Category: History

Categories
Culture History

What God Hath Wrought: Postmillennialism

Postmillennialism is another fascinating part of the story told by Daniel Walker Howe in What God Hath Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.  Many Christians today who buy into the narrative of “American Exceptionalism” cite Christian and Biblical influences on the U.S. Constitution as a key reason for America’s success — in particular, the Calvinist-inflected idea that checks and balances are necessary to limit the sinful tendencies of government officials.  But very few would embrace a much more important driver of the link between religion and the early belief in American exceptionalism:  postmillennial eschatology.

In brief, postmillennialism is the belief that the evangelistic and reform efforts of the Church will result in the conversion of substantially the entire world and will produce the peaceful and prosperous thousand-year reign of Christ alluded to in Revelation 20:4-6.  I think it’s fair to say that most serious, trained Christian theologians today are Amillennial — that is, they understand this text to be metaphorical and symbolic, not a reference to a “literal millennium” (this is my view).  It’s also fair to say that, in terms of historical theology, the most widely held position throughout Church history has been “premillennialism” — the belief that temporal judgment will occur before a literal millennium.

Particularly in North American evangelical Christianity, of course, many if not most believers at the popular level are “premillennial,” with a “dispensationalist” flavoring — that is, they think a literal millennial reign will occur after Christ first judges the world with terrible destruction (the “Great Tribulation”) and removes Christians from the earth (the “Rapture of the Church”).  Premillennialist Christians disagree on the timing of the “Rapture,” but the most popular version asserts that it will occur before the Tribulation (this is the view underlying the “Left Behind” franchise of books and movies).  The belief in a “Rapture” is not a significant part of historic premillennialism.

Most American protestant Christians in the Nineteenth Century, however, including nearly all evangelicals, were postmillennial.  They believed that their efforts were spurring on a golden age to be capped by Christ’s return.  As Howe notes, for example, revivalist Charles Finney once “told his congregation that if evangelicals applied themselves fully to the works of mission and reform they could bring about the millennium within three years.”  “Postmillennialism,” Howe suggests, “provided the capstone to an intellectual structure integrating political liberalism and economic development with Protestant Christianity.”

The sort of evangelical Christianity that is now emerging among many educated North American Christians has taken on some of this dynamic.  Although this small but growing segment of American evangelicalism largely rejects dispensational premillennialism in favor of amillennialism, it (we) are emphasizing the this-worldly aspects of the Gospel — the ways in which the already-present “Kingdom of God” is concerned with freedom from oppression and material relief for the poor.  Missional theology, for example, incorporate the dynamic of postmillennialism without the Biblicism of a literal millennium.  On the whole, I think this is a positive development, particularly in that it properly separates the Kingdom of God from any earthly polis.  And the need for this sort of separation ultimately renders talk of any sort of National Exceptionalism idolatrous.

Categories
History

What God Hath Wrought: Jacksonian America

I’ve been reading lots of history lately.  Nothing cures shallow thinking like a rich dose of history.  Recently I finished reading Daniel Walker Howe’s sweeping narrative of the period between Colonial and Civil War America, What God Hath Wrought:  The Transformation of America, 1815-1848.  This was a period dominated in many ways by Andrew Jackson.  Anyone interested in contemporary debates over “American Exceptionalism” should study this period carefully.

Jacksonian America defintely was “exceptional” — the question is in what way.  The brash entrepreneurial drive and populist dynamism that imbued this time remains a prominent, quintessentially American characteristic.  Howe’s summary of the political dynamics of this period could map comfortably onto our times:

As the historian Daniel Feller has noted, ‘A newly functioning system of gathering an disseminating information [the telegraph] made people aware of a larger world and gave them the power to change it.  This increased ‘power to change’ encouraged controversy and contest.  Equal rights for the two human sexes was but the newest subject over which Americans divided.  The disputes that raged among the people of the young republic between 1815 and 1848 cannot be reduced to a single fundamental conflict (such as the working class against the capitalists).  Rancorous competition between the major political parties reflected real disagreements over policy as well as mutual distrust between their constituencies….  Constitutional and legal ambiguities combined with fierce ambitions to produce a culture of litigation.  Racial, ethnic, and religious divisions spilled over into public violence.

Does any of this sound familiar?  But Howe notes that the signature driver of this period was white violence against African slaves, Native Americans, and Mexico:

The most bloody conflicts, however, derived from the domination and exploitation of the North American continent by the white people of the United States and their government.  If a primary driving force can be identified in American history for this period, this was it.  As its most ardent exponents, the Jacksonian Democrats, conceived it, this imperialist program included the preservation and extension of African American slavery as well as the expropriation of Native Americans and Mexicans….  Above all, westward expansion rendered inescapable the issue that would tear the country assunder a dozen years later:  whether to expand slavery.

This isn’t liberal revisionism.  It’s the reality that America has been “exceptional” both in spreading liberty and promoting oppression; in creating prosperity and destroying livelihoods; in justice and peace and in brutal violence.  It’s the messiness of all human history.

