Amillennialism and Postmillennialism had a fight at the Pub Part I

Premill just sat there drinking a coke and wishing he could argue..

Our two fighters:  Black Butte Porter the Postmillennialist vs. Pabst Blue Ribbon the Amillennialist.

Porter:  “I don’t think all Amill folk are preterist but being preterist= (the pos. that says most of the prophetic “end-times” material is fulfilled in and around 70 AD with destruction of apostate Jerusalem) is really important.”

Pabst:  “Yes, I’m a preterist.”

Porter:  So, on that, amills and postmills can agree, that’s step 1.

Step 2 is where amill has error.  Step 2 is believing the gospel will be victorious on earth in the future.

Pabst:  (Lets out an obnoxious grunt, rolls his eyes and says,) “Oh, everyone knows that the world is not getting better..Of course the gospel is going to be victorious in the end, when Christ returns.”

Porter:  Here is one of the best short definitions of Amillennialism I’ve ever seen:
“We are in the millennium now, but the blessings of the millennium are not outward but rather the inward blessings of the church and in the heart.”
This, from my ordination examination test actually.
This is why the amill pos. is criticized for being semi-gnostic.. That the blessings of the New Covenant age are inward and in the heart, not outward-flowing and recreating the world.  The place to hammer out the eschatalogical positions is not Rev 20 (millennium proper) but the greater telos “end/goal” eschatology of the Bible.  What is the end goal of the Bible, its eschatology?  It is new creation, first in the changed hearts of its subjects but then outwardly towards all creation–Rom 8 and all over Isaiah’s latter chapters and other prophets.
Pabst:  Spits out his blue ribbon beer and has a black-eye.

Porter:  As I’ve studied the Bible the burden of Scripture does not move towards the advancing church’s blessings in the world to be “in the heart,” “up there” with Gary Larson’s far side heaven cartoons..no, but, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”  In the end, in Revelation 21:2 heaven comes down to earth in final consummation.  The two will become one.

Pabst:  “uh-uh..”
To risk being reductionistic for the sake of clarity, amill pos. sees the church as always beaten down and never really victorious…Christ never really subdues all His enemies beneath His feet….until one great climactic moment in the end similar actually to premill but without the rapture.

Pabst:  I guess I have been kind-of a depressed Christian.

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Porter:  Amillennialism is depressing, and it’s defeatist.  The Bible is not defeatist.  This misses the entire melody of Scripture which is that “the knowledge of the glory of God will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.”  He will reign until all His enemies are subdued.”

Pabst:  But the NT is alarmist and “pessimistic!”

Porter:  Some folk say that you can’t get to this optimism when reading NT.  But they miss the fact that the NT, not the age to come, is “pessimistic” because God was bringing that old age, the old covenant order to an end with judgment upon the arch-enemies of God—as it turns out, the unbelieving Jews themselves!
The world was feeling like it was going to end when you lived in 55 AD and were reading the Apostle Paul’s letters.  But the power of the raised Messiah is more than sufficient to topple all the citadels of unbelief both now and in the future.  The problem comes when we read into the NT’s doom-is-coming language into the present.  The Church, now in that symbolic thousand years, and living in the kingdom will be victorious, albeit in a death and resurrection pattern, like her King–Notice the terrible predicted anguish of Christ in Ps 22 but then notice the telos, the fruit of that cross in vv.27-29.  That theme, “the government will rest upon His shoulders-” (Is.9:6) as I’ve now discovered, drips from the Bible.  My previous presuppositions that the Bible was essentially pessimistic with victory and that the Church could not be predominant blinded me from what texts actually say.

Pabst:  I need another beer..

Porter:  Notice Is. 9:7 “There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace…”  That doesn’t mean the church brings in the kingdom without suffering and that there are long periods of terrible persecution.. It is that our graph of world history is much longer than the short ones predicted by both premills and amills.  A long graph has severe depressions, yes, but you have to see how the gospel has enveloped the globe already very significantly since the first century.

Pabst at this point, started slinging wild punches from non-sensical theological expostulations from Rev 20…

Porter:  You really need to read David Chilton’s, Days of Vengeance.  And your argument from Rev 20 has nothing to do with the burden of argument I’m bringing from the eschatology of the Bible as a whole.

The apostle said not to box as though beating the air…