Pessimistic Postmillennialism
(This article first appeared at Theopolis. Read it there HERE.
Hebrews 10:34 For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance."
There is an old Puritan dictum that goes, “Sit lightly on the world.” George MacDonald places it in the mouth of one of his fictional priests upon his realizing that, for as good as the world can be, it still persists in carving a consummation-shaped hole in the heartbroken, the ailing, and the aged. As long as death is allowed to keep eating, there will be a kind of hunger that lingers in the living faithful.
It’s not that postmillennialism isn’t true; rather, it’s that the additional optimism, which is often an added ingredient modifying an already optimistic eschatology, pushes the smile a little too wide. The lightbulb of the idea burns just a little too bright. Postmillennialists have the ability to occasionally attract and exhibit a naive confidence that sees the long game as one of institutional recovery and revival of policy that is forged on the anvil of Scripture; but they can also tend to forget that workers in the advancing kingdom will still bury their wives, children, and friends sooner than they would have wanted. Wise ministers 4000 years from now will still ache in their hearts over the lack of love for God’s Word in their large and thoroughly catechized congregations. There will be much to thank God for, but it will still not be enough.
By pessimistic postmillennialism I mean that the Gospel will successfully bring nation after nation into obedience to Jesus Christ . . . and most of it will be an obedience that is of faith . . . but every Christian will continue to have a deeply ingrained sense of things not being as they should be, right up until the final parousia. The pessimism of which I’m speaking is a necessary ballast on an already optimistic Biblical eschatology. Postmillennialism must be accompanied by a kind of pessimism . . . or heartbreak . . . or yearning . . . call it what you will, if it is going to maintain a Biblically required sense of evangelical gravity.
Regardless of the sawtooth advancements upon which the kingdom of God will progress in an overall upward trajectory, postmillennialists must remember that institutional recover, policy reform, and even successful advancements in discipleship, while definitely being reasons to praise God, they are also only part of a lasting Christian future. Even if Ken Ham were to become the Secretary General of the United Nations, even if Awana troops were to replace the police departments in downtown Baltimore, even if James Jordan chanting Psalm 88 was the most viewed Super Bowl halftime show in television history, as long as Christ has not yet returned in His final appearing to consummate the union of heaven and earth, to exile death, and to judge the living and the dead, then the Christian hunger has not been satisfied. Until the consummation, every praise and thanksgiving should be backlit with a kind of somber acknowledgement that we are still obliged to ask for more. In New England there is a saying about the work of farm veterinarians never being done: “Thank you. But, while you’re here doc . . .”.
Hardly any of this needs to be said to the older men who have labored in congregations as the postmillennial minorities of Evangelicalism over the last half a dozen decades. Many of those who have shaped the new postmillennialist wave in Protestantism have labored slowly and, with heavy hearts, have picked rocks out of ancient fields, looking at a harvest as ones from afar. But there is a new generation that is young, and the young are online, and the internet kills the orator. Sometimes the young postmillennialist sounds as if he is only two congressional seats away from closing the patent office. We must remember that the work is not done and the work won’t be done even when nation after nation proclaim the kingship of Jesus Christ. Thirty minutes before the final parousia, Christian hearts should still be heavy with dissatisfaction over the abiding specter of death.
Isaiah 65:20 There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed.
1 Corinthians 15:54-55 "So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.” "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
Since death remains operational until the final return of Christ, as evidenced in Isaiah’s and Paul’s visions of the mature millennium, even the advancements of the kingdom should still leave us with a sense of wanting. The promises of Scripture are optimistic in and of themselves, as far as the futures of the nations are concerned. But make-believers will plot the penultimate rebellion in the midst of a very good life full of institutional reform, renewed policies, and wildly successful discipleship. A rebellion like the one that is going to take place is only possible because death still lingers and it still lingers as the wages of sin.
The postmillennial message is summarized in tropes about the church having all the time in the world. When not coupled with a healthy dose of pessimism, this can detract from a necessary evangelical urgency. It must be essential to the Reformed Catholic future that we always remember that postmillennialism is true, but so is Hell. Let the church recover the day when our hearts were pricked by the call to preach as dying men to dying men.