Categories
Historical Theology History Law and Policy

Calvin's Political Legacy in the U.S.

For those interested in the similarities and differences between the Puritans and other Reformed-Calvinist groups in colonial and antebellum America, take a look at James Bratt’s essay, “The Prism of Calvin’s Political Legacy in the United States,” in the current issue of Perspectives:  A Journal of Reformed Thought.  I think Bratt does a good job of laying out the Puritan vision and comparing it to the Dutch and Scots Reformed in the North and the Southern Presbyterians.  As Bratt notes, the Puritan churches “were state-supported to the exclusion of all others with the aim of thoroughly reforming not only church but also state and society.”  I think there are obvious echoes of this, albeit in a different political and historical context, in Kuyper’s thought.  During colonial times, Bratt notes, the Dutch reformed were mostly a sectarian lot, but along with German, Irish and Scots Presbyterians, they founded Princeton University and established what we now call the Old Princeton tradition, which of course deeply informs contemporary American Evangelicalism.  It was the Southern antebellum Presbyterians who had a public ideology closest to the “withdraw from the public sphere” versions of contemporary fundamentalism, but for different reasons:  they had to try to preserve the integrity of the Church without challenging the institution of slavery.

Categories
Culture Epistemology History Law and Policy

Evangelicals and Slavery

John Patrick Daly’s book “When Slavery Was Called Freedom:  Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War” should be required reading for anyone interested in the relationship between Christian faith and public policy in America.

Daly traces the ways in which evangelical Christians supported the pro-slavery cause in the antebellum South.  As Daly notes, evangelicals in the North tended towards abolitionism, and used theological and Biblical arguments in support of their position.  But evangelicals in the South overwhelmingly supported slavery, and likewise used theological and Biblical arguments in support of their views.

It’s tempting to make a “no true Scotsman” argument at this point:  the Southern evangelicals, we would like to suggest, were using theology and scripture improperly, as a mask for their greed.  In a sense, I would argue along these lines.  Like nearly all Christians today, I think it’s clear that a properly developed Biblical theology must consider slavery a great evil.

However, in another sense, this kind of argument is anachronistic.  The Southern preachers who supported slavery really believed that Divine Providence had ordained the institution of slavery in the American South for the benefit of both the white and black populations.  Interestingly, according to Daly, they for the most part did not rely on earlier arguments from creation and geneology (i.e., the so-called “curse of Ham”), but rather mostly framed their arguments in terms of Providence.  Moreover, the Southern preachers argued that the revivalistic fires of the Second Great Awakening burned hot in Southern states where slavery flourished.  For many antebellum Christian leaders in the South, Providence and Revival confirmed the righteousness of slavery.

Of course, to us today (and to most Northern theologians at the time), this was a tragic, awful, horrid betrayal of Christian principles.   The lingering question is, do we have the courage to question our own beliefs about how our faith ought to relate to the pressing issues of our day?

Categories
Early Christianity Historical Theology History Spirituality

Perpetua IV: Questions

Here are some questions for discussion about the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas.

Question I: What were the nature of Perpetua’s dreams / visions and what do they say about her spiritual beliefs and practices?

Related sub-questions:

Were Perpetua’s dreams / visions given to her by the Holy Spirit, were they stress-induced psychological manifestations, are they literary devices, or all or none of the above?

What messages would the record of Perpetua’s dreams / visions have communicated to third-century readers?

Can we infer from Perpetua’s reliance on dreams and visions that she was part of a Montanist or proto-Montanist movement?

Question II: What, if anything, can we infer about Perpetua’s understanding of the afterlife from her vision about her deceased younger brother (and, presumably, the understanding of the afterlife in the Christian community she had joined)?

Question III: Should we take Perpetua today as a role model?

Related sub-questions:

What should we make today of Perpetua’s spirituality of dreams and visions?

What should we make today of the theology implicit in Perpetua’s dreams / visions, particularly concerning the afterlife?

Should we be eager, as Perpetua and Felicitas were, for martyrdom?

Can you think of any contemporary analogues to Perpetua’s story that might edify the North American missional church and/or appeal to people who are indifferent to the Gospel?

Categories
Early Christianity Historical Theology History

Perpetua III: Favorite Quotes

These are some of my favorite quotes from the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas.

“And Hilarian the procurator – he that after the death of Minucius Timinian the proconsul had received in this room the right and power of the sword – said: ‘Spare your father’s grey hairs; spare the infancy of the boy. Make sacrifice for the Emperor’s prosperity.’ And I answered: ‘I am a Christian.’”

“And when they had been brought to the gate and were being compelled to put on, the men the dress of the priests of Saturn, the women the dress of the priestesses of Ceres, the noble Perpetua remained of like firmness to the end, and would not. For she said: ‘For this cause came we willingly unto this, that our liberty might not be obscured.’”

‘The said he [Saturus] to Pudens the soldier: ‘Farewell; remember the faith and me; and let not these things trouble you, but strengthen you. And therewith he took from Pudens’ finger a little ring, and dipping it in his wound gave it back again for an heirloom, leaving him a pledge and memorial of his blood.’”

