In
his 600 plus page exposition of post-millennialism (He
Shall Have Dominion) and
opposition to it largely from pre-millennialists Kenneth Gentry points
out one objection such that post-millennialism is too much like
evolution theory and/or that post-millennialism isn't doom oriented
sufficiently in the short-term. Nothing apocalyptic and exciting like
a rapture or 7 year tribulation is going to happen (it happened in
the 7th
decade of the first century).
Premillennialism
is comparable to stock market forecasters predicting a vast stock
market crash followed by a 7-year tribulation where the anti-Christ
rules or maybe his beast. Then the world as we know it ends with the
Second Coming of Christ who sorts things out positively. Though the
2008 Wall Street meltdown is a loose scaled-down model of some
aspects of pre-mill visions history provided innumerable other
examples of boom and bust socio-economic cycles with corrupt leaders
and corrupt morals. Post-millennialists are somewhat more optimistic.
Post-millennialists
(remaining in the stock market metaphor) are like investors who
believe the market's long term trend is upward though there may be
occasional crashes. All of the worst doom of tribulation occurred in
the 1929 crash and the stage was set for-long term increase. When the
market has fulfilled its role serving humanity the Lord will appear
to take things farther (and reward the lost with their abode in hell
and outer darkness maybe gnashing teeth).
The
market trend metaphor for long-term increase of people being saved
and a Christian social environment prevailing could be fulfilled on
or off world. Perhaps for a time amoral evolutionism woos those
desiring change to such an extent that a reprobate planetary
environment becomes normal. Maybe networks of plutocrats will crush
free expression and wars and rumors of wars will become televised or
live entertainment on the Internet or smart phones however in the
long-term Christianity will increase and at the real end time the
tares of anti-Christian sewn in the midst of the temporal association
of the kingdom of God will be gathered and burned. For
post-millennialists Jesus will return physically at the end of days
yet he is already here living spiritually in the hearts and souls of
those that have been born again in the spirit.
Apparently
the idea of progress of the Universe through evolution or change
(change to American Democrats seems to mean 'gay') is associated with
all things secular and materialist rather than spiritual; so in some
way an interpretive paradigm of the Revelation and Christian
eschatology that is comparatively optimistic is by pre-mil default
regarded as in the Darwinian condo.
One
readily discerns that issues of evolution and eschatology are not
simply of ecclesiastical or academic interest. The Presbyterian
Church USA's June 2014 vote to doctrinally approve homosexual
marriage demonstrates slippage into apostasy that can occur with
socially natural causality. Corrupting politicians and persons may
reduce social morals to a compote useful for scientific manipulation
by elites bereft of moral concerns.
I
should say that I view the 2nd
law of thermodynamics and various interpretive time literals for the
physical cosmos as packed with subjectivism and preponderantly de
trop for finding the truth about a schedule of eschatological events
that aren't as knowable prima facie as the date of the 2030 Super
Bowl.
Space-time
and Einstein's General and Special theory parameters cohere within a
theistic absolute space that is timeless yet there may be contingent
meta-time structures or even contingent dimensional space-times
within which a given Universe may exist. Finding which one is most
suitable for associating with a given interpretation of a correct
version of Genesis to discover or infer facts about physical
cosmology seems a poetic endeavor yet a journey fun enough to make.
Rosenberg's view of Genesis and it's construction and meaning differs
from others. I would think that most pre-mill believers do not regard
Genesis as arising from a prevalent residual pre-history of the
Persian Gulf region's catastrophic flood of a proto-civilization that
was also told in the tale of Gilgamesh and perhaps elsewhere. Naive
secularists with Biblical replacement therapy policy tend to assume
the Bible implicitly has pre-mill and Usherian construction.
Eschatology
to many means a prophetic vision of the end times of either the world
or its people. Alternatively it may refer to the end of a
civilization or even the Universe. Traditionally eschatology has been
regarded as something more of a religious field -although in the
early times of mankind before vast right-wing polysyllabic words
arose that could describe with a sociological objectivity human areas
of belief such as might be regarded as religious end times
eschatology could also be said to have included a unified field of
primitive religio-philosophic-physical speculations about the nature
of the experienced world-environment. Thus Ragnarök and Brahma along
with the plain of Tilmun were out there with Janus the Door goddess
and the vast turtle of labor carrying the world upon its back. At
least like Aristarchus the idea of a rotation of the Earth or land
was a primary element of the explanation.
