A Case for Historic Premillennialism

An Alternative to "Left Behind" Eschatology

Blomberg, Craig L., Chung, Sung Wook

• Editore: Baker Academic
• Anno: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781441210562
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Christian Theology

Many evangelical readers who have learned the basics of eschatology from popular authors and more recently from novelists assume that dispensational premillennialism, with its distinctive teachings about the pretribulation rapture of the church, is the only reliable view of the end times and the return of Christ. This volume, however, offers a compelling case for an alternative perspective--one that was widely prevalent throughout church history. The contributors, all respected scholars in their respective fields, suggest that classic premillennialism offers believers a more coherent and viable approach to understanding eschatology. Their studies, which examine eschatology from biblical, theological, historical, and missiological approaches, provide a broadly accessible argument for returning to the perspectives of historic premillennial eschatology.

1
Dispensational and Historic
Premillennialism
as Popular Millennialist Movements

TIMOTHY P.WEBER

America has always been fertile ground for millennialism. Given the American free-market religious economy, people are free to believe what they want, organize as they please, and spread their ideas as best they can. Sometimes such efforts pay off nicely, but sometimes they do not. In a relatively few cases, millennialist ideas have generated large and hard-to-ignore movements. When this happens, millennialist ideas can even seep into the popular culture.

A 2002 Time/CNN poll reported that since 9/11 more than one-third of Americans have been thinking more seriously about how current events might be leading to the end of the world. Even though only 36 percent of those polled said they believe that the Bible is the Word of God, 59 percent thought that events predicted in Revelation were being fulfilled. Almost one in four Americans thought that 9/11 had been predicted in the Bible, and almost one in five expected to live long enough to see the end of the world. Finally, more than one-third of those who expressed support for Israel said they based their views on the belief that the Jews must have their own country in the Holy Land for the second coming to occur.1

One could credibly maintain that the poll merely uncovered the views of many American evangelicals, who now constitute somewhere between one-quarter and one-third of the population and among whom Bible prophecy still resonates. But as historian Paul Boyer has argued, many other Americans who usually ignore the Bible are willing to listen to teachers of Bible prophecy when world events reach crisis levels.2 We probably all know biblically illiterate and religiously unaffiliated people who have somehow picked up rudimentary notions of the rapture, the antichrist, or Armageddon. It is clear, then, that one way or another, someone’s millennialist beliefs have made their way into nonevangelical territory. And we know who they are. From Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth to Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’s Left Behind series, dispensational premillennialists have made impressive forays into the popular culture, often combining their views of the future with well-organized right-wing and pro-Israel political action.3 No American millennialist group has received more attention or reached further into mainstream culture than dispensationalism. But despite its successes, dispensationalism is not the only kind of premillennialism current.

How does historic premillennialism—the subject of this book—measure up as a popular millennialist movement, especially when compared with its biggest rival, dispensationalism? As we shall see, comparisons are difficult because these are two very different kinds of movements. Nevertheless, the relationship between the two is interesting and revealing. This study will explain how and why.

The place to begin is a definition of what we mean by “popular.” When used to describe a millennialist movement, the word can have two quite different meanings. “Popular” can refer to the size of its following, to the extent of its acceptance. In this sense, then, a popular millennialist movement has a large clientele with recognizable leadership, supporting institutions and organizations, and a clear set of identifying beliefs. This “popular” refers to a movement’s popularity.

The word “popular” can also refer to the kind of following a movement possesses. Does it appeal to common folks or to a more elite audience? Does it consciously position itself over against the so-called experts? Where do its leaders come from, how do they make their case, and what is the nature of their appeal? Does it come across as a highbrow or a lowbrow movement? In this sense of the word, “popular” can mean that a movement is populist rather than elitist.

In a nutshell, this study will show that historic premillennialism does not qualify as a popular millennialist movement in either sense of the word, at least not yet.

Labeling Millennialist Movements

Christian eschatology includes a large number of end-times issues—death, the end of the world, divine judgment, and heaven and hell. Some Christians have paid special attention to the end of history and whether there will be a golden age of peace connected to Christ’s return. The key biblical passage for such speculation is Revelation 20, in which Christ returns to earth, defeats Satan, and sets up a thousand-year kingdom on the earth, a millennium (from the Latin mille, “thousand”). This passage in particular and the book of Revelation in general have been interpreted in vastly different ways, which has led systematic theologians and historians to provide labels to identify various millennialist positions.

