World without End

Mainstream American Protestant Visions of the Last Things, 1880–1925

James H. Moorhead

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780253335807
• eBook ISBN: 9780253028501
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"In this compelling intellectual and social history, Moorhead argues that for mainline Protestants in the late 19th century, time became endless, human-directed and without urgency.... Moorhead offers some brilliant observations about the legacy of postmillennialism and the human need for a definitive eschaton." —Publishers Weekly

In the 19th century American Protestants firmly believed that when progress had run its course, there would be a Second Coming of Christ, the world would come to a supernatural End, and the predictions in the Apocalypse would come to pass. During the years covered in James Moorhead's study, however, moderate and liberal mainstream Protestants transformed this postmillennialism into a hope that this world would be the scene for limitless spiritual improvement and temporal progress. The sense of an End vanished with the arrival of the new millennium.

1

Prophecy, the Bible, and Millennialism

LIKE OTHER Christian visions of the last things, postmillennialism claimed its authority from the Bible. To be sure, not everyone invoking eschatological images or themes offered a thorough exegesis of scripture. During the Civil War, shortly after the Battle of Antietam, for example, Theodore Tilton, who edited the Independent, published a hymn expressing his hopes for the conflict’s outcome:

By the great sign, foretold, of Thy Appearing,

Coming in clouds, while mortal men stand fearing,

Show us, amid this smoke of battle, clearing,

Thy chariot nearing!¹

Tiltons poetry vividly affirmed the eschatological significance of the struggle for the Union, but he made no effort to ground his hope in a detailed interpretation of the Bible. Throughout the nineteenth century, hundreds, if not thousands, of other Protestants often limned pictures of millennial glory or of apocalyptic judgment without stopping to provide systematic scriptural warrant. Yet even when its texts were not carefully plumbed, the Bible loomed in the background. Allusions to biblical prophecy carried weight because men and women assumed that biblical predictions would in fact come to pass. Lines from the Princeton Review summarized the prevailing view:

The predictions uttered by the prophets were real disclosures of future events, and must therefore of necessity always be accomplished.... Prophecy... came not in old time by the will of man, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. It proceeded from Him to whom the future equally with the present, is naked and opened, and whose word cannot return to him void. This removes it entirely out of the region of vague anticipations, the forebodings of hope or fear, shrewd conjectures.²

Formal consensus on the authority of prophecy did not, of course, yield unanimity as to its meanings. Millennial interpretations assumed kaleidoscopic variety. Because biblical prophecies were simultaneously canonical and obscure, they offered an authoritative language through which diverse and changing meanings might be expressed. But that language remained authoritative only insofar as people believed that the predictions of the scripture were “real disclosures of future events.” Without this conviction, millennialism had no firm basis.³

In the decades after the Civil War, many discarded that conviction and with it the cornerstone of millennialism. A 1919 book by Kemper Fullerton, professor of Old Testament Language and Literature at the Oberlin Graduate School of Religion, epitomized the change. In Prophecy and Authority: A Study in the History of the Doctrine and Interpretation of Scripture, Fullerton argued that contemporary biblical studies had demolished the notion that the prophets uttered errorless predictions, often of events far from their own time. Modern scholarship, he asserted, demonstrated that the prophets were primarily preachers of righteousness. To the extent that they offered prognostication, it related to their own era, and even then they sometimes “failed in their predictions.” A modern understanding of prophecy “does not concentrate its attention upon a series of unconnected predictions whose truth depends upon their minute, literal fulfillment.” Rather it stressed the ethical vision of the biblical authors and looked for its development in subsequent history. Did the Bible, then, contain anything which could enable Christians to tell the future? Fullerton replied bluntly that the Bible was not a blueprint for the ages ahead. Aside from a hope “for a spiritual consummation of this world order which will be satisfying to the moral demands of the conscience of the race,” one could extrapolate nothing about the future from the scriptures. This fact meant that “the various Millennialist attempts to read the signs of the times are so much labor wasted, and the peculiar forms which the Millennialist hope takes must be relegated to the place where they properly belong—the sphere of Christian mythology.”⁴

The story of the loss of faith in predictive prophecy is multifaceted. It is an account of (1) the unfolding of ambiguities or tensions within postmillennial exegesis, of (2) changing understandings of the Bible and its authority, and of (3) the scholarly reevaluation of prophetic and apocalyptic literature. Taken together, these developments constituted a major revolution in religious consciousness—a transformation in which the contours of mid-nineteenth-century postmillennialism blurred into a more amorphous vision of the last things.

