That seems like a simple question. Every Christian knows what the gospel is, right? Jesus died for our sins, we believe it and are saved. As Paul says in Romans 10:
9 If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved.
We’re now reconciled to God and we’ll spend eternity with Him instead of separated from Him in hell. We’re no longer enemies of God, hostile to Him and dead in our sins, but reconciled children of God. That is “the good news,” and indeed it is. However, that is not all the news there is.
The modern Evangelical’s view of the gospel is extremely reductionistic, meaning our tendency is to reduce it to something narrow and simple, as if it applied only to our salvation from sin and our own relationship with Jesus. While, we think, it might have an impact on the wider world, our society and culture, that’s a spillover from out transformed personal lives. For most Christians, cultural and societal transformation is not the purpose of the gospel. Any other impact it has on the world is nice and all, but it’s beside the point, and really a distraction from the main thing. I believe God begs to differ.
The gospel in fact was like a spiritual Big Bang. An infinitely dense point of spiritual light and blessing that 2,000 years ago exploded when Jesus rose from the dead, ascended to the right hand of God, and sent his Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The gospel is an entirely new spiritual universe transforming this material world because Jesus’s mission was to transform it, as he himself tells us in John 3:
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
The idea of the world is pretty expansive in English, but the Greek word for it, our word cosmos, is more so. According to Strong’s, it is “properly, an “ordered system” (like the universe, creation); the world.” We as modern, individualistic Westerners tend to equate world with whosoever believes, and leave it at that. God loves people, he came to save them from their sin, that’s it. But that’s not all he was saying. The Apostle Paul gives us a picture of the expansive and all-encompassing nature of Christ’s mission, of the influence of the kingdom of God in the world, in 2 Corinthians 5:17, another verse Christians individualize but shouldn’t. The NIV has the best translation:
17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
Yes, the new creation refers back to the pronoun anyone, but there is no pronoun directly attached to “new creation,” no “he is a new creation.” Strong’s is again helpful with the adjective attached to creation: “properly, new in quality (innovation), fresh in development or opportunity – because “not found exactly like this before.” Christ accomplished redemption, redeemed not only his people (Matt. 1:21), but when it was applied by the Holy Spirit, the end goal, the telos in Greek or purpose, was the entirety of creation, the cosmos.
An Expansive and Transformational Gospel
There is a reason most Christians miss the world transformational vision of the mission of God in Christ—Pietism. I’ve written about it here many times, and I go into it in great depth in my forthcoming book, so I won’t do that here. Briefly, I’m speaking of a German Lutheran movement that started in the 17th century and eventually came to dominate modern Evangelical Christianity. I always have to clarify what I mean for those who might think I mean Christian piety, as in a committed devotional relationship with God through Christ in daily Bible reading and prayer. Pietism, while it often includes that, is not the same as that kind of piety. It is, rather, an over spiritualized, other worldly orientation of the Christian life. The primarily personal nature of the faith I mentioned above is part of it.
If we’re to challenge this narrow, constricted vision of the Christian life, we must ask ourselves an important question: What makes the Great Commission great? Is it merely that individuals will be saved so when they die they can go to heaven? Or is it more than that? I will argue, as I do in my upcoming book, that what makes the Great Commission great is that it’s a mandate of dominion from King Jesus, as Christians being salt and light was never meant to be limited to us and our personal holiness or just the church.
If you read those parables in Matthew 5, Jesus says we “are the salt of the earth,” and “the light of the world.” By using earth and world Jesus is surely extending the scope and extent of the gospel’s influence through us to everything we do as creatures made in his image, to everything defining us as human beings and the cultures and societies we create. Yet for the last two hundred years the scope and extent of God’s kingdom influence has been a point of contention among Christians, most limiting it in the various ways I’ve mentioned.
Christians tend to see the gospel and soteriology, our salvation from sin, as the end of God’s plan for man, instead of the means to an end. Andrew Sandlin in his book, A Postmillennial Primer: Basics of Optimistic Eschatology, explains the fuller orbed biblical view of God’s redemptive plans:
The actual end is the subordination of all things to God through Christ by means of the earthly dominion of the godly. God’s purpose is not chiefly to save man and fit him for heaven, but to restore him to covenant-keeping submission and his calling as God’s dominion agents in the earth. Heaven on earth in eternity is the blissful culmination of this task faithfully prosecuted by the redeemed.
The gospel restores everything it touches because it is fundamentally a restoration project. The point of the gospel is new creation, in that the old creation, fallen and distorted, becomes paradise restored. David Chilton in his book, Paradise Restored, describes the difference between an eschatology of victory and one of defeat
We must not look upon the world with eyes that see only the Curse; we must look with the eyes of faith, enlightened by God’s word to see the world as the arena of His triumph. History does not end with the Wilderness. World history will be, on a massive scale, that of Sodom: first a Garden, lovely and fruitful; then corrupted into a Wilderness of Death through sin; finally restored by God’s grace to its former Edenic abundance.
Throughout Isaiah we see intimations of such restoration, as in Isaiah 35:
The desert and the parched land will be glad;
the wilderness will rejoice and blossom.
Like the rose, 2 it will burst into bloom;
it will rejoice greatly and shout for joy.
The glory of Lebanon will be given to it,
the splendor of Carmel and Sharon;
they will see the glory of the Lord,
the splendor of our God.
