The Bright Hope of Defeatism
Premillennialism, by placing the inauguration of Christ’s Kingdom in the future, encourages the Church to keep circling the runway in a perpetual holding pattern until Jesus returns. This has led to all kinds of ecclesial passivity where the Church’s mission is not something we do today but rather an appeal for divine intervention. It is like a child waiting for the parent to clean the room for them. Jesus did not commission us to such a petulant posture.
Introduction
Hello everyone, and welcome back to our new series called A Practical Postmillennialism, where we are talking about the end-times doctrine called postmillennialism. We will define that term and see a Biblical case for that doctrine in the weeks ahead. Still, in these early episodes of this series, we need to look at the other eschatological views and show how they are not only deficient but actually contribute to a defeatist mindset that has hampered the Church in the modern world, caused her to retreat from culture, expecting an imminent return of Christ who will come and rescue a bruised and beaten up church. This inglorious view has done much to harm the bride of Christ and immobilize her for mission. So before we get to the Biblical view of the end-times and the good news that postmillennialism puts forward, we have to wade through the dirty waters of eschatological defeatism, identifying it for what it is, and flushing it back to where it belongs.
In our first blog, called Defeating Defeatism, we tackled the most egregious of the end-times perspectives, a relative newcomer among the positions on eschatology, which is called Dispensationalism. There, it was shown how Dispensationalism is a theological system of fragmentation, slicing the Bible up into seven arbitrary and totally made-up epochs, which have little to nothing to do with each other. Like ripping a chapter out of seven different books, combining them together, and trying to create a cohesive story, Dispensationalism produces only incoherence and (as a viewpoint) inspires no one to do anything. This does not mean all Dispensationalists are lazy couch potatoes who are merely eeking their way through life. But, it does mean that whenever dispensationalists do any Kingdom work, evangelizing and making disciples, building and planting churches, they are not operating consistently within their own frame of reference. If the sky is always falling, there is no time to build. Which means whenever they do build, they are betraying their own view.
Furthermore, by destroying the unity of Scripture, assigning the Church to an arbitrary era that is doomed to fail, and by punting all of the promises of Jesus’ Kingdom to an indeterminate epoch we will never see in the future, proponents of this view naturally withdraw from culture, because frankly, what’s the point? We will never win; we will only lose, and our only hope is to be slingshotted out of here in an unbiblical rapture. The consequences of this action are devastating. While they have removed themselves from culture, society has supremely decayed, becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for the prophecy pundits. Instead of seeing the clear and obvious truth that society has worsened because the Church has failed to engage it (as the salt and light as Jesus commanded), dispensationalists continue to avoid culture. It continues to worsen because of that, and their fever to escape the mess they have created ever increases. Like a fussy child who uses meltdowns to manipulate the parents, refusing to clean his room because it has gone from bad to worse, knowing mom will eventually step in and perform the rescue mission, dispensationalists frantically adopt increasing levels of mania over society and the future, much like the prophets of Baal, attempting to get Christ to come and take them home. This “winning” view has produced a landscape of losers, and it is high time for us to discard it.
In our second episode, I invited renowned Bible teacher and scholar Gary Demar onto the PRODCAST to help us understand how, Biblically, this view does not work. For over an hour, Gary took us through one passage after another, proving how a rigid commitment to futurism does not account for what we see in the text. He showed us how wars and rumors of wars, famines, earthquakes, the abomination of desolation, the great tribulation, and others are not signs of a future tribulation period under a European Antichrist. But actual historical events that happened in the lead up to the destruction of Jerusalem. And as I said, Gary Demar took on one passage after another for over an hour, completely and totally undermining that view. I highly recommend you go and check out that episode.
Today, we will look at the more reasonable older sister of Dispensationalism, Historic Premillennialism. By Premillennialism, I mean that Jesus will return pre (which means before) He institutes His millennial reign. Unlike Amillennialism and Postmillennialism, which see Jesus currently reigning on His throne in heaven, Historic Premillennials await Christ’s future and physical reign on earth, which will last for a thousand calendar years. To properly examine this view and to show how it is deficient, I will need to move quickly, painting with broad strokes, and I will not be able to be exhaustive. My goal is to show that this view is not Biblical and actually produces anti-Biblical attitudes in the Church, which has led to the mess we are currently in in this country. That’s right, I believe Premillennialism (both Historic Premillennialism and its red-headed Dispensational heifer) is one of the chief reasons that society is murdering a million babies a year, why men are trying to become women, why our political elites are embracing Marxism and running our country into moral chaos, and so much more. How can I say that? Because when a view so successfully undermines the Church’s mission, causing her to retreat, to stop making disciples, to stop advancing, and to cease holding culture accountable, should we be surprised when pagans run into all kinds of rank and disgusting errors? If you leave raw hamburger meat out on the counter it putrifies. That is what meat does when it is not preserved in the refrigerator. In the same way, Premillennialism left society to hide in the eschatological basement, waiting for her rapture. Sadly, while the Church has been waiting for fifty years at the rapture bus top, hands in pockets, doing little else, the meat of American culture has turned a slimy green, and the moral maggots have crept in and totally infested it.