Postmillennial Exegesis

To understand why postmillennialism was vulnerable to erosion, one must grasp the ways in which its adherents interpreted biblical texts. What principles governed their reading of the Bible? The diversity of their approaches has prompted one scholar to rule out the possibility of an unequivocal answer to the question. Postmillennialism, Robert Whalen contends, was “a collection of various optimistic eschatologies, sacrificing uniformity to popularity, complex but without leadership or accepted traditions, and forming no integrated system or philosophy.” Although Whalen overstates the case, he is correct in emphasizing the assortment of opinions which flourished under the rubric of that eschatology.⁵

At one extreme, postmillennialists included precursors of modern critical scholarship. Moses Stuart, professor of Sacred Literature at Andover Theological Seminary from 1810 until his death in 1852, provides the most notable case in point. A self-taught philologist who read German biblical scholarship with avidity (though seldom with complete approval), Stuart applied critical principles to apocalyptic and prophetic scriptures. For example, in A Commentary on the Apocalypse (1845), Stuart concluded that the Revelation was a tract for its own time. John wrote to the victims of persecution, probably under the reign of the Emperor Nero, in order to shore up their courage by telling them of things which would shortly come to pass. Therefore, to regard the Apocalypse as a “Syllabus of history” or “to look for the Pope, or the French Revolution, or the Turks, or the Chinese in it” was patently absurd. Yet while asserting that the events foretold in the first nineteen chapters of Revelation had been accomplished in the first century, Stuart also insisted that chapter 20 and following—the portion of the book dealing with the millennium and the final consummation—did predict future events which, even in the nineteenth century, had yet to occur: a spiritual reign of Christ on earth, then a final unleashing of evil once again, and the raising of the dead for the Last Judgment. Stuart in effect had made the Apocalypse a postmillennial drama whose middle portion was missing. The book contained a first act detailing events of the early Christian era and a final scene explaining how the play would turn out. No one, however, could say how many intervening acts John had omitted or what would transpire during them.⁶

What then could nineteenth-century Protestants, who lived somewhere in the midst of the missing acts, learn from the Revelation of John? Could they discover anything about the coming millennial glory? “My answer to the question ... would be,” Stuart replied, “that it will speedily take place, when all Christians or at least the great body of them, come up to the standard of duty, or come very near to this standard, in their efforts to diffuse among the nations of the earth the knowledge of salvation. The divinely appointed means will secure the end, because God will bless them. Every Christian, then, and every Society for propagating the knowledge of Christianity, is helping to usher in the millennial day, when they ply this work to the best of their ability.” In the explosion of evangelical benevolent activity in the antebellum era, Stuart saw hopeful “signs that such a day is approaching.” Nevertheless, he insisted that contemporary Christians had no biblical warrant for establishing precise events or dates which would augur that happy time. At best they could derive from the Revelation a “generic truth”—that is, the general knowledge that in all eras “Christ will reign until all enemies are put under his feet.” Stuart intended to take the Apocalypse away from “the dreams and phantasies [sic] of ancient or modern Millenarians”—he had contemporary premillennialists in mind—who arrogantly presumed to locate the present moment in the timetable of the Apocalypse, but he also wished to affirm the reliability of apocalyptic forecasts and to assert the reality of those great eschatological events so dear to mid-nineteenth-century Protestants: the millennium, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment. He succeeded in this endeavor, but at the cost of severely delimiting the sphere within which predictive prophecy operated.⁷

