Postmillennial Blues -- A Reflection

 Despite my reservations, it appears to me that postmillennialism is the most correct interpretation of the Bible's sense of time. This brief essay is not so much an exegesis of the Scripture to prove this claim, but a broader reflection on why this appears to be the case given broader, perhaps meta-textual, considerations. However, postmillennialism as such has often mishandled in what a Christian would expect to come about. The proper understanding (as the Bible demonstrates over & over) is pessimistic comedy.

Why postmillenialism will come after why not the alternatives. The concept of millennialism is how to properly interpret the promise in Revelation of a thousand-year reign that Christ will implement on Earth, heavenizing the dwelling-place of man. Premillennialism involved the idea that Christ would first come back to establish this millennial rule. Postmillenialism, in contrast, was Christ's return after a millennial reign in His name. Finally, amillennialism is a symbolic interpretation that the thousand years is for the Church Age, however one precisely understands this conjecture. Thus, the real question at the heart of the debate is the very definition of Time -- not linear progressive time (chronos, hour following hour etc.) but epoch-defining time (kairos, the sense of "the Moment"). What is history? Why does it flow the way it does? Does it have form?

Premillennialism was, a millennia plus, the normative view of some in the early Church. Such is reflected in the thought of Irenaeus & Justin, who expected a reign of Christ to usher in a literal one-thousand years of kingly rule. The expectation, in itself, is not wrong; for Christ may very well continue to reign for a time until All is in All, every matter settled as the resurrection of dead proceeds & the judgement confirmed when History has come to a true close (in a literal sense). But premillennialism suffers from its time preference. It was not a problem when a mere two hundred years had passed, where Rome was perhaps simply the last beast to be ground into dust, where the Empire was (truly) the last in the world. Of course, historically one might take the wider vantage & notice the untouched domains of the Chinese, the Hindoo, & the American Indian (among many others). But these do not have the same place in concrete, & normative, Biblical history as Rome had (succeeding the Iron Throne after the Babylonians, Medes-Persians, & the Greeks, or however one precisely counts the four stages). Nevertheless, it is not wrong to see the statue of iron with clay toes broken by the Uncut Stone. So what next? Why hasn't he come back?

The core objection here is this -- the Bible, beyond any ancient text that formed cult & law & polity (all of the same cloth in true Human thought), never dealt in mythos. The Bible drags the mind of man, kicking & screaming, into historical time. The chronicles of kings was also the plane upon which Jehovah entered. The fancy in Homeric poetry or Thesiod's theology did not exist in the ugly & brutal world into which the LORD forged a people out of the rump of Adam-Noah's race & gave orientation to time & space. Exodus was not merely an origin myth for an ethnos, it contained within it seeds of self-criticism & supernatural expectation. The land was never conquered, the promise never fulfilled. History twists & turns unto the coming of the Christ, but even here history does not conclude (as not a few suspected). Instead, the Apostles were tasked to disciple the nations, fanning out across the Roman Empire & beyond. The Acts of the Apostles is thus a fitting second-work for St Luke, who sees in the success of Gospel as part of heilsgeschichte, of redemptive-history. Beyond the normative ideas in the various canonical epistles, Revelation offers symbol-soaked vision of the very form & shape of history. Premillennialism can explain nothing of this beyond the end of the Empire, its expectations withering in the fourth-century.

What took its place? Temporarily, it was a version of postmillennialism in the high days of Constantine. Eusebius is slandered & maligned by the ignorant, but history grabbed hold of the reins of this Heavenly Empire. Few who mock Eusebius have bothered to read him, content with saccharine pseudo-Christian vomit to wallow in as they pride themselves on their objectivity & highly spiritual disposition. But Eusebius did not make Constantine into a second Christ or savior, rather Constantine was a mere product of the true conquest of the saints. Three hundred years of blood, three hundred years of faithful witness & apologetic excellence, was vindicated, not through imperial arms or tactical planning, but the finger of God. Constantine's conversion was unexpected & a lightning bolt. The Edict of Milan promised toleration for Christians & all those who worshiped Heaven. Constantine's rule was not without faults or sins (even as these are often exaggerated or misunderstood), but it put an end. Constantine was not imperious, even as he governed an exhausted & depleted empire, often respecting the wishes of the bishops. Nevertheless, in Eusebius' vision, a new age of peace had dawned.

