General introduction to American Evangelical Millennialism

A presentation by Daniel Silliman

Out topic is evangelical millennialism. It‟s interesting, I think, that this

has come up already several times, as we‟ve worked our way through

the early history, as something that was important or even vital

to understand. But that‟s curious when you remember millennialism

is not one of the essential, foundational planks of evangelicalism.

Remember the quadrilateral, from Barry Hankins‟ introduction:

evangelicalism‟s most basic elements are Biblicism, conversionism,

crucicentrism and activism. None of those are about eschatology or

Jesus coming back, and an idea of how the world will end is not an

essential tenet of evangelicalism, and yet, as our own experience

in this class has shown, we seem to have to talk about millennialism.

It is somehow integral to understanding evangelicalism. It relates to

each of those four elements. It colors them, or flavors them. And

millennialism is, in fact, very tightly intertwined with evangelicalism.

And why is that?

We‟re going to come back, several times, to the question of how

millennialism relates to the quadrilateral, but I want to start by

answering the more basic question of why: Why have an

eschatology at all?

Eschatology, of course, is a theological word meaning the study of the

end, the final, cosmic conclusion of the ongoing battle between

ultimate good and evil. Millennialism is defined, in the Encyclopedia of

Apocalypticism, as “the belief that God has revealed the imminent

end of the ongoing struggle between good and evil in history.”

And Christianity, with almost every formation of however it‟s done,

involves some version of an overarching, meta-history, including an

original violation of perfect order, a fall from that grace, and a final

restoration. Even if some of the texts we read, the Hal Lindsey or the

Tim Lahaye that‟s Michael‟s going to talk about, just appear crazy, I

want to start with a recognition of the need for those texts or

something like that, some kind of eschatology. If you‟re a Christian, at

any point in history and especially if you want to read the Bible in a

certain way, as having a real applicability to present history, there are

certain passages of scripture that you‟re going to have to do

something with. I‟d like to start with just a couple of these.

Rev. 20. (SLIDE)

1Thessalonians 4:15-18 (SLIDE)

Matthew 24:30-36

Now, early Christianity, the first generation after Jesus,

understood themselves to be living on the cusp of the end.

Scholars tell us Christianity was very much an apocalyptic cult,

inspired by and preparing for the end. This is evident in the New

Testament, some of the letters of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles,

and it really informed that first generation, and the idea that a new

reality was coming, a new eschaton was imminent, really allowed the

early churches to embrace some of the radical, anarchic aspects of

Christianity, for instance giving away everything they owned and

engaging this idea that there was or would be “neither male nor

female, Jew nor Greek.”

But, obviously, whatever happened in the first century, history didn‟t

end, time continued, and there was a kind of crisis in Christianity, a

problem, and they had to find new interpretations of the

apocalyptic parts of scripture. Let‟s look, briefly, at the various,

general ways of reading these passages before turning specifically to

evangelicals.

The question that has to be answered in an interpretation of

these texts is, are they to be understood as historical or

ahistorical. Is this just about an allegorical, ongoing, cosmic or

transcendent struggle been good and evil, lightness and darkness, or

is this something that can be or should be projected onto human

history, as working out in, sort of, “real time,” with politics and wars

and so on.

One of the basic ways in which these texts have been read is as

allegorical. It‟s not about history, but prophecy should be understood

as a kind of poetry. This eschatology is called “amillennialism,” which,

very crudely, means that there is no actual, final version of the

apocalypse in our ordinary, everyday time, but the scriptures do

reveal the transcendent, cosmic conflict between God and the dragon,

heaven and hell, etc. Amillennialism is the position of Augustine, the

4th century, North Africa saint, and the Augsburg Confession, as I

understand it, and also the position in the Roman Catholic Catechism,

which was written by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI.

There are and have been evangelicals who take or have taken this

position, but they have predominantly tended towards the expectation

of a historical, future reality for these things. In an article Stievermann

wrote he mentions that this is the idea of millennialism where

“millennialism grounds the transcendent promise (SLIDE) of

salvation for the elected few on the word of God and projects it onto a

particular social group in history.” If you go this way, with these texts,

history is actually going to end with this titanic struggle and there will

a real, historical period where Christ comes down and reigns on the

earth, maybe for an actually, 1,000 years, a millennium. Normally,

here, this interpretation is described as not being “allegorical,” but

“literal.” We want to be careful, though, because this isn‟t “literal”

as we usually use it, since, for example, the “dragon” is not

understood as a dragon, but to represent something. It‟s more

complicated than that. Paul Boyer – this helped me – (SLIDE) says this

is “a literalistic interpretive hermeneutic in which key texts are viewed

not as allegorical representations of spiritual realities, or as records of

apocalyptic expectations at the time the works were composed, but as

a guide to God‟s plan for human history, verbally dictated and inerrant

in every detail.” So this way of reading the texts is to project them

onto us, onto recent history and present and the future, normally the

near the future, and to take the texts as a kind of coded guide to

what God is going to do.