I hope this series, in some small way, can be a part of changing that. With that, let us begin our time today by describing the history of Historic Premillennialism.
The History of Premillennialism
The Ancient View
Among the end-times positions, two schools of thought go back to the ancient and apostolic Church. After the canon of Scripture was closed, all of the apostles died, and as the early Church began to spread in a hostile world, there began to be prominent and influential Christian thinkers who weighed in on a variety of theological subjects to help the Church become robust in her thinking. Unfortunately for us, eschatology was one of those doctrines that took significantly more time to systematize, which means we only have scant statements and underdeveloped postulations of what the earliest Christians living in the first three centuries believed about the end-times. But, of our information, two basic views rise to the fore.
The first view, set forth most prominently by Augustine of Hippo, is that when Christ ascended into heaven, He sat down on His throne to reign. As proponents of this view attested, he was not waiting for a future period where He would return to reign for a thousand years. He is reigning now, which made the thousand years described in Revelation 20 a non-literal number of years. To be clear, this group believed Jesus was reigning from the moment He ascended into heaven and would continue to reign over His Kingdom, the Church, until He was finished building His Kingdom.
The other view, represented in the ancient Church, is that Jesus would return at some point in the future to reign physically on earth for a thousand years. This end-times view shows up in fragmentary form quite early in the writings of church fathers (such as Papias, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian) and was laid out most fully by a man named Irenaeus of Lyons in his work called Against Heresies in 180 AD. This view, bolstered by a commitment to a literalistic hermeneutic, tried to explain Old Testament prophecies of worldwide peace, prosperity, and global justice as a future, physical period on earth that would commence after the Messiah’s return.
In fact, this is where postmillennialism and Premillennialism agree, seeing those Old Testament prophecies as coming physically to the earth under the reign of Christ. Postmillennialists understand these things coming gradually and increasingly upon the earth through the Church as Jesus reigns victoriously over her in heaven. The Premillennialists, however, see the current age we are living in collapsing in fantastic defeat, the Church being unsuccessful in her task to disciple the nations, which will prompt Jesus to return to a world filled with evil, to put it away, to be crowned as its new King, to reign bodily on earth for a thousand years, and near the end of that rule, a group of people will rebel against Him, and He will win a final battle. Premillennialists understand the reign of Christ to be a future event. Postmillennials understand the reign of Christ as happening now.
The Middle Ages
As the Ancient Church began to gain ground in the Roman world, Premillennial thought also began to wane. With later apostolic fathers (such as Origen) promoting an allegorical view of the millennium, Augustine of Hippo’s towering theological influence, and Christianity becoming the official religion of the Roman empire, Premillennialism faded from the majority opinion to the minority report in the 4th century AD.
Augustine, in particular, was influential in this transition. He argued that the millennium described in Revelation 20 was not a literal number of years, in the same way, that God does not own the cattle on a literal thousand hills, but on all hills. Instead, according to Augustine, the one thousand years represented the ongoing reign of Christ over His Church. This became the prominent view in the early Roman Catholic Church and remained the majority position in Christendom until the 16th century when a few radical offshoots of the Reformation gravitated back to premillennial thinking. For context, the view that Christ is currently reigning over His Church and not waiting for a future return for that reign to ensue has been the dominant position of Church history, especially between 400 and 1600 AD.
The Modern Era
During the Protestant Reformation, Augustine’s eschatological allegoricalism was a decisive influence upon the magisterial reformers. This meant that the overwhelming majority position on eschatology in the Reformation was that Christ was currently reigning over His Church, not awaiting a physical reign on earth at some point in the distant future. At the same time, a few radicalized offshoots of the Reformation, such as the Mennonites and Anabaptists, departed from the allegorical view of the millennium and began constructing various end times positions. Some groups began returning to premillennial thinking, reinvigorating the discipline in seed form, which the Plymouth brethren would later take up in the 19th century. From this group, we get John Nelson Darby, who became the father of dispensational Premillennialism and is responsible for bringing Premillennialism back into the forefront of Christian eschatological thinking.
