Eschatology and Social Theory: Why It Matters
by Gary DeMar
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Today's preoccupation with eschatology has led some to advocate a wholesale abandonment of this age, stating that there is no relationship between the temporal kingdom and the eternal kingdom. There is no prescription for the transformation of this world based on the certainty of the next, so someone want us to believe. The transformation of the present social structure is built "upon the concept of commitment to the heavenly society as being primary and determinative for this worldly order." [1] There is continuity between the present age in the age to come. The preaching of Jesus regarding affairs in everyday society was based on an intimate continuity between the world to be and the world that was, even now, being summoned into likeness with it. What the Lord wills for this life cannot be severed from his ultimate plans to be realized fully in the eternal kingdom. Jesus' own parables makes clear that this kingdom which is future in its complete fulfillment is already present in its operation and influences. Far from proposing a rigid separation of the future and the present, Jesus is proposing, not another world in which to find refuge, but one whose character in being is even now modifying in reshaping the present organization of life. [2]
A concern for this world is evidence of concern for the next. Love for our neighbor is evidence of our love for God who presently occupies the throne of heaven. The exhibit of our Christian life in this world is a reflection of our regard for the world to come. The world to calm is the Christians focal point. The Christian takes a stand with Christ in the heavenly places (Dee PH. 2:5-7), and brings from heaven, through the "God-breathe" Scriptures, instructions for this present world (210, 3:16-17). "This constitutes setting one's affections on things above. It does not spell the turning of one's back on things beneath.... the kingdom of God is not brought in by man. It will common God's own way and with his unconquerable consummation. It is coming even now, in its present impact upon the belligerent, but already defeated, world that knows it not." [3]
The Reformation Connection
The medieval church sought a vital connection between heaven and earth, with heaven being the pattern for earthly activity. The eternal serves as a standard for the temporal. The Creator outlines parameters for living for the creature.
Central was the assumption of a coherence between heaven and earth, to parts of one homogeneous world, built to a single plan and hence were separately related, yet based on the principle of any quality inherent in hierarchy, in which the superior serves as a model for the inferior. [4]
Without the heaven/earth connection, the world is assigned to the realm of indifference and the inevitabilities of evil. The Lutheran and Calvinistic arms of the Reformation viewed the possibility of social change differently:
Luther had regarded this world and its institutions as incorrigible, and was prepared to leave them to the devil. But for Calvin this world, created by God, still belonged to Him; it remained potentially His kingdom; and every Christian was obliged to devote his life to make it so in reality by reforming and bringing it under God's law. [5]
Calvin's comprehensive approach to life was carried to France, England, Scotland, Italy, Germany, and to the Netherlands by refugee pastors who came to Geneva to study in what John Knox described as "the most perfect school of Christ that ever was on the Earth since the days of the Apostles." [6] "So while Lutheranism was confined to parts of Germany and Scandinavia, Calvinism spread into Britain, the English-speaking colonies of North America, and many parts of Europe." [7] The Puritan tradition, and the tradition of American evangelicalism, is the legacy of Calvinism. [8]
"When our Lord Jesus appeared," Calvin declared, "he acquired possession of the whole world; and his kingdom was extended from one end of it to the other, especially with the proclamation of the Gospel.... God has consecrated the entire earth through the precious blood of his Son to the end that we may inhabit it and live under his reign." This meant that religious reform pointed also to the reform of the secular realm. "We must not only grieve for the offenses committed by unbelievers," Calvin warned, "but also recognize that we remain unworthy to look upon heaven until there is harmony and unanimity in religion, till God is purely worshiped by all, and all the world is reformed." Believers "truly worship God by the righteousness they maintain within their society." [9]
The Pilgrim/Puritan Legacy
The Pilgrim and Puritans have gotten a lot of bad press. Some of it they deserve. Of course, I'm sure that few of us would want to be scrutinized as thoroughly as the Puritans. There would be a number of condemnations among the accolades. But on the whole, the Puritan legacy is a remarkably emulative heritage. Few critics fully appreciate the historical circumstances in which the Puritans found themselves. But this is not a study of Puritanism. Rather, it's a study of how Christians, Puritans included, understood the relationship between Christianity and the world.
Social reform and evangelism went hand-in-hand prior to the Civil War in America and continued to the close of the nineteenth century. Of course, the impetus for reform in America pre-dates of the founding of our nation. William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation is an eye-witness account of the kingdom application of the gospel that motivated our nation's earliest settlers: "A great hope and inward zeal they had of laying some good foundation, or a least to make some way thereunto, for the propagating and advancing the Gospel of the Kingdom of Christ in those remote parts of the world; yea, though they should be but even as stepping stones unto others for the performing of so great a work." [10]
The relationship between gospel and society can best be seen in how our nation's founders appreciated education, and how education was conceived as a way to preserve the Christian past and the establishment of a Christian future. Harvard College (founded in 1636, six years after the arrival of the British Puritans and named after John Harvard), set the agenda for the nation's future: "Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore lay Christ in the bottom, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning."