For most of my Christian life I saw this restoration as reserved for the new heavens and earth after Christ returned, but postmillennialism turned my gaze earthward.
Per the Lord’s Prayer, we are to pray and work for, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The entire earth is our mission field. Our eschatological assumptions will determine how we view the impact of God’s kingdom coming on earth. These assumptions will further determine how we interpret history, as well as the present and future, including our own lives. Prior to embracing postmillennialism, 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. In a phrase from the name of the YouTube channel I’m associated with—eschatology matters. This was put well by Greg Bahnsen’s son, David:
The cause of an optimistic eschatology has never been one of enlightening one’s view of the future as much as informing their activity in the present.
He’s speaking specifically of postmillennialism, but the point he makes about eschatology informing a person’s “activity in the present” applies to all eschatological views, even those claiming to be irreligious, like secularists. How we view the end matters in the present. For the secular, they can only look forward to an eschatology of doom, as the multitude of dystopian movies demonstrate. Christians, however, shouldn’t embrace an eschatology of doom; unfortunately most do.
As Christians there is much we agree on about what happens after Christ returns. We also agree that part of the Great Commission is to bring the gospel throughout the earth to all peoples, and build Christ’s church. What separates us are the implications of the gospel and Great Commission for this fallen world and the peoples and their cultures and their societies, prior to Christ’s return.
An Optimistic Eschatology for Gospel Transformation
Over the last several years I’ve become convinced an optimistic eschatology is necessary if Christianity is again going to influence the direction of America and the Western world, and the entire world Jesus died for. As Chilton rightly observes:
The fact is that you will not work for the transformation of society if you don’t believe society can be transformed. You will not try to build a Christian civilization if you do not believe that a Christian civilization is possible.
Or if it’s even important, which most Christians don’t think it is. Again, it is the Pietism. If we are to have a meaningful impact as salt and light in the larger culture and nation, we have to build with a reasonable expectation of success; postmillennialism gives us that whereas the other eschatological options do not.
The most important thing I’ve learned and what changed my perspective from negative to positive, from pessimistic to optimistic, is that there is biblical warrant for doing so. The most surprising thing to me about postmillennialism when I first learned about it, is that the case is completely exegetical, and thoroughly biblical. In other words, the case is made solely from Scripture. This depends, of course, on which eschatological glasses you have on. Two different sets of glasses give us two completely different interpretations of a passage. Take the passage from Isaiah 35 I quoted above. I used to believe the desert would only bloom after Christ returned. Prior to my eschatological awakening, I believed sin and the devil had the upper hand in this fallen world. After I realized that Christ’s first coming made the blooming possible now. Christ’s righteousness, the Holy Spirit working in and through us, and his authority exercised from the right hand of God now makes it possible to push back sin and evil “far as the curse is found.”
Too many Christians view the purpose of the gospel more as a means of escape from this horrible world, than as a means of transforming this into a blessed world. As I think about this specifically, how I convince others of my eschatological optimism, I go back to the very beginning and God’s covenant promises that started His reclamation project, His reclaiming the earth back from Satan. As soon as the fall happened and the curse declared, God told Satan that the woman’s seed or offspring would strike or crush his head. Then after the Lord scattered the people over the whole earth and confused their languages, he called one man, Abram, through whom he would bless all peoples on earth. The offspring of the woman, Christ, would eventually diminish Satan’s power on earth, and would come in the form of blessing.
The beauty of Christianity is that it isn’t just personally transformational but transformational in every way, societal, technological, relational, material, etc. It effects every single thing human beings put their minds and efforts to in the light of God’s word, the gospel, and His law, for our good and His glory. These blessings will eventually leak out from God’s people to bless society. And we are never under the illusion these blessings are solely due to us, but they can’t happen without us either. Jordan Peterson, one of the most important Christian apologists of the twenty-first century even though his Christianity isn’t fully formed as we would understand it, sees Christianity as essential to bringing order out of the natural chaos of life. He’s studied evil probably more than any person alive, and he sees Christianity as the answer. As Christians we should oblige him by bringing our faith into every nook and cranny of life and “infect” the people around us with a positive vision for the future.
Lorraine Boettner puts the postmillennial perspective in its definitive terms:
We hold that Christ is not merely the potential victor, but the actual victor over sin. During the interadvental reign He is steadily putting into effect the victory that He has won, gradually overcoming the forces of evil, until all His enemies shall have been made the footstool of His feet (Acts 2:35).
He also speaks of purposefully using “the word ‘conquest,’ rather than ‘conflict,’ for Christ is not merely striving against evil, but progressively overcoming it.” We are all familiar with the passage from Matthew 16:18 when Jesus says He will build His church, “and the gates of hell will not overcome it.” I never realized I was interpreting this incorrectly all my Christian life. I thought Satan and his minions and the evil they perpetuate were on the offensive, and it was Christians and the church who are on the defensive. That is exactly backward! Gates in the ancient world were defensive mechanisms. It is the church enabled by God the Holy Spirit that is on the offensive—Satan and his kingdom don’t stand a chance!
I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to be on the winning team! That is the gospel, winning and victory over sin on this earth, in this life. Quoting Psalm 8 and referring to Psalm 110, the most quoted Psalm in the New Testament, Paul says in I Corinthians 1:
25 For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be destroyed is death.
That process of subduing his enemies, sin, disease, chaos, disorder, and eventually death, started at his first advent. That is the good news, that is the gospel we proclaim for this age, and the age to come.
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