Before the Reformation, Premillennialism was mostly unattested for nearly a thousand years of Church history. After the Reformation, it was only slightly reinvigorated through a few Reformation offshoots to become a marginal position in a predominantly Amillennial and Postmillennial world. Yet, by the 19th century, under the influence of John Nelson Darby, Dispensational Premillennialism would explode to become the primary view of eschatology in Evangelical America, still influencing most people’s views on the end-times to this day. This is not a credit to Dispensational Premillennial thinking or how accurately it conceptualizes Scripture. But, it is what happened in the history of its development.
Dispensationalism was always a flawed view and was never really adopted among Reformed churches. Churches that held tightly to the theology of the Reformation and adopted its confessions almost entirely avoided dispensational thinking since it so clearly deviated from covenant theology and a proper hermeneutic for understanding Scripture. This was until George Eldon Ladd, a 20th-century theologian, revived Historic Premillennialism from the ashes of history, giving some Reformed thinkers a possible third option for eschatological schemas, especially among various strains of Baptists.
Unlike Darby, who divided the Bible into arbitrary dispensations, Ladd rightly saw the Bible as one unified redemptive story, seeking to reintegrate it into His theological work. This included reintegrating Israel and the Church, whom Ladd saw as distinct redemptive peoples, yet one under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. He also rejected the rapture-driven escapism of Dispensationalism, adopting instead a posttribulational view of the rapture where the faithful suffer right alongside the pagans in Antichrist’s seven-year reign of terror before Jesus Christ returns. Ladd also correctly identified that the pietism and purely allegorical interpretation among some amillennialists did not do justice to the prophetic promises given in the Old Testament, which describes these events as future realities that will come to pass on earth and not just spiritually in heaven. All these modifications by Ladd and others were improvements and certainly reinvigorated a return to true historic Premillennialism that had been dormant since the second-century days of Ireneaus. Yet, while it was an improvement, the entire system was still built upon an entirely flawed premise.
A Plank in the Eye Called Futurism
We are all products of the world to which we were born. Modern Premillennialism is no different. It was born into a world of German higher critical thinking, the rise of secularism and theological liberalism, and a gamut of academic disciplines seeking to undermine the sanctity and sufficiency of Holy Scripture.
Few places in the Scriptures canon where these attacks were leveled more ferociously than onto the person and work of Jesus Christ. From accusations that He never existed and was a failed messianic upstart to Him being a false prophet who did not come back in the time frame that He had given, secularists were continually attacking the credibility of Jesus more ferociously than piranhas on a hambone. This was not a foolish strategy. If you can invalidate the author and perfecter of the Christian faith, if you can remove the cornerstone from the structure, then you can dismantle the entire structure of our faith.
Of all the places critical scholars aim the barrel of their criticisms most effectively, it was at Jesus’ predictions contained within the Olivet Discourse. If they could show that Jesus was a false prophet, that what He predicted to happen had not come true, then they could dismiss Jesus as one of a legion of gods that were invented by mortal men. In doing that, they could live however they wanted without being held accountable to an absolute sovereign.
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Dead Men Talking – Part 6
Written by David S. Steele |
Sunday, July 2, 2023
May you learn from them, be inspired by them, and be challenged by them. When you run across a new name, dig in and learn something new about one of the great heroes of the Christian faith. But ultimately, my encouragement is this: Follow the dead guys to the cross. The cross is where they want us to go! Dead men are talking.The heroes of church history can rightly inspire us, motivate us, challenge us, and fuel our resolve for living the Christian life. But in the final analysis, these godly people remind us about the power of the gospel, and in so doing, lead us to the cross of Christ. “For in the cross of Christ, as in a splendid theater,” Calvin says, “the incomparable goodness of God is set before the whole world. The glory of God shines, indeed, in all creatures high and below, but never more brightly than in the cross.” Nothing would please the French Reformer more than when followers of Christ stand humbly at the foot of the cross.
Every one of the dead guys we have learned about over the last several days lived a long time ago; a time when everything was different. Cultures were different. Clothing styles were different. Technology was virtually non-existent, at least by our standards. There was no internet, no television or radio. No motor cars or airplanes. Almost everything was different.
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A Resilient Church on the Fringe
The idea is to take an existing church and alter it so that it can be lean, effective, and build owned space. The goals are to make the institutional church cheaper, more agile, and more effective, whilst making the Christian community more resilient in the face of hostility and change.
Strategic Thinking for the Negative World
The church needs to change. I find this hard to accept. I am a rusted-on, curmudgeonly, conservative, traditional Presbyterian. I do not want to change anything. I’m the kind of Presbyterian that thinks Charles Hodge was a bit loose. But even Christians like me, perhaps especially Christians like me, need to face the fact that the church in the post-Christian West needs to rethink how it does things.
