I’ve written here and there about how woefully misunderstood postmillennialism is, but I’ve never given it the full blog post treatment. There are deep historical and theological reasons for the typical knee-jerk reaction that will be fascinating to explore given Christians live in profound eschatological tension, the already and the not yet. The question and the debate always has and always will come down to the scope and extent of what N.T. Wright calls inaugurated eschatology. In other words, what will be fully realized at the end broke into our world at Christ’s first coming, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost. The moment the tongues of fire came down on the 120 disciples in that upper room in Jerusalem, the Holy Spirit was unleashed in His redemptive power to bring God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. What does that all mean? What are the practical results in this still fallen world from Christ’s accomplished work? Therein lies the debate.
John Murray, the great Scottish theologian who helped found and for decades taught at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, wrote a book called Redemption Accomplished and Applied, the title of which captures the essence of this debate. He writes primarily about soteriology and the order of salvation, or how we are saved, but salvation is not limited only to our own personal saving from the guilt and penalty of sin. Salvation is much bigger than just us, as we learn from the Apostle Paul in Romans 8:
18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; 21 because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in this hope we were saved.
Our salvation is literally cosmic in scope. That means creation in all its manifestations will be redeemed and renewed, starting with the apex of God’s handiwork, man, who will become fully human through everything it means for him to be a human being. Paradise lost will become paradise restored, slowly but surely in this life, then completely at Christ’s return.
Aristotle in his Politics said man is a political animal, not exactly a biblical way to put it, but yes, human beings are intuitively driven to organize with others in developing societal structures, be it family, church, business, or government. Christ’s redemption is applied to all these spheres, specifically under his kingly rule from the right hand of God. This is why before he ascended to that ultimate position of power in the universe he told his disciples:
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Notice Jesus says all authority to all the nations. One would think given the clarity of Christ’s command, along with the clarity of redemptive history in God’s revelation, the scope and extent of the church’s mission would not be a point of contention, but it is. Jesus even used a Greek word we translate in English as nations, and not a comparable Greek word for individual. His charge was to disciple people groups as corporate entities, not merely as isolated people in their personal lives. This was accepted by all Christians regardless of their eschatology until the Second Great Awakening in the mid-19th century when soul saving became evangelicalism’s raison d’etre, or reason for being. Conservative Protestant Christianity became about saving souls so we can go to heaven when we die and personal holiness. Cultural transformation now became, at best, the incidental fruit of the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth, not as Christ seems to be saying one of its primary purposes. It took a while in the form of fundamentalism in the 20th century for our version of Protestant Christianity to completely turn in on itself. But by the middle of the century Christianity in America had become culturally irrelevant and the Great Commission had changed. The charge had become to save as many as we can from a sinking ship while the world goes to hell in the proverbial handbasket.
How the Enlightenment and Dispensationalism Took Down Postmillennialism
It seems my favorite bogeyman has to make an appearance in all such discussions, and this one is no different. The Enlightenment, a period of Western history starting in the mid-17th century, gave birth to the philosophical concept of rationalism. Man, so it was thought, via his reason could discern all truth without any reference to revelation. This process slowly progressed through the 18th century, but by the late 19th as Friederich Nietzsche said, God was dead and Western intellectual man had killed him. This entire period coincided with the Scientific Revolution and a remarkable increase in knowledge that inspired sinful man’s Babel like tendencies that he could accomplish anything. Given the Western world at the time was known as Christendom, it was inevitable that Enlightenment rationalism would make its way into Christianity.
The first consequence we see develop among Christians in the late 18th century is the heresy of Arianism, a rejection of the Trinity. Ironically, what came to be called Unitarianism grew out of Puritan churches in New England that in due course would come to be known as the mainline churches in the 20th century. The abolition, feminist, and temperance movements were filled with such Unitarians, people who still embraced Christianity but rejected Christ as God. For them, and the liberal Christianity they birthed, Jesus was a great moral teacher and example, but not the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. At the same time as this liberalizing tendency was taking over large parts of more intellectual and activist Christianity, the Second Great Awakening burst onto the cultural scene in response. This revivalist movement was anti-intellectual and anti-theological, and out of which would come dispensationalism. These two streams of Christianity would flow in opposite directions both of which would end up discrediting postmillennialism in the eyes of all Christians.