The
2nd
law of thermo dynamics has a highly order initial configuration of
the Universe perhaps at a singularity expanding-releasing its initial
endowment of energy and order in a dispersion that produced
particles, stars, molecules and eventually life and even sentient
life. If one thinks about that somewhat philosophically it seems easy
to realize that it would be easier to configure living beings in an
environment whereat there is a fixed initial endowment of energy that
disperses yet may cluster and cohere to build more complex and
temporally stable physical structures. If the opposite environment
prevailed where new energy was flowing into a Universe continually
from one or all possible locations that energy might tend to break-up
or radiate out existing forms making life and coherent structure more
unlikely. God might choose to configure a given environment with a
particular quantitative endowment and let it proceed. Of course the
nature of mass and energy perhaps is ultimately spiritual so in some
senses there is a continuing presence of God through the history of
the Universe though the Universe has a given material pattern. There
are limits to what a human can know directly or even through
inference of the Universe.
Humanity
never developed a comprehensive explanation for the reason that the
Universe exist nor did it find an exhaustive, unimpeachable
description of the physical boundaries. Instead it learned that time
is an implicit characteristic of matter that is itself convertible to
energy explaining rather nicely I suppose that energy can present a
time aspect when it becomes matter and loses it inversely as it
converts to energy. Cosmologists can speculate perhaps if time was
included in finite quantity at an initial singularity with alpha and
omega being equal or if energy existed at singularity or mass and if
it was a finite quantity and is so, why? Why did an initial
denouement of energy or mass filling the singularity cut off at a
particular place without having exhausted the initial supply?
Gentry
wrote on page 440 of 'He Shall Have Dominion'-“Historically,
this alleged association of evolutionary thought with post-millennial
theology has ignored the fact that both a developed
post-millennialism (e.g., the Puritans), as well as nascent
post-millennialism (e.g., Athanasius), arose well before scientific
evolutionism, which is generally dated from the publication of
Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Historically, it may more forcibly
be argued that the evolutionist stole from the
post-millennial
idea of progress rather than vice versa.”
Christian
eschatology has three fundamental fields on the reformed side of
things. One is a premillennialist belief that John's Book of
Revelation described future events that mostly haven't yet happened.
That viewpoint has some logical difficulties. One is that for the
saved Jesus lives in a real sense in their spirit in some mysterious
way. That indwelling spirit is the being born again belief and is the
first resurrection post-mills believe. Logically it might be absent
from the pre-millennialist paradigm wherein Jesus won't appear until
the end time. There is something of a different criteria for the
kingdom of God existing in part right now on Earth too.
Post-millennialists
believe along the lines wherein Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is
within you,that the kingdom of God is drawing in new believers and
that the world will gradually increase the number of Christians until
the real end times that could be soon or way down the road even unto
the distant future (when the time of the gentiles is fulfilled).
Christians in the post-mill scenario are a dampening of the doom that
results from a pagan or atheistic world that is always seeking to
increase its power. Christians should eventually become a
majoritarian polity though evil still does exist in-the-world.
One
might regard the fact that it requires just a small minority of
Bolsheviks or terrorists to throw a wrench into social stability or
establishment even when the establishment is a corrupt or oppressive
minority itself; evil minorities are historically not uncommon ruling
political powers seeking to expropriate the private property and
economic independence empirically in order to establish networking
collectives dominated by oligarchy, plutonomy, aristocracy or
dictatorship. Annihilating marriage designed to protect the poor and
middle-class interests in order to theoretically reconfigure society
to a spineless white meat boneless product increasing profits for the
rich is a usual method for turning the clock back to the year zero
socially speaking so that the timer may begin all over again to the
drummer bought and paid for by the sponsors. When these sorts of
things happen believers may look for one coming in the clouds to
change the changlings back to a less politically antipathetic form.
End
times paradigms exist thus in many contexts. Some require active
human participation, others have a deterministic fatalism such that
it is all pre-determined clockwork ticking along like a wave of bombs
biding there time until explosion. Some are of a Universal and
physical kind-a third kind one might say, without a plain
end-somewhat silly for an end-times theory I will note.
Cosmologist
with humble and uncertain origins of the singularity that started the
big band or inflaton or collision of symbolic membranes such as
occurs in the 1812 Overture may consider the end of the Universe as a
very distant future event that would be the conclusion of the highly
organized energy at the start of the Universe that expanded losing
its organizational coherence in the time-process and ran down to a
cold and low energy state with matter perhaps as energy dispersed in
powerless isolation as basic elements. Whatever it is that make up
quarks-perhaps one-dimension brains-would be equally spaced away from
each other perhaps a few trillion miles and that could be said to be
an uncertain yet probable end time.
Except
that evolution as a process of degradation of organization materially
speaking could evolve not more complex forms on the way to the cold
dead end, it could evolve non-existence at any time too. There is no
guarantee that evolution could not move molecules or quarks to some
mysterious presently yet pre-determined configuration that poofs mass
and energy into coherence again with a return to the One singularity.
Coherence is sort of an odd word as physicists use it for cosmology
and quantum affairs. They regard mass as a kind of entanglement of
energy quanta in a field that decohered from the field to take the
form of mass (matter) as if it were a sacrificial lamb found by
Abraham in a bush to take the place of a son for a sacrifice, or
better-a cosmology theory to sacrifice.