This is not a Rob Bell-style call for a watered-down faith nor Brian McLaren-style attempt to cloak liberalism in emergent church “orthodoxy.” You won’t catch me wandering off the reservation on doctrine or even ecclesiology. As I said, I am a curmudgeonly, traditional Presbyterian.
I am talking about how we organize our institutions. We need to rethink at a strategic level how we operate, how we spend money, how we invest in the future of our institutions, and how we create resilient Christian communities. The world of the twentieth century is passing away and the institutional arrangements that have undergirded the church will need to alter in the face of this.
My motives are not theological — hence my distance from Bell, McLaren, and even people like Mike Frost and Alan Hirsch. They imagined an ecclesial revolution from the perspective of either theological liberalism or a sort of Anabaptist primitivism. They were driven by ideals. The emerging and emergent church types believed change was theologically necessary. I do not agree with this.
I believe that change is necessary because of practical and political reality. It may turn out that some of the ideas I outline below will have some positive spin-offs for discipleship and community, some that people like Frost and Hirsch would welcome. Indeed, some of the ideas are needed for that reason, but this is not theologically necessary, nor are my prescriptions driven by high ideals. They are driven by that thing that every anabaptist primitivist despises: lucre.
The Future
I am no prophet. Even worse, I’m a cessationist. But I know that the future won’t look a lot like the past. Here are a few predictions, hopefully, founded upon reasonable suppositions, that undergird my analysis and constructive suggestions:The world as a whole is going to get poorer and more dangerous. To see why this is, read Peter Zeihan’s The End of the World is Just the Beginning. We might differ with some of the details in this book, but the basis of Zeihan’s analysis is demographics, and demographics, as they say, is destiny. Demographics concerning the number of workers, tax-payers, potential soldiers, retirees, and people drawing on their pension funds, are set for the next 20 years. So, too, is the number of deaths. Demographic decline is set to swallow the better part of the world. The economic decline will follow fast. And geopolitical and military chaos will ensue. Which will lead to trade chaos. Which will lead to more economic and military chaos. And so on. Add to this the reality that the United States world police force is going to withdraw from protecting the globalist economic trade order with its navy, and it is hard not to be pessimistic. Other outcomes are possible; e.g. during the Black Death, people and communities increased in wealth. But something akin to the scenario Zeihan outlines should be one we plan for.
Churches will decline in numbers and wealth, mainly because of the demographic shift. Boomers are dying. They built, funded, and shaped the cultures of, the Western church. Boomers are the reason the church is the way it is in an aesthetic sense (bad CCM anyone?), but they are also the reason we have so many privately-funded parachurch organizations and Christian education institutions. They are the reason why churches can afford multiple ministry staff. They were rich, they are rich, and they are … going to take that wealth to the grave. It will be gone before we know it, all of the greyheads that currently make up 50% or more of our churches will disappear, and even if they were all replaced numerically, there is almost no way that their wealth will be replaced. We have peaked, and it is downhill from here.
Persecution will increase. This should be obvious, given what the scriptures say about the normal mode of operation for the church. We have had it sweet for a long time, but in the West, that is coming to an end. Even if we recede into a form of out-of-favourism, where no one hates us but everyone ignores us, things will be hard. But if it ends up worse, if we are outlawed, if our schools are outlawed, if we lose tax exemptions for churches, if we are actively ostracised from society, then this will impact churches’ operations at an institutional level and also place a lot of pressure on laypeople.These are the main reasons the Christian church needs to rethink the way it does things. I firmly believe in God’s sovereignty. The Lord reigns, and earth ought to rejoice (Ps. 97:1). Nothing that God plans is thwarted, and there is no event, whether personal or world-historical, that is beyond God’s control (Job 42:2, Matt. 10:29–31). In other words, there is nothing about any of this is out of God’s control, and Christians should not worry.
But we should plan and we should be strategic. And note an important distinctive of what I am doing here: note the lack of theology. My reasoning is pragmatic. We will almost certainly have fewer people, less money, and therefore far fewer resources taken as a whole. Even if we don’t get squeezed by civil governments for more taxes or get the rug pulled some other way, we will have less money. Those darker possibilities need to be prepared for, too. But the even best-case scenario is not a good one, and the plausible scenarios are even worse.
In short, we need to consider changing. The church needs to change to survive and thrive. To use Nassim Taleb’s concept, we need to make our churches antifragile in a world that will despise us and possibly hate us.
Key Ideas for the Church in a Dangerous World
What should we do? How should we respond to this possible, perhaps plausible future? This is where things get uncomfortable. For a Presbyterian who is wedded to traditional denominational structures, theological colleges, and other such niceties of Protestant Christendom, this is hard. However, these prejudices are also a strength, because I am going to posit some models which could work even in traditional denominational structures.
