of that year explaining my “conversion,” and I will quote myself to give you the premise for my interaction with Kim in this one:

I didn’t realize how our theology of “end times” determines how we interpret everything about the times in which we live, whether negatively or positively.

It seems Dr. Riddlebarger doesn’t much like this framing of how we postmillennialists think of eschatology. When I first came across this piece I’ll be responding to, I was not at all surprised.

As an amillennialists I found myself becoming increasingly pessimistic about the world and the Christian’s role in it. In fact, I came to mock my younger self for thinking I could “change the world.” How absurd. Sin isn’t going anywhere until Jesus returns, and we’ll just have to muddle along until Jesus returns and cleans this whole mess up. Then Trump. No, Donald Trump did not persuade me to become a postmillennialist. That was James White in a sermon entitled, “My Journey to Hope for the Future.” I’d become increasingly optimistic since I found Steve Bannon’s War Room after the compromised 2020 election, and was looking for a biblical justification for my optimism. I found that in postmillennialism, as will anyone who believes Jesus didn’t teach us to pray in vain, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Kim, however, believes we have a “rather embarrassing shortage of biblical passages in the New Testament that teach such a view.” He’s aware that the Bible is made up of both a New and Old Testament, and speaking of the Old, Paul tell us, “All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness” (2 Tim. 3:16). I became a postmillennialist specifically because I found it so exegetically grounded, both in the New and Old Testaments.

This assertion comes in the second paragraph of his piece, so you can see we’re not getting off to a good start. The article is from a 2011 issue of Modern Reformation magazine called “Eschatolog y by Ethos.” The magazine comes from the White Horse Inn guys, which includes Michael Horton, who I interacted with in my last post. I learned a lot from them over the years, but slowly realized much of their perspective on the faith wasn’t sitting right with me, especially as Trump came on the scene and contributed to so many of the red pill experiences I’ve had in the last decade.

Before I get started, I want to mention and define the two logical fallacies we’ve seen in the previous two pieces I’ve critiqued, and in this one. One is begging the question which means assuming the premise without arguing for it. The writer will make assertions about something without seeing the need to prove it, just like Kim did about the supposed exegetical problem with postmillennialism. We’re just supposed to agree with him because he asserted it. The other is the straw man fallacy. In this, the writer creates a distorted, exaggerated, incorrect, or invalid version of what the other side believes, and then refutes that and not the actual position. There are a lot of both of these fallacies in this piece, and it’s good to be aware of them as you read.

The Eschatological Optimism/Pessimism Paradigm
Right out of the gate he makes two inaccurate assertions about postmillennialism. I’ve already addressed one, and the second comes shortly after that. He says we determine the “soundness” of our “eschatological position using the optimism/pessimism paradigm.” This follows logically from his first assertion, that postmillennialism isn’t biblically exegetical, so of course he thinks we’re using something other than the Bible to establish it’s “soundness,” and he believes it’s this paradigm. I can assure you it is not. Since he assumes these two things, everything he says from here about postmillennialism will necessarily be inaccurate. He rightly says no Christian wants to be identified as a “pessimist,” and given we know who “wins in the end,” we shouldn’t be. But that doesn’t address how we regard what happens in this “present evil age” (he’s quoting Paul in Gal. 1:4).  Did you catch the assumption in this reference? What Paul means, supposedly, is that evil in this age can’t be overcome because this age is evil, and optimism is not “the best category to use in identifying the essence of one’s eschatology.” Who said it was! Do you see how that works? It’s begging the question at its best.

Mind you, when someone does this, they aren’t intending to be deceptive. They simply believe what they’re saying is so obvious that the readers will of course see what they mean, and most importantly, agree with them. If you are not aware of assumptions and how they work, it’s easy to fall into their trap. If you read through the piece, you’ll see this everywhere, which is the reason it was such a frustrating read for me. I kept saying, “That’s not what we believe!”

Then we get to one of Kim’s fundamental assumptions coloring everything he says. That would be his amillennial eschatology, and a futurist understanding of eschatological passages. There are three options for reading a time frame into these passages. We can see them as happening in the past, preterist, during the course of history, historicist, and happening in the future, futurist. We can see here Kim is in the latter:

Jesus himself speaks of world conditions at the time of his return as being similar to the way things were in the days of Noah (Matt. 24:37-38)—hardly a period in world history characterized by the Christianizing of the nations and the near-universal acceptance of the gospel associated with so-called optimistic forms of eschatology.