I
am not very comfortable with the idea of energy quanta existing
decohered from a meta-Higgs field yet still going through the hoops
of a singularity and expansion as degrading organization with some
life formation from complex, expensive molecule on the way-it seems a
little like having two different theories in one that makes one or
the other so contingent that it is hard to be fashionably cool. If
one knows that a particular cosmology theory is something of a
joke-or at least a little Buddhist illusion resembling yet still
real, it is challenging to take it as seriously as if it were a ninja
turtle carrying the world on its back.
Energetic
particles of quanta have existing forces such as the strong force
that keeps quarks together. It is hard to imagine how they would
break down. In a Higgs and meta-Higgs field however all things are
possible for the imagination at least.
In
the end of the universe isolated quanta would still exist in a
meta-field and might be regarded as the final phase of decoherence
before returning unto the one true field of fields. Maybe only only
in complete end times isolation could an energetic quanta be so
relativistically dissociated from other particles that it could be
considered to be matter-as-energy for-itself. Energy however seems
like an event instead of a thing. Energy must be some sort of
intrusion through micro-entanglement into the space of nothingness
that humans regard as the Universe. So when it is really run down
that field fluctuation return generally produces nothing for
observers entangled in the field to observe nor any observers either.
It makes philosophical writers wonder what is happening on the other
side of the field that yielded the entangled state of energy that
seems to be the matter of this Universe,-or perhaps, what is
happening all the time 'up there' in the heaven beyond the quanta
entangled in a steady state form that seems to be this Universe?
The
answer to what a sponsoring field is like isn't that of a myriad
Universes. A myriad Universes could be produced simultaneously or in
an order and progressive profusion however that would be beside the
point in question such that one wonders if the field progenitor of
Universes with an abundance of energy sufficient to light up a
infinite number of Universe into being has much of a concern about
how much time it takes (just kidding).
There
are some controversies about all of the various forms and potentials
for end times scenarios synthetic and given by Revelation. There are
those who trust a particular theory and desire the extinction of any
sort of rival theory of course however with the all things must pass
thought in mind the astute interpreter of end times theories may find
that though some seem to have more merit than others none are
entirely comprehensive nor even necessarily mutually exclusive and
exhaustive as the very interpretive terms and literal values of rival
theories may be in error or inaccurately understood. That amazes one
considering how God could keep track of all of the various theories
of end-times for-Himself.
Jesus
Christ as the way to renormalize the spirit unto a form acceptable
with God transcends the time whorls and relativistic networks of
space-time and potential space-time that are circumstantial
formations of the physical cosmos. Reason overcomes evolution in a
sense always transcending and surpassing its deterministic parameters
in some senses yet remains within it as a product or quality of the
field-entanglement itself. Quantum uncertainty within the field and
within the mind of an individual may be enabling conditions that let
the soul or living identity of an individual in-the-field become
within the transcending kingdom-of-God even while remaining within
the steady state decoherence of the Universe-field quanta. When the
worldly existence of an individual or of the species will end is
difficult to know exactly yet be assured that there are a number of
elements working to bring that situation to exist if unintentionally
through economically fueled mass extinctions and global warming gas
emissions. One never knows though perhaps 'we shall overcome'.
Exploring
Consequences of Eschatological Point of View to Global Warming
Response
Three
basic paradigms for interpreting end times an apocalypse for world
civilization exist in protestant Christian eschatology. I wonder how
each might interact with the best present empirical end-times
inducer: Global
Warming?
Not only must scientists and the shade tree mech. measure the parts
per million of greenhouse gases and oceanographers the temperature of
the oceans; social scientists and theologians, philosophers and
politicians must consider how to measure the body politics's
attitudes toward global warming, its relationship to economics,
theology and their willingness to change or even to understand the
public domain issues and ways the end
of days*
could effect them.
Those
Christians-largely evangelicals that believe the apocalypse is yet
ahead and will occur when and anti-Christ appears and a great
tribulation occurs at the start of which Christians will be raptured
into the sky and away from the world's doom like kids in a movie
theater transported to the snack bar during the scary scene perhaps
have a fatalist vision of greenhouse gas emission comparable to that
of people that log old growth forest and destroy ecosystems;
indifference because the world is doomed anyway and God will make a
new world later anyway.
Amillenialists
tend to view some of the events of the Revelation prophecy as having
already happened yet not entirely. Generally amillennialists are
opposed to post-millennialists who have the view that the events of
the first century during the reign of Nero unto the destruction of
the Temple in a.d. 70 largely yet nit entirely fulfilled the
prophecy. Post-millennialists believe the world should now be in an
indeterminate time of Christian evangelization, peace, harmony and
working together to make the world a better place. Amillennialists
generally dissent with that and are somewhat more of a recurrent doom
point of view with perennial struggle for Christians against forces
of evil.