I believe in the Presbyterian polity. You might believe in episcopacy, or something different. You might not really care about church polity. Let me again emphasize that the ideas below are not meant to make you think of (once again) Mike Frost and Anabaptist primitivism. They should make you think of keeping the ecclesial scaffolding you already have but changing the building inside the scaffolding.
To properly understand my prescriptions and ideas, on top of the basic assumptions about the future outlined above, there are two ideas that readers should grasp.Ecclesial institutions will need to be lean.
The church, in its organic form, will need owned space.Put another way, the institutional church will ideally operate with less real estate, whilst the organic church needs more. This may seem contradictory, but there is reason behind this.
An Institutional Church that is Lean
In the first instance, the institutional church is, at this point, a big target for people who hate Christ and his Church. And it has a big target on its back — property. Property makes the church more vulnerable. The church is more vulnerable to being inflexible, to be unwilling to adjust to the environment around her when she is laden with sanctuaries, seminaries, and office buildings. These are blessings when things are going well. These could be blessings when things are not going well.
But my sense is this will not be the case moving forward. They are a target. People who hate God and what Christians stand for can get at us via our property through legal avenues. Who is going to be targeting the church? Well, the same people who are chasing us now. Activists from left-wing groups, but possibly governments as well. This woke revolution is not just going to blow over. This is one reason to make the institutional church leaner.
But there is another one: mission. Buildings can be a vehicle for mission, certainly. But into the next age of the church in the West, I believe they will be a barrier to mission. They will create big legal and financial headaches for an institution that is under siege, and they will burden the church’s mission.
The church in the developing world offers a model. Where there is a high level of difficulty in establishing a local church ministry, churches grow and multiply when the church is lean. Churches grow and multiply when they use a model that is focused on homes and is, in turn, replicable. It is low on staff, low on overheads, and big on house churches with local pastoral leadership. It is a house church which, when it gets too big, plants a further house church with a new leader.
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Last Abortion Business in Mississippi Will Close Down as New Abortion Ban Takes Effect
This is a landmark day for the Pro-Life movement and our entire nation. After staining the moral fabric of our country for nearly 50 years, Roe v. Wade is no more.
The last remaining abortion business in Mississippi will finally close down tomorrow [July 7, 2022] when the state’s new abortion ban officially takes effect.
As LifeNews reported, Mississippi was one of 10 states to ban abortions following the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Thanks to a state judge who denied a request from Mississippi’s last remaining abortion business to stay open, the new ban protecting babies will take effect tomorrow.
In accordance with the provisions governing Section 41-41-45 of the Mississippi Code, Attorney General Lynn Fitch published the required certification to Mississippi’s Administrative Bulletin for what is known as the State’s trigger law. That meant abortions are now banned and babies are legally protected from conception for the first time since 1973. The law protects babies from conception and bans abortions except in the case of a formal charge of rape or for the preservation of the mother’s life.
But the Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion company challenged the ban in a last ditch effort to stay open. Yesterday, Special Chancellor Debbra K. Halford denied its request to block the law while its lawsuit continues.
As a result, the JWHO abortion business will close down tomorrow, according to the Washington Post.
“Without any further action, today will be the last day that Jackson Women’s Health can provide abortion care,” said Hillary Schneller, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights who represents the abortion center.
Robert McDuff, another attorney for the clinic, said that the legal team is considering next steps, including a possible appeal in the coming days, but the clinic will not be able to continue offering services while the case winds its way through the courts.
“As for now, the prospects for reopening the clinic are not very good,” McDuff said.
JWHO claims a 1998 Mississippi Supreme Court opinion, Pro Choice Mississippi v. Fordice, ruled the Mississippi Constitution contains a right to privacy that “includes an implied right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.”
But Halford noted that the judges in that case relied on Roe and Casey for their decision. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned both, neither of those cases are precedent on abortion.
“Since Roe and Casey are no longer the law of the land, reliance upon Fordice will almost certainly not be well founded when pursuing this case at the (Mississippi) Supreme Court,” Halford wrote.
JWHO will now close, babies will be saved, and women will find better alternatives.
Owner Diane Derzis says she plans to reopen the abortion business under the name “The Pink House West” in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where abortions are legal up to birth.
Under Mississippi’s trigger law, Attorney General Lynn Fitch is required to publish her determination (1) that the United States Supreme Court has overruled the decision of Roe v. Wade and (2) that it is reasonably probable that Mississippi’s trigger law would be upheld by the Court as constitutional.
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