Into the 1800s Christ’s prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” was something all Christians believed was the mission of the church. Even Monastic movements prior to the Reformation sought to transform this fallen world with the righteousness of Christ, as did the Pietistic movements inspired by them after the Reformation. What united all Christian visions of transformation prior to the 19th century was a dependence on the Spirit of God. These were not Babel building projects of man’s hubris, but God working through His people to crush Satan under their feet (Rom. 16:20). Once orthodox Christianity was thrown under the bus, the spirit of Babel merged with a growing secular confidence that nature itself could be conquered by human ingenuity and will. The “new premillennialism” developed by the Plymouth Brethren and J.N. Darby in Ireland in the 1830s was a response to this secularizing tendency in the church. They saw corruption everywhere, and the convoluted eschatology of dispensationalism was the result.
Largely because of the Enlightenment and the growing secularism it spawned, Christianity encountered a fork in the road in that fateful century. Down one road was a this-world, man-centered hubris, down the other was an other worldly over spiritualized piety of escape. Biblical postmillennialists who affirmed a rigorous orthodoxy would not take either road. They would, however, after World War I, be tarred with the Babel label. The collective insanity of the Western World known as The Great War, the war to end all wars, would cement pessimistic eschatology into the minds of Evangelicals for the rest of the century. Postmillennialism would be discredited as the perversion of unbiblical secular progress, man thinking he could usher in the kingdom of God based on his own efforts and ingenuity. That is exactly what I thought it was until August of 2022. I was actually shocked that a biblical case could be made for an optimistic eschatology.
Optimism or Pessimism: The Parable of the Wheat and The Tares
In addition to postmillennialism having the baggage of being secular progress, critics contend its optimism is biblically unwarranted. I thought so myself. When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 I found over time that it turned me into a pessimist. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, or weeds, Jesus tells of the kingdom being like a man who sowed good seed in his field. An enemy comes and sows weeds among the wheat. Jesus says the weeds should not be pulled up before the harvest lest the wheat gets pulled up with them, so the weeds and the wheat will grow up together until the end.
Both pre- and A-mill see this as the metaphor for life in our fallen world. Sin and righteousness are in constant conflict and in due course the weeds win. Pastor and theologian Kim Riddlebarger, who convinced me initially to embrace amillennialism, puts it this way:
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.
You can see in his comment two of the straw men I discussed above. One is that postmillennialism is a product of the Enlightenment and not Scripture, and the other is that it teaches that we usher in the kingdom of God through human effort. Neither of which resembles the truth in the least.
The conflict of sin and righteousness, good and evil, is what informs the worldview of most Christians, as it used to do with me. If you think this way and simply look at the world in all its misery and suffering, it’s almost impossible not to be a pessimist. If we live by sight and not by faith, we will inevitably see the weeds as the ultimate winners in our fallen world. But, as I found out, if we live by faith it’s a completely different story. Instead of seeing conflict everywhere like two heavy weight fighters pummeling each other for 15 rounds, we can begin to see the struggle in terms of conquest. It is difficult to convey how transformational this shift in perspective was for me. I’ll never forget what I heard Doug Wilson say only a few weeks after I embraced postmillennialism:
Now you have the theological justification for your optimism.
Bingo! I’d already started becoming more optimistic for a variety of reasons, but it had nothing to do with theology. I was looking for a biblical justification for it, and the very last place I thought I’d find it was in postmillennialism.
In my pessimistic phase, when I thought we lose “down here,” I didn’t realize the field into which the weeds are sown is a wheat field. It is a field primarily of wheat, not weeds! In any wheat filed weeds are a nuisance, but when harvest time comes there is always more wheat. I always missed that. I also missed that the next parables Jesus tells are of the mustard seed and leaven (yeast). I’m pretty sure that wasn’t a coincidence, Jesus putting these parables together, and in this order. I believe he did it to give us the context for how to see the parable of the wheat and tares. I’ve written about this in depth, so I won’t do that here, but the parables teach us about the extension and scope of the progress of the gospel. The kingdom of God and Christ’s righteousness will inevitably be like the largest tree in the garden, and the leaven will go through the entire batch of dough. Everything, every single thing, will be impacted, influenced, and transformed by the power of God, far as the curse is found.
