Bully's Blog

Interpretive Maximalism

Need help combating those pesky liberal scholars who insist the Bible has been cobbled together and is nothing but an archaic shambles? Or those premillennialists who gasp in horror when you mention that the church replaced Israel? You need a strong dose of interpretive maximalism. It cuts liberal scholarship and dispensational nonsense to shreds. How? It shows, using repeated typology, that orthodox preterism and postmillennialism flow naturally out of the Old Testament.

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“Prayer is not a retreat from the history of redemption into private ecstasies of communion. Prayer is a chief instrument by which the Father renews the world through His sons who are in the Son and who have received the Spirit.”

Peter Leithart, Romans 8, continued, www.leithart.com

Just watched The Painted Veil. Must be Edward Norton week. A movie based on a 1925 novel by Somerset Maugham, with strong messages of the benefit of forgiveness after betrayal, and of how suffering strips away our delusions and brings maturity and freedom to love.

The main thing that struck me was how the superstitions of the locals obstructed those who risked their lives to help them. We lose sight of just how much the gospel has changed the world, and take the foundation of our culture, the Bible, for granted.

Ecclesia reformata semper reformanda est.

“Reformed theology should be reforming theology, for the Church – finite, sinful, not yet fully glorified – always stands in need of God’s reformation, by his Spirit, through his Word taught, trusted, and obeyed. And so, Ecclesia Reformanda exists to assist the Church in the ongoing task of listening to Scripture in all its depth and richness. It will seek to be truly theological, distinctively Reformed, and prayerfully reforming.”

An “ongoing theological conversation” cannot be tolerated by the academy. James Jordan writes:

“We looked last time at the problem of academic theology. Systematic theology tends to become paramount, a “Greek” discipline that specializes in comparison and contrast… what the academic guards is not the woman, not the Bride, but rather ideas. Loyalty to ideas, and sometimes loyalties to the men who came up with the ideas, is more important than loyalty to the Church and to the Spirit. Does N. T. Wright not say things exactly they way Geerhardus Vos did? Then we might fight him. He must be put down. A spirit of churchly catholicity, of humility before the infinity of the Word and the long future of the church ahead of us, is simply absent, or certainly seems to be.

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Steve Kryger, in his article Thank The Porn Industry?, says the sex trade has been the driving force behind innovation on the internet.

Clearly, not all of these innovations have been good (as the article itself concedes). It doesn’t take a particularly web-savvy reader to work out which of these are ‘naughty’ (in the words of the author), and which are ‘nice’:

• Online payment systems
• Spam
• Streaming content
• Malware
• Live chat
• Pop-ups, pop-unders and mousetrapping
• Broadband
• Browser hijacking
• Traffic optimisation
• Domain-name hijacking
• 3G mobile services
• Paris Hilton

Christian ministry makes use of six of these twelve innovations (i.e. all of the ‘nice’ ones!).

He complains about the fact that the world comes up with the ideas (like YouTube) and the church just mimics them (GodTube). I would agree on this when it comes to our worship music and culture. But in a very real sense, this is the way God has worked in history and will always work:

“Enoch and Babylon are the first cities, but Jerusalem is the last. Jubal is the first musician, but David the “last”. The wicked get there first and do much of the work, laying up an inheritance for the just. Because they are not concerned with morality, the wicked can employ slave labour to build their cultures early, while a righteous culture takes longer to build.”1

To clarify my thought, it means we as God’s people will inhabit houses, towns, vineyards and software that we didn’t build.

1 James B. Jordan, Was Job an Edomite King?, BIBLICAL Horizons, No. 131,www.biblicalhorizons.com

Dear Heathen:

The Lord Jesus Christ hath promised that the time shall come when all the ends of the earth shall be His kingdom. And God is not a man that He should lie nor the son of man that He should repent. And if this was promised by a Being who cannot lie, why do you not help it to come sooner by reading the Bible, and attending to the words of your teachers, and loving God, and, renouncing your idols, take Christianity into your temples? And soon there will not be a Nation, no, not a space of ground as large as a footstep, that will want a missionary. My sister and myself have, by small self-denials, procured two dollars which are enclosed in this letter to buy tracts and Bibles to teach you.

Archibald Alexander Hodge, and Mary Eliz. Hodge,
Friends of the Heathen.

(June 23, 1833. A letter to the “heathen” from ten-year-old A.A. Hodge and his sister Mary Elizabeth, given to J.R. Eckard, a Princeton Seminary graduate who was to go to Ceylon. Quoted in Princeton Seminary: Faith and learning 1812-1868,v. 1, p. 193).
From www.christkirk.com

“…the coming of the kingdom means that the saints are, in Christ, seated in heavenly places, enthroned in fulfillment of the dominion mandate. Heavenly dominion over sin and Satan is the basic form of dominion for the individual Christian. But the Bible teaches that the saints have dominion over earth as well as heaven (Rev. 5:10). Heavenly dominion is over “spiritual forces of wickedness in the heavenly places” (Eph. 6:12), but by exercising this heavenly dominion, the church rules also on earth. The rule of the church over the demons is not only subjective and spiritual, but has objective historical consequences.

