The Postmillennial Problem

I do not normally delve into discussions of biblical prophecy, partly because I find the claims in most (if not all) cases far outweigh the modest biblical evidence presented in support. However, in this entry I will make an exception, though to be honest this is not a comment about biblical prophecy itself as much as it is a comment about the difficulties involved with rigid methodological commitments. I am a fond reader of the American Vision blogs by a fellow named Gary DeMar and his associates, but one aspect of their analysis which irritates me is the way in which their firm commitment to postmillennialism forces them into a preterist view of prophecy that neglects the firm and consistent scriptural record. Since this is a blog, and not a weighty tome of several hundred pages (which would be necessary to analyze the case for different views of biblical prophecy), the analysis will be by necessity somewhat more superficial than I would prefer.

There are basically four ways to view biblical prophecy (especially the book of Revelation, but the same problem is true for the prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and others): preterism, historicism, futurism, and spiritualism. The preterest takes prophecy as applying to the time in which the prophecy was written. For example, Jeremiah would apply to the Babylonian captivity of Judah, Haggai would apply to the rebuidling of the second temple around 520 BC, and Revelation would apply to the first century church. This is the view taken by Gary Demar and many who ascribe to the postmillennialist position (for reasons that will become more clear below). Historicists see prophecy as applying in stages throughout human history. This view, with regards to Revelation 2 and 3 (perhaps the most notable example of this strain of prophetic view) would ascribe various eras in the NT church according to the letters to the seven churches, and some have even (with considerable excellence) used this view with regards to the OT as well. Futurists see prophecy as primarily about the end-times (which are usually just around the corner in their view). Spiritualists see prophecy as involving different believers or different types of believers in any time, and make no historical commitment about the fulfillment of various scriptures. For example, a spiritualist would see the seven letters of Revelation 2 and 3 as referring to different types of believers.

Now, I am of the belief that the Bible is big enough for all of these views to be true. To use Revelation as an example, I believe John the Apostle was writing to contemporary believers, to eras of the OT and NT spanning thousands of years of human history, to faithful in the end time, as well as to individual believers, congregations, and even religious organizations as a whole whose spiritual profiles match those of one church or another. To view only one view as true, and to view evidence bolstering one particular perspective as meaning the disproving and refutation of another perspective is to engage in bad-logic, a false dilemma of either/or when both/and is the correct and proper answer. The Bible was written for people in a specific time and place, with certain historical and social knowledge and in a form designed to reach people in a specific time (this accounts for the fact that the NT Epistles are written in the general form of first century letters, and why the Ten Commandments are organized like a Hittite suzereignity-vassal treaty, as well as why the Psalms often resemble Ugaritic hymns minus the pagan trappings, why the Proverbs resemble Egyptian wisdom writing, and so on). This does not, however, diminish the equally important fact that the Bible was written for people of all times and places as a revelation to mankind so that we can orient our lives according to the will of God. The laws of God are eternally applicable (though in ways we may not always recognize) and reflect the unchanging and unchangable character of our Creator God. We neglect these laws (however big or small, however famous or obscure) at our peril. Indeed, we may honestly through our hands up in the air and wonder how on earth we are supposed to obey some laws (say, for example, the law about tassels), even as we recognize that God had a point with the law that remains valid today, even as we struggle to understand what that point was.

For the most part, Gary Demar and his associates understand this, as they are members of the Theonomic movement, which posits that a godly society must live under God's laws (all of them, even the civil laws) and not rely on God's grace to rid ourselves of the requirements of obedience. To this end, I would support them. From what I understand of the Theonomy movement (which is admittedly not as much as I'd like to), I agree with their aims and approach, and find them similar if not identical to the thoughts of Ron Dart in his Law & Covenant book, which I find to be an excellent and authoritative examination of the applicability of covenants to our time. However, the commitment to postmillennialism is a serious problem, as it involves a substantial neglect of scripture. It should also be noted that a firm commitment to premillennialism (at least in most of its forms) shares a similar neglect of scripture that has equally serious consequences, and both "solutions" are flip sides of the same coin.