This interpretation then breaks down into two versions. Normally, this

is described with the theological tags, “premillennial” and

“postmillennial,” but those aren‟t really entirely helpful. Basically what

they describe is different timelines or expectations for what happens

when, as this stuff happens in history, what happens next and in what

order, at what point does Christ return and does the final battle

happen at this time or at that time, and so on, but it‟s really not, for

our purposes, helpful. There are a lot of theological technicalities here

that we don‟t need get lost in – what is important and useful, though,

at this point, is to note that the historical interpretation can either be –

these are your two options – optimistic or pessimistic. Generally

speaking, once you‟ve decided on a historical, “literal” reading, you

then have this choice of, almost, disposition. Do you think the world is

getting better and better and the church is going to grow and keep

growing, or do you think we‟re in this downward spiral and everything

keeps getting worse and very few people will remain true to

Christianity in the end. This is crude, of course, but, basically, one

version, postmillennialism, is broadly-speaking optimistic and

hopeful and premillennialism is sort of very pessimistic and

gloomy.

The optimistic millennialism, for instance, in the 2nd Great Awakening,

(SLIDE) “maintained a millennialist vision that considered salvation to

be an imminent terrestrial fact leading to a total transformation of life

on earth by divine agencies,” according to Gunter Leypoldt. This

meant, according to James H. Moorhead, there were “effusions of

hope” – “scattered effusions of hope.”

It‟s important to remember – this might seem kind of naïve, to just

think the world is this wonderful, ever-improving place, but if I can set

my own cynicisms aside it‟s clear that, one, this fit some of the

ideologies of the era, such as Manifest Destiny, and even the idea of

why you could have this new form of government – remember the

phrase from the Declaration of Independence, “a more perfect union”;

there was this common idea, at the time, about progress and

perfectability – and, two, these was a time when people had really

seen amazing developments and advancements and progress. This fit

into and fed into their expectations, those “effusions of hope.” For

example, the telegraph was hailed as tool for a sign of the

progress towards the final glory of God (SLIDE).

Boyer says of the second position, premillennialism, on the other hand,

that, (SLIDE) “Those drawn to this tradition shared the longing for a

righteous social order, but combined it with a deep pessimism about

the possibility of achieving the Christian utopia.”

Someone else, John Wiley Nelson, described this (SLIDE) as an

“onslaught of fear [and] anxiety,” and Randall Balmer wrote that,

“Society, this new rubric insisted, was careening towards judgment; it

could never be reclaimed for Christ, short of His return to establish the

millennium.”

Also very broadly-speaking, the optimistic view was predominant in

American evangelicalism through the Revolution and up to the Civil

War, and this is, more or less, what you would get with Jonathan

Edwards and, as we‟re going to look at in a minute, Samuel Hopkins

and Samuel Sherwood. After the Civil War, though, and in the present

day – for instance in the texts we have in the Hankins‟ reader – the

more pessimistic version is more common.

So, with the broad outline in place and the general introduction, let‟s

take a minute to look at the text by Sherwood, page 38, and the one

by Hopkins, page 39.

We‟ve looked at these texts before, so just quickly, (SLIDE) the

question we want to ask is how do these respective

millennialist visions connect to biblicism, crucicentrism,

conversionism and activism?

Some of this may be clear, some less clear, but I think in both these

texts we find millennialism reinforces Biblicism and

crucicentrism, showing how they‟re important, and how they‟re

relevant. It‟s one thing to just say the Bible is this infallible book and a

guide to life and the cross and Jesus‟ death on the cross is central,

somehow, not only to individuals‟ private faith but also to their whole

lives and to all of life, and history, and central, in fact, to the whole

universe – but how? What we see here is the applicability.

Likewise with these millennialisms there‟s an invitation, you‟re

supposed to join in and participate, which is conversion, initially, and

then activism. These eschatological ideas involve work that

we‟re supposed to do. James H. Moorhead says, “the quest for

salvation provided imaginative participation in the last things.” That

was true farmers and the uneducated, but also for some of the very

well-educated and respected members of society.

