Dispy PreMil VII: How We Got Here

We all walk into the theater in the middle of the movie.

Regardless of when we were born, there have been years and decades and centuries of doctrinal and historical developments before we showed up. As we grow we begin to try to make sense of the world. We connect the disparate pieces and begin to form a picture of why things are the way they are and how everything works.

As soon as we do that, we realize some of our conclusions are incorrect and need to be repaired. We reach positions based on incomplete information and must do the hard work of deciphering how much of what we have believed has been a lie, how much was only partly correct and what parts we may have actually gotten right.

The study of history is the quest to understand what exactly happened in the movie before we walked into the theater. And wisdom is learning to base your conclusions on what actually happened and why as opposed to what makes sense to you based on the limited amount of information you started with.

What follows is a brief introduction to some of the primary historical and theological dynamics that played a part in forming the circus of eschatological disagreements we all find ourselves involved in today. It is by no means exhaustive, but is simply meant to be both a kind of primer for those who may be interested in digging deeper on their own as well as an ankle-deep explanation of how we got where we are.

To reiterate, there are God-fearing, Christ-loving, Bible-believing Christian people on all sides of this discussion and in all of the various camps. The grace of God allows for both disagreement and being wrong about certain topics. What’s incumbent upon us, however, is to hold our eschatological convictions delicately, which is to say without arrogance and without treating those who happen to disagree with us with an air of smug condescension. It is by design that none of us can precisely know the future: we are meant to walk by faith and in absolute dependence on the One who not only knows it all but who creates the future and sovereignly controls it.

However, the Bible is meant to be understood and we are also meant to look into the future with absolute confidence that God will vindicate His name, build His kingdom, fulfill His promises and rescue His people. To that end, let’s take a quick trip through history:

The earliest form of the Church was Jewish and, therefore, premillennial. Christ’s ministry was to Jews (Matthew 15:24) who understood the prophets of their past to be foretelling a coming Messianic kingdom based in Jerusalem upon the throne of David (Isaiah 9:6-7; Daniel 2:44; II Samuel 7:16; Jeremiah 23:5, etc.) As the very first Christians witnessed the resurrection of Christ and began to understand that His ministry had been about something other than the defeat of Rome and the establishment of a new Jewish monarchy, they continued to believe the kingdom would come (Acts 1:6). Importantly, Christ did not correct their understanding by pointing out that the kingdom was wholly symbolic and never meant to be taken literally, but rather that it was not for them to know when the kingdom would be fully established and to instead prioritize bearing witness to the truth of Christ (Acts 1:7-8). As the final sentence of the Book of Acts reveals, the apostles believed the kingdom was coming and spent their lives spreading the message about how to be a part of it:

[Paul] lived there [in Rome] two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. - Acts 28:30-31