A hundred years later, this hopefulness had dashed against wicked empires & heresy. Constantine was fair about the Arian controversy (far more than later critics give him credit for), where many fail to understand the reason for the controversy & why so many bishops had sympathy for the Alexandrian presbyter (the reason dates back to Paul of Samosata & his aberrant christological claims, combined with his magisterial tyranny, the first prince-bishop). Thus, as F.A. Drake has demonstrated in his Century of Miracles, the great hope of Rome's conversion broke over heresies, imperial losses, bad emperors, & a general sense of pessimism. Into this void Augustine offered a way out. City of God was not only an apologetic against Pagan claims that Rome suffered for abandoning the old gods, it also introduced a novel view of time. Augustine, drawing on the work of Ticonius, saw history as a battle between the Kingdom of God & the Kingdom of Man, with the former located primarily in the Church. While polities & organizations may pledge allegiance to the Church, they were fallible & accidental to the prime struggle. However, with less pessimism born of Donatist solipsism & failure, Augustine offered a robust sense that the Church Age was coequal with History as such. The Church did not have a particular mission besides combating the dark Kingdom of Men. But to what end? In what shape?

Augustinian amillennialism, flowing alongside conciliar condemnation of chiliasm, became the norm for the Church, sort of. As the Roman Empire rent, with the Roman Church slowly dividing into Hellenophone & Latinophone, the East tended towards a stronger sense of historical importance, though increasingly collapsed into the Empire itself. The Roman Emperor held the world together, a quasi-Christ who brought together ecclesial & civil functions. I am disinclined to consider such as much of a corruption as many Westerners are prone to do, lamenting the slavishness & pomp of the orient, a caesaropapist Church subservient to politics. Such is nonsense, but there was still a very real welding together of Rome with Church that (unlike Eusebius or Constantine in the fourth century) saw the Empire as the new Israel marching through time. Like Israel, Roman suffered apostasy, betrayal, & loss, struggling to understand what to do against barbarians & Persians (later with Muslims & Latins). The loss of a Roman emperor still hamstrings Orthodox concepts of temporality. Still, the kernel of truth was preserved -- God had significance for history, with a particular shape.

Augustine was much more a doctor to the Latins, who increasingly found in the Church an organization that could preserve order & justice in lands newly occupied with Teuton barbarians. The fissiparous nations eventually found unity around a Roman Emperor & the Roman Bishop, though this often suffered for lack of clarity. Wherein Constantinople the relation between prelate & prince was established (with certain due deference between responsibilities & roles), in the West it was confused. The rise of an Emperor of the Romans in Aachan was later matched with the growing spiritual & political prestige of the Roman pontiff. While Charlemagne's court had the gravity to shrug off the Byzantine-influence papacy over Nicaea II, by the eleventh century the papacy had become a power in its own right. The Gregorian reforms tried to orient the fairly vulgar election to the episcopate (swapped between Roman aristocratic families) into a moral center to guide the many kingdoms & fiefdoms of Europe. Utilizing rival groups (whether the Normans, the Empire, the French, or others), the papacy increasingly carved its political power in Italy but also throughout the Continent. 

Amidst these changes & reforms, amillennialism made a certain level of sense. There was no sense of "end" & the force of history was located squarely within the Church. Augustine's disciple Orosius had further schematized history into ages: all the events of the OT/NT constituted the first five, with Acts opening up the sixth age of the Church, penultimate & followed by the Day of Doom. The Church began to easily fit into this role as mediator, with the pope increasingly donning the titulature of Jesus Christ (or at least his vicarage as prime-minister). Time, to some extent, froze. Heaven was full of the triumphant saints (willing & able to intervene to help the faithful) & Earth straining as the militant fought to enter Paradise. The Church produced medicines of immortality, whether in the Eucharist (or at least gazing upon it) or the many penances to atone for sins. Life was a vicious pilgrimage towards Heaven, an escape from the vicissitudes of nasty earthbound mortality. Few made it in the first try, with the bulk working off their failure & debt in purgatory. There was not really any particular shape to history, as any moment in redemptive-history could be drawn up to explain victory or failure. There were enemies to fight in the Turks, heathen, & Greek heretics (among various sects cropping up in the unpoliced hinterland of Europe). But there was an order & balance, even as occasional chiliast movements challenged the contented corruption of Church affairs (whether the Spiritual Franciscans within, or Waldensians on the outside), often signaling the soon to be apocalyptic war between the forces of Christ & antichrist. Imperial figures, humane & dominating, like Frederick II Hohenstauffen often signaled the end, as the world-emperor would arise to challenge the Church. But these times came & went.

