Eschatology - Intro to Postmillennialism
I have posted another set of notes on eschatology over at Theologica, which you can read here.
Long winded (fingered?) type that I am I have a fairly long introduction to the notes over there and I have reproduced it here in the post continuation. It's mainly some personal reflections on how postmillennialism is perceived in our world.
If you are interested in a .pdf copy of the notes, here they are:
Today's set of notes are an introduction to postmillennialism and I want to offer a few introductory words.
Something to keep in mind is that, though I was teaching this class in a Presbyterian church, our church was made up pretty much exclusively of people who were broadly evangelical. What this means is that, for 99% of our folks, the only thing they knew about eschatology came from radio programs and reading books in the Hal Lindsey or Left Behind genres.
Being conservative and evangelical, though most of our folks didn't know the terms, they were thoroughly dispensational premil in their eschatological views. Further, most of the folks were like me in my younger years, they had it ingrained into them that this was the only biblical view and that anyone who took a different view was probably a liberal who didn't believe in the inerrancy of Scripture.
A few may have heard of postmillennialism, but the only thing you would hear in most evangelical churches was that postmillennialism was a view that was held by a few archaic types who believed that the world was getting better and better. The standard evangelical line on postmillennialism was that it had died out after two World Wars that had shown that the world was not getting any better.
I can remember talking with a friend one time and telling him that a certain well known Christian celebrity was postmil. This person was incredulous - they couldn't believe that a modern Christian could believe in something so patently false as postmillennialism.
And so I came into the class realizing that this was what I was walking into. I was in a strange position in that I am not a postmillennialist, yet I have many sympathies for this view. I also think it is a shame that a view which has been held by so many throughout history has gotten the bad press in our day that it has.
So, though I will argue against postmillennialism in my defense of amillennialism I wanted to convey to the class that this was a legitimate eschatological view which, even if you didn't agree with it, offered some helpful insights into eschatology. Further, I wanted to show that postmils aren't ignorant - this view has been held by those who did serious exegesis of the Scripture and were diligent to derive their views from the Scriptures. I may argue against some of their conclusions, but I wanted to let folks know that they make a solid Scriptural case which cannot be easily dismissed.
So, though I am not a postmil, this set of notes are written from the perspective of an advocate. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to read all of the literature I should or could on postmillennialism, and so this set of notes simply contains snippets by me that are designed to hopefully show the standard conservative evangelical skeptic that they ought to give postmillennialism a look before easily dismissing it.
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