Athanasius, AD 296-372
Incarnation
“…the kingdom of God on earth is not confined to the mere ecclesiastical sphere, but aims at absolute universality, and extends its supreme reign over every department of human life….It follows that it is the duty of every loyal subject to endeavor to bring all human society, social and political, as well as ecclesiastical, into obedience to its law of righteousness.”
(Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, [1890] 1990), 283
“It would be easy to show that at our present rate of progress the kingdoms of this world never could become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. Indeed, many in the Church are giving up the idea of it except on the occasion of the advent of Christ, which, as it chimes in with our own idleness, is likely to be a popular doctrine. I myself believe that King Jesus will reign, and the idols be utterly abolished; but I expect the same power which turned the world upside down once will still continue to do it. The Holy Ghost would never suffer the imputation to rest upon His holy name that He was not able to convert the world.”
~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon
As Amill eschatology believes that the Kingdom of God is exactly identified with the Church and only with the Church it is inevitable that Amills will diminish the necessity for Christianity to conquer in every area of life outside and beyond the Church. After all, for the Amillennial types, if the Kingdom of God is not inclusive of any area outside the Church and the Kingdom is only synonymous with and for “the Church,” there is no need to conquer those other arenas / areas that for the Amillenialist are “non-Kingdom” arenas.
What I mean is this: As the Amils are always leaning towards identifying the Kingdom of God only with the Church — thus drawing a bright line demarcating between Kingdom/Church activity and non-Kingdom/Church activity — the consequence is that the “consistent with their eschatology” Amils will always chide anybody in the Christian faith who sees the Kingdom as being an arena that is expansive beyond the Church so as in include arenas as education, jurisprudence, just war theory, politics, economics, etc.
The fact that this analysis is accurate is seen especially in the writings of David Van Drunen, who I believe has drawn out the most consistently the errant implications of the Amil eschatology. Van Drunen writes in his “Living in God’s Two Kingdoms”;
“God is not redeeming the cultural activities and institutions of this world, but is preserving them through the covenant he made with all living creatures through Noah in Gen. 8:20 – 9:19.”
Van Drunen continues writing;
“God is redeeming a people for himself, by virtue of the covenant made with Abraham and brought to glorious fulfillment in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who has completed Adam’s original task once and for all” (p. 15). As VanDrunen explains, “redemption is not ‘creation regained’ but ‘re-creation gained’” (p. 26).
When one follows this reasoning closely one realizes that for R2K Amillennialism the intent of Biblical Christianity is to preserve culture so that individuals alone, as extracted from their cultural context, might be redeemed. Individuals are redeemed while their cultural context by definition is unredeemable. If Van Drunen were a linguist he would say that God intends to redeem the text while leaving the context to experience soul sleep. This is consistent Amillennialism and because of this Amillennial “theologians” will go spastic in condemning Postmillennialists for preaching on subject matter that in their Amillennial worldview does not particularize the need for the individual as an individual to be redeemed.
This explanation also sheds light on the fact that Amillennialism Christianity and Postmillennialism Christianity create very different types of character and personalities in people. People who are decidedly Postmil are typically going to be type “A” personalities who have a thirst to conquer while people who are decidedly type “B” personalities will be content to be passive and retiring — except when attacking postmillennialists and their eschatology. Amills typically refuse to fight unless it is to fight those (postmills) who never tire of fighting for the honor of Christ.