As the Church began to grow after Christ’s ascension and Pentecost, they endured heavy persecution at the hands of the Jewish religious authorities (Acts 4, 7, 21, etc.) So intense were the attacks, arrests and harassment that by the time Jerusalem was sacked and the temple destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, Christians no longer remained in the city. Simultaneously, the ministry of the apostle Paul had begun and the Church began to fill with Gentile converts (Acts 13:44-49, etc.). Through Paul, the primary focus of gospel ministry shifted from the Jews to the Gentiles. As the Jews rejected their Messiah and His gospel of repentance and faith, the Gentiles began to accept and believe it (Romans 9:30-33, 11:13-24; Ephesians 3:1-12).
As Gentiles entered the congregations of Christian churches, they brought their old cultural practices and pagan philosophies along with them. Among those philosophies were Gnostic and Platonic ideas pertaining to the nature of physical and spiritual reality. Namely, that the physical world was base, broken, and irredeemably corrupt. Conversely, the spiritual world was in all ways higher, enlightened, and pure.
The persecution of Christianity at the hands of the Jews together with the influence of Greek philosophical constructs are what began the Church’s departure away from its original biblical, premillennial outlook. As the first century transitioned into the second, Gentile Christians began to outpace the Jews in the demographic makeup of the Church. Consequently, they started to struggle with the notion that the people who were so intent on silencing and killing them and thereby quenching the message of the gospel could still be the covenant people of God. Add to this the common and readily accepted idea that the spiritual world was in every way superior to the physical and the notion of an actual, literal kingdom of Christ on the earth centered in the heartland of the Jews began to seem incoherent, if not abhorrent.
The destruction of the temple in 70 AD at the hands of Titus and his Roman legions lent credence to many that God was finished with the Jews. The diaspora that followed and the continual failures of their uprisings and rebellions against the empire only served to further bolster the idea.
In 150 AD, Justin Martyr published his Dialogue with Trypho, and with it the first known instance of the Gentile Church being the “new Israel,” or the “true Israel.”
In the first half of the third century, a Christian mystic and theologian from Alexandria by the name of Origen introduced a concept of multifaceted approach to biblical interpretation. He taught that passages of scripture ought to be understood in three distinct ways: literally, morally and spiritually. He insisted that the spiritual understanding of a text is always the deepest and most meaningful and went so far as to say that some passages had no literal meaning at all. What resulted from Origen’s ideas and significant influence was an emphasis on allegorical biblical interpretation: the Bible no longer needed to understood at face value.
In 313, the Edict of Milan legalized Christianity throughout the Roman empire and officially protected Christians from state persecution. In 380, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the official religion of the empire. As Christianity gradually moved from the faith of a persecuted minority towards toleration, then to legalization, and finally to recognition as a state-sanctioned religion, the Roman citizenry began to follow in the footsteps of people like emperors Constantine and Theodosius and converted in mass numbers. Rather suddenly, the churches were overflowing with former pagans looking to conform to the new standards and lifestyles of their ruling class.
Seeking to further justify Christianity as a state religion and defend it from blame for the fall of Rome in 410 (which many claimed was the result of the Romans forsaking their pagan roots), Augustine of Hippo wrote The City of God in 426. In it, he taught that the organized, institutional Church was the kingdom of God on the earth and that the thousand-year reign of Christ was an allegorical picture of the Church Age. Augustine effectively systematized amillennialism, which in turn became the dominant eschatological position of the Roman Catholic Church and was carried forward throughout the Medieval and Reformation periods.
This amillennial view of the Roman Catholics was the effectively exclusive position of institutional Christianity for more than a millennium due to Roman Catholic control of both church and state. To be Christian was to be Catholic. Laymen had no access to the Word of God except through the mechanism of the Church and its priests, and often times the priests themselves were far more educated about the rituals of the Mass than they were about the actual words of the Bible. Biblical literacy among the clergy was unnecessary for Rome to maintain the control it demanded. Throughout the Medieval period there was no effective pushback against the doctrinal diktats of Roman Catholicism that was not persecuted, marginalized or suppressed.
The Reformation of the 16th century caused a schism in Christianity between Romanism and what we know of as Protestantism. Important to remember, however, is that the Reformers were not looking to create a Protestant movement. They were looking to reform Catholicism. The early Reformers were themselves Catholics (Martin Luther was an Augustinian friar and ordained to the priesthood, for example.) The early Reformers broke with Rome over issues of justification, soteriology and the authority of the Word of God. Eschatology was not an issue of contention. Thus, even to this day, being Reformed means sharing many of the same eschatological positions as the Roman church: namely, that the Gentile Christian Church is the new, true Israel, that there will be no literal kingdom of Christ on the earth, and that most (if not all) of the prophetic scriptures are either already fulfilled or are to be understood as allegorically referring to the Church and not to Israel.
The Reformation of the early 16th century was only possible because of the advent of a new technology created less than a century before known as the movable-type printing press. The teachings of the Reformers were able to spread because, for the first time, people could print and share ideas through pamphlets and books in languages understood by the laity. The Roman Church effectively lost control of the doctrinal narrative. What occurred in the decades and centuries after the Reformation, as well, was the continued publishing of ideas and interpretations that would never have been allowed to see light of day while Rome was the exclusive authoritative power in Christianity. As documented in books like Dispensationalism Before Darby by William C. Watson, the premillennial viewpoint and many of the doctrinal distinctives we now recognize as dispensationalism began to find a place after the Reformation hit the shores of England. The same printing press that fomented the Reformation soon gave voice to others who, now finally able to read the Word of God for themselves as well as publish their own ideas, began to reject allegorical interpretations as unwarranted and teach literal understandings of the prophetic writings.
In the centuries since the Reformation, both premillennial and postmillennial camps have experienced various levels of acceptance or rejection within Protestant Christianity. Amillennialism has stayed relevant in Protestantism due in large part to its connection to the Reformers. Postmillennialism grew in relevance alongside the advent of America: the so-called “New World,” founded on biblical precepts which included the worth of the individual, the distrust of human power, and a “firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence,” gave many hope that the establishment of a kingdom of God on the earth built by the Church was a sensible and even likely possibility. The existential darkness of the twentieth century, however, served to undermine that notion.
Meanwhile, premillennial dispensationalism found its footing in the 19th century among the teachings of men like John Nelson Darby, who emphasized doctrines like a pretribulational rapture, a distinction between Gentile Christians and elect Israel, and the promise of a literal kingdom of Christ on the earth, established and founded by Christ Himself.

