Postmillennial Tent Revivals
Postmillennial eschatology is a direct contact sport eschatology. It’s not flag football; it’s the result of a baby created by rugby and the Constantinian religion.
One of the joys of speaking loudly around here is seeing some fine china broken in real-time. What is that thing broken and replaced? The thing broken is a variation of pessimistic eschatology, and it is being replaced with some garden variety good news. In some circles, they call it postmillennialism. Mind you, I am not so concerned about the loyalty to the systematic category as I am with the biblical impetus behind it.
Seeing folks going through that theological transformation and sending me notes about it pleases me. It is amazing to plant seeds and see them bear fruit much later. God seems to work like that on many occasions.
Postmil Revivals
We are reaching a stage of massive theological conversions, and I have alluded to some of these factors before. Still, the postmil conversion is a fruitful blossoming of many seeds planted long ago. I have been harping on the postmil “C” chord for a really long time, and I think postmil is beginning to see a resurgence. The fruitfulness of Canon Plus and Canon Press has accelerated the postmillennial machine. We receive regular visitors at our church who say they were looking for a CREC congregation after reading Douglas Wilson or James B. Jordan on eschatology.
The other element behind these stories is the ecclesiastical behavior that has taken over the world these past few years. I will go so far as to say that the churches who have been pushing against government tyranny and sundry silliness have postmil bones. Now, lots of other non-postmil flocks have come alongside our efforts or later decided to peek behind the curtain, but the reality is that the majority of pastors I know who chose to fight the tide named one of their kids or their dogs, B.B. Warfield.
This happens not because dispensationalists are gnostic pirates but because theology and ideas matter. A theology that urges the Christian population to cave in cannot be one that says, “Jesus shall reign where’r the sun doth his successive journeys run!” It simply can’t!
Postmil For Dummies
Now, yes, there are peoples of all eschatological stripes who act inconsistently with their theologies and opine like disciples of John Murray, but by and large, attitudes of reconciliation with government officials eager to steal your liberty didn’t come from postmil reformers. They came from those who believed and affirmed that the church is a spiritual institution concerned with things of heaven. They were too sophisticated, but deep inside, they sang J. Vernon McGee’s chant: “If the ship is sinking, why polish the brass!”
Postmillennial eschatology is a direct contact sport eschatology. It’s not flag football; it’s the result of a baby created by rugby and the Constantinian religion. It’s real. It’s fleshly. It’s in your face. And wherever it goes, it carries three central affirmations:
First, it affirms that the Christian faith is rooted in the proto-evangelium (Gen. 3:15). It believes that the first Gospel preached was a Gospel that de-throned disciples of the Serpent and moved forward on the offense against religious and political tyrants (II Cor. 10:5). The seed of the woman shall crush the head of the serpent in tangible ways, which necessitates the confrontation of institutions and systems that do not harmonize with the kingdom of heaven.
Second, it affirms the centrality of the Cultural and Great Commissions (Gen. 1:26-28; Matt. 28:18-20). Postmil is not an eschatology of guesses; it’s an eschatology of certainty. We don’t walk around wondering whether the kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven; we affirm the kingdom shall come on earth as it is in heaven in history and time. Christ shall return to receive a glorified bride, not a defeated bride. The great feast is a glorious feast of victorious proclamations (Rev. 7:12). What God commands shall be fulfilled, and there are no nuances to that.
Finally, it affirms a bodily sacrificial life before the watching world (Rom. 12:1-2). The certainty of postmil eschatology is not naive about suffering and pain. In fact, it triumphs through our suffering and pain. It sees the sacrifice of the Church as a sacrifice towards something, a symphonic movement reaching its finale. It moves through sacrificial acts of worship first on the first day of the week (Acts 20:7) and then throughout the rest of time (I Cor. 10:31).
Postmillennialism breaks the fine china of the spiritualized/escapist church and calls her to take up the sword in one hand and the shovel in the other (Neh. 4:18). That means we will protect our right to worship the Triune God, work as unto the Lord, and strive with all our hearts to ensure that our children and our children’s children seek the good of the city until that day.
Notations
Doug Wilson’s work “American Milk and Honey” is another stellar and popular-level introduction to a complex topic. If my definition of good scholarship is to be adopted, then Wilson falls squarely in the middle. As a student of John Frame, I argue that good scholarship takes itself lightly while never losing track of its main objective.
Everyone seems to have some opinion about fixing the crisis in the Middle East, but no one wants to get to the root of the problem. The root is the historical context deeply embedded in religious fervor mixed with a profoundly theological understanding of the land.
Wilson sets out to lay a history of the mess of the Middle East. He does it with standard wit and the capacity to summarize big arguments into bite-sized truth pretzels. Among them is the historical record that in 1978, as Egypt embraced a new regime, Israel “gave the Sinai Peninsula (along with its oil) back to Egypt… in exchange for a statement of Israel’s right to exist as a nation.” (33). Furthermore, it is the reality that while some may accuse non-dispensationalists like Wilson and myself of anti-semitism, still, we should still seek to exercise our theological muscles to ensure that genuine antisemitism does not prevail in our world (40). And, Wilson argues, make no mistake that the anti-joos lobbyists come dressed in sheep’s clothing praying the rosary.
It's good to be back and see that the world acted just splendidly without my insights. I have used seasons like Lent to read and write more to a limited group. My Substack account has filled that void, and I want you to subscribe so you can get all the Friday goodies.
I suspect the world will be headed toward a more decentralized writing platform, allowing writers to use their gifts without much censorship. Substack has been wonderful for giving readers a sense of my journey in travel, writing, and projects.
I also spent much time this season talking about my new book. Books like mine have a one-month momentum that needs to be absorbed. I tried to use that short season to do 15 podcast interviews, including a talk at New Saint Andrews College's Sword and Shovel Bookstore. The evening was beautiful and filled with delightful conversations and book signings—my gratitude to Adam Walter and the Swait clan for all the organization.
Beyond that it has been great to hear of churches buying copies for Book studies. That was one of my reasons for writing a book on a familiar text. I wanted folks to see the armor of God in the context of priestly warfare, which shocks many out of their interpretive comfort zones. The argument is compelling and has been persuasive to various audiences. In some ways, I am following the argument of many of my mentors (James B. Jordan and Peter Leithart) and making adequate theological interpretations rooted in reworking the Jewish world in Paul’s Gentile universe. After all, my case is that Paul is a Jewish theologian who has seen the risen Jesus and now can’t help but see his old world in light of his new world. Or, as I argue in the book, Paul is decidedly speaking his first language wherever he goes. He brings his Hebrew school books to all his encounters.
Those who have seen my work as a typological overreach have their concerns, and I respect them. But I attempted to build the armor through priestly patterns, patterns that are overwhelmingly present throughout the Scriptures. I have run away from mystical and esoteric interpretations, choosing the Scriptures to speak its own language with its raw simplicity.
I have further argued that Paul was not a bored prisoner staring into a Roman soldier and building his metaphor but richly active, imaginatively using the categories from which he built his entire pastoral theology (and if he did write Hebrews, the pattern becomes even more striking).
I may not have convinced everyone that there is something to consider in the priestly theme, but I have hopefully moved the ball in the right direction.
Christ is Risen!
Uriesou Brito
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