What was of real significance was the shock of the Reformation. When Christendom rent, there was a growing expectation of apocalyptic struggle. Both Rome & the Reformers claimed the mantle of the faithful against the legions of antichrist, with an end perhaps on the horizon. The discovery of the Amerindians by solidly Roman Spain & Portugal reinvigorated a Papal sense of amillennial war. Still was the Church Age, struggling not only against Muslim but now Protestant, heresies of Man threatening to besiege the Celestial domain. Amillennialism befits well Bellarmine's claim that the Church was real & visible the same way Venice was real & visible -- you can enter its domain, walk its streets, exist under the protection of its authorities & law. Amillennialism's symbolism did not deprciate the physico-visibility of the Kingdom of God, only that the millennium was a symbol for this protracted struggle. In a sense, amillennialism still sits well upon the Papacy & its efforts to fully struggle against the Kingdom of Man until Christ returns. The ugliness here is that there's no sense of form or expectation, history just rolls on in an endless struggle with selected interpretations. If Orthodoxy has stalled in the loss of an Emperor, Catholicism remains because it still has a pope (though, for some traditionalists, it's not clear for how much longer, if at all).

The Protestants in no way rejected this Western heritage. Augustine was their doctor, often more so on issues of predestination & sacrament. However, this inheritance was predicated upon a certain expectation of succession. The Evangelicals fully believed in victory over Rome, the restoration of Christendom on different terms. However, the failure & chaos of religious war left the Reformers increasingly shattered. The division between Luther & the Reformed broke any initial hopes (despite the herculean efforts of Bucer & Melanchthon, among others, to heal the breach). As Novalis centuries later lamented, the universality was muddied in particularity, & instead of Protestantism the Germans received Lutheranism. The attempt to carve out a Lutheran dominion often became reactive & defensive (as the Reformed were sometimes hated more than the Roman, though that was rare). The Lutheran domains eventually settled into the squalid compromise of Westphalia, where elite-secularity guaranteed the rights of the Church. Similarly, the hope of the Reformed International (to use an odd framing) also hit the shoals. The defeat of the Huguenots in France, the increasing separatism of the Swiss, the rivalry between England & the Netherlands (let alone the Civil Wars that rocked the British Isles), all these contributed to malaise. The rise of the British Empire created some hopeful expectation that a Protestant Empire could combat the Roman, & increasing caesaropapist, power of France could give some hope to Evangelicals. However, other matters had taken greater concern.

It's not wonder then that Protestants began to branch away from amillennialism, it seemed self-evidently not true. Here I will make a hard claim: amillennialism only makes sense if there's some institutional continuity. Attempts to cleave to amillennialism, gripping Augustine tight, often mutate into a kind of a-temporality. History is just a series of incoherent disaster, without shape or reason, pertaining to a seemingly endless reign of the Devil, as a few souls were plucked out. Such was the temptation of some proto-Pietists, such as Amos Comenius, though this basically gave the game away. History was the devil's labyrinth, Heaven was only in the heart. Despite the historicizing bent of the Bible, time had become emptied as soon as one put down the pages of the New Testament. One simply suffered & that was there was. Such a view is not entirely incorrect, but this is for later.

