Days of Vengeance - The Preterist Archive

PUBLISHER’S PREFACE
case for eschatological pessimism. A lot of readers will
reject his thesis at this point. The ones who are serious
about the Bible will finish reading it before they reject
his thesis.
Pessimism
The vast majority of Christians have believed that
things will get progressively worse in almost every area
of life until Jesus returns with His angels. Premillennialists
believe that He will establish an earthly
visible kingdom, with Christ in charge and bodily
present. Amillennialists do not believe in any earthly
visible kingdom prior to the final judgment. They
believe that only the church and Christian schools and
families will visibly represent the kingdom on earth,
and the world will fall increasingly under the
domination of Satan. 7 Both eschatologies teach the
earthly defeat of Christ’s church prior to His physical
return in power.
One problem with such an outlook is that when the
predictable defeats in life come, Christians have a
theological incentive to shrug their shoulders, and say
to themselves, “That’s life. That’s the way God
prophesied it would be. Things are getting worse.” They
read the dreary headlines of the daily newspaper, and
they think to themselves, “Jesus’ Second Coming is just
around the corner.” The inner strength that people
need to re-bound from life’s normal external defeats is
sapped by a theology that preaches inevitable earthly
defeat for the church of Jesus Christ. People think to
themselves: “If even God’s holy church cannot
triumph, then how can I expect to triumph?”
Christians therefore become the psychological captives
of newspaper-selling pessimistic headlines.
They begin with a false assumption: the inevitable
defeat in history of Christ’s church by Satan’s earthly
forces, despite the fact that Satan was mortally
wounded at Calvary. Satan is not “alive and well on
Planet Earth.” He is alive, but he is not well. To argue
otherwise is to argue for the historical impotence and
cultural irrelevance of Christ’s work on Calvary.
The Revival of Optimism
While pessimistic eschatologies have been popular for a
century, there has always been an alternative theology,
a theology of dominion. It was the reigning faith of the
Puritans in that first generation (1630-1660) when
they began to subdue the wilderness of New England. It
was also the shared faith in the era of the American
Revolution. It began to fade under the onslaught of
Darwinian evolutionary thought in the second half of
the nineteenth century. It almost completely
disappeared after World War I, but it is rapidly
returning today. David Chilton’s books on eschatology
are now the primary manifesto in this revival of
theological optimism.
Today, the Christian Reconstruction movement has
recruited some of the best and brightest young writers
in the United States. Simultaneously, a major shift in
eschatological perspective is sweeping through the
charismatic movement. This combination of rigorous,
disciplined, lively, dominion-oriented scholarship and
the enthusiasm and sheer numbers of victory-oriented
charismatic has created a major challenge to the
familiar, tradition-bound, aging, and, most of all,
present-oriented conservative Protestantism. It
constitutes what could become the most important
theological shift in American history, not simply in this
century, but in the history of the nation. I expect this
transformation to be visible by the year 2000– a year of
considerable eschatological speculation.
If I am correct, and this shift takes place, The Days of
Vengeance will be studied by historians as a primary
source document for the next two or three centuries.
Producing New Leaders: Key to Survival
Because pessimillennialism could not offer students
long-term hope in their earthly futures, both versions
have defaulted culturally. This withdrawal from
cultural commitment culminated during the fateful
years, 1965-71. When the world went through a
psychological, cultural, and intellectual revolution,
where were the concrete and specific Christian answers
to the pressing problems of that turbulent era? Nothing
of substance came from traditional seminaries. It was as
if their faculty members believed that the world would
never advance beyond the dominant issues of 1952.
(And even back in 1952, seminary professors were
mostly whispering.) The leaders of traditional
Christianity lost their opportunity to capture the best
minds of a generation. They were perceived as being
muddled and confused. There was a reason for this.
They were muddled and confused.
In the 1970’s, only two groups within the Christian
community came before the Christian public and
announced: “We have the biblical answers.” 8 They
were at opposite ends of the political spectrum: the
liberation theologians on the Left and the Christian
Reconstructionists on the Right. 9 The battle between
these groups has intensified since then. Chilton’s book,
Productive Christians in an Age of Guilt-Manipulators
6. Gary North and David Chilton, “Apologetics and Strategy,” Christianity
and Civilization, 3 (1983), pp. 107-16.
7. Gary North, Dominion and Common Grace (Tyler, Texas: Institute for
Christian Economics, 1987), especially chapter 5.
8. Francis Schaeffer had been announcing since 1965 that humanist civilization
is an empty shell, and that it has no earthly future. He repeated over and over
that Christianity has the questions that humanism cannot answer. The
problem was that as a Calvinistic premillennialist, he did not believe that
any specifically Christian answers would ever be implemented before Christ’s
second coming. He did not devote much space in his books to providing
specifically Christian answers to the Christian questions that he raised to
challenge humanist civilization. He asked excellent cultural questions; he
offered few specifically Christian answers. There were reasons for this:
Chilton and North, op. cit.
9. In the highly restricted circles of amillennial Calvinism, a short-lived
movement of North American Dutch scholars appeared, 1965-75, the
“cosmonomic idea” school, also known as the neo-Dooyeweerdians, named
after the Dutch legal scholar and philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd. They
made little impression outside of the North American Dutch community,
and have since faded into obscurity. Their precursors in the early 1960s had
been more conservative, but after 1965, too many of them became
ideological fellow travelers of the liberation theologians. They could not
compete with the harder-core radicalism represented by Sojourners and The
Other Side, and they faded.
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