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Postmillennialism and preterism

from davidpfield.blogspot.com

“It’s been a very long time since I looked at Louis Berkhof’s Systematic Theology. But when I was flicking through it today I noticed a section called “Objections to Postmillennialism”. This is in his first paragraph:

There are some very serious objections to the Postmillennial theory.

The fundamental idea of the doctrine – that the whole world will gradually be won for Christ, that the life of all nations will in course of time be transformed by the gospel, that righteousness and peace will reign supreme, and that the blessings of the Spirit will be poured out in richer abundance than before, so that the Church will experience a season of unexampled prosperity just before the coming of the Lord - is not in harmony with the picture of the end of the ages found in Scripture. The Bible teaches indeed that the gospel will spread throughout the world and will exercise a beneficent influence, but does not lead us to expect the conversion of the world, either in this or in a coming age. It stresses the fact that the time immediately preceding the end will be a time of great apostasy, of tribulation and persecution, a time when the faith of many will wax cold, and when they who are loyal to Christ will be subjected to bitter sufferings, and will in some cases even sealed their confession with their blood, Matt. 24:6-14, 21, 22; Luke 18.8; 21.25-28; II Thess. 2:3-12; II Tim. 3:1-6; Rev. 13.

I don’t know about “just” before the coming of the Lord but what I found most striking was that, in my view, every one of the six passages he cites in defence of his objection to postmillennialism has reference to first century events.

There are other things to say about the relationship between postmillennialism and preterism but I thought this remarkable.”

Greater Solomon

The structure of Revelation passes through two large heptamerous cycles (1-11 and 12-19). But the book as a whole follows the same pattern as Ezekiel. In the last three chapters, following Ezekiel’s pattern, John is shown the destruction of Gog (Amalek) in the Land, and a vision of a new Jerusalem. However, unlike Ezekiel, these events are beyond the second cycle of the book, and for good reason. This final “east-west” section exiles the Accuser to the Abyss (Azal) and enthrones the Bride. It is the only part of Revelation that directly concerns our own day.

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“[Revelation 20:7] tells us that the Millennium, which began 40 years after Jesus’ ascension, will not last all the way to His second coming. There is a brief period of time after the Millennium in which Satan will once again be released from the Abyss. Once again he will deceive the nations, Gog and Magog (prince and people; Ezekiel 38-39), to attack the Church. This final assault will be cut short by fire from heaven and the Last Judgment.”1

The allusion to Gog and Magog brings us to Ezekiel 38-39. Satan is Haman (head), ejected from the Emperor’s court but still desiring to destroy the people of God by deceiving the nations (body). The Lord, however, has prevented him from carrying out that plan. David Chilton writes:

“The stated goal of the Dragon’s deception is to entice the nations to join forces against Christ for the final, all-out war at the end of history. Satan’s desire from the beginning has often been to provoke a premature eschatological cataclysm, to bring on the end of the world and the Final Judgment now. He wants to rush God into judgment in order to destroy Him, or at least to short-circuit His program and destroy the wheat with the chaff (cf. Matt. 13:24-30). In a sense, he can be considered as his own agent provocateur, leading his troops headlong into an end-time rebellion that will call down God’s judgment and prevent the full maturation of God’s Kingdom.”2

Not only does this identify Satan as the true Amalek, surrounding the camp of the saints as he did in Exodus 17, and the beloved city as he did in Ezekiel 38, it also identifies this Conquest period of the greater Bible pattern with the Book of Esther. It is the time of God working unseen in the affairs of mankind, masterfully orchestrating all events for His ultimate purpose. After all, the kingdom of God is like leaven hidden in dough (Matthew 13:33). It is this process Satan would wish to stop.

The “binding” does not mean Satan has no influence in the world. He was bound in one aspect of his “ministry”, that of deceiving the nations. He is unable to mount another “universal” attack—a conspiracy of nations—against the church until he is released.

Finally, Satan is loosed again. And what does he immediately do? As He did in the late 60′sAD, he AGAIN gathers a conspiracy of nations against the church, this time on a world-scale. And what does this attack do AGAIN? It brings about the end of the age and a resurrection – this time on a world-scale. The second resurrection and the final judgment.

So, hyperpreterism misunderstands and truncates this entire process back into the first century. But this limits the conquest of Christ to Garden and Land. Jesus is now conquering the World. As Greater Amalek, Satan is powerless to gather the nations as “the sand by the sea”, while Jesus, as Greater Solomon, has been given all power to do so.

“Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand by the sea in multitude, eating and drinking and rejoicing.” 1 Kings 4:20

 

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1 James B. Jordan, The Vindication of Jesus Christ, p. 84-85.
2 David Chilton, The Days of Vengeance, p. 504.