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Whatever Happened to Postmillennialism?
“Only fools and madmen are positive in their interpretation of the Apocalypse.” Charles Spurgeon’s warning came amid a boom in mid-19th-century speculation about the details of Christ’s second coming. It remains a helpful caution. Believers have often been tempted to trace the precise ordering of “the things that must soon take place” (Rev. 1:1) in clearer outlines than Scripture provides.
The bumpy history of postmillennialism—the belief that Christ will return after a millennial (1,000-year) period of gospel expansion, mass conversion, and human flourishing—offers a telling illustration of this tendency. It provides an opportunity to reflect on how personal and historical circumstances can subtly influence our understanding of what Scripture says about the consummation of redemptive history.
Postmillennial Problem?
While Christians have always been united in the belief that Christ “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end,” various perspectives on the “last things” have developed within those broad biblical boundaries. Three views have come to define modern discussions of eschatology: postmillennialism, amillennialism, and premillennialism. Each represents a different conviction about the timing of Christ’s return in relation to his millennial reign described in Revelation 20:1–4.
Postmillennialism was especially influential in the 19th century and helped fuel early evangelical revivalist movements. Its influence began to wane around the American Civil War (c. 1861–65) and declined sharply through the early 20th century. While it experienced a slight resurgence in the late 20th century and remains a potent force in some corners of evangelicalism, postmillennialism has yet to regain the popularity it once enjoyed.
Postmillennialism was especially influential in the 19th century and helped fuel early evangelical revivalist movements.
A certain eschatological optimism sets postmillennialism apart from both amillennialism and premillennialism. Because it anticipates an upward arc of gospel progress and temporal prosperity before Christ’s return, its popularity has often ebbed and flowed in step with world events. But this phenomenon isn’t unique to postmillennialism. The trajectories of all eschatological views have reflected, to one degree or another, the course of history. Still, postmillennialism’s positive outlook makes the imprint of historical influence especially visible.
Rise and Decline
Some of its earliest seeds were sown in the millenarian fervor of 17th-century England. While Augustine’s figurative reading of Revelation 20 had shaped the church’s understanding from the fifth century through the Reformation, by the early 1600s some Reformed theologians had begun to offer different interpretations.
English churchmen like Thomas Brightman (1562–1607) and Joseph Mede (1586–1638), for example, made the case for a future-oriented millennium. Influential Puritans like William Perkins (1558–1602) also began to lend support to historicist readings of prophecy and express growing confidence in the church’s future.
Puritan eschatology in this period came to emphasize two related themes: the conversion of the Jews and the global triumph of the gospel. The former, derived from Paul’s words in Romans 11, was probably, as Iain Murray has noted, the “dominant” hope through the 1640s. Thereafter, it remained a common thread drawing loosely together a good deal of the beliefs that emerged in this period. In a century marked by civil war and religious and political upheaval, millenarian expectation became widespread as many saw in current events signs of Christ’s advancing kingdom.
Elements of today’s three main eschatological positions were certainly present in this excitement. But because these terms are of relatively recent vintage (“postmillennialism” likely emerged in the mid-1800s), they resist being mapped neatly onto a period that witnessed the development of staggeringly diverse views. Yet the basic elements of what we now call postmillennialism were coming together. And despite Puritanism’s failure to secure a lasting foothold in the Church of England after 1662, these convictions endured into early 18th-century evangelicalism.
This was especially the case in America. Jonathan Edwards, for example, though somewhat cautious in his public pronouncements, was bullish about the prospects for revival and the advancement of Christ’s kingdom before his return. Privately, he paid close attention to current events, ever ready to slot them into a chronological framework derived from his reading of Revelation. Unsurprisingly, too, the First and Second Great Awakenings sparked the kind of conversionist expectation that has since come to mark postmillennialism.
As it developed into a more coherent and distinct theological position, postmillennialism soon became intertwined with the activist spirit of 19th-century evangelicalism, offering theological justification for sweeping social reform. It also resonated with Enlightenment ideals of progress and shaped responses to a dynamic age of revolution, industrialization, and scientific discovery. In turn, a secularizing form of postmillennialism emerged alongside its evangelical cousin, shaped by different assumptions but animated in part by similar visions of positive historical transformation.
Postmillennialism’s subsequent decline was a fruit of the cultural soil that spurred its growth. Scientific progress and increased secularization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries challenged the biblical foundations of postmillennialism. Additionally, with the rise of German biblical criticism, scholars began to cast a skeptical eye over the Bible’s historical veracity, as well as the very notion of a divinely ordained historical trajectory. The tumult of the 20th century—with its economic depressions, world wars, totalitarian regimes, and nuclear arms race—further eroded confidence in the idea of inevitable progress.
Premillennialism, Modernity, and Renewal
The rise of dispensational premillennialism in the 19th century, with its emphasis on Christ’s imminent return and a period of tribulation before the millennium, offered a stark alternative to postmillennialism. Popularized by figures like John Nelson Darby and D. L. Moody in the 19th century and C. I. Scofield, Hal Lindsey, Jerry B. Jenkins, and Tim LaHaye in the 20th, it helped people come to terms with a perceived decline in Western civilization and a growing hostility to Christianity. The promise of escape from a world that appeared to be spiraling toward destruction resonated with many evangelicals who felt increasingly marginalized by a rampantly secularizing modern culture.
Postmillennialism’s decline was a fruit of the cultural soil that spurred its growth.
Yet postmillennialism has made something of a comeback. In the mid-20th century, R. J. Rushdoony spearheaded a revival of postmillennial thought, albeit one that put a sharper point on its earlier iterations. This postmillennialism emphasized the application of Old Testament law to all areas of life, advocating for a radical transformation of society.
While controversial, his ideas found a receptive audience among evangelicals concerned about the erosion of morality and the supposed acquiescence of dispensational premillennialism in the face of this sort of societal degradation. Similarly, the influence of Douglas Wilson, Christ Church Moscow (Idaho), and New Saint Andrews College on a reinvigorated postmillennialism with a social, cultural, and political leading edge is hard to overstate. In this renewed form, postmillennialism may be gaining back some ground, even if it lacks the preeminence it enjoyed among evangelicals over a century ago.
What Ultimately Matters
Today, the eschatological landscape within evangelicalism remains diverse. Though diminished, postmillennialism endures, and its history is instructive. Its rise during eras of revival and reform, and its subsequent decline as rationalism, secularization, and war reshaped the Western world, ought to remind us to remain wary of allowing our eschatology to be overly influenced by our contexts.
As Spurgeon implied, we must be careful to keep our views of Revelation within biblical bounds. We must stay alert to how context can shape our reading of God’s Word. We must also seek the kind of interpretive balance on these issues that Christ illustrates for us in Matthew 24. For most of that chapter, he gives us specific markers of his return, while making clear that “no one” except “the Father only” knows when these events will take place (v. 36).
He then shifts our attention at the end of the chapter to what ultimately matters: spiritual readiness. As the apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 5:6, we must “not sleep, as others do” but “keep awake,” carrying out the work of the Great Commission and living sanctified—and sanctifying—godly lives, for “God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 9). In the end, this truth should cause us to say with joyful expectation, and as the apostle John concludes Revelation, “Come, Lord Jesus!” (22:20).
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