Two great Christian heresies — Marxism and Islam — borrowed something from the Christian faith which Christians should actually ask to have returned. They borrowed it, used it to great effect, and Christians for some reason let them, neglecting this idea ourselves. That “thing” they borrowed was a sense of inevitable victory for their cause. But they do not have the promises, and we do. Mainland China and Saudi Arabia will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Marxists sustained themselves by means of a blind faith in the inexorable forces of dialectical materialism. Islam has always depended upon conquest, and so they have never been the same since Lepanto and Malta.
So all the nations of the earth will stream to Christ. It is not unbelief to think this will not happen by this time next week. But it is unbelief to waver, thinking it will never happen at all. It is unbelief to place the fulfillment outside the course of history, to hold that the promises to the nations will only come to fruition when the nations are no more.
Now the revolutionary thinks that his inevitability is within reach. We never see revolutionaries with their agitprop crowds, protesting for the cameras thusly: “What do we want!” “Peace!” (or “Whatever!”) “When do we want it?” “In the eschaton!” Revolution is necessarily impatient. One exception, more or less, will be noted later.
The person who locates all transformation outside time and history really has learned how to use the Christian faith within the boundaries contained by Marx’s taunt — as the opiate of the masses. By and by, in the sky, when we die, good things will happen. We gave it a big name to console ourselves, mixed in a little already/not yet, and blam, we were good to go. In this instance, “going” means “sitting here, and maybe taking some seminary classes.”
But Reformation faith takes note of Christopher Dawson’s wonderful observation — the Christian church lives in the light of eternity and can afford to be patient. In patience we are to possess our souls. And we can know that our labor in the Lord is not in vain (1 Cor. 15:58) because there is a direct line of continuity between what we (each of us) do right now, and the conversion of the nations.
What I am trying to do is persuade Christians that we win the race, and that we should run it as those who intend to win it. I am not trying to persuade them that the race is a brief little burst, a hundred yard dash. No, it is a couple marathons, end to end, and we have barely started. But we are running to win, and not to place or show.
So what should we want now? We should want Christians to know this now — they don’t have to do it all now. The martyrs who went to their deaths in the first century were building the Christendom that did not begin to appear for several centuries after that. Patience.
When it comes our secular arrangements, I am not trying to get Christians to vote it out in the next election cycle. That’s not going to happen, and fine. What can happen, and what is happening, is a large number of people realizing that secularism is the joke that fell flat. This too shall pass.
One revolutionary, the exception mentioned earlier, who did have a longer view than did Lenin was named Gramsci. He advocated a strategy for the West that has proven — from the perspective of the revolutionaries — far more potent than Lenin’s impatient violence. He urged what he called “the long march through the institutions.” Lenin’s approach was taken in the East, and Gramsci’s in the West. Lenin did an enormous amount of damage, but Gramsci did more. Like the violent revolutionaries, this slow approach cultivates a sense of inevitability.
That sense of inevitability is potent, even with false faiths, if only for a time. How much more potent will it be when Christians understand that the gospel is all about world conquest, and will be content with nothing less than world conquest. I know that place where I labor — the Pacific Northwest — will one day be overwhelmingly Christian. This will happen long after I am dead, and long before Jesus returns. This is reformational transformation, not revolutionary zeal.
This “conquest” will be accomplished by means of God’s weakness, not man’s strength, for our weapons are not carnal. This thing will be done — and it will be done — in the power of the Spirit by means of words and water, bread and wine. What are we doing? We are besieging strongholds, and the citadels of unbelief will fall. Every sermon is another swing of the battering ram, every baptism is an engine deployed to overthrow the devil, and every administration of the Supper is an inexorable offer of wine for the forgiveness of the world, and bread for the life of the world. And the day is coming, when they will receive it.