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Dear Friends,
Last Friday’s “The Fruit Stand is on Break” elicited a comment from a longtime reader and commenter. “Reepicheep” (whom I don’t think I know, but has a very cool handle!) writes:
I'm still not 100% with you that classical liberalism is a safe haven for serious Christians. It's a blessed resting place in history, but that's about it. It has a host of its own problems, but the silly premodern nostalgia that CNs promulgate is far worse than liberalism. European princes of the 1500s may have been Christian, but too often the CNs in lamenting the Enlightenment which supposedly swept away all of that goodness don't really correct the Enlightenment with God's word, they just adopt the postures of the right wing of the Enlightenment. Antibiblical sophistry with a "right wing" twist.
I thought that was an A+ comment that prompted so many thoughts I didn’t immediately respond. Instead, I let it simmer in the back of my head for a week. It was that one phrase that struck me: “blessed resting place in history, but that’s about it.”
That seemingly off-hand way of putting things actually opens up a whole host of interesting things to think about. What if there is no further “it”? What if “blessed resting place in history” isn’t just a way station, but a destination—one for which we ought to be satisfied and grateful? And one cannot really grapple with that question without considering fundamental questions of eschatology: what are our expectations for human civilization during this “in-between,” “already/not yet” time between Our Lord’s first and second advents (i.e., the “interadvental age”)?
I do not intend to write a theological treatise on the differences between postmillennialism and amillennialism. I might end up doing it anyway. (I am leaving all forms of Premillennialism to the side because I simply find them much more hermeneutically dubious.) “Postmillennialism” is the optimistic belief that the interadvental age will see the relentless advance of the kingdom of God and, prior to Christ’s return, an essentially Christianized world. The kingdom will advance like yeast and eventually transform the whole lump of dough. For a very good short primer, see here. At its (cartoon caricature) margins it can become a kind of utopianism, an expectation of a “golden age” where sin is veritably eradicated and lions really will lie down with lambs prior to the coming age. Amillennialism, to put it mildly, does not share this optimism; rather, it views the interadvental age as one of constant struggle between the Kingdom of God and the world with little expectation that the former will visibly overcome the latter. At its (cartoon caricature) margins, it downright expects the inverse: the people of God are destined to be a small and beleaguered minority and the sinful world will always have the upper hand. By “cartoon caricature” I do not mean to suggest that there aren’t some people who really do believe the extreme versions; I am suggesting that those extremes are caricatures—exaggerated and unnecessary versions of each view.
My unpopular opinion (unpopular because Reformed people just love to fight) is that there is far less daylight between these views than is commonly supposed. At their best, postmillennialism and amillennialism share the same basic eschatological structure—that is, the biblical one. Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension marks the inauguration of his kingdom; the “end time” reign of God has broken into the world in the here-and-now. The kingdom is “at hand” and the entire period between his first and second coming is characterized as “the last days.” The so-called “millennium” is the entire interadvental age. The kingdom that was inaugurated at the first coming will be consummated (“completed,” “perfected”) at Christ’s second coming. Note: this is postmillennialism at its best; the version in which the “millennium” is some future (to us) “golden age” strikes me as just wrong-headed as a matter of biblical interpretation.
So what are we arguing about? In his seminal critique of postmillennialism (Chapter 9 of the out-of-print Theonomy: A Reformed Critique, but found here), Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. comments:
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