Those who conceived and built Harvard wanted the Puritan legacy to continue. First the change of heart in the application of the gospel; second, the change of society by men who have changed hearts: "One of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministry to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust." Why an educated Ministry? Ministers were often the only source of education in the colonies. "No other thinker had such a wide audience as did the preacher in his pulpit, and his printed sermons and treatises were the staple reading matter of his parishioners." [11]
The A reformation of Manners
There were similar expressions of evangelical reform in England. We should expect this, since America's penchant for reform was inherited from its theological English forebears. For example, England's abolition movement was almost entirely led by the evangelical wing of the church. At the pleading of Lady Middleton and Bishop Porteus, James Ramsay wrote a long Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784). Ramsay was "convinced that men will not respond to lessons of each eternal redemption from those who enslave them on earth, or about heaven when kept in hell.... He proposed steps to total Emancipation, and suggested that free labour would yield more profit to plantation owners." [12] William Wilberforce, upon being struck with the oppression of the slave trade, wrote in his diary, "Almighty God has set before me to great objectives: The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners." [13] Had the British governments "not been in the hands of Christians there seems little reason to have expected it to mount its massive, expensive, and voluntary campaign against slavery." [14] If modern anti-reformists had their way, the institution of slavery would still be with us. They would be preaching to the Church to remain silent on the issue and not to mix Church and State.
America had its social reform advocates as well. As in England, nearly every theological tradition took up the banner of reform, from revivalist to seminary professor. Charles Finney, best known as he revivalist preacher, saw an obvious relationship between Eve Angelos some and the "reformation of matters," that is, and social reform. John Stott writes about Finney's views on social reform.
Social and bottled meant was both the child at the evangelical religion and the twin sister of evangelism. This is clearly seen in Charles G. Finney, who is best known as the lawyer turned Eve Angelos and author of Lectures on Revivals all of Religion (1835). Through his preaching of the gospel large numbers were brought to faith in Christ. What is not so well-known is that he was concerned for 'reforms' as well as 'revivals'. He was convinced, as Donald W. Dayton has shown and his Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, both the gospel 'releases a mighty impulse toward social reform' and the that the church's neglected social reform grieved at the Holy Spirit and hindered revival. It is astonishing to read Finney's statement in his twenty-third lecture on revival that 'the great business of the church is to reform the world.... The Church of Christ was originally organised to be a body of reformers. The very profession of Christianity implies the profession and virtually an oath to do all that can be done for the universal reformation of the world.' [15]
Then he saw no contradiction between preaching the gospel and social reform: "the Christian church was designed to make aggressive movements in every direction -- to lift up or voice and put forth her energies against iniquity in high and low places -- to reform individuals, communities, and government, and never to rest until the kingdom... shall be given to the people... and till every form of iniquity shall be driven from the earth." [16] In a footnote, George Marsden informs his readers that "Letters on Revivals -- No. 23," from which the above quotation is taken, is "left out of modern editions of these letters." [17]
The Rise of the Scofieldism
Reforms continued into the twentieth century, but the evangelical spirit seemed to die as the movement was captured by those who did not place as great an emphasis on gospel proclamation. The evangelical community reacted, but the reaction was unforgiving and comprehensive. Instead of simply criticizing social reform divorced from gospel proclamation, these early critics abandoned reforms altogether.
A cursory reading of the Fundamentals, a series of papers published in 1917 to define the fundamentals of the Christian faith, will bear this out. In all their battles with the modernists, the authors of the articles of the Fundamentals do not deal with an evangelical a evaluation of social reform. There is an article in the Fundamentals that criticizes reforms has a modernism developed them, but nothing is offer to replace non-gospel reforms. Of course, it was about this time that the dispensational view of eschatology was making its way on the evangelical scene and its doctrine up the imminent return of Jesus. Cyrus I. Scofield's (1843-1921) Study Bible was first published in 1909 and later revised by Scofield in a 1917 edition. Dispensationalism is all about what happens after the rapture of the church. Our time in the "parenthesis" is only temporary. The church is God's afterthought, His "Plan-B."
