00:01:49.860we've been talking in this season, as you already know, about building this great cathedral of
00:01:53.660Christendom, looking to establishing the doctrinal and cultural distinctives that we believe
00:01:59.360applied over time will result in the next Christendom. And so we've been clearing our
00:02:05.540job site where this cathedral needs to go up of all sorts of shantytowns and models that
00:02:09.640are in the way. Things like Big Fast and famous megachurchianity and all the other things we've
00:02:14.240covered revivalism here. One of the through lines that cuts through quite a few of these shanty
00:02:20.500towns is the topic of today's episode. Actually, you'll find that one of the dominant theological
00:02:26.800through lines that runs through megachurchianity, modernly, that runs through some of the
00:02:31.320fundamentalism that came out of the 20th century, that runs through revivalism, particularly out of
00:02:35.920the 19th century, is an extraordinarily pessimistic view of eschatology. An extraordinarily pessimistic
00:02:44.120view of eschatology, particularly dispensational premillennialism is kind of the big theological
00:02:52.020category that you could put a lot of this under. And so later we'll make a distinction that we're
00:02:57.520not talking about all premillennialists. We'll talk about how in a lot of ways it's actually
00:03:02.000easier. And we found it easy to link arms with dispensationalists as co-belligerents on lots
00:03:07.080of battlegrounds. And we want, if you're a premillennialist, we don't want you to turn
00:03:10.600this episode off and be like, well, here you go. We don't want to straw man you. But we do want
00:03:15.460to make this point that there is a particular kind of pessimism about the future and about
00:03:20.740the story of the church and where we stand in it today that has functioned to really hinder
00:03:26.880the growth and progress of the church that has caused us to actually jettison much of the
00:03:32.100theological legacy that we've gotten from our spiritual forefathers, and that if consistently
00:03:36.780applied would actually make you look back at the last Christendom with extreme skepticism and say
00:03:42.700that certainly couldn't have been an actually Christian thing and definitely look forward to
00:03:47.260the future and without any expectation of there being a future Christendom. And so if I may just
00:03:53.640really quickly to frame this, give you a brief history, premillennialism from the early church
00:03:59.360to today, and then tie it into this pessimism that we're rejecting. Then we'll explain why
00:04:04.520and some of the implications of it. Premillennialism is not the majority view in church history. In
00:04:10.100fact, there's not really, you could say, a particular dominant view through church history
00:04:14.700of eschatology. There's a reason why this didn't end up in any of the creeds or confessions as an
00:04:19.740explicit point, or any of the creeds, particularly in the early church. Premillennialism isn't a
00:04:24.300majority view in church history. There's no trace of premillennialism, for example, in Clement of
00:04:29.340Rome, Ignatius, or Polycarp, not in the Apostles' Creed. And in fact, the Apostles' Creed seems to
00:04:35.300imply resurrection and life everlasting immediately follows the return of Christ to judge the quick
00:04:40.420and the dead, not after a thousand-year period. But premillennialism rose in popularity in the
00:04:47.680mid-second century, especially under the persecution of the church. And premillennialism is the idea
00:04:53.440that history is going to end, essentially, with the return of Christ to the earth physically,
00:05:00.420where he will establish a thousand-year kingdom, usually it's considered a literally thousand-year
00:05:05.620kingdom, where he'll rule physically from Jerusalem in Israel, where people will still
00:05:11.520be dying, people will still be getting married and giving birth, people will still be getting
00:05:15.920saved in this period, but that during this period, post-return of Christ, there will be essentially
00:05:21.320like a lot of what we're describing, a golden age, Christendom, you might say, where after the
00:05:26.760return of Christ, you see a lot of what we're describing. The nations come, most people are
00:05:31.280Christians, and then there's a final cataclysmic, upheaval, rebellion, followed by the final
00:05:38.120judgment and the eternal state where death is killed forever. This view rose in popularity
