How Post-Mill Figures into It

These were my intro comments during the Christian nationalism round table discussion.

On the one hand, it is truly admirable when a man knows what his duty is, and simply does it, regardless of whether or not he feels like it. As Screwtape once put it to Wormwood, “Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring but still intending to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.”

Admirable, certainly. Admirable, but not very common.

And so, on the other hand, God does promise us rewards. He remembers our frame. He knows what most of us are like. In fact, truth be told, He knows what all of us are like. “And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ” (Colossians 3:23–24). “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him” (Hebrews 11:6). Believing that God rewards us is an article of faith. In order to come to God, you must believe this.

We are not supposed to be Stoics, impervious to anything except the summons of raw duty. We are not supposed to be amill Kantians, performing all our duties in a misty and disinterested cloud of moral superiority. Incentives are not sin. There is a difference between selfishness and self-interest. Now incentives vary, but I want to focus on one of them.

For wise men, one of the rewards of work is to see the work actually accomplished, to see the mission completed. The telos of lawn mowing, one of the great ones, is the satisfaction of seeing the lawn actually mowed. A man’s duty is a man’s duty, regardless, but if the duty is pointless, or seems pointless with regard to the teleology of it, then it might not be long before a man could start to feel like Sisyphus, rolling the rock up the hill again.

And this:

So completely apart from the prophetic word, believing that you are going to win frequently has a big impact on whether you do or not. Of course, if we are going to operate on a carnal level solely, believing you are going to win can also set you up for the kind of losses that can arise from overconfidence. With that reality freely acknowledged, who among us has not had the dismal experience of playing on a team that had no air left in the tires. If you aim at losing, you are very likely to achieve your goal.

If this is true, as I think that it is, then should we not consider that an eschatology that teaches “we lose down here” is an eschatology that may have had something to do with why we are, you know, losing down here? We are right on schedule, apparently.

However, I said earlier that a certain approach to losing was admirable. I am speaking there about the kind of spirit that defended the Alamo, or which the gods of Norse mythology displayed going into Ragnarok. I probably gained my admiration for this by observing my father, who was not postmill, but who was dedicated to evangelizing Moscow until it became a Christian town. He dedicated himself to this because that is what we were told to do in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20). We should do what we were told to do, and let God sort out the doctrine.

So taking everything into account, it is not really true that all of us are rowing on the same stroke, and that the postmills among us are just a little more upbeat. While it is good to be cheerful, and I have nothing against it, I believe that much more is involved. I was in my thirties when I came to postmill convictions, and although I don’t remember the time before that very clearly, being lost in the mists of time and all, I believe that I had a fairly optimistic personality back then also. The change in conviction did not alter my attitude to the same old mission. The change in conviction altered my convictions about the very nature of the mission. It was much greater than I had thought. So we need to meditate more on the greatness of the Great Commission. It is not the same old thing, only done cheerfully now.

Evangelism is no longer a “man the lifeboats” approach to evangelism. It certainly still includes the necessity of the new birth and conversion, but this is not simply to get people off the sinking ship. It now is to save the ship, to right the ship.  

Now having run my postmill flag up the flag pole, at the same time I want to emphasize that I do not want us to get tangled up in eschatological train schedule debates. That kind of thing would truly be a distraction. If you will allow me to zoom out, let me borrow a couple of terms from the late Gary North, and those terms are optimillenialist and pessimillenialist. These terms do not refer to the time after the Second Coming because all Christians are optimistic in that final sense. I am talking about historical optimism and historical pessimism.

Out of the three positions—post mill, amill and premill—the postmills are required to be optimillenialists. It is part of the package. But amills and premills are allowed to be. You have probably heard some people describe themselves as optimistic amill, and yes, that’s a thing. Just think of it as chastened post mill. And you can even be an optimillenialist and be premill, as Spurgeon was. That’s allowed also. But that is about as ecumenical as I am going to get, at least today. I am convinced that America is in the condition we are in today because we have bought into grim eschatologies that discourage, pacify, and enervate the faithful. We really need to be done with that.