Because
amillennialists have something of a culture-kampf perspective they
are perhaps too concerned with a dualistic viewpoint of good and evil
to take a side on something like global warming that is largely a
secular issue. Amillennialists like pre-millenialists tend to
discredit empirical reality in a Buddhist like manner-it is
contingent being and not too worthy of regard. One might expect
millennialism however to combat evil more so than the rather
defeatist premillennialist camp. The trouble with amillenialists is
that there view of evil is perhaps largely based upon issues
coinciding with social politics and matters of how one treats
Christian amillennialists financially. Fortune 500 descendants of
Presbyterians may treat the amillenialists rather well while Godless
evolutionists of the left don't. The left has adroitly expropriated
the anti-global warming issue for themselves from the corporate
producers that manufactured it and have thus a solid political
advantage regarding populist support. This latter fact isn't good for
Christian evangelization.
I
believe that part of the difficulty amillennialists have with the
post-millennialism viewpoint is based on over-reliance upon tradition
as well as misunderstanding of tradition and the history of Christian
thought in the church throughout history. Amillennialists tend to
use false alternative or straw man arguments about post-millennialist
beliefs in order to change meanings and to create logical
inconsistencies. Perhaps 90% of the prophecies of John were fulfilled
in the first century A.D. largely by 70 a.d., yet there will be a
second coming of the Lord down the road someday, and there will be a
decisive removal of anti-Christian elements from the world. It
doesn't mean though that the period before the end times must either
be entirely Utopian with a Christian accent or that Christians won't
have any struggles or persecutions-for assuredly we do (meaning us
Christians inclusive of the persecuted Chinese Church if Christ).
Post-millennialist
eschatological viewpoint's may be somewhat more adaptable to modern
times and yet also more accurate in analysis of the Revelation and
additional eschatological references such as those found in Matthew.
They may also be consistent with the viewpoints of reformers such as
John Calvin generally, though none should rely upon non—Biblical
sources as infallibly correct. The reformed faith is about
discovering truth rather than obfuscating it. Martin Luther said that
the Revelation had a lot of straw; that expresses his feeling that
his understanding f it wasn't right or that it differed from other
New Testament books in percent of amorphous content. Of course it
did. The Revelation referred largely to first century events that
were fulfilled and largely forgotten after the 2nd
century a.d. It is remarkable that the common sense interpretation of
the Revelation was lost to history as first century historical
viewpoints were lost to history.
In
northwest Alaska on the Chukchi Sea Arctic coast a little village
that formerly was protected by fall storm wave surges by virtue of
that fact that the sea water was frozen now suffers the storm ravages
because the sea doesn't freeze over until much later in the season.
One might take the little village of Kivalina as a global warming
index; If the premillennialists are right, even as an end-times index
for predicting when the Lord will return (as the sea level rises and
temperate regions become deserts wars and social catastrophes will
ensue and things on the radical left side of the doom index will
flourish hastening the Lord's rescue and wrap it up mission).
Of
the fifteen hottest years of global average temperatures fourteen
have occurred since the year 2000. The world is getting hotter though
there are local variations. The world oceans are warming too.
Cristian post-millennialists can take an active role in working to
moderate or halt global warming as good neighborliness and common
sense while premillennialists can only wring there hands and look to
the sky in hope that there deliverer draweth nie. Amillennialists
might think its a temporal recurrence of the doom of immoral humanity
and that a closer relation to corporatism would end the problem if
one exists outside the minds of the leftist global conspiracy.
At
Kivalina the first people's descendants -who were actually the last
to arrive in America from Sibir and raced across the continent in
record time with dogs and dog-sleds -must cross their lagoon to
escape the warm-water storms. They want a road built to a mine 60
miles away for safety instead of relocating the village beyond the
Lagoon with the seacoast frontage becoming something like Cape
Hatteras resort village for subsistence people. Yet putting more
global warming gases from SUVs at high latitudes is a way to enhance
global warming. Building one crisis highway becomes a herring bone of
new sprout roads with roadhouses, trucks and accelerated global
warming contribution.
Post-millennialists
might search to find a way to solve the storm and housing security
issues of Kivalina yet probably not pre-mills or amills. So one can
make something of a global warming index and measuring device from
the seashore village of Kivalina politically and empirically perhaps.
The human solutions to repairing damage they have caused themselves
is to make more damage. Even the churches that have sanctified gay
marriages have repeated the lie that the Apostle Paul mentioned in
reproof in the book of Romans. Jesus was the founder and sponsor of
the Christian efforts to make the social environment a better and
Godly place. It is true that humanity cannot do that without the
Lord, yet it does seem that some of the saved cannot work toward that
purpose even with.