00:05:43.600in the mid-second century, especially when the church was still heavily influenced by the Jewish
00:05:50.120faith. And this makes sense. I mean, the Jewish view of the coming of Messiah was much more in
00:05:55.380alignment with this, that the Christ would come, he'd rule physically from Jerusalem, and that
00:05:59.900most of the dominant politics would come out of Jerusalem, but it would still be in this part of
00:06:06.760history. There would still be death and this sort of thing. This view faced stark opposition in the
00:06:11.200third and fourth centuries of the church, and particularly by Augustine, it was almost a dead
00:06:16.740idea as far as we can tell in doing the work of historical theology. By the time we get to the
00:06:22.820reformers, Calvin's treatment of premillennialism is fairly representative of most reformational
00:06:28.840treatments of this doctrine. He basically said it's too puerile to deserve refutation. He didn't
00:06:34.160even really deal with it because nobody held it and nobody had held it for something like 1,200
00:06:38.640years at that time. It started to come back into the fringes of the reformation stream of theology
00:06:45.620with a group called the Fifth Monarchy Men of the Puritans, which is a very small group,
00:06:50.600very, very small group. And finally, in the 1800s, we have a guy from the Presbyterian Church in
00:06:55.480Scotland. His name is Edward Irving. You've probably never heard of Edward Irving. He was
00:07:00.120influenced by the beginnings of something we've already talked about, the Second Great Awakening,
00:07:04.900combined with a restoration or with the restoration in England and the politics of
00:07:10.560England in the 1700s, this idea that things were going to get worse. And so he came up with this
00:07:17.300idea that there was a decline in the church that was impending, and it was marking the imminent
00:07:22.940return of Christ. And though he was pretty influential at this time, most folks haven't
00:07:27.720heard of him, and he probably would have ended up a pretty forgotten footnote in the history of the
00:07:31.220church, but for another man named John Nelson Darby. In the 1830s, John Nelson Darby became
00:07:36.780the father of what's now known as dispensationalism. And he came up with this system of reading the
00:07:42.200Bible, reading prophecy, reading the relationship between the Old and New Testament, between Israel
00:07:48.360and the church. And he came up with this view that God had essentially governed history through
00:07:54.880these seven dispensations. There's a lot more work you could read here and invented the doctrine
00:07:59.300of dispensationalism. Before John Nelson Darby, the idea of something like a pre-tribulational
00:08:05.560rapture, that the temple would be rebuilt, even ideas that things like the Levites and the
00:08:10.860sacrifices would be reinstated in this thousand year reign. Those weren't really around until
00:08:15.720the 1800s and didn't become popular, certainly until John Nelson Darby. Why are we telling you
00:08:20.460all this? Well, we're telling you all this because one of the main features of this system
00:08:24.580that Darby invented and that became extremely dominant, we'll talk about this, the Schofield
00:08:29.880Bible later in the episode. One of the reasons that this matters is because a huge feature of
00:08:34.120this was an extraordinary degree of pessimism about the future of the church. They believed
00:08:38.640that the return of Christ was imminent. Any moment Christ was going to return, that there was going
00:08:43.900to be a massive rebellion and upheaval, the Great Tribulation was going to happen. And so some of
00:08:48.880the implications of this theological conviction led to things like a hesitance to build for the
00:08:55.680long haul, a hesitance to do the work of establishing schools and thinking in terms
00:09:00.840of a thousand generations and our children's children's children. Why? Well, because we
00:09:04.720didn't really expect for them to be around for this. When you start believing in a dispensational,
00:09:11.000I'm not even going to tackle the theology at the moment, just the worldview. You're a dispensational
00:09:16.660premillennialist. You know things are going to go from bad to worse. Every event that happens then,
00:09:22.340like you read the newspaper and something bad happens, you have confirmation bias. You say,
00:09:26.860of course it would happen. Of course it's getting worse. Of course we have World War I.
