When adopting a hermeneutical framework for reading the Bible, the standard evangelical method is to try and understand what the original author was attempting to communicate to the original audience. When you do that, the only viable method of interpreting eschatological passages is the method known as partial preterism. Partial because we do not believe everything in the Bible has already been fulfilled, but when looking at the subject objectively, it is clear that the majority of its future-oriented texts have already been fulfilled. 

If you have been following along with our more recent episodes, you will know that we have been in a mini-series in the book of Acts, looking at all the eschatological passages within. This is also part of a larger macro-series on the end-times that began in the book of Malachi, crossed the intertestamental gap and looked at the eschatology of John the Baptist, then plunged into the eschatology of Jesus, traversing critical texts in Matthew, as well as the tremendous eschatological prophecy found in the Olivet discourse. Today is our thirty-fourth episode dealing with eschatology.
With that, you may be wondering, out of 84 total episodes of the PRODCAST, why would we devote 34 episodes to eschatology? That question is easily answered. Because your eschatology will dictate the way you engage with culture. To say that differently, what you believe about the destination of human history will shape your thoughts about its direction. If you believe the world is basically barreling over a cliff’s edge, going from bad to worse, ready to implode at a moment’s notice, then you will either try and save as many people as you can before the collapse or you will huddle away in your bunker until the commander returns to rescue you. You will not be interested in fighting any losing battles. You will not put energy and effort into preserving anything or building anything because what moron would waste their time arranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship? 
No, if that is the destination we are all heading in the eschaton, then you will aim all of your efforts toward making as many converts as you can before the imminent rapture, and you will leave the time-consuming things like making disciples and building the next Christendom to fall by the wayside. And that would be the right approach if the world were moments away from catastrophe. 
But, what if, on the other hand, you believe that history is His story of great victory and that over the last two thousand years, He has been building His Church, His Kingdom has been growing, and it will continue to grow until His reign of peace covers the earth with His glory and covenant blessings? If you believe that, and there are good reasons for doing so, then you would not bury your head in the proverbial sand. You would not frantically seek to make a litany of shallow converts. Instead, you would build churches that preach the Gospel and plant new churches that make disciples. You would run like you are running the Iron Man instead of the 60-meter sprint. You, my friend, will get up and build! 
This is especially important to me and central to the mission of this show because I began this as a way of invigorating Christians. The tagline that I say before every episode, “to prod the sheep and beat the wolf,” is my admission that the Church in America has been in a state of gross lethargy, and we need to wake up, shake things up, and get on with building the Kingdom we have been commanded to build wherever God has called us to live. Yet, because many Churches and many within the Church have been in full-scale retreat mode, hiding from this culture for the last several generations instead of engaging it, three things have inevitably occurred:

A legion of savage wolves have multiplied like rabbits without fear of reprisal. This is because weak-kneed pastors, shallow churches, and uninvolved Christians have allowed the hounds of hell to proliferate unchecked in both the Church and throughout this world.
Because the Church has overwhelmingly abandoned culture, society around us has decayed like a year-old Ribeye, left out on the counter, and now stinks to high heaven.
Because the Church has focused so much of its energy on making converts instead of disciples, the vast majority of Christians today are spiritually immature and incapable of even lifting the sword of truth, much less wielding it in battle. 