At Princeton Theological Seminary, the bastion of Old School Presbyterianism, a similar caution toward apocalyptic and prophetic scriptures reigned. Charles Hodge, who was the commanding eminence at the school from mid-century to his death in 1878, affirmed a postmillennial hope “that before the second coming of Christ there is to be a time of great and long continued prosperity.” In many respects, Hodge’s scheme resembled Stuart’s, but there were important differences. Unlike the Andover professor, his Princeton counterpart believed that specific events, institutions, and persons between the first century and the millennium were foretold in scripture. He supported, for example, the traditional Protestant notion that the papacy was the Antichrist. Still, Hodge was exceedingly diffident about precise identifications of historical events with particular biblical predictions. That reticence reflected no suspicion that prophecy was in any sense flawed or inaccurate. Interpretation demanded caution because the prophecies were frequently enigmatic, sometimes telescoped widely separated events into a single portrait, and often dealt with whole classes of similar events under a single figure. Biblical prediction was “not intended to give us a knowledge of the future analogous to that which history gives us of the past... prophecy makes a general impression with regard to future events, which is reliable and salutary, while the details remain in obscurity.” Thus prudence demanded that one abstain from overly precise prophetic schemes and allow future events to supply the interpretation.⁸

Not all postmillennialists were as unwilling as Stuart and Hodge to posit contemporary events as the fulfillment of specific biblical predictions. In two extended analyses in 1856 and in 1859, the Reverend Joseph Berg, one of the leading ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church, sought to correlate particular biblical passages with events then in process. Among his numerous conclusions were that the power of Louis Napoleon signified the pouring of the seventh vial of the Apocalypse, that contemporary evangelical efforts to convert sailors fulfilled prophecies in Isaiah (chapter 24) concerning those who “go down to the sea,” and that the appearance of the United States in world history clearly corresponded to Daniel’s prediction of an enduring fifth world kingdom. Several years later, during the Civil War, a postmillennialist writing in the Methodist weekly Christian Advocate and Journal argued that the scriptures foretold the American Civil War. The Apocalypse’s twelfth chapter, recounting the celestial battle of the Archangel Michael, was fulfilled in the Southern rebellion, and the dragon’s expulsion from heaven signified the Confederacy’s defeat. But the forces of tyranny would regroup among the tottering regimes of Europe, and these corrupt powers would ally to confront the United States, probably on the field of battle. That future conflict, as prophesied in the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth chapters of Ezekiel, would eventuate in American victory. Then as a result of the triumph over European despotism, the way would be clear “for the universal spread of the Gospel, and the sublime realization of self-government among all people ... That long cycle of ages called the millennium will then be ushered in.”⁹

In view of these diversities (and many more could be cited), one may be tempted to echo Whalen that postmillennialism indeed offered “no integrated system or philosophy,” but the conclusion would be premature. That eschatology acquired a unity as it defined itself against competing premillennial views. Of these the theories of the Baptist William Miller constituted a notable instance. Predicting that Christ would return around 1843, Miller generated a mass movement which at its height rated front-page coverage in the newspapers. Although the Millerites provided an easy mark for scoffers (at least after the time of Jesus’s supposed advent had gone by), the popular interest they aroused forced postmillennialists to define themselves against the movement.¹⁰

Nor did the challenge end once the Millerite excitement abated. Within the major denominations, vocal advocates kept premillennialism before the public. While eschewing the setting of specific dates, these people nevertheless expected an early end to the present world order and an imminent Second Coming. They won relatively few prominent Protestants to their cause prior to the 1870s, but thereafter their numbers grew dramatically through yearly Bible conferences, two major prophecy conferences, and through the numerous Bible institutes created to train Christian workers. A new variant of premillennialism gradually took shape in these years. Before the 1860s, most premillennialists adhered to an historicist interpretation asserting that the Bible contained predictions of the church throughout the ages, but after that decade, a futurist interpretation gradually replaced its rival. The latter position is so named because it maintained that none of the prophecies concerning the latter days had yet been fulfilled. The foremost proponent of that view was John Nelson Darby (1800–1882), an unofficial leader of a British sectarian movement known as the Plymouth Brethren. His futurist view received the name dispensationalism and soon overflowed the banks of its sectarian origins to win adherents among premillennialists in many American denominations.¹¹

According to most dispensationalists, the key to the interpretation of prophecy was the timetable in Daniel 7–9. Purportedly written in the sixth century B.C.E. after the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians, the text predicted the rebuilding of the holy city and the restoration of the Jewish people to their homeland. Daniel described 70 weeks (in the Hebrew, 70 “sevens”) at the end of which God would act “to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the Most Holy” (Daniel 9:24). The text further subdivided the seventy weeks. Sixty-nine would elapse prior to the coming of “Messiah the Prince” who would be “cut off” shortly after his appearance (Daniel 9:26). Only at the end of the seventieth week would restoration finally occur. For dispensationalists, the seeming obscurity of the prophecy disappeared once one understood that the Hebrew “sevens” referred to years, not weeks. Sixty-nine weeks—that is, 483 years—passed, according to their reckoning, between the decree permitting the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and the time of Christ. Prophecy had received indisputable confirmation.

