Biblical Eschatology and the Millennium, Part IV: Postmillennialism

Postmillennialism is the view that Christ slowly takes hold of the world, its people and political systems, through the gospel so that when He returns, it will be to a Christianized world. Hence, Christ returns after the millennial kingdom has run its course. This view became popular in the Enlightenment due to a newfound positivism toward human moral development and society. It was the majority view in America before Dispensational Premillennialism took hold of the populace in the twentieth century.

Arguments For:

 

1.      Daniel 2 talks about the rock cut out of the mountain taking over the other kingdoms as it grows larger and larger, eventually taking over everything.

2.      Matt 13:31–32 // Mark 4:30–32 talks about a mustard seed starting small and then growing into a giant tree. The giant tree that shades the whole earth in Daniel is sometimes combined with this idea to argue that this is the kingdom of God taking over the world.

3.      Isaiah 66 talks about a new heavens and new earth, and a promise of a kingdom in which people will live a really long time, there is peace and harmony among men and nature, but they still die and unbelievers still exist to serve believers. So these types of prophecies must refer to a stage in the earth that has been affected by the life-giving gospel kingdom, but is not the eternal state itself, where all of the enemies of Christ, death being the last one, are wiped away from the earth.

Arguments Against:

 

1.      2 Thessalonians 1:6–10 and 2:1–12  indicate that Paul is looking for relief from his persecution (both Jews and Gentiles) and the persecution of the Thessalonians (their own countrymen [1 Thes 2:14], i.e., Gentiles in Thessalonica) when Christ returns and destroys their persecutors, including the man of lawlessness, who is yet to be revealed (i.e., not a false teacher Paul knows of yet) exalts himself above every god, performs signs and wonders, and is destroyed by Christ at His coming. There is no indication that Paul is looking for a distant millennial kingdom that gradually changes the world and will bring Christians relief from persecution, or that any of this happens in the first century. The preterist theories often presented to answer this claim tend to disregard the entirety of what is said in these passages, and attempt to assign these statements to first century referents that do not fulfill all of what is said. The passages are as follows.

⁶ God is just: He will pay back trouble to those who trouble you ⁷ and give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. ⁸ He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. ⁹ They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might ¹⁰ on the day he comes to be glorified in his holy people and to be marveled at among all those who have believed. This includes you, because you believed our testimony to you. (1:6–10)

Concerning the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ and our being gathered to him, we ask you, brothers and sisters, ² not to become easily unsettled or alarmed by the teaching allegedly from us—whether by a prophecy or by word of mouth or by letter—asserting that the day of the Lord has already come. ³ Don’t let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the apostasy occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. ⁴ He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God’s temple, proclaiming himself to be God. ⁵ Don’t you remember that when I was with you I used to tell you these things? ⁶ And now you know what is holding him back, so that he may be revealed at the proper time. ⁷ For the secret power of lawlessness is already at work; but the one who now holds it back will continue to do so till he is taken out of the way. ⁸ And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord Jesus will overthrow with the breath of his mouth and destroy by the splendor of his coming. ⁹ The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with how Satan works. He will use all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders that serve the lie, ¹⁰ and all the ways that wickedness deceives those who are perishing. They perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. ¹¹ For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie ¹² and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness. (2:1–12)

2.      Those who enter the millennial kingdom in Revelation 20:4 are not Christians who are regenerated but physically resurrected Christians who have been martyred for their faithfulness to Christ. The text states:

⁴ I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

This cannot be regeneration because these Christians had already become Christians, lived faithfully for Christ, had been executed because of it, and are souls that then come to life to reign with Christ for a thousand years. The physical resurrection of Christians (assuming the martyrs represent all Christians who live for Christ), therefore, is at the beginning of the millennium, not the end.

Furthermore, “came to life” in this passage does not refer to regeneration because the rest of the dead do not “come to life” until the thousand years are up (v. 5), and only those who partake in the first resurrection are considered blessed. These seem to be the dead of vv. 11–15 who are judged and damned. 

3.      Daniel 2 does not teach that the kingdom of God slowly grows and eventually takes over the kingdoms of the world. It actually teaches that the kingdom of God wipes out all of the other kingdoms so that there are none left, and then grows immediately to take over the world. Daniel 2:31–35, 44–45 are as follows.

³¹ “You saw, O king, and behold, a great image. This image, mighty and of exceeding brightness, stood before you, and its appearance was frightening. ³² The head of this image was of fine gold, its chest and arms of silver, its middle and thighs of bronze, ³³ its legs of iron, its feet partly of iron and partly of clay. ³⁴ As you looked, a stone was cut out by no human hand, and it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. ³⁵ Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold, all together were broken in pieces, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that not a trace of them could be found. But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth . . . ⁴⁴ And in the days of those kings the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that shall never be destroyed, nor shall there be any other kingdom left to another people. It shall break in pieces all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, and it shall stand forever, ⁴⁵ just as you saw that a stone was cut from a mountain by no human hand, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold. A great God has made known to the king what shall be after this.

Notice that the rock destroys all of the kingdoms so that there is no other kingdom left for another people. They are destroyed at the violent and sudden coming of the rock, not its growth. It’s growing occurs after it strikes the statue and destroys all of the kingdoms that make it up. Daniel is not working off an already-not yet view, where the kingdom comes spiritually first and then physically. He is referring to the physical coming of the kingdom, the final coming, when all other kingdoms are wiped away. So this is not a gradual growing of the kingdom side-by-side with other kingdoms until they are wiped away, but a violent upheaval of these, and then the kingdom grows and fills the whole earth.