The Greatness of the Great Commission
This is the title of a book I recently read by Ken Gentry which raises a question: What makes the Great Commission Great? Is the greatness limited to the salvation and transformation of individual lives and the personal relationships they have? I’ve listened to hundreds of testimonies over the last handful of years, and I hear supernatural greatness in every one of them. Transformed lives are one of the great evidences of the truth of Christianity, but so are transformed civilizations. In the foreword of the book, Gary North puts it well speaking of the grace and restoration made possible in the healing power of the gospel:
Nothing is to be excluded from Christ’s healing: not the family, not the State, not business, not education, and surely not the institutional Church. Salvation is the salve that heals the wounds inflicted by sin; every type of wound from every type of sin.
One could expand his list to include art and architecture, law and entertainment, agriculture, science, and health. The scope of God’s transforming power in Christ is as expansive as God’s creation. This was man’s task, dominion, before the fall, and the gospel calls us to exercise that dominion through the second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-49). That is what I argue makes it great, the discipling of entire nations and everything contained therein. This has only become my perspective, and conviction, since August of 2022.
Prior to that date, to my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed salvation was primarily for saving the souls of individual people, and the real, substantive transformation of the world would have to wait until Christ returns and makes all things right. I believed we should apply a Christian worldview to all of these things, but the basic structure of it would be wheat and tares struggling it out on a level playing field until the end of time. That won’t change until Christ returns; weeds win, I guess.
I came across a perfect example of how I used to think about this from the magazine of my alma mater, Westminster Seminary. The issue is about global missions, and in one of the articles the author states what he sees as the mission of the church of Jesus Christ: “God is calling people to himself out of every nation . . .” Prior to my “conversion” I wouldn’t have given this a second thought, but now my response was, “No, He’s calling us to disciple the nations! To see them transformed by the gospel!” If our mission is calling people “out of” every nation, then we’re not teaching them to obey everything Jesus commanded his disciples.
If we look back through the corridor of time it becomes easier to see the greatness of the Great Commission. And I mean way back in time. Four thousand years ago, God called one heathen man out of all the people on earth, Abram, to create a people for Himself. He promised that all peoples on earth would be blessed through this man. All was darkness until God himself lit this small candle. The history of Israel, from a human perspective, can be described as Thy kingdom stalled on earth, fits and starts, seeming to go nowhere for 2,000(!) years. That’s a long period of futility. After all those years God’s kingdom had made its mark in one little plot of land in a backwater province of the Roman Empire. Then came Jesus of Nazareth, the most unexpected Messiah. The blessing God had promised Abram all those years before was about to break out, only it didn’t look like it, at all. The odds of this fledgling little religious movement within Judaism going anywhere was between slim and none, and the Roman government and Jewish leaders made sure slim had no chance at all. Not only did it go somewhere, but it also eventually came to dominate the civilization that was bent on destroying it.
Now looking back 2,000 years we can see the civilizational power in the Christian message, and it goes well beyond what most Christians consider “spiritual.” A non-Christian historian named Tom Holland wrote a book whose title says it all: Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World. An historian of the ancient world, Holland realized what he believed, how he lived, and how he saw the world, was nothing like the ancient pagans he’d studied for so long. What changed? Jesus of Nazareth! Christianity in what we’ve come to call Christendom changed everything. Specifically, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension. The great 20th century English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge put it in his own inimitable way:
The Man on the Cross dying to ribald shouts and mockery is validated, and seen to have guided and inspired through the Christian centuries all that is most creative and wonderful in human life.
From my new postmillennial perspective, I now see these 2,000 years as the fulfillment of Yahweh’s promise to Abram 4,000 years ago, that all peoples on earth would be blessed through him. As I always say, God is never in a hurry, which is why I think we may have a while to go before the final enemy will be destroyed, death (I Cor. 15:26). Until then Christ “must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (15:25). He will do that by the power of the Holy Spirit through his people, his body, the church. What makes the Great Commission great is that it brings God’s blessing in Christ to everything human beings do, not just their “spiritual” lives. And at the end of the day everything creatures made in God’s image do is spiritual. That is our mission field.
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