When Rome, the Eternal City, was sacked in 410 AD, St. Augustine was brought to write his monumental work, the City of God. Part of the reason he felt the book had to be written was because many Christians had had their faith rattled by the event. Over the course of the previous centuries, Christianity had gone from being a small persecuted group to the religion of the empire, and it is not surprising that many believers had come to think that it was only going to get better and better from here on out. And then the hairy barbarians from the north showed up, and sacked a place commonly believed to be inviolable.
The distinction which Augustine felt compelled to make is one which must be made again in our own day. He showed that history contained two stories, the story of the City of God, and the story of the city of man. These stories were commonly intertwined, and frequently one cannot be understood without reference to the other one. But at bottom, a fundamental distinction between the two must be preserved.
Now before I came to understand and embrace a postmillennial eschatology, I was baffled by something — and this was the result of my own failure to make this fine Augustinian distinction. How, I wondered, can someone who holds a optimistic eschatology at the same time be able to offer trenchant social and cultural criticism, showing how our fin de siecle culture is just about at the end of the road? The question occurred to me because in my reading I was encountering a good deal of pointed and pessimistic cultural criticism, and this from people who were postmillennial. What giveth? thought I.
The answer is based upon the same distinction which Augustine made: the future of the kingdom of God is not to be confused with the future of America. Just as many ancient Christians could not comprehend a flourishing gospel without a flourishing and powerful Rome, so many contemporary Christians cannot comprehend Christmas or Epiphany unless accompanied by the Fourth of July.
All secular idolatries must totter and fall. This is a wonderful part of the hope found in the biblical worldview — in the long run, stupidity never works. It would have been nice if the communists had been right in thinking that bread could be made for 50 cents, and sold for 25 cents, and with plenty of bread left over for everyone. But alas. And wouldn’t it be grand if we could build a government school system which could impart universal literacy without ever having to undertake the nuisance of teaching children the sounds of the letters? The real tragedy in these stories occurs when Christians, who should know better, invest more than a little emotional capital in these bankrupt ideologies. This means that when the necessary judgment of God comes, Christians are often as distressed about it as the average pagan.
None of this should be taken as a rejection of a biblical patriotism. It is right and proper for us to love our nation, and to be distressed when the Lord’s hand is heavy on us. But it is never right to be confused about our nation, thinking, for example, that the corruptions in the Oval Office somehow contaminate the courts of heaven. When we do this, we are acting like the Gentiles, without God and without hope in the world.
The earth will be filled one day with the sound of praises, and the knowledge of God will cover Thailand and Scotland, South America and Asia, Detroit and Berlin. All the families of the earth will remember, and will turn to the Lord to worship him. The promise made to Abraham and his seed, that he would be heir of the world, will be brought about through the preaching of the gospel, resulting in the response of faith from countless millions. In the great heavenly vision, John heard the number — 144,000 — but when he turned and looked, he saw a multitude that no one could number. How many will be saved at the last day? The biblical answer is that we cannot count that high.
The tendency we have, and it is quite a natural one, is to intrude our familial and national bonds into the process. I said it was a natural tendency, which makes it understandable, but it is still far from being the spiritual understanding we are called to. What is the place of America in a postmillennial understanding of prophecy? The answer is that we do not know. At the end of history, the land where we live will be filled with the knowledge of God. But we do not know if it will be filled with our descendants, or even with those who speak English. We may stumble, but then recover, like the Jews. We may fall away into oblivion, like the city of Ninevah. We may continue in our national identity until these wonderful things happen. Only God knows. But the glory of all this is that regardless of what we do, the City of God remains. And there we find our true citizenship, there we find our true and everlasting home.
Every civilization and advanced culture regards itself as indispensable. But guide books for tourists, and history books for students, are commonly filled with many pictures of many beautiful ruins. Not surprisingly, the photographs of these ruins frequently include pictures of their idols.