In a discussion this morning at breakfast, some of the men in our gathering were talking (not surprisingly) about the federal vision controversy that has recently heated up again. One of the things that was noted is that there are some issues that are not currently part of the controversy, but which are real indicators of where someone would be in that controversy.
I mentioned one of those issues and suggested that I thought it was the real culprit, the issue being postmillennialism. I know there are a handful of exceptions, but it is striking to me that the federal vision side of things is overwhelming postmill, and the anti-fv side is overwhelmingly not. Is this just an oddity, or might there be a causal connection?
If there is a causal connection, here is how it might work. Postmillennial thinking is the type of view that gets into everything. Postmillennialism proper requres us to believe that God is intent on saving the world, all the nations of men. At the end of the process, the world will in fact be saved, and the number of the saved will vastly outnumber those who are lost. This, in its turn, commits the one who believes it to a certain optimistic frame of mind. Peter Leithart’s recent book Deep Comedy goes into this in a wonderful way.
What does that optimistic frame of mind do when it encounters other issues? First, what does the alternative do, the pessimistic frame of mind? If your worldview could be summed up with “where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?” the end result will necessarily be a certain wariness, an expectation that Murphy’s Law will govern everything. If something can go wrong, it will — in the sacraments, in admitting young children to the table, in teaching Christians from the law, in having a high view of the church, and so on. A hermeneutic of suspicion gets into everything.
Going the other way, the postmillenialist does not approach everything he does with the idea that the wheels are all about to fall off. Having become convinced that God is lovingly engaged with human history in order to ensure that everything will turn out right, this affects how we approach our everyday tasks. It affects how we approach our congregations, our spouses, our children, our studies, our theologies of everything else. This is not a dogmatic belief that nothing can ever go wrong, but it does help set the general orientation in a positive way. And everything that does go wrong is doing so in a broader, comedic context. When a nation rejoices because they have just won a war, the grief of the widow whose husband was killed the day before the armistice was signed is a very real grief. But it is grief in a context of broader joy.
God is love, and He is demonstrating that love throughout the course of history. His love will not be revealed in a surprise move at the last day; His love is shed abroad in our hearts now. This means we can afford to extend grace more liberally than we used to, without fear of that grace being abused. We now have a more potent view of what God is actually up to with that grace.