00:09:31.660And then we have World War II. The whole world is fighting. Atomic bombs are dropped. We find
00:09:37.120out there are concentration camps. What's happening in Russia with the Cold War? There's
00:09:41.840no lack of fodder to feed this idea of things steadily declining over time. And so the question
00:09:50.040I have is, Brian, maybe you could answer this, this idea of decline. Is it actually true or is
00:09:56.100it a myth? Is it a myth of decline? In 2023, Indigo Sundries became one of our sponsors. At
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00:10:38.940Yeah, it is one of the central threads that you have to deal with in situating yourself in history.
00:10:44.040I think that, to frame my answer a little bit, one of the issues with the church today is that most Christians don't really self-consciously stand in a historically rooted understanding of their place in history.
00:11:01.020Things have changed more rapidly in the last 150 years for everybody than in the entire history of humanity combined before that, in many ways, technologically.
00:11:09.400For much of history, you could say something like, I'm a farmer, like my father was, like his father was, like his father was, like his father was.
00:11:17.440I'm an Anglican, like my father was, like his father was, like his father was.
00:11:20.840You could even see the tracing of last names.
00:24:29.460The human sacrifice is untold. But I think, too, the other thing I just want to interject is when you look at this, so the church is in retreat mode because we believe in this vision of decline. And so to summarize everything to Dan's question, is there a myth of decline? Summarize everything we've said. And Brian said the answer is yes. Yes.
00:24:47.400but then you look at it and you're like okay biggest problem why is the left why are the
00:24:52.020pagans winning because they believe in the infinite progress of evolutionary theory
00:24:56.000they're they're sitting there believing that the state will transform the world
00:24:59.600believing it they go and they do yep christians are sitting on their hands saying well we lose
00:25:04.140anyway so what does it matter yeah look at look at the uh transhumanist liberal post-millennialism
00:25:11.160for lack of a better words and dominion theology of someone like elon musk who believes that we
00:25:15.060are going to successfully link human beings to technology such that we might even be able to
00:25:19.540achieve something akin to immortality that we're arc of the beast chip in the head yeah continue
00:25:24.000that we're going to become uh an interplanetary species this is his whole point of spacex it's
00:25:28.860all about ai artificial intelligence plus neural link technology plus interplanetary
00:25:33.220humanity plus evolution equals an enlightened basically a a dominionist mentality of human
00:25:38.700history so the liberals playing for keeps and they're not dispensate they're not they don't
00:25:43.440have a myth of decline they really believe they're going to win even the lgbtq alphabet i mean that
00:25:48.640they made such a small minority of the u.s population and they've been radically successful
00:25:54.960in pushing their agenda because they think they're going to win and they are winning
00:25:59.080yeah and a lot of this i think is is fundamental so the you know dispensationalism is part of this
00:26:04.700you know marxism critical race theory all of it but it all comes back to the practical issue of
00:26:10.340what do you do with your kids so the left for a long time since the at least the 50s said we're
00:26:15.720going to make a long slow march through the institutions and we're just going to relentlessly
00:26:19.740teach these things meanwhile i think as christians we were pretty much seeding the ground there were
00:26:24.600some fights along the way it would be you know we've been seeding the ground on it yeah and so
00:26:29.160this is why i think in in our day there's actually been a revival of post-mill thought part of it i
00:26:34.660do think dan is because we see the way the left is going hard in the paint we see that but we also
00:26:40.260So, Brian, you mentioned this earlier, maybe we should talk about some of the historical roots.
00:26:58.780Number one, dispensationalists claim, like many people, well, we're the true vision.
00:27:04.440We're the true ideal from the beginning.
00:27:07.560And Gentry goes through and he's like, that's actually just a lie.