He again thinks his readers agree with him without seeing the need to establish that Jesus is talking not about what he in fact said he was talking about, that generation he was speaking to. He makes that clear in verse 34:

Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.

The you in Greek is the second person plural, so all the people he is speaking to, and “this” is the same in any language, a pronoun indicating the lifetime of those people. But to the futurist, Jesus wasn’t speaking about people in the first century and events they would encounter, as he seems to be saying, but about events that will happen far into the future. Preterists, on the other hand, believe Jesus was speaking of events that we know happened in the run-up to AD 70 and the destruction of the Temple. So Kim’s sarcasm about “so-called optimistic forms of eschatology” depends on a view he assumes is true but sees no need to prove, or at least acknowledge others see differently.

In the very next paragraph he presents Straw Man # 1 and a complete distortion of what postmillennialists believe:

Aside from the fact that many contemporary notions of optimism have stronger ties to the Enlightenment than to the New Testament. . . the New Testament’s teaching regarding human depravity (i.e., Eph. 4:17-19) should give us pause not to be too optimistic about what sinful men and women can accomplish in terms of turning the City of Man into a temple of God.

He doesn’t identify who these “contemporary notions of optimism” belong to or what they are, but since they are tied to the Enlightenment they are if not anti-biblical at least not biblically justified. Where these “notions” come from makes them problematic, but also the presumption of Christians thinking they can by their own power transform the products of sinful humanity into something holy. This is a common criticism among critics of postmillennialism and “optimistic eschatology,” that we think we can change things by what we do without the supernatural intervention of the Holy Spirit. Nothing could be further from the truth. The whole point is that we believe God by the power of the Holy Spirit is building His kingdom, extending Christ’s reign on earth, and building his church, and He does that through his body, the church, you and me, because he has no choice. That’s how it works. God has always used fallen, sinful, imperfect people to bring His kingdom to earth. Without God doing the accomplishing our efforts are in vain.

That is what postmillennialists actually believe, and thus our optimism is not in our strength or power, but solely in God and what He can do. We believe the point of Christ coming to earth was to establish his kingdom rule in this fallen world, to defeat the devil, to bind the strong man (Mark 3), and reclaim ground the devil took through lies and deception. It is in fact a reclamation project. What separates postmillennialists from other eschatological perspectives is that we believe Christ began reclaiming what is his, this earth and everything in at, at his first coming. He didn’t come and suffer and die and rise again and ascend to the right hand of God to leave his people to suffer in futility as they fight for righteousness, to “lose down her” while they wait for ultimate victory to come at the end of time and Christ’s return. We believe with Paul about Christ (I Cor. 15):

²⁵ For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶ The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Christ reigning “until” is not him sitting on his throne just observing while the world and sinful man goes on its merry way in sin and misery to destruction. And the word all in this case does mean all, as in each and every one. It’s not merely the enemies in our personal lives, but enemies everywhere in God’s created order. The other positions I reference also believe Christ is reigning, but his rule is limited to Christians and the church. Outside of that, the devil reigns and there isn’t much we can do or accomplish in the “City of Man.”

Why Optimism/Pessimism Is the Apt Description of Modern Eschatology
In the next section of his piece, Kim discusses the rise of optimism versus pessimism in eschatology with the book An Eschatology of Victory by J. Marcellus Kik, published in 1971. Kick comments on a variety of verses that speak to the victory of God in Christ in the messianic kingdom during the millennium (the period between Christ’s ascension and Pentecost and his second coming). Then he says, “We do not glorify God nor his prophetic word by being pessimists and defeatists.” So if postmillennialism is an eschatology of victory, then the other positions are eschatologies of defeat, thus optimism and pessimism, and Kim doesn’t like that.