Other Protestants turned to an expectant apocalypse. It was not that they abandoned amillennialism, but Revelation must be understood as a progressive historical revelation. Indeed it was a church book, but it was only relevant for certain ages. The two prophets slain who testified against the Beast & the Whore-- were these Luther & Calvin? Was the end of the age about to come, as catastrophic war rocked Central Europe for thirty years? Later Pietists in a later age would attempt to chart out the coming apocalypse, dabbling in gematria & other chronological charts. The School of Halle hoped in a coming finale. Similarly, though earlier, some radical Protestants saw in the rise of an English republic, & then Cromwell, a New Jerusalem upon Earth. God spoke English & the reign of King Jesus was at hand (though these fifth-monarchists found their hopes dashed in the restoration of the Stuarts, violently put down). Here, a more laughable (but all too serious) chauvinism swept up the soul. The Roman Empire seemed more plausible than little England (let alone the earlier Florentine republic of Savanarola & the Taborites of Bohemia), but these were of the same spirit. Again, these may be admired for their effort to take history seriously, to see the reign of Christ giving a shape to time.

Thus it falls to postmillennialism to make sense of things. It was not a titanic singular struggle on the horizon, but the work of the Church (defined not merely as pastors & prelates, but of covenanted communities) to establish the reign of King Jesus, taking back the Earth inch-by-inch. The Puritans who landed in New England were often (though not singularly) of this mind. They were not ignorant of mundane challenges, that they were within an English Empire who more often than not found than odious, & the obvious challenge of evangelism among the Indian. Nevertheless, there was a kind of wind of future change propelling their plantations forward. This dream was often tainted with self-criticism & failure, but the hope remained even as rationalists began to dominate the clerical mind. In the fracture of the British Empire in the America crisis, not a few colonist took up the banner of the Protestant Interest to protest the parliamentary sovereignty that was now claimed. Britain, seemingly, had moved from a Protestant Empire to a fully temporal one, no longer concerned with Catholicism but with India. The universality faded, or at least it appeared to dissipate among some of the hot-headed Evangelicals, for geopolitical particularity. Thus it was no surprise that, having gained independence, this postmillennial expectation passed onto the United State, an entity pockmarked with unbelief & heresy. The second Great Awakening sounded the trumpets of reform, temporarily smashed against the shoals of civil war, only to rebound in a third Great Awakening of the late nineteenth century.

Here heresy & division shattered this vision. Fourierism, Marxism, & a variety of other utopia movements. While this in no way impacted Evangelicals, the influence of Higher Criticism & Darwinism drew some away to consider that perhaps they needed to modify to progress. Not exactly socialist or communist, Progressives advanced a social gospel that converted postmillennial expectations into world-government. The Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy shattered any sense of Evangelical unity, driving Fundamentalists further into the novel ideas of John Nelson Darby. Premillennialism returned, now with a historicizing modification of Augustinian Ages into Dispensations. The gap of hundreds of years, if not thousand, was swept up into a fervent expectation that the end was nigh. The churches had fallen, all that was left was to huddle into chapels & await the coming end, whether a Rapture preceded it or not. Technological change & social chaos had made this plausible to some in the Millerite movement, but now with the loss of churches it seemed even more paramount. Such continues even today, with more elaborate charts & explanations, often feeding into a naive (& murderous) unwavering support for the nation-state of Israel, with the seemingly endless flow of money & arms from the United States. While many modern premillennialists will decry ethnic-racial chauvinism in America or the West, it is entirely acceptable for a Jewish state to assert its ethno-religious superiority against its foes. In someways, as the Orthodox has melded millennial expectations with Rome & Catholics with the Pope, so too have the premillennialists found Israel to be their historic actor.

It is easy to be a buffoon & mock these groups, throughout time & space, as falling for the great temptation, as if air to breathe was some great spiritual failure. Those who refuse to acknowledge the biblical crisis of history are often relegated into begging to escape from the late planet Earth, or simply meld into secular realities (pastoral office & theological nerdery help keep some in remembrance of God, but for most they simply drift into this-worldly political concerns, as princes & paupers of every age have done). The Human being demands history & its end; what freak would not only suffocate the soul but also turn the Bible into a mockery?

Then what is left? Premillennialism exhausts itself in any meaningful sensing of time. Amillennialism is plausible if there is still a Church that can claim boundaries against its adversarial City of Man (otherwise, what are we waiting for? who is the prime actor in history?) in the sixth age. To shatter any sense of institutional coinherence & harmony only exacerbates the tension further, for what reason is this divide even allowed in the first place? More & more accept other confessions of Christians as brethren (even if defective), than what forestalls unity? Petit disputes over doctrine? When & how will this end? When & how will history end? As is common for the average rube & middling intellect, the answer is simply mystery. Christ told us none could predict his return, ergo there's no sense of anything, history is just one colossal train-wreck. The subjection of all things beneath the Son of Man is prolonged for two thousand years just because (on the authority of whomever) & one is simply faithless for questioning such a non-biblical supposition. A living death is all that remains, as the bodily clay molders as the spirit leaves for greener pastures.