00:27:10.260that that's not true at all and he he cites resources and stuff like that so that's really
00:27:15.120important but the other thing historically i think is really important we're huge on postmill
00:27:19.740we love it however even gentry who's making the case for postmill theology says there's a reason
00:27:26.240eschatology was never part of the creeds because it was not something that that the early church
00:27:31.080believed was essential to orthodoxy and therefore that we should divide over i feel like that's an
00:27:36.600important thing to Brian's point of, hey, we can link arms with pre-mill, historic pre-mill guys,
00:27:41.180A-mill. Absolutely. And we can push the ball for it. That's great. Even if you're dispensationalist
00:27:45.980and you're like, look, I'm convinced my hermeneutic, a lot of this has to do with your
00:27:50.140hermeneutics. How do you read prophecy? How do you interpret scripture? And you say, look,
00:27:54.960I'm still convinced of the system of dispensationalism. And yet I believe in the
00:27:59.840moral imperative of Christians to behave as if post-millennialism is true. I've heard people
00:28:04.060say this. To that person, I would say, hey, let's grab a beer and talk about your hermeneutic,
00:28:10.840and let's talk about scriptures. Let's open some passages. But I would also want to say,
00:28:14.920yeah, brother, let's build together. Let's go. In our church, we have, just for the record,
00:28:19.920in our membership, and certainly in attendance, we have dispensational premillennialists,
00:28:24.280probably more historic premillennialists, some leaky disbies, probably like MacArthur.
00:28:29.560We've got amillennialists who are optimistic and pessimistic, and we've got postmillennialists
00:28:33.880who are of various stripes. So it's like, we get along and we build together.
00:28:38.160Yeah. And it's funny because I know that predominantly American Christians are
00:28:42.500dispensationalists. And so this is anecdotal. So take it for what it's worth. In my experience,
00:28:48.980it's been easier to link arms with you dispensationalists than it even has been to
00:28:54.080those that are essentially a subset of post-millennialism with all millennialists.
00:28:58.900and particularly particularly those of a like a modern two kingdoms sort of over spiritualization
00:29:06.860of everything all the old testament readings and and everything that would say that post
00:29:12.820millennialism is an over-realized eschatology and you're actually doing harm whereas right
00:29:18.460whereas the dispensationalist is like hey i'm not sure about where you guys are coming from
00:29:23.300i think we're gonna lose but i mean i want to fight with you guys like i'm on your your side
00:29:28.080And so even though those two theological viewpoints of the end times seem to be polar opposites, in my experience, it has been easier to link arms with you dispensationalists than it has been to the all-male guys.
00:29:41.180So I would say all-male guys, just be a little bit more friendly.
00:29:43.820Yeah, a certain stripe for sure. A certain stripe that has, like we've made some criticisms of certain forms of radical two kingdom theory and things like that, that would relegate much of human life to the common kingdom that's not governed or regulated by scripture in the same way.
00:29:58.520And so it's actually actively harmful, they would say, to attempt to get Christians, Christians and non-Christians, to obey Christ in these areas.
00:30:08.160And that to me is, I think, Dan, that's a great point.
00:30:11.400That's actually much harder to link arms with than the dispensationalist who says, yeah, I think the Antichrist is going to show up any minute.
00:30:17.740But in the meantime, he's going to find, when I get raptured, I'm going to get raptured with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other.
00:30:56.200And that was a desire to read the scriptures literally, saturated in the scriptures. And I think it gets wrong, the reading of prophecy and all of that. But I will say it makes it a lot easier to partner with someone who takes the Bible very seriously, even if I think that at the core, the way that they're reading the scriptures is not necessarily the most faithful to the text as a whole.
00:31:20.020But I will say that I definitely respect that. But you can see, as I tie it back to the fundamentalist movement, during that same time period, the literal reading, the high view of Scripture, the inerrancy of Scripture, where you could see this took root.
00:31:34.880As far as the myth of decline, you can see where Christianity has really lost a lot of ground in the 19th century. And actually, some of the most horrible human atrocities of mass scale happened during that same time period, which gave it a lot of footing.