“But Perpetua, that she might have some taste of pain, was pierced between the bones and shrieked out; and when the swordsman’s hand wandered still (for he was a novice), herself set it upon her own neck. Perchance so great a woman could not else have been slain (being feared of the unclean spirit) had she not herself so willed it.”

Categories
Early Christianity Historical Theology History

Perpetua II — Summary

This is a summary of the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas.

The document is the prison diary of Vibia Perpetua. Perpetua’s account of her pending execution is framed by a prologue and after-word that may have been composed by Tertullian or another witness to the executions.

Perpetua and a number of other catechumens (people who were preparing to join the Christian Church) are arrested shortly after their baptism. Two deacons in the local church, who apparently had not been arrested, pay bribes to gain access to the prisoners and to permit Perpetua to nurse her infant and visit with her family. During a visit, Perpetua’s brother, who also is a Christian cathecumen, relates that the Lord told him Perpetua should “ask for a vision” about whether she would be released or martyred.

Perpetua seeks a vision from the Lord concerning whether she will be released or martyred. She receives a vision of a ladder to heaven guarded by a serpent. She understands this to mean that she will be required to overcome her fear and receive martyrdom.

Perpetua’s father is permitted to visit her and tries to convince her to renounce her Christian faith so that she would be spared. There is a moving account of his grief and his efforts to manipulate Perpetua into avoiding martyrdom.

After a few more days in prison, while the group is praying, Perpetua “uttered a word and named Dinocrates,” her brother, who had died of an ulcerating disease at age seven. She begins to pray for Dinocrates. That night, she has a vision of Dinocrates in distress, reaching towards a fountain of water that was too high for him. Perpetua continues to pray for Dinocrates and receivedsanother vision of him appearing clean, healthy, and drinking from a golden cup. She notes “[t]hen I understood that he was translated from his pains.”

The day before her execution, Perpetua receives a final vision in which she “became a man” and defeated an Egyptian warrior in the arena. She understands this vision to mean that “I should fight, not with beasts but against the devil; but I knew that mine was the victory.”

Following the narrative of Perpetua’s final vision, the document recounts a vision received by Saturus. It seems that Saturus was imprisoned after the first group of cathecumens that had been captured along with Perpetua. His is a vision of heaven, where he and Perpetua met other martyrs. Also present in Saturus’ vision are “Optatus the bishop” and “Aspasius the priest and teacher,” who are involved in a dispute. Perpetua speaks with Optatus and Aspasius “in Greek” and then they are addressed by the angels.

The document then describes the martyrdom of Perpetua and the other prisoners. Felicty, a cathecumen who was a slave, is afraid that she will not be martyred, because she is pregnant, and it was illegal to subject a pregnant woman to capital punishment. The other prisoners pray that Felicity would deliver her baby in time. The baby is born and entrusted to Felicity’s sister. The martyrs enjoy a final love feast together, apparently a “last meal” of the same sort we provide people on death row today.

The prisoners refuse to dress as Roman priests and priestesses for the spectacle. They speak boldy to the Roman Procurator, Hilarian, about God’s judgment. The crowed is outraged and Hilarian orders them to be flogged. Wild animals are uncaged, including a boar (which gores and kills its handler), a bear (which fails to attack), a “savage cow,” and a leopard. They report a sort of ecstatic state in which they feel no pain as the animals attack. A soldier named Pudens finishes off the mauled and bleeding prisoners with a sword. Before dying, Saturus gives Pudens a blood-soaked ring as a memorial.

Categories
Early Christianity History

Paternoster Puzzle

This little word puzzle has been found in various Roman ruins, including in Pompeii:

R O T A S
O P E R A
T E N E T
A R E P O
S A T O R

Rearrange the words, and you get this “Paternoster” (“Our Father”) cross form with “A” — alpha and “O” — omega at each tip:

A
P
A
T
E
R
A P A T E R N O S T E R O
O
S
T
E
R
O

Apparently no one is sure of its purpose.  The early Christian use of symbols like this is fascinating to me.  I wish evangelicals weren’t so stingy with symbolism.  I guess one similar thing we sometimes use is the Christian fish on our cars.

Categories
History Humor Personal News Photography and Music

The Bluesman

This is a picture from the Gordon College Talent Show, circa 1987.  I’m performing my biggest hit ever, “The Major Minor Concentration Undeclared Blues.”  Ah, the bright lights, the applause, the groupies — at least that’s how I remember it.

Categories
Culture History

Remember

It’s 9-11 today in New York. It’s hard to believe that only five years have passed, and just as hard to believe that it’s been five years already. I don’t have anything profound to say that won’t sound treacly. On 9/11/2001, I saw the smoke rising from the towers from outside my office in Newark, NJ, where I was a young law firm partner. Today, I took the train into my office in New York, where I’m a somewhat older young professor, on a bright blue morning just like that morning five years ago. Time goes on, but we have to remember.