This is why a salty little show like this exists, and this is why we focus on a topic like eschatology: because we want to see the Church get prodded into faithful activity and to see the wolves and the enemies of God beaten into submission. But to do that, we need to be focused on the right kind of eschatology. 
The Kind of Eschatology Matters
There is no debate on whether Jesus wants us to be engaged with culture. When He told us to make disciples of all the nations (Matthew 28:19), He told us to be about transforming them. That work will continue until all the nations bow their knee to King Jesus and joyfully obey Him. Further, by calling us salt (Matthew 5:13-16), Jesus intends on His Church to be the agent of preservation in a culture that would decay and rot without us. In the same way that meat would be packed with salt before the dawn of refrigeration, the nations of this earth must be packed full of Christians who will act for the preservation and renewal of the world instead of hiding from it. “This is why Jesus called us to be lights that shine in crooked generations (Philippians 2:14-16), like a lampstand (Revelation 2:5), set upon a hilltop for all the world to see (Matthew 5:14).
Yet, as we have said before, certain eschatological schools of thought invigorate our cultural engagement and others (the wrong ones), which stifle it. While a full-scale treatment of this is impossible here, I want to break down the primary schools of eschatological thinking into two camps so that you will know where this show comes from and why we are so jolly. We need to talk about eschatology in two particular ways to do this. First, when does the millennium happen? And when will Jesus’ return occur in relation to that millennium? And second, what hermeneutical framework should we use to interpret all of the eschatological passages in the Bible? Let us begin with the millennium. 
The Millennial Challenge
If you are still getting familiar with these categories, the millennial Kingdom is the one-thousand-year reign that John speaks of in Revelation 20. It is Jesus’ reign over the whole earth, where the entire planet comes under the banner of His Lordship when Satan is bound for a thousand years, and Jesus’ Kingdom of peace reigns among the nations without opposition. Concerning this passage, there are 3 primary schools of thought.  
Premillennialism
The first is called premillennialism, which holds that Jesus will return in the future to this earth (rapturing His Church out of it and crushing Antichrist’s 7-year reign of terror) before He sets up His literal and physical one thousand-year millennial Kingdom. According to the premillennialists, Jesus is not reigning at the right hand of God as Earth’s current King but is instead sitting at the right hand of God, awaiting the time when He can return and set up His millennial Kingdom. This punts the reign of Christ into the uncertain future and allows premillennials to view the world pessimistically since they believe it is still under the authority and control of the devil. While it is essential to recognize that various streams and differences exist within the premillennial camp (i.e., dispensationalism, historical premillennialism, etc.), this represents a basic schema. 
Amillennialism
The second primary millennial position is called amillennialism, which holds that Jesus is in His reign right now. Unlike premillennialism, He is not waiting for it to occur in the future; he is ruling currently in heaven. And, just as the prefix “pre” tells us something about what premillenials believe, the “a” prefix says something about what amillennialists think as well. Generally speaking, when “a” is applied to the front of a word, it is done so as negation. For instance, a theist believes in the possibility of a god, whereas an Atheist does not. The “a” in atheist negates the term theist.
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If Christianity, the bedrock on which the natural law tradition was built, is destroyed, then the rule of law is destroyed alongside it. This permits the triumph of the will and the rule by arbitrary decree to take its place out of the ashes of that destruction.  

When discussing the American founding, it is common to hear that the Founding Fathers were not Christian and not influenced by Christian ideas. This is patently untrue.
Yet the anti-Christian scholarship of the past century, especially the past 50 years, has “downplayed or denied the degree to which the animating ideas of the American founding were deeply indebted to the Christian natural law tradition.”
In their new book, “The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics,” published by Cambridge University Press, professors Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer return our attention to the fact that Christian ideas permeated the revolutionary generation.
Scholars have recently reemphasized the American founding’s reliance on political theology and classical virtue. Many books have challenged the de-theologizing of the American founding. Thomas Kidd’s biography of Thomas Jefferson, published by Yale University Press, restored the theological spirit of his political outlook. “First Principles,” a bestseller by Thomas Ricks, recovered the debt our Founding Fathers had to Greek and Roman thought.
Cooper and Dyer join this important and growing list of authors who returned to source material from the founding generation, which modernist scholars like to deliberately misinterpret or simply ignore. Beyond the Christian impact on the founding generation, Cooper and Dyer also reveal how the classical political tradition influenced the American Revolution. These two spirits of political theory were the common inheritance of colonial America.
“When John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail,” the authors wrote, “to report news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the British North American colonists were not yet living in our secular age.”
Classical vs. Modern Political Philosophy
What is the classical political tradition and what distinguishes it from the modern political tradition?
Classical political philosophy starts with the assertion that humans have a nature that reason can discover, that freely and knowingly choosing to live in accordance with that nature offers freedom, and that the rule of law accords with man’s nature and freedom. The Anglo-American common law tradition was premised on the classical humanism of the Greeks and Romans and the Christian natural law tradition.
Modern political philosophy starts with the power of the will and the assertion that humans are creatures of desire who act on bodily impulses. To limit this will and its right to act upon its desires is tantamount to slavery.
Cooper and Dyer explain it in even simpler terms: “The classical political tradition begins with the rule of law, but the characteristic doctrine of modern political philosophy and the modern state is the arbitrary rule of will.”
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When we prioritize the least successful students over their more well-prepared peers, we invariably lower standards for all students. Educators focus on gaming the system to produce “high” grades and graduation rates and in the process, everyone loses sight of why learning matters in the first place. Schools only work when teachers believe in the value of their lessons and students feel responsible for their own learning. In the absence of those vital components, everyone is less likely to succeed.