Even worse, as Agamben noted in the debate between Peterson & Schmitt over eschatology, the amillennialism of the twentieth century absorbs the progressive linear disposition of Democracy. Per Peterson (& R.A. Markus), Augustine had defeated any sense of Christian politics, or rather that politics had been radically defined. The liturgy (nothing else!) was the sole act of politics, an endless process of glorification of God towards no particular end. Rather than rest, here was the endless process of Democratic procedure, endless surveys & elections, which were not so much to offer political alternatives but offer praise for the system. Every election (even as they're empty policy battle over the Center) was simply showing the system worked. Heaven was a never ending set of surveys & ballots. Was this the age of the Church, where militant Democrats (such as Gandhi, King, & Adenauer) interceded to keep the votes of the militant going? Such seems to be the direction of Vatican II ecclesiology, as Francis fully conforms Rome with Social (not even Christian) Democracy. History is over, it's only a time to subsist & survive unto death.

Into this postmillennialism remains, a mission for the Church to continue on this Earth, with the Apocalypse of St John as a guide. This now is the millennium & there are conditions for victory, all being worked out through the reigning sovereign Jesus. But how is such a victory achieved? Is it success after success, as soldiers bearing the cross trample down enemies? No, it is as Eusebius described. It is the faithful testimony of the martyrial army, it is taking every thought captive through the renewal of the mind, it is continued outward conquest through the gospel as the Empire of Jehovah envelops the Earth? Do we not see this continue, despite an almost unending train of setbacks? Has not the Gospel penetrated nearly into every crevice of the Earth, with more & more of Africa & Asia entering into the sheepfold of God? Failure is endemic, but postmillennialism has never contemplated an easy success of rational uplift, at least its most coherent defenders. John Elliot believed in this dream as he translated the Bible into Algonquin, & even as his hopes dashed, yet more & more Native Americans (let alone the mestizo & indigenous in Central & Southern America) have entered, to some degree or another, into the Church. The mission field is still open, not as a wearied plucking of a few grains before the harvest slices through the grain, but a joyous conquest as all things are brought beneath the Christ's rod of iron.

All the Bible comes alive, for the Promised Land will cover the whole globe, that the ground is tilled expecting Eden to arrive once more in the form of the eternal city. Shall we not consecrate our very lives to this task, that every twist & turn of history is one step closer to Paradise? The saints march soaked in their own blood, bearing their wounds, glorified in mind as they tread down scorpions & snakes. Cursed are those who neglect such a vision, shackling their sons in their own ineptitude & iniquity. Now is the time for suffering unto victory. Now is the time to take up the cross for the joy set before us all. Every failure & loss is a means forward, sins forgiven every scar eventually glorified. Beset by darkness, the morning-star rises before the coming dawn. The Lamb has conquered, let us march through the very gates of Hell.

Post Scriptum: One might inquire, since it is not explicit, what is the shape & form of history then? How does postmillennialism take this seriously, if other view of millennial reign do not? As the Psalmist says, a day for the LORD is like a thousand years, and a thousand years like a day. What is the form of history? It is none other than the Crucified Lord judging his cross, enthroned with a cursed crown as King of the Jews. Christ's crusade is to subdue the Earth through his atoning sacrifice. The history of the Church, the history of the whole universe, is none other than an image of Christ on the cross, slain before the foundations of the world. The Church is the rib pulled from the Second Adam's side, grown as a companion to cover the whole Earth with Edenic glory. Then & only then will the City from Above descend. Victory through sacrifice, that when the whole world mocks that the little Christs have failed, then shall triumph dawn upon the arrogant & foolish. The darkness is real & suffocating, but victory is assured. The sorrows of the crucified Christ were none other than the birth-pangs of the New Creation. The continued failures, sufferings, persecutions, corruptions & weakness of the Church will, through the sanctity of the Holy Spirit, unveil a New World.