This computation left a crucial question: why had Jesus not returned seven years after the crucifixion to complete his work? Dispensationalists explained that God had temporarily stopped the clock of biblical prediction when the Jews rejected Jesus. With prophecy postponed, the risen Christ commissioned his disciples to gather a people from among the Gentiles. To this people (the church), Christ had not given—as postmillennialists wrongly supposed—the task of building the kingdom on earth. That task he himself would perform once the fulfillment of prophecy resumed. In the interim, the church had the more modest task of proclaiming the gospel to all nations and of summoning individuals to faith. At the close of the age of the church, true Christian believers would be literally “caught up in the clouds, ... to meet the Lord in the air” (I Thessalonians 4:17). Most dispensationalists believed that this event, known as the Rapture, would transpire prior to the tribulations foretold at the end of history. Then, the church having been taken from the earth, the clock of prophecy would tick off the final seven years of Daniel’s prophecy. The Jews would be restored to Palestine, the dreadful wars and desolations of the Book of Revelation would take place, and finally Jesus would establish the thousand-year kingdom. According to dispensational theory, no one could predict with certainty the time of the Rapture—after all, the church existed in a prophetic hiatus for which no prediction had been given—but signs indicated the nearness of the great day.

Not all premillennialists accepted dispensationalism, but it illustrated in extreme form several themes common to most millenarian tracts of the nineteenth century: a refutation of the postmillennial view that the thousand years would be merely a perfection of the current age, a concomitant belief that a supernatural abrogation of the present declining order was necessary, and hence an expectation that Jesus would return on the clouds of heaven to establish his kingdom. Undergirding all of these millenarian motifs was a self-proclaimed adherence to a literal exegesis of God’s inerrant word.

Millenarians claimed, as if it were their special property, the historic Protestant bias in favor of the plain meaning of the biblical text—a meaning which they generally identified with the literal sense. Premillennialists also shared the prevailing commitment to the Scottish Common Sense Philosophy, which dominated much of American thought until after the Civil War. That philosophy glorified the empirical method, shunned metaphysical speculation, and stressed that the common sense of humanity offered a sure guide to truth. When the scriptures were viewed through this philosophical lens, it was assumed that they offered a source of pure, hard “facts”—facts to be taken at face value and requiring no elaborate theory to explain them. Thus any biblical interpretation that seemed to deviate from a straightforward, factual reading of the text was at a severe disadvantage.¹²

George Duffield, a nondispensational premillenarian, provided a graphic case in point in his Dissertation on the Prophecies (1842). Duffield claimed to bring no preconceptions to his study. A common-sense man of no metaphysical presumptions (or so he styled himself), Duffield merely turned to the text to derive its plain meaning. “Theory is out of place and unallowable in the study of prophecy.... It is a simple question that in all cases must be asked, what is the fair and legitimate meaning of the words—a matter-of-fact investigation—no theorising, no speculations.” This common-sense literalism did, of course, allow for metaphor in many instances. No millenarian was fool enough, said Duffield, to think that when the Apocalypse spoke of a woman who “appeared in heaven clothed with the sun, having the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars, there ever, literally or in reality, was such a thing.” But the burden of proof always rested on those who wished to make prophecy metaphoric. A prediction was always ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Postmillennial Tradition, 1800–1880
• 1 Prophecy, the Bible, and Millennialism
• 2 Millennial Dreams and Other Last Things
• 3 “A Summary Court in Perpetual Session”
• 4 A Kingdom “as Wide as the Earth Itself”
• 5 The Kingdom of God and the Efficiency Engineer
• 6 Efficiency and the Kingdom in a World at War
• 7 The Fundamentalist Controversy and Beyond
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index