A few years ago, the school district where I teach became enamored with a book called The One Thing by real estate mogul Gary Keller. Keller argued that, rather than spreading out effort over many different objectives, the secret to success was to identify and focus on the one thing that mattered most for achieving your goal. Taken with this insight, our superintendent asked every principal in the district to determine the “One Thing” that would be the unifying focus of their campus efforts. When teachers returned from summer break that year, we learned about this new initiative and the specific cause that our principal had selected for us to rally around.
Our high school wasn’t going to focus on helping students develop better problem-solving skills, increasing student engagement, or even on aligning our curriculums more closely to the demands of standardized tests. In fact, we weren’t going to focus on anything that would be relevant to the majority of our students. Our One Thing was to improve the educational outcomes of our “critical students”—the lowest achieving five percent who had not passed standardized tests and were most at risk of not graduating. In a school with over 2,000 students, we were told that improving the scores of our bottom 100 was what mattered most.
While a bit more blunt than is typical, this was only stating a hidden reality of which most educators were already aware. Public education, today, is far more concerned with raising the grades and test scores of its lowest achieving students than with pushing all students towards a higher standard. Of course, schools would love everyone to learn more and they are eager to highlight any academic achievement that they can use to create the illusion of educational excellence. But in a world of finite resources, the priorities are quite clear. Whenever a school has to choose, they will sacrifice the benefit of the many to focus on the least successful few.
Many would argue that this is how it should be—that schools should embrace the Rawlsian ethic and direct the majority of their attention to supporting the least advantaged, whose environments or talents make them less likely to become successful students. Such sentiments are particularly common in education, where I’ve often heard teachers make the case that: Good students don’t really need you. They will do well no matter what. The students who really need you are the ones who don’t care about school. As progressive as this sounds, it speaks to a culture that does not actually believe that the subjects they teach matter.
Considering the needs of each student, why should so much emphasis be placed on teaching algebra to a high school student who still can’t multiply single-digit numbers in his head. By high school, most “critical students” are years behind their peers. They often don’t know the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship, where China is relative to Australia, or that “I” is supposed to be capitalized. Barring an enormous and unlikely investment of energy, they will not enter a field that requires academic competency. This is not to say that motivated students should not have access to remediation. But the vast majority of critical students would benefit far more from getting work experience in a specific trade than from prolonging this painful educational charade. It seems foolish for a teacher to pay less attention to students who are likely to need higher-level academic skills in their future, so that he can pull uninterested students aside to quiz them on the parts of the cell.
By contrast, most other students need to be challenged to go beyond superficial task work. But, the higher-order skills that high schools should be focused on developing require a level of attention, rigor, and skilled feedback that remediation-focused teachers are not able to offer. Consequently, the majority of high school graduates today are not adequately prepared. A 2010 report revealed that of the 23 member universities in the California State University system, all of which demand a college-preparatory curriculum completed with at least a B average, “68 percent of the 50,000 entering freshmen at CSU campuses require remediation in English/language arts, math, or both.” And if these same standards were applied by the California Community Colleges, “their remediation rates would exceed 80 percent.”
The report (which comes from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education and the Southern Regional Education Board) goes on to argue that most other states would have similar findings. Indeed, according to former professor and United States Assistant Secretary of Education, Chester E. Finn Jr.:
For years now, the College Board, the American College Testing program, and, more recently, the National Assessment of Educational Progress have supplied data indicating that the percentage of 12th graders (or 12th-grade test-takers) who are truly ready for college coursework is somewhere below 40.
None of this is likely to surprise Americans. According to 2018 Gallup polls, only three percent of Americans thought high school graduates were “very well prepared for college” and only five percent thought they were “very well prepared for work.” Most people sense that our education system is falling short, yet we struggle to identify many of the most obvious causes and their solutions. Most notably, by placing a disproportionate emphasis on the education of less capable students, schools downgrade the education of everyone else. Teachers lower their standards and their role shifts from academic and developmental experts to that of activity-organizers. Mainstream students skate by without ever cultivating a capacity for logical analysis, synthesis, written argument, or any of the competencies that will be most valuable after high school. Even Advanced Placement courses are often forced to lower their standards, as many parents realize that the mainstream track is inadequate and decide to push their kids into classes they aren’t prepared for.
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