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Amillennialism by David Engelsma

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Amillennialism by David Engelsma Amillennialism by David Engelsma. This series of articles was written for the PRC Standard Bearer from Jan. 15, 1995 to Dec. 15. 1996 in support of Amillennialism as reformed echatology, and refuting Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, Christian Reconstructionism, and Dispensationalism in the process. TABLE OF CONTENTS Jewish Dreams ................................................................................................................................... 2 A Letter and Response on “Jewish Dreams” .................................................................................... 6 Another Letter and Response on “Jewish Dreams” ....................................................................... 10 1. A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism – Introduction .......................................................... 16 2. A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism – Revelation 20 ........................................................ 19 3. A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism – Apostasy and Persecution .................................... 23 4. A Defense of (Reformed) Amillennialism – Matthew 24 ........................................................... 26 An Open Letter to Gary North (Part 1) ........................................................................................... 29 An Open Letter to Gary North (Part 2) ........................................................................................... 32 5. Matthew 24 (Again) ..................................................................................................................... 37 6. Matthew 24 (cont.) ...................................................................................................................... 41 7. Matthew 24 (cont.)....................................................................................................................... 43 8. Matthew 24 (concluded) ............................................................................................................. 46 9. Those Glorious Prospects in Old Testament Prophecy .............................................................. 49 10. A Spiritual Interpretation of Isaiah 65:17ff ............................................................................... 53 11. A Spiritual Fulfillment of Isaiah 65:17ff .................................................................................... 57 12. A Spiritual Fulfillment of Isaiah 65:17ff. (concluded) .............................................................. 59 13. The Victory of Christ in History ................................................................................................. 62 14. The Victory of Christ in History (concluded) ............................................................................ 65 1 Jewish Dreams By Engelsma David Volume 71/1995 Issue: 8, 1/15/1995 http://standardbearer.rfpa.org/articles/jewish-dreams?keyword[]=jewish%20dreams The hope of the Reformed church and believer at the beginning of a new year is the second coming of Christ and the resurrection of the body. A hope, as was pointed out in the previous editorial, is the resurrection of the soul at the believer’s death. The hope is Christ’s return and the resurrection of the body. The Word of God makes this the hope of the church. The “glorious appearing of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ” is our “blessed hope” (Titus 2:13). “We groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Rom. 8:23). The prayer of the saints is, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20). It is no part of the church’s hope that a majority of humanity will soon be converted; that the church will then physically dominate the world; that all nations will be “Christianized”; and that a “golden age” of earthly peace and prosperity will precede the coming of the Lord Jesus. This is the hope of some in Reformed and Presbyterian circles. Certain teachers aggressively promote this hope, particularly those associated with a movement known as “Christian Reconstruction,” or “theonomy.” The church will enjoy earthly dominion. This future dominion — the Christianizing” of the world — will be the Messianic kingdom. Because this doctrine of the last things thinks to base itself on Revelation 20’s teaching of the “thousand years” (Latin: millennium), it is commonly referred to as postmillennialism. Jesus Christ will come only after a thousand years in which the church has had earthly victory and the kingdom of Christ has been the political world-power. The hope of postmillennialism, particularly in its “Christian Reconstruction” form, is a “Jewish dream,” This was the express judgment of the early Reformed creed, the Second Helvetic Confession (A. D. 1566): We further condemn Jewish dreams that there will be a. golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth. For evangelical truth in Matt., chs. 24 and 25, and Luke, ch. 18, and apostolic teaching in 2Thess., ch. 2, and 2Tim., chs. 3 and 4, present something quite different (Chap. 11, in Reformed Confessions of the 16th Century, ed. Arthur C. Cochrane, Westminster Press, 1966). The carnal kingdom of postmillennialism, particularly as painted by “Christian Reconstruction,” is exactly the kind of Messianic kingdom dreamed and desired by the Jews in the days of Christ’s earthly ministry. This was what the Jews of John 6 wanted: Christ as the king of an earthly kingdom and a temporal future bright with the prospect of political power and earthly glory. The damning judgment upon postmillennialism by the Second Helvetic Confession reflected the theology of the early Reformers, Luther and Calvin, as well as Bullinger, author of the creed. More importantly, it is the stand of the confessions that bind Reformed and Presbyterian churches and Christians today. I leave to those whose creeds they are to demonstrate that the Westminster Standards rule out the illusory dream of postmillennialism. But it may be noted that Anglican theologian Peter Toon has written that the postmillennialists at the Westminster Assembly failed to “affect the final wording of the (Westminster) Confession of Faith, which gives the impression of following 2 the Augustinian teaching” (“Puritan Eschatology: 1600-1648,” in The Manifold Grace of God, Puritan and Reformed Studies Conference, 1968, p. 50). It is surely significant that, immediately after the adoption of the Westminster Confession, the independents drew up their own creed, the Savoy Declaration of 1658, in which they explicitly affirmed their post-millennial hope: ...we expect that in the latter days, Antichrist being destroyed, the Jews called, and the adversaries of the kingdom of his dear, Son broken, the churches of Christ being enlarged and edified through a free and plentiful communication of light and grace, shall enjoy in this world a more quiet, peaceable, and glorious condition than they have enjoyed (see the Savoy Declaration, 26.5, in P. Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, vol. 3, Baker repr., 1966, p. 723). The “Three Forms of Unity” condemn the hope of postmillennialism. The church in the end-time will be a persecuted church, not a triumphalist church (Heid. Cat., Q. 52; Bel. Conf., Art. 37). The Messianic kingdom in history is the church, not a “Christianized” world (Heid. Cat., Q. 123; Bel. Conf., Art. 27). For this reason, it is unfaithfulness on the part of office-bearers bound by the “Three Forms of Unity” to permit the advocacy of the post-millennial dream in the churches for which they are responsible. There is this openness to postmillennialism, evidently, in the churches that have recently split from the Christian Reformed Church and that are loosely associated in the Alliance of Reformed Churches (ARC). There is openness to these “Jewish dreams” in the extraordinarily, virulent form of “Christian Reconstruction.” To a chief theorist and proponent of “Christian Reconstruction” was given the privilege of drawing up the hermeneutical basis of the set of new creeds once envisioned by leaders in the Alliance and sanctioned by the Alliance itself. At least one of the most prominent, and vocal, ministers in the Alliance has publicly associated himself closely with “Christian Reconstruction.” Already virtually committed to the dead-end of independency, the churches of the ARC are opened up as well to millennial fantasies. Reformed saints in this movement do well to brace themselves for a wild ecclesiastical adventure. The consequences will be injurious, if not disastrous. The “Jewish dreams” of postmillennialism produce practical nightmares. They take the hope of the church off the coming of Christ and the resurrection of the body. For they direct hope toward the golden age and the carnal kingdom. Just as the “blessed hope” of premillennial dispensationalism is the earthly rapture, so the “blessed hope” of postmillennialism is the kingdom of Christ as earthly world-power. We groan for the redemption of the body (Rom. 8:23); the committed postmillennialist groans, if he groans at all, for the millennial kingdom. Postmillennialist and “Christian Reconstructionist” David Chilton cheerfully informs us that history has “tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, of increasing godliness ahead of it, before the Second Coming of Christ” (Paradise Restored, Reconstruction Press, 1985 pp. 221, 222). That Christ will not come for hundreds of thousands of years saddens this postmillennialist not at all. Indeed, this
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