Why Was Preterism Sought?

From Lesson 213 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charlie Clough

 

 

An earlier view views history as the cross, the Church Age, and then Jesus Christ would come and there would be this Millennial Kingdom, then it would be the end of history. So you’d have this Millennial Kingdom period, and it’s called premillennialism.  Again the word “pre” means Christ precedes the Millennial Kingdom.  Premillennialism was the belief of the early Jews who became Christians.  Premillennialism was circulating in the 1st and 2nd centuries of the Church.  There is no evidence it was amillennialism.  There is very explicit evidence that the early church was premillennial, maybe not well thought through, that’s fine, but basically it was premillennial.  The 4th century was the time when Constantine, the Roman Emperor, capitulated to the Christian religion and he made Christianity the religion of the Roman Empire by decree. The Church was not persecuted after the 4th century like it had been in those first 3 or 4 centuries. 

Something else happened, namely the Church kind of liked to get away from its Jewish roots; it wanted to be more just Christian and not this Jewish thing.  So when they did that they lost the premillennial emphasis because what’s the basis of premillennial­ism but the Old Testament prophecies literally fulfilled.  Who in the Church do you suppose was adamant about the literal fulfillment of the Old Testament?  It was your Hebrew Christians, so you give up your Hebrew Christians, you don’t evangelize the Jews, you don’t have any Hebrew Christian influence so what happens?  The Church drifts into amillennialism. 

Now when the Protestants left Rome, Luther, Calvin, those guys, when they walked out they were men who had a lot of stuff they had to deal with. They had to deal with salvation primarily, so they emphasized doctrines of salvation.  They didn’t have time, they didn’t have the energy and they didn’t have the impetus to deal with eschatology.  So what do you suppose the Reformers did to amillennialism?  They carried it right on; Reformed theology never reformed eschatology, it kept it intact as inherited from Rome. 

By the 19th century you had a return to premillennialism, because what’s happening now is you’ve got your third, fourth generation of Protestants who are taking sola Scriptura seriously and that premillennialism came out of literal interpretation.  So since there was a return for literal interpre­tation they got back to the early Hebrew Christian position, and wound up with premillennialism.

But this left behind all these Reformed people that were amillennial.  These people are feeling the heat from all this discussion.  This is a big discussion here and lots of heat coming out of it.  And what has happened in our time is that you have people like Tim LaHaye writing the “Left Behind” series, selling millions of copies of this book, people are picking it up all over the place, it’s in the media, it’s all over the place, now how do you feel if you’re an amil?  You feel the heat, so the response of amillennialism in our time has been to try to defend against this overwhelming premillennial eschatology.  What they have done is to move it backwards, to get that clump of material behind us so it doesn’t stand in front of us as far as historical time goes. 

So the idea is that a lot of the prophecies, and, for example, many of the things in the Olivet Discourse where Jesus is talking about His return, if you can show that a lot of that material has already happened, it will ease the pressure, it gets rid of it.  And that’s what preterism means; preterism means, “it’s past.”  That’s what preterit is, it means past.  What is past?  Most of the passages we thought were about the Second Advent of Christ have already occurred.  You say, “WHAT?!!  When did all this happen, I missed it.  You know, run it by me again, I’m a student of history, I didn’t see it.”  So what they did is they attach it to an event called AD 70, which was the fall of the Temple and the judgment of God upon Israel for rejection of Messiah.  That event, they say, is the event behind the drama of the book of Revelation.  That event is the drama behind Matthew 24 and its parallels in the Gospels.  That is what Jesus was talking about, the imminent coming of God’s wrath, the wrath of God. 

The difference, and I just point this out right here to avoid confusion, the wrath of God that they’re talking about in AD 70 was directed against the nation Israel.  Now whenever the wrath of God is directed against the nation Israel in the Old Testament picture, Table 8 in the notes, you have God disciplining the nation but not destroying the nation.  Right?  The wrath of God disciplines Israel but since Israel was promised an eternal destiny, when God disciplines the nation yes, He fiercely disciplines it, I mean, think of the horrors of 586 and 721 BC, the northern kingdom going out in 721 BC and the southern kingdom going out in 586 BC, the tragedy of the exile, the suffering of the Jews being plundered, being destroyed.  That has happened down through history but God says I will never erase My nation, Israel, period.  I will discipline her to get her in shape but I’m not going to end her.  This interpretation coming out of this amillennialism, where we take AD 70 as an expression of the wrath of God, is a different kind of wrath of God because the kind of wrath of God that they talk about, by identifying this cluster of events and moving it backwards to AD 70, that wrath of God is the termination of Israel in God’s plan. 

That’s what they mean, the termination of Israel.  It’s not a wrath of God against Gentiles, it’s not a wrath of God against the Church, it’s a wrath of God against Israel because of Israel’s rejection of Jesus Christ.  Now I don’t think you have to be a theologian here to think that if you really thought this, it predisposes you, as amillennialism always has, to anti-Semitism.  And historically the Europeans, who have been dominated by Roman Catholicism in the south part of Europe and in the north part of Europe dominated by Reformed theology and Lutheranism, it’s no secret that anti-Semitism has generally been the case for all of Europe.  Jewish synagogues are desecrated in France; the Nazi Germans burned them in Germany; the Poles went after the Jews; the Soviets, Russians, went after the Jews because they were Eastern Orthodox and they were amillennial. 

The thing I want you to see is, because I know some of you sit there and think maybe all this is theory.  Why I’m citing this history is to show you that ideas have consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences.  Ideas set off motion.  Once you have an idea it sort of fulfills itself in behavior, and these are the great ideas that have motivated European history for four, five centuries, going back even further into the Middle Ages with Rome.  So these are non-trivial things.  They are hard, I apologize to keep reviewing these things but this is where the effect of the Bible explains your world in which we live, and the forces that are operating in it.  If you get stuff wrong and screwed up, and get the wrong approach, you’re going to have the wrong behavior. 

And if you’ve got the wrong behavior you’re fighting the plan of God instead of going along with it.  So we don’t want to be in the position of opposing God in what He’s doing in history and the only way we can avoid opposing God in what He’s doing in history is to get straight what it is He’s doing in history and you can’t do that without eschatology.  Eschatology is the essence, the doctrine of last things which answers the question, where is history going? There is a plan of God behind the events of history; slowly and exorable it is moving to fulfill His plan.