Rescue, not Reform
The earlier reform world view espoused by the revivalists, "was replaced by an eschatology that looked for the return of Christ to rescue the 'saints' out of this world. Pre-millennial teaching and plied that the world was in such bad shape that it would only get worse until the return Christ. Some even argued that efforts to ameliorate' social conditions would merely postponed be' blessed hope of Christ's return by delaying the process of degeneration." [18]
This shift in eschatology had profound, and somewhat mixed, impact on the social involvement of Evangelicals. On the one hand, the expectation of the imminent return of Christ freed many from building for the immediate future (social a dance meant, pension plans, etc.) to give themselves wholeheartedly to the inner cities and foreign mission fields. Results in contact with poor and oppressed people often pushed these devoted souls into relief and other welfare work -- and occasionally into reform.
But more characteristic was the tendency to abandon long-range social amelioration for a massive effort to preach the gospel to as many as possible before the return of Christ. The vision was now one other rescue from a fallen world. Just as Jesus was expected momentarily on the clouds to rapture his Saints, so this long worker established missions to rescue sinners out of the world to be among those to meet the Lord in the air. Evangelical effort that had once provided the impulse and troops for reform rallies was rechanneled into exegetical speculation about the timing of Christ's return and into maintenance of the expanding prophecy conferences.
The extent to which of the shift in eschatology was felt throughout Evangelical life and thought is difficult to overestimate. One of the most striking contrast between pre-Civil War revivalists and those after the war is that the former founded liberal arts colleges while the latter established to Bible schools. To the post-war premillennial lists the liberal arts college in Baltic too much affirmation of the cultural values of this world and took away from the crucial task of getting minimal knowledge of the Bible before rushing into the inner cities or the mission fields the father as many souls as possible before the imminent return of Christ. And the late nineteenth century the Bible school movement picked up the message of the prophecy conference says and trained a whole generation of Evangelicals in the new doctrines. [19]
America is paying the price for the century of indifference. What makes the heart to fight against is the belief that the Bible teaches these things. A careful study of Scripture and history will show that Christians involved in this world have made a profound difference.
Notes
[1] Ray C. Petry, Christian Eschatology and Social Thought: A Historical essay on the Social Implications of Some Selected Aspects in Christian Eschatology to A.D. 150 (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1956), 18. Go Back
[2] Petry, Christian Eschatology and Social Thought, 18-19. Go Back
[3] Petry, Christian Eschatology and Social Thought, 21. Go Back
[4] Georges, Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined, tras. Aruthur Goldhammer (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Pree, 1980), 57. Quoted in Stephen Tonsor, "Order and Degree: The Medieval Quest for Individuality within the Bounds of Community," The Intercollegiate Review (Fall 1988), 29. Go Back
[5] William J. Bouwsma, "Explaining John Calvin," Wilson Quarterly (New Year's 1989), 73. Go Back
[6] John Knox, Works, ed. David Laing, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, Scotland: Wodrow Society, 1864). 4:240. Quoted in W. Stanford Reid, Trumpeter of God: A Biographer of John Knox (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, [1974]1982), 132. Go Back
[7] Bouwsma, "Explaining John Calvin," 71. Also see David W. Hall, The Genevan Reformation and the American Founding (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003). Go Back
[8] John Calvin has been described by more than one historian as the "founder of American Demoracy," despite his alleged excesses. A. Mervyn Davies, Foundation of American Freedom: Calvinism in the Development of Democratic Thought and Action (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1955) and W. Stanford Reid, "John Calvin: One of the Fathers of Modern Democracy," Christian History, 5:4 (1986), 27-30. Go Back
[9] William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 192. Go Back
[10] William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation: 1606-1646, ed. William T. Davis (New York: Charles Scibner's Sons, 1908), 46. Go Back
[11] Richard B. Schlatter, The Social Ideas of Religious Leaders, 1660-1688 (New York: Octagon Books, [1940] 1971), v. Go Back
[12] John Pollock, Wilberforce (Belleville, MI: Lion Publishing, [1977] 1986), 51. William Wiberforce led the effort in Parliament. In the United States, abolition was spawened by revolutionary rhetoric and acts. See Otto J. Scott, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement (Seattle, WA: Uncommon Publications, [1979] 1993). Go Back
[13] Cited in Charles Colson, Kingdoms in Conflict (Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1987), 100. Go Back
[14] Otto J. Scott, The Secret Six: John Brown and the Abolitionist Movement, 85. Go Back
[15] John Stott, Involvement: Being a Responsible Christian in a Non-Christian Society, 2 vols. (Old Tappan, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, 1984, 1985), 1:23. Emphasis added. Go Back
[16] Finney, quoted from "Letters on Revivals - No. 23," The Oberlin Evangelist (n.d.) in Donald Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 21. Quoted in George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford Universtiy Press, 1980), 86. Go Back
[17] Mardsen, Fundamentalism and American Culture, 252, note 5. Go Back
[18] Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 126. Go Back
[19] Dayton, Discovering an Evangelical Heritage, 127-128.Go Back