Semi-Random Musings (41)

At its leanest and meanest, the Reformed package requires some variant of Calvinism, plus Covenant Theology. Supersessionism and/or postmillennialism are often associated with these but are not, so far as I know, mandatory in order to call yourself Reformed. Some of these concepts fit together better than others; for example, supersessionism harmonizes quite naturally with CT. If there is only one covenant people through all the ages, it follows that someone has to be in and someone else has to be out.

Not all these theological components fit together quite so well as that pair.

The self-imposed mandate to disciple the nations is one of postmillennialism’s more discordant elements. Where I read the Great Commission as a command to make disciples from every nation without limitation or distinction, postmillennials understand it as an obligation to transform the nations themselves. The method is the same — the gospel — and the power behind it the same — the death and resurrection of Christ — but the perceived objective is very different indeed, and its potential timeline considerably lengthier. Where dispensationalists anticipate the return of the Lord Jesus for his people at any moment, consistent postmillennials do not expect him until the Church has first Christianized our world, leading some to talk seriously about the present age perhaps lasting another ten thousand years.

From my perspective, this seems both unbiblical and unlikely; nevertheless, postmillennials cheerfully persist in their belief that not just individual believers but every nation on earth will one day be transformed just as leaven works its way through dough.

Except one. Replacement Theology teaches that the Church has superseded Israel in the plans and purposes of God, acquiring all its promises, blessings, privileges and future glory. Individual Jews may respond to the gospel and become part of the Church, but Israel as a nation has broken the covenant and forfeited its future. The irony that God should single out this one nation of all the nations on earth for such comprehensive and permanent abrogation of very specific promises appears lost on most postmillennials, but it strikes me as a uniquely sour note in an otherwise-optimistic eschatological framework.

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Speaking of packages, I watched an interesting YouTube interview between Michael Knowles and “rogue archeologist” Tim Alberino the other day. Alberino tells fascinating stories and approaches his studies of lost civilizations from a biblical paradigm. For example, he takes Noah’s flood literally, as I do, and he looks at the sons of God in Genesis 6 as supernatural beings rather than children of Seth, as I also do, and the “unclean spirits” of the first century as their disembodied half-breed children awaiting their final day of reckoning. These are not all mainstream subjects debated by your average evangelical, but they evince a respect for the text of scripture as its original readers understood it, whether or not you agree with Alberino’s specific interpretations.

Alberino had me mesmerized right up until he launched into his bit on extraterrestrials, which he seems to believe in almost as fervently as the Flood and the Old Testament giants, the vast majority of whom it surely carried away. Some people love scripture because it provides us with the most accurate view of our universe in existence. Others gravitate to it, I suspect, because of an unhealthy fascination with esoterica: “Look, everything you always thought turns out to be wrong! I know something you don’t …”

I don’t doubt for a moment that much of what passes for conventional wisdom in our world are deviously crafted satanic lies, the pronouncements of scientists, historians and archeologists among them. Hey, there may even be aliens out there, who knows? But we don’t make the message of the gospel any more credible by packaging concepts from the Bible with strange lights in the sky and theories of government cover-ups that sound more like Fox Mulder from The X-Files than Moses. Even Sesame Street in its heyday used to tell us that one of these things is not like the others.