Yesterday we posted about dispensationalism, a theology that has deeply influenced American evangelicalism, including its political proclivities. Lutheran that I am, I find the dispensational view of Scripture to be shockingly wrong. (See Pastor Bryan Wolfmueller’s critique of dispensationalism.)
And yet, I argue that the influence of dispensationalism on evangelicals’ political views have been pretty mild, pretty much in accord with mainline conservatism. Though the dispensationalist influence continues, even on evangelicals who do not hold to that theology, a far more radical view has come into vogue.
Whereas dispensationalist pre-millennialists believe that Christ will return before his mysterious thousand-year reign on earth (Revelation 20), the post-millennialists believe that He will return after those thousand years.
You may be thinking, so what? Revelation is famously obscure, so does it really matter how you interpret a single detail that will likely take place far into the future?
It matters because post-millennialists believe that the church will bring on this millennium, that the saints–having evangelized the world and created the perfect Christian society–will rule on earth for a thousand years. And then Jesus will come back.
Post-millennialism has a much longer pedigree that pre-millennial dispensationalism. Its first formal affirmation can be found in the Savoy Declaration of 1658, a Reformed congregationalist confession. Some trace the view to Calvin, but this is strongly disputed, but a particularly violent form of postmillennialism can definitely be found in Thomas Müntzer, the mastermind behind the Peasants’ Revolt. “He thought the role of the elect was to purge evil from the world in order to hasten the second coming of Christ,” according to the Concordia Historical Institute. He expected that many would resist these reforms and that this new order needed to be instituted forcibly.”
Post-millennialism came back in force during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The evident progress in the world inspired both the secular “Progressive Movement” and mainline Protestants. The accomplishments of science, technology, and democracy seemed to herald an impending utopia. This seemed to accord with post-millennial theology. This was a major inspiration for the social gospel. Instead of fixating on the otherworldly gospel of bringing people into the Kingdom of God after they die, Christians should be working to build the Kingdom of God on earth. And then Jesus will return, if only metaphorically. So taught the liberal theologians and ministers who were anxious to put the old supernatural doctrines behind them. So these churches focused on social reform, helping the poor, and progressive politics. This is still the major emphasis in most mainline Protestant denominations today.
World War I and then World War II demolished progressive optimism, though liberal denominations kept their this-worldly focus. The post-war period was when many conservative Protestants, reacting against theological liberalism, turned to premillennial dispensationalism. That theology accorded with the pessimism of the period, and the Cold War fears of totalitarian, international Communism made it easy to imagine the rule of Antichrist, and the prospect of secular “end times” brought on by nuclear war made Armageddon seem very real.
Those fears subsided somewhat by the 1960s and 1970s, but Christians had new concerns: the sexual revolution, abortion, homosexuality, drugs, and what seemed like a wholesale repudiation of “family values” in favor of a neo-pagan counter-culture. Now many Christians saw their task as “taking back America.” A new version of post-millennialism took shape.
An Armenian-American Calvinist named R. J. Rushdoony embraced post-millennialism and formulated an ideology that would apply Biblical law to earthly government. Advocates of his Christian Reconstructionism, sometimes called Theonomy, include Greg Bahnsen and Gary North.
Douglas Wilson is in this camp, as a Reformed postmillennialist, though he distinguishes his views from those of the Reconstructionists, as such.
On the other end of the theological spectrum from Calvinists are the Pentecostalists of the New Apostolic Reformation. One of its founders, C. Peter Wagner, described that movement this way:
Our theological bedrock is what has been known as Dominion Theology. This means that our divine mandate is to do whatever is necessary, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to retake the dominion of God’s creation which Adam forfeited to Satan in the Garden of Eden. It is nothing less than seeing God’s kingdom coming and His will being done here on earth as it is in heaven.
This will happen as Christians take over in the “Seven Mountains” of society: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.
It is good to exert a Christian influence in society. Some of these folks have had a positive influence in the homeschooling and classical education movements. Their activism in the political and cultural spheres–particularly in pro-life and family issues–should be appreciated.
We Lutherans are often a part of such reform movements, but our motivation must be to support God’s temporal kingdom by opposing evil and by doing what is right, and to live out our Christian vocations by loving our neighbors in the God-given estates of family, church, and state. NOT to seize earthly power, rule the world, and reign for a thousand years, so as to cause Christ to return. As Jesus explained to Pilate, ““My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
We must remain cynical about the very possibility of sinful human beings establishing a utopia of any kind. A church that rules can only preside over a religion of law. There is no social gospel, either of the left, or the right. There is only one gospel, the good news of Christ crucified for sinners, to forgive their sins and bring them into the everlasting Kingdom of Heaven. When Christ will return, no one knows–even Jesus didn’t know–and it will be at the Father’s own timing (Matthew 24:36). When He does, the dead will rise, and a New Heaven and a New Earth will be created for us to live in forever.
In 19th century America, millennialism of both the premillennial and the postmillennial varieties were rampant, and they drew in many Lutherans. This issue, called the “chiliastic [Greek for 1,000] controversy” was a point of debate and division in the various Lutheran bodies of that time. One of the founders of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod was expelled for his post-millennialism, a point of contention too between the LCMS and the Buffalo and Iowa Synods, which considered millennialism to be an “open question.”
Lutherans are “amillennial,” rejecting pre-millennialism, post-millennialism, and the whole earthly-kingdom mindset that accompanies such theologies. They have to in order to be Lutheran. According to the Augsburg Confession on Christ’s Return for Judgment,
Our churches also condemn those who are spreading certain Jewish opinions, that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed. (Article XVII. 5)
“Jewish opinions” refers to the expectation that the Messiah would establish an earthly kingdom, a view that was revived by some Jewish converts in the early church and by Müntzer in the Peasant Revolt, and by later millennialists to the present day.
In the words of the Brief Statement of the Doctrinal Position of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod,
We reject the whole of Millennialism, since it not only contradicts Scripture, but also engenders a false conception of the kingdom of Christ, turns the hope of Christians upon earthly goals, 1 Cor. 15:19; Col. 3:2, and leads them to look upon the Bible as an obscure book.
Illustration: Thomas Müntzer via Rijksmuseum – http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.175487, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151249186
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