Lee N. Field
Since Mar 2, 2000
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Lee N. Field
Since Mar 2, 2000
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I am a Christian, specifically of the "reformed" protestant variety. Yes, I'm one of those horrible people who believes in "total depravity". You think we "Calvinists" are a dark, glowering and cold people? Think again. I draw your attention to a beautiful question and answer that begins the Heidelberg Catechism:
Question 1. What is thy only comfort in life and death?Answer. That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but belong unto my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, has fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the devil; and so preserves me that without the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head; yea, that all things must be subservient to my salvation, and therefore, by his Holy Spirit, He also assures me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to live unto him.
Since it's a subject that comes up frequently (and contentiously) on FR, my eschatology is mostly "amillenial". "Amillenialism" is a misnomer. Amillenialists do believe in the millennium, just not the same kind of millennium as the chiliasts do. Amillenialism 1)is not antisemitic, 2)is not "replacement theology" (a term only, best I can tell, used by dispensationalists trying to make rhetorical points), 3)is not an innovation by that horrible old Roman Catholic protocalvinist St. Augustine, and 4)does not "spiritualize the text". There, have I covered all the usual canards?
Oh, yeah. Contra Jan Markell, holding to amillenial eschatology does not make one part of the great end-times apostasy.
If you want to read up on it, forget LaHaye and Missler and those guys. I suggest you read Anthony Hoekema's The Bible and the Future and Kim Riddelbarger's A Case for Amillenialism, and the materials on Rev. Riddelbarger's website. That, and get your Bible out.
Positively, amillenialism holds that the "thousand years" of Revelation 20 represents the period between Christ's ascension to heaven (to the right hand of God, there to rule) and his return in glory at the end of this age. For an exposition of this, and the nature and parallelism between the first and second deaths and first and second resurrections, I point you to Meredith Kline's short article "The First Resurrection".
I can coexist with most everybodies eschatological opinions except Hymenaen preterists and dispensationalists. Both, if consistant, run the risk of getting the gospel wrong.
Full preterists (who hold that all prophecy is fulfilled, and thus have an unorthodox doctrine of the resurrection of the body) are scarce. Dispensationalists, unfortunately, are not. The more I read and listen to advocates of dispensationalism, the wackier I find it. It combines in one system woodenly literalist interpretation, a tin ear for metaphor and the wildest speculation. It's an eschatological kludge.
If dispensationalism was limited to end times speculation, I could just let it go. It's not. Dispensationalism has as an axiom, a root assumption, that Israel and the church are separate peoples of God with separate destinies. The end times speculation is almost incidental to that. The two peoples of God notion leads to all kinds of weird conclusions, and can (if the dispensationalist is consistent) lead to getting the gospel wrong.
How so? If you hold that Jews are under a different set of rules, and have benefits not available to Gentiles, you deny the universality of the gospel. We are no longer "one new man". Jesus is no longer the only name by which one may be saved. Substance gives way for the return of shadow.
Don't believe me? Check out this guy's chart. Note carefully the salvation plan for the millennium. I've seen this brought up on FR. I've brought it up on FR. So far I've only seen one dispensationalist repudiate it. "Works, no faith." Tell me there's not a gospel problem with that!
Sixty years ago the Presbyterians looked into Dispensationalism, and saw problems. Short (four pages) and too the point, read the 1944 PCUS Report on Dispensationalism.
THIS FUNDAMENTAL DIVERGENCE OF DISPENSATIONALISM FROM THE COVENANT THEOLOGY OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH MANIFESTS ITSELF IN MANY WAYS, SOME OF WHICH ARE THE FOLLOWING:
A. The Rejection of the Unity of God’s people.
B. The Rejection of One Way of Salvation.
C. The Rejection of One Destiny for All of God’s People.
D. The Rejection of the Bible as God’s one Revelation to His One People.
For a little more in depth critique of classic dispensationalism, I recommend Oswald Allis's Prophecy and the Church. (I keep hearing that the saner "progressive dispensationalism" is all the rage now, but from what I've seen, the classic dispensationalism that Allis wrote about 60 years ago is alive and well out in the evangelical churches.)
(*"Where's the gap?". For the dispensational chronology to work, the "prophetic clock stops" between the 69th and 70th weeks of Daniel's prophecy of "seventy sevens" in Daniel 9. There's no hint of it in the text. You can't find it in the text unless your system requires you to find it there.)
Politically I am a pessimist with libertarian sympathies. Fallen human beings being what they are, I am pessimistic about human utopias. This opinion comes in part from my religious convictions ("total depravity", see above under Calvinism).
From historical observation we all know the path a Marxist state will go: gulags and gray concrete apartment blocks, public schools and general ugliness. A boring gray dullness broken by episodes of terror. Thuggish rulers, starvation, poverty, blood, despair, death and ruin. The cradle to grave Eurosocialist style welfare state is a slow motion death cult whose subjects don't even care enough to reproduce themselves.
I suspect Libertopia would have it's own set of problems. A disproportionate number of libertarians I have interacted with have been, well, "extreme" personalities.
Chucking it all for an anarchy (good as it looks in theory and from the numbers (see Joe Sobran, The Reluctant Anarchist)), I suspect it would end up like tribal Darkest Africa, in need of a (sigh!) government to restrain evil. A government that will itself most likely be evil. Many humans are predators who will happily prey upon everyone else around them (which is why, children, I own guns.). And so it goes.
I am also an optimist (see above under eschatology). "This age" will end, "the age to come" will arrive. God's triumph will be manifest in the end. Every knee shall bow.
The cosmic end game prospect of the double (divine and human) pleroma bound together in the theanthropic Christ is presented to us in gospel mode. It comes as an invitation to an eschatological banquet on Har Magedon. In Isaiah's words, on that day when Yahweh of hosts reigns on (Isa24:2I-23), he "will make on this Mount Zion in his Glory-parousia mountain a feast for all peoples"(Isa 25:6). And the herald of this messianic good news is exhorted to get up to a high mountain and shout, "Behold your God. Behold the Lord Yahweh comes with might . . . He will feed his flock like a shepherd"(Isa40:9-1 l; cf. 52:7).The Har Magedon banquet is the marriage supper of the Lamb and those who are invited to come and enjoy without price (Rev 22:17) are pronounced blessed(Rev 19:9).
Referring to this banquet in a kingdom parable (Luke 14:16ff,) Jesus tells us that in the face of the rejection of his invitation by many, the householder persists in gathering guests, determined that his house be filled (v.23). The harvest-gathering to which Jesus commissioned the church will be completed. The eternal good pleasure of him who accomplishes all things according to the counsel of his will (Eph 1: 1 1) will be fulfilled: Christ will be the firstborn among many brethren (Rom 8:29). The Son will receive his request that all whom the Father had given him be with him where he is to behold his glory, the glory the Father gave him in love before the foundation of the world (John 17:24). The predestined pleroma in Christ will be assembled fullness of joy before his parousia-Presence on consummated Har Magedon, Mount of Gathering.
7And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations.
8 He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.
IS 26:1 In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea. AMEN
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