The Long View
“To be postmillennial is to be committed to the claim that the state of creation, over time and in time, will be recognizably as the prophets predict…”
Peter Leithart gets down to the nuts and bolts of postmillennialism:
I am postmillennial, and postmils like to speculate about the long view. We like to ask questions like: What is the church and world going to be like after another several millennia of evangelism, baptism, teaching, discipline, Eucharistic merriment? What kind of political system will exist? How will the church worship? What will the economy look like? What kinds of technological advances will be retained and which will be dispensed with as incompatible with God’s commandments?
To be postmillennial is to be committed to the claim that the state of creation, over time and in time, will be recognizably as the prophets predict: Zion will be raised as the chief of the mountains, nations will beat tanks into tractors, chemical weapons into fertilizers (napalm – a sign of millennial bliss?), peoples from the four corners will be eager to hear the instruction of Jesus, and will live by it. Wildernesses will turn to gardens, wild animals – and bestial humans – will be pacified.
Yet, some qualifications are in order. My first instinct in answering the question, “what will the church and world look like in a thousand years?” is to say, “Who knows?” We can’t determine this with the infantile categories we’ve got now. We’re only beginning to understand Scripture, or the world. How can we possibly know in detail where it’s all going?
Read the full article here.