Most early Christians interpreted Revelation 20 quite literally and expected a millennial age following Christ’s return. Such views are called premillennialist because they place the second coming before the millennium. After the fifth century and Augustine’s enormously influential City of God, most Christians adopted a more figurative interpretation of Revelation 20. They concluded that the “millennium”—a spiritual kingdom characterized by Christ’s reign—actually began with Christ’s resurrection and will continue to expand in both the church and in heaven until Christ’s return. Because they do not expect a literal millennium on the earth, they are called amillennialists (literally, “no-millennialists”). A third, more recent group of Christians argues that the second coming will follow the world’s conversion to Christ and the rise of a Christian golden age. Because they place Christ’s return after this millennium, they are called postmillennialists.

Differences extend beyond the interpretation of Revelation 20. Interpreters have also disagreed about the way to approach Revelation as a whole. Most modern scholars choose between a preterist and an idealist reading of Revelation. Preterists believe that the book reflects late-first- or early-second-century conditions and was written to bring hope to persecuted believers at that time. Thus preterists understand Revelation more in political than in prophetic terms. Idealists set aside all chronological or predictive issues in order to treat the book as an artistic exposition of the ongoing battle between good and evil; in short, Revelation is a drama that speaks to the longings of the human heart.

Others (mainly those holding millennialist views) utilize either a historicist or a futurist approach. Historicists believe that Revelation contains a prophetic overview of the entire church age. Thus they look for prophetic fulfillments in past, present, and future historical events. Futurists believe that Revelation’s prophecies are scheduled to occur in the future, just before Christ’s return, which leads them to develop elaborate future scenarios and look for current “signs of the times” that point ahead to expected events. If a core sample is taken of Christian thought almost any time in the last two thousand years, advocates of these positions can be found.4

Although such labeling helps in distinguishing one group from another, many millennialist movements are difficult to classify. History is messy, and most prophetic movements do not consult with theologians before putting together their belief systems. Consequently, historians who trace these movements over time often find it very difficult to fit them into neat categories.5 Nevertheless, for the people within these movements, even small distinctions can have big consequences. For example, the premillennialist revival that began in Great Britain in the late eighteenth century and moved in waves to America in the nineteenth produced not only advocates of historicism and futurism but fierce divisions within the ranks of the futurists, as the comparison below between dispensationalists and historic premillennialists will show.

So Many Millennialist Choices

Dispensationalism and historic (not historicist) premillennialism were relative latecomers to a religious culture already replete with millennialist successes and failures. In the first half of the nineteenth century, evangelical Protestantism was overwhelmingly postmillennial. Historians have called antebellum America an “evangelical empire” characterized by optimism, growth, and democratic ideals. Religious and political leaders alike viewed the new nation in millennial terms, as a “city upon a hill” with a special role to play in the world.

The dominance of postmillennialism came as a surprise. Most of the Protestants and Catholics who settled colonial America were overwhelmingly and “officially” amillennialists; however, most Puritans who settled New England held historicist premillennial views that had grown popular in England in the early/mid-seventeenth century, especially among the radical Fifth Monarchy Men. Colonial Puritans believed that they were in the last days, that the work of the antichrist was already evident all over the world, and that signs of the end were everywhere. Then the unexpected happened: the First Great Awakening of the 1740s generated thousands of conversions and hundreds of new churches. Jonathan Edwards, borrowing heavily from the prophetic writings of Daniel Whitby, concluded that God was using such ordinary means of grace to Christianize the world and bring in a golden millennial age before Christ’s return. Although the results of the First Great Awakening faded fast, these postmillennial expectations were revived and validated by the even more impressive Second Great Awakening in the early nineteenth century. Popular commentaries throughout these periods by Matthew Henry, Thomas Scott, and Adam Clarke articulated a postmillennial understanding of the Bible that became deeply rooted in the evangelical churches.

Postmillennialism joined forces with the surge of democratic ideals to make American Protestantism boldly evangelical and activist. Operating with the certainty of prophetic promises, evangelicals built schools, churches, publishing houses, and missionary agencies in order to carry out God’s plan to Christianize America and the world. Their strategy included both religion and politics. Evangelists such as Charles Finney told their converts to apply Christian principles to social and political causes and predicted that if they did so, the millennium was just around the corner.