Unfortunately, he has a distorted perspective of postmillennialism, thinking our optimism is determined by what we can do to the exclusion of the work of the Holy Spirit, but that is a straw man and not our actual position. The big bogeyman for him and people like him is cultural transformation, which he thinks is at best a distraction from the real purpose of Christianity. This, he argues, developed with the publication of two other books after Kik’s, R. J. Rushdoony’s Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) and Greg Bahnsen’s Theonomy in Christian Ethics (1977). With these books the concept of theonomy, or rule by God’s law, made its way into the Reformed conversation. The problem with that word and its variants is that nobody can agree on exactly what it means, and no two people agree on how it should be applied in a nation. Other than that, it’s great! God’s law must be the ultimate foundation of a nation’s laws, but that’s a (huge) conversation for another time, but regarding transformation he says:

With the publication of these volumes, a new form of eschatological optimism made its way into the Reformed bloodstream—one closely tied to the transformation of culture.

On the printout of the article next to this I wrote, “It wasn’t new!” It can only be new to him because of the assumption he makes about the purpose of the gospel, and how Christians prior to the 19^th century understood it. For all of Christian history, the purpose of Christ’s first coming was to transform this fallen world into a less fallen heavenly world. Bring heaven, as Jesus taught us to pray, to earth, God’s kingdom come, His will be done. Of course that is going to affect everything, from politics and governments to families and how they live in their communities, which means everything Christians put their minds and hands and effort into. That’s not just part of a Christian worldview and its influence, but bringing Christ’s kingdom reign over all things, a la Ephesians 1 and his reign at God’s right hand in this age, and the Great Commission (Matt. 28), Christ having all authority in heaven and on earth.

By contrast, for people like Kim, Mike Horton, and Carl Trueman, who I interacted with in my last two posts, their two kingdom Pietistic assumptions limit the extent of the gospel’s influence in the world and is a byproduct not a purpose of faith. Any transformation outside of the walls of the church has nothing to do with its true purposes, which are primarily “spiritual,” and thus about salvation of individuals and their personal holiness. Culture, as we’ve seen from Truman and Horton, is at best a distraction, and at worst a deceptive idol. Here is how Kim sets up his straw man. For “theonomic postmillenarians”:

“Optimistic” Christians are not only to evangelize the world, but they also must engage the surrounding culture with the goal of transforming it. Transformation of culture becomes the church’s mission.

In my printout I circled the word, “the,” as in “the” mission. Something can be part of something without becoming the primary thing, but in his mind it became that. The reason, as I’ve referred to it, is in the next sentence,

Transforming culture is no longer understood to be the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

Exactly. The word incidental means it’s unplanned, so if influencing the culture for Christ because of the gospel is your conviction, you have now, according to Kim, made cultural transformation “the” church’s mission. How can people living together in society be incidental to the purpose of the gospel? And Christians never thought transforming what people do in relationship to each other in society was incidental to the spread of the gospel, but that is what he’s implying Christians have always believed. That is called historical revisionism.

If God decided the ultimate end of things, the wiping out of sin and suffering and death, was to be introduced into the world at Christ’s first coming, how can we not be optimistic? N.T. Wright calls it inaugurated eschatology. In other words, 2000 years ago God formally commenced bringing all the blessings to earth that will be fully realized at Christ’s return. John the Baptist and Jesus introduce his ministry with the exact same words, “The kingdom of God has come near.” And Jesus taught us two parables about the inevitability of the growth and influence of the kingdom, the mustard seed and leaven (Matt. 13). It would be slow and steady exactly because it is God’s kingdom, and he’s the king!

Most premillennialists and amillennialists, to one degree or another, believe sin in “this evil age” will always have the upper hand, and our efforts to combat it will be futile until Christ returns to transform everything in an instant. For them, the growth of the kingdom a la Matthew 13 only happens within the church walls. That’s what the gospel for them is about, transforming and discipling people, not nations, even though Jesus expressly states in Matthew 28 it is the nations, the ethnos, not individuals who are to be discipled. And this gets at their biggest distortion about postmillennialism. They think we believe it is our efforts to change culture that is of primary important, not the message of salvation in Christ. No postmillennialist believes the nations will be discipled without the power of the Holy Spirit working through the gospel in God’s people, and as Paul says in Ephesians 1, in this age:

¹⁹ and his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength ²⁰ he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, ²¹ 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. ²² And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, ²³ which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.

There is much more to say along these lines in Kim’s article for anyone interested in learning more about what postmillennialists don’t believe.