Postmillennialism posits that Christ will return after a millennium established by mankind through accordance with God's laws that overturns the consequences of the fall of man in Eden. In this view, righteousness will spread throughout society ever-more progressively until the world is so filled with obedience to God's law that sin is vanquished and mankind will live in peace and harmony and then Christ returns to establish his kingdom on earth. This appeals to Gary Demar (and others of like mind, especially among Catholic scholars in political science, where I first became familiar with this view, like Harry Jaffa) who consider their work to educate mankind on their proper obedience to God, and the role of the United States as bringing liberty to a world enslaved by tradition, and the role of the Catholic Church (or Christianity in general) as the church victorious becoming more active and more powerful as time goes on in an essentially millennial and extremely optimistic light. It is this optimism, incidentally, that allows them to remain active and avoid despairing in a world that looks pretty dark and depressing (and this optimism is its most righteous and most redeeming feature).

Pre-millennialism, by contrast, is extremely pessimistic about the world's future, and frequently believes that things are so bad in the world today that Christ's return is imminent because mankind is on the verge of absolute ruin. Pre-millennialists often can be found trying to calculate the return of Jesus Christ (against the commands of Jesus Christ, who said 'no man shall no the day or the hour' of his return, something often neglected by would be prophets), and can often be found making various claims about raptures and places of safety based on rather slim biblical evidence and a very healthy dose of speculation that may or may not come to pass. In general, pre-millennialism often discourages any kind of action that could postpone the return of Chist, including any meaningful effort to arrest our civilization's and our nation's alarming slide to ruin and perdition. Indeed, pre-millennialism often itself serves as a recipe for passivity and the misguided belief that God will do everything and so mankind needs to do nothing, in contrast to the equally deluded belief by post-millennialists that mankind's efforts (admittedly of God-led and Holy Spirit-endowed people) are sufficient to bring about the Millennial paradise on earth.

I happen to be a pre-millennialist myself, though not of a passive strain, and I find there to be a great tension between my belief that mankind is on the fast train to hell in a handbasket as well as my belief that I must do whatever is in my (very) limited power to arrest that trend. Indeed, I find this tension to be present quite frequently in the Bible. I think of Amos, for example, sent to preach about Israel's destruction and the social injustices (mirrored, intriguingly enough, in our own society) present in a people of superficial religious and 'spiritual' values but insufficiently deep commitment to God's law and its application in their lives and society (a situation alarmingly like that in the USA at present). I think of Jeremiah, called to preach to a hostile and unwelcoming and unrepenant society trusting in foreign alliances and full of moral decay and a government that was set on the separation of church and state (at least by eliminating religious leaders who criticized the politics of the day). I think of John, persecuted and exiled by the Roman government of his time for refusing to worship the emperor as a god and instead preaching that all men are accountable to God (something our political and religious and business leaders seem to forget sometimes). Their call was to action, and to involvement, even though their mission was unsuccessful. They did not passively wait for God to deliver them in a rapture, and neither did they believe that their preaching would lead to a national revival, as much as they would have liked that, to be sure. Instead, they avoided either extreme and felt the tension that seems to be essential for development of godly character, tension that would destroy us if not for the protection and mercy of God Himself.

That view, surprisingly enough, puts me in the rather delicate and strange position of agreeing with the actions of those who, like those at American Vision and other organizations, seek to write books and engage people in recognizing our nation's (and indeed, Christianity's) lost virtues while avoiding the passive copouts like rapture or dispensationalism, even while I disagree with their approach and consider their prophetic knowledge to be extremely lacking on account of their firm (and unwarrented) commitment to a preterist view of scripture (to the exclusion of other views) and a post-millenialist prophetic framework that denies the whole of biblical history (where calamity purges the unrighteous, where human institutions crumble under the weight of human fraility and Satanic corruption, and where God delivers a righteous and small remnant to start again). We will see, in the end, who is right.