[If I can take a brief detour: The issue of imagination is interesting

too because these biblical texts – even if they‟re not fully worked out

in any theological way into an eschatology – definitely provide an

imaginative language and inspiration. The apocalyptic imagery is very

powerful, and moves people. We looked at the Timothy Dwight poem,

page 36, several weeks ago, which as we said at a very secular

purpose or function, but you see this imagery – “Then, then a

heavenly kingdom shall descend,/And savage nations at thy scepter

bend” and “Till the last trump the slumbering dead

inspire,/Shake the wide heavens, and set the world on fire.” --

that ties directly to the imagery we saw in Revelation. We see it too in

the Nat Turner text, page 92, though it‟s not very theological, there,

it‟s not very worked out and there‟s not an elaborate hermeneutical

explanation of timelines or specificities, but the millennialism is almost

a force, just like an ocean swell: “I had a vision – and I saw white

spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened –

the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed down in

steams.” I think it‟s worth noting, at least, sort of, parenthetically,

that one of the functions of millennialism hasn‟t been theological, but

rhetorical and inspiration.]

Now, let‟s jump ahead, to after the Civil War, and look at C.I. Scofield,

page 60 in Hankins. A little background, according to Boyer, Scofield

was a Confederate soldier, he fought for the South during the

Civil War. After the war, he was involved in Kansas politics, which

was pretty wild, at that time. He held a number of positions, high

positions in state government and in party politics, and at some point

he was caught embezzling money, skimming or stealing money from

the party (I believe). He fled the state, leaving his wife and kids

behind, to avoid prison. He was later caught and jailed for passing bad

checks or forging checks. In prison he underwent a conversion

experience and afterwards he joined this church, a small evangelical

church that had its roots in Great Britain, and he moved to Texas, and

became a minister. That‟s the background. This is not, actually, that

unusual a story, either in history or as an evangelical

conversion narrative, but what makes Scofield important, for us and

as a figure in the history of American evangelicalism, is he took this

kind of obscure idea of the Plymouth Brethren, this one evangelical

group, called dispensationalism, and popularized it. Almost to the point

that it‟s almost universal in American evangelicalism. It‟s very

predominant in 20th century and today.

It‟s a simple idea – a meta-history, as we mentioned in the beginning.

Look at the first and second paragraph in our text on page 60:

“The Scriptures divide time (by which is meant the entire

period from the creation of Adam to the „new heaven and a new
earth‟ of Rev. 21:1) into seven unequal periods, usually called

dispensations …

“These periods are marked off in Scripture by some change in God‟s

method of dealing with mankind, or a portion of mankind, in respect of

two questions: of sin, and man‟s responsibility.”

It‟s important to note the idea is not that God changes, since God is

unchanging, immutable, etc., but God‟s relationship to humans

change. And it changes – there‟s always one sort of signifying person,

a man, who marks a dispensation.

A couple of questions, here, that we should ask (SLIDE):

Why is this useful, if you‟re an evangelical Christian who wants

to read the Bible literally?

For one thing, it explains some of the more awkward juxtapositions of

scripture – like, why didn‟t God tell Moses that salvation comes

through the death of Jesus, why was there this thing with the law, the

ten commandments, and the 613 positive commandments in the

Hebrew scriptures, and why, if God did give laws about things like

eating pork and the way you cut your hair, does Paul, in the epistles,
tell us those things aren‟t salvific and we need to have faith and this

relationship to Jesus‟ crucifixion.

For another thing, this works out and spells out how the Bible is

relevant to us – Boyer says it shows how the bible is an anchor – and

it is relevant to our current, confusing, chaotic realities. It also shows

how the cross is central (even though, here, it‟s not always central,

throughout time, but just to this particular dispensation of grace), and

it also, again, invites people into this participation, through

conversion and certain kinds of actions.

And how does this dispensation end?

“[T]he descent of the Lord from heaven, when sleeping saints will be

raised and, together with believers then living, caught up „to meet the

Lord in the air; and so shall we be ever with the Lord.”

This returns us, I think you‟ll recognize, to one of the Bible verses we

started with. This is the rapture. It figures really powerfully into the

evangelical imagination, as we‟re going to see in a minute with the

fiction texts – but first, I want to end with the question, is this

pessimistic or optimistic?
There‟s a sense in which it‟s both. Which is why I was saying my

earlier distinctions were just kind of rough. It‟s deeply pessimistic

about the world, with this hope kind of ensconced inside.

There‟s a personal hope, if you‟re an evangelical, within this larger

frame of gloom about the world and human history. Boyer says there‟s

“a subtext of conspiracy, paranoia, and social alienation,” and, at the

same time, a way in which it‟s reassuring and tells us that all

the bad stuff and catastrophic stuff really is part of a plan and

there is a larger point. Boyer (SLIDE) I‟ll end with this, says:

“[The] Fundamentalist apocalyptic invested history with drama and

meaning. Whereas the secular history of the public schools and the

text books offered no clue to history‟s overarching pattern or ultimate

goal, the prophecy popularizers insisted with confident assurance that

history is following a clear trajectory determined by God and that it is

headed towards an ultimate, glorious consummation.”