Along the margins of this culture-shaping postmillennial juggernaut were a number of other distinctive and often controversial millennialist movements. In the 1770s an Englishwoman called Mother Ann Lee brought the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming to America. More popularly known as the Shakers for their distinctive worship style, her followers believed that Mother Ann was a female incarnation of Christ who intended to bring in the millennium by forming distinctive communities. Eventually the Shakers established nineteen such communities from Maine to Florida, where they attempted to reproduce primitive Christianity. Shakers adopted simple lifestyles; husbands and wives lived apart and turned their children over to be raised by the community; and no one had sex. Because of the latter restriction, the Shakers prospered only as long as the Second Great Awakening provided a stream of new converts or as orphans found their way to the Shaker communities. But once the revival peaked, the Shaker communities started their slow decline. On their best day, the Shakers numbered no more than five thousand.6

John Humphrey Noyes, a Yale graduate and convert of Charles Finney, formed another millennialist group. He taught that the second coming occurred in AD 70 but that Christ decided not to establish his millennial kingdom because of the lack of Christian love among his followers. Noyes believed that it was up to him to set things right. In 1838 he started a small Christian commune in Vermont where he promoted his notion of sinless perfection and “complex marriage.” Under his careful supervision and control, community members were encouraged to have sex with each other’s spouses, which he thought would facilitate greater love within the community and counter the selfish tendencies of traditional marriage. Noyes maintained that such practices marked the arrival of the kingdom of God, but outraged neighbors saw things differently. Fierce opposition forced Noyes to move the commune to Oneida, New York, where in time his followers tired of the unavoidable and disruptive complications of complex marriage and Noyes’s millennial schemes. Their numbers, which never exceeded three hundred, dwindled, but those who remained found a new calling in successful business ventures.7

In the 1830s Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after he discovered and translated the Book of Mormon. The Mormons believed that through them God was restoring the authentic apostolic gospel and reestablishing the Aaronic priesthood. As a modern-day prophet, Joseph called all Mormons to relocate (“gather”) to Jackson County, Missouri, to begin the work of establishing the new Jerusalem to which Christ would shortly return. When anxious and angry Missourians drove the Mormons out of the state in 1839, Smith led them across the Mississippi River to Nauvoo, Illinois, where he built a new temple, revealed new “endowments” (i.e., temple rituals), and began preaching the plurality of gods and wives. After the prophet’s murder in 1844, Brigham Young led the church to a temporary Zion in Utah. Unlike the Shakers and the Oneida Colony, the Mormons survived and prospered. In the twentieth century, Mormon leaders talked much less about Joseph Smith’s prophetic teachings, but faithful Mormons still await a new prophet’s call to move back to Missouri just before Christ returns.8

Reflecting more-typical evangelical Protestant beliefs and practices were the followers of William Miller, a Baptist preacher from Vermont and upstate New York. A skeptical deist, Miller was converted after the War of 1812 and began reading the Bible with the critical eye of a former rationalist. Using a historicist and premillennialist approach to the study of Bible prophecy, he studied the numerology of Daniel and Revelation. Once he established past prophetic fulfillments as a starting point, he used “millennial arithmetic” and the “year-day theory” (by which he converted days to years in prophetic texts) to set a date of the second coming “in about 1843.” Although Miller claimed that he came to these conclusions on his own, as we shall see, they were nearly identical to those held by other historicist premillennialists in Great Britain at about the same time.

Miller arrived at these findings in 1818 but waited about fifteen years before making them public. Thanks to new advertising and promotional techniques, his message generated a large following (estimates range from thirty thousand to one hundred thousand) drawn from the evangelical denominations, more or less where the Shakers, John Humphrey Noyes, and the Mormons obtained their followers. But the Millerites were different. They never questioned traditional marriage or practiced unconventional sex or altered the church’s historic teachings about the Godhead. Miller did not claim to be a prophet, only a careful reader of Scripture who invited others to check his calculations and come to their own conclusions. In time, however, he grew tired of his critics and instructed his followers to separate from “Babylon,” by which he meant the dismissive evangelical denominations, in order to spread the word of the “Advent near.” As the predicted time approached, Miller felt pressure to be more precise abo...