It is a popular conceit to claim that dispensationalism is a new development within Christianity and a bizarre one at that, not rooted in any legitimate tradition or history within the Church. Serious research, however, leads to two important conclusions:

The early church held disparate viewpoints in regards to eschatology, but the elements of what we now know of premillennial dispensationalism were certainly present. The earliest Christians, as recorded in the book of Acts, expected the establishment of a literal, physical kingdom of Christ in Israel. The Lord Himself did not correct their understanding. What John Nelson Darby did was systematize a group of ideas that both existed in various forms and times throughout church history and which flow naturally into one another. Similarly, the doctrine of election, for instance, existed long before John Calvin, but what we now call Calvinism was a grouping together of the doctrine of election along with other doctrines that both depend on and result from it. Conflating the systemization and labeling of a set of ideas with the creation of those ideas is either a mistake or, worse, a slander.
To the degree the premillennial dispensationalism is “new,” it is only because the doctrines it promotes were suppressed for centuries by an amillennial Christian authority that refused to tolerate even the slightest form of dissent. The doctrines of the premillennial dispensational position blossomed back into public consciousness soon after the advent of movable-type printing and the breaking of Roman Catholic control over all of Christianity. IE: the reason premillennial dispensationalism may appear to be new in history is because it wasn’t permitted to exist while Catholics controlled Christianity.

The notion that premillennial dispensationalism was created by uneducated fanatics and is disconnected from any serious biblical tradition is erroneous. But there are significant reasons eschatological differences between Protestant camps still exist today. Many Christians who share the Reformers’ view on salvation, justification and the authority of the Word of God see no reason to question the Reformers’ position on eschatology or the nature of the distinction between the Church and Israel, despite the kinship those positions hold with the Romanism the Reformers so adamantly rejected. Tradition is a powerful force and all of us deploy presuppositions when it comes to our faith and understanding of the Bible.

All of this is to simply show that there are reasons why these eschatological divisions emerged throughout history and why God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians still disagree about them. There are reasons certain things seem to have a stronger traditional pedigree while others appear to be new. But it is vital that we all do our own homework and check ourselves before condescending to the other camp.

And perhaps what’s most important is to reach our positions based on the teachings of the scriptures themselves and not to let the traditions of men or what we perceive from an incomplete understanding of history determine for us what the text means. If the Reformers taught us anything, it is that the Bible is the highest court of appeal and the lone source of divine truth we possess. It alone is God-breathed.

Let us not follow along with those who have elevated man-made traditions to the level of the Word of God. Let us instead let the Word speak for itself and entertain the possibility that those giants of the faith who have come and gone before us may have been human after all and maybe, just maybe, not infallibly correct about everything.

Now these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. - Acts 17:11

I gain understanding from Your precepts; therefore I hate every false way. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. - Psalm 119:104-105

Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance, - Proverbs 1:5

And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed, to which you will do well to pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts, knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. - II Peter 1:19-21