4.      I will say again what I have said before in dealing with Premillennial uses of prophecy in the Old Testament. Isaiah 66 and other prophecies that relate a promise of a “this age” physical kingdom that has some microcosmic similarities to the eternal state, even using the language of the eternal state (“new heavens and new earth” for example) are contingent promises given to Judah/Israel concerning what God will do for them when He brings them back into the land from deportation and exile. The contingency, like all prophecy, is based on their faithfulness. If they are faithful when they get back in the land, they will receive this earthly picture of eternity in the here and now. They, however, are not faithful when they get back in the land and so these promises of a this-worldly physical kingdom are never realized. They could have been the priests God made them to be and pictured the eternal state in harmony with God, but decided to reengage in idolatry and sexual immorality when they got back in the land by marrying daughters of foreign gods, disregarding the ministry of God, the poor, etc. The use of prophesy by those seeking to establish some millennial view is mistaken in its methodology. As God promises judgment to Nineveh without any sign of offering them an alternative if they repent, those promises are not carried out in Jonah’s story because all prophecy, whether explicitly stating it or not, is contingent upon the repentance or lack thereof of its recipients. Hence, these passages only present what could have been had Israel been faithful to its physically-beneficial Mosaic covenant. They were not. Hence, the New Testament looks toward the physically-beneficial eternity promised to it while enjoying the fruit of its spiritual benefits and promises now. There are no physical promises of a this-worldly/already nature repeated in the New Testament. The already is spiritual and the not-yet is physical (e.g., resurrection of the spirit in regeneration already, but resurrection of the physical body not yet). Hence, none of these Old Testament prophecies should be used to secure a particular view of the millennium. What they depict, even according to some of their own language, is the eternal state of the new heavens and new earth promised to Christians (Rom 8; Rev 20–21).

5.      This last objection to Postmillennialism I will mention here will be the most difficult to communicate, as it takes a lot of background information to undo the traditional reading of this text, but the mustard seed growing into a large tree: (1) has nothing to do with Daniel’s tree, and (2) is talking about the spiritual growth of the kingdom within a true believer, not the expansion of the kingdom upon the earth. 

First, Daniel 4:20–22 makes it clear that the tree that overshadows the whole earth in that context is Nebuchadnezzar.

Second, although the passages in Mark and Luke give a little context to bring out its meaning, Matthew 13 gives the most context for the reader to understand what Christ is talking about. The parables in Matthew 13 all have to do with the same thing. This is why only a couple are interpreted. The interpretation is meant to provide a key by which one can interpret the others that are given no explicit interpretation otherwise. 

The first parable given in vv. 3–23 deals with the fruit of a genuine believer versus false believers within the believing community (something very much connected to Matthew’s message, as well as Mark’s concern with true discipleship in following Jesus in general and Luke’s concern that true disciples take care of the poor and marginalized within the church). In other words, these things give some characteristics of true and false believers/disciples within the covenant community. The concern is not evangelism in these Gospels, but rather a correction of antinomian tendencies popping up in the church.

The Parable of the Weeds to follow, surrounds the two analogies of the mustard seed and the leaven in flour. First the parable, then the two analogies, then the interpretation of the parable, which signifies to the reader that he is to interpret these analogies in light of the parable that surrounds them, and frankly, all of the parables in the section, which is signified not only by subject matter but the parallel framework of the previous parable to this one. 

That this parable is about the nature of true and false believers within the kingdom is evidenced by the fact that “the Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all lawless ones,  and throw them into the fiery furnace” (vv. 41-42a). This connects to those calling Christ, “Lord, Lord” in Chapter 7, who think themselves to be Christ’s servants, but practice “lawlessness.” 

The remaining analogies/parables all present characteristics of true and false believers/disciples within the church. True believers give up all they have to have God rule over them, as demonstrated by the parables of the treasure in a field and the pearl of great price. Likewise, the final parable in the sequence presents the kingdom as a fish net (v. 47) that holds both evil and righteous men that must be gathered from the net, not the world in general. 

Back to the analogies within the Parable of the Weeds pericope. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed and leaven that grows to fill up the place where it is planted. What is helpful is to understand that if these are all about what characterize true believers or false believers (these short parables/analogies exist only to characterize the true believer), then these are talking about a characteristic of true believers, not how the kingdom of God grows in the world, which is no commentary on the nature of those who are the kingdom of God.

And that is the important point. The kingdom of God is the people, and the kingdom is planted within them and grows within them. In fact, “kingdom” often confuses us. We think of something external. However, in the already-not yet scheme that exists in the NT, the kingdom is the dominion of God and His Christ over His people. “God’s rule” might be a better translation. God’s rule begins with seeds that are planted within individuals, or are the individuals themselves. The Son plants the seeds, which are characterized by their origin in God or their fruit. Matthew is all about the true and false believer that is known by his fruit. He wants to say that the true believer bears much fruit because he is planted by God, and even though the seed begins as a small dominion given to God within a true disciples life, God eventually grows from that seed a faith and practice that takes over the entire person, so that God reigns over every aspect of his life (in contrast to Pharisaical righteousness that only technically obeys superficially). As a result, the true disciple gives all else up to follow Christ, and becomes righteous in his deeds. This is the already invisible kingdom within in contrast to the already invisible kingdom seen in the professing church. The not-yet visible kingdom in the age to come can only be accessed by those who are of the former and the latter, and not by the latter.

Hence, the mustard seed is what is planted in a believer and grows within him to produce a all-encompassing righteousness that distinguishes him from the false believer. It has nothing to do with evangelism or the takeover of the physical world by the Christian church.

The biblical evidence for Postmillenialism, therefore, is the weakest, as it not only contradicts other passages in the New Testament, but it takes many of its supporting Scripture out of context, and they do not end up being solid prooftexts for it at all. However, as I have argued, that does not exclude it from being a possibility concerning how Christ might bring about His eternal kingdom upon the earth, since the Bible does not give us a definite framework.