00:31:54.580But in a way, you could even say that it was amplified by the retreat of Christianity from things like schools.
00:32:02.580You know, people have essentially relegated their children to being taught by pagans and instructed by pagans because you're going to lose anyway.
00:32:11.520You know, so maybe that's not a fair characteristic or criticism, but I wanted to, you know, make a sandwich that where I complimented and then I gave a critique.
00:37:21.240So then that starts being, I mean, that just totally grounds you
00:37:23.820a different way in the way that you would educate your children. Yeah. It's like, if you really
00:37:28.760believe that the Great Commission will be successful, and the Great Commission has two
00:37:33.560basic parts, conversion and baptizing, this entrance into the church, and discipleship,
00:37:40.200teaching them to obey all that Christ commanded to the nations. When you believe that that will
00:37:44.640be successful and that the nations will stream to Mount Zion for instruction in God's law, Isaiah 2,
00:37:49.560When you believe that, when you believe Psalm 22, 27, and 28, that all the families of the earth will turn to the Lord, when you believe Psalm 2, that as for me, I have set my king on the throne, and he will ask for the nations as his heritage, and I will give them to him.
00:38:06.040When you believe that, then you actually have to have something to say about every aspect of human life.
00:38:14.480Because if you really believe that all of that is going to happen in history and you believe that that's the case, then you also have to believe that, well, we're going to have to disciple all these people to figure out things like politics, economics, arts, music, agriculture, city planning.
00:38:31.520because we're going to have a lot of Christians, and they're going to have to know what to do
00:38:35.020about all these different areas of life. And so it really does change your mindset from
00:38:39.140a fundamentally dispensational mindset. Essentially, what we're trying to do is
00:38:44.700convince people to get on the helicopter that's leaving the roof in Saigon, in Vietnam.
00:38:51.560Not Saigon. In Vietnam. The last helicopter out before the Viet Cong stormed the compound.
00:38:57.200Get on the helicopter. Get on the helicopter. Get on the helicopter. No one's really worried about
00:39:01.240education that much. You're not like, you know, you should really have a theory. You should really
00:39:05.420have a philosophy and theology of the education of children. They're like the Viet Cong are coming,
00:39:10.200get on the helicopter. And so you're going to be obsessed with evangelism only. You're going to be
00:39:14.780extremely imbalanced in that. And you're not going to be thinking as much about covenant
00:39:19.140succession in the normative means of families, tribes, nations, instruction. You know, you
00:39:23.740actually have to have something to say. Yeah. And I think I was talking to a friend about this the
00:39:27.260other day. So his dad, mom and dad were missionaries in China. And so he grew up in that world. Him and
00:39:34.940his brother, I said, well, what was your childhood like? And he said, literally, my brother and I
00:39:38.860are doing lines of cocaine on the table and we're fornicating, we're doing all this. And my parents
00:39:44.000are missionaries to China. I asked him, what was that environment like? And he said, well, my
00:39:49.460parents were godly, devout people, but their focus was clearly outside of the home. And so a lot of
00:39:55.360times like these missionary kids would be left in the states to like be raised by somebody else
00:39:59.380yeah so i think that's one element of it because if you think hey the helicopters are coming we
00:40:04.140need to get everybody we can to the top of the building you're not thinking long term about your
00:40:08.020children i've gotten them to pray the sinner's prayer and they've been baptized and so they're
00:40:12.380good i'm gonna move on their eternity is secure that yeah there's the rest of this life that
00:40:16.340they're gonna but you know once saved always saved so they're fine we got to get people on
00:40:20.300the helicopter yeah yeah and absolutely i mean the one thing you'll never get out of a culture
00:40:24.200like that is culture well you get a culture but it's not a self-replicating yeah yeah you know
00:40:30.640robust culture durable it's a culture that's one generation it fizzes it gets one then it's gone
00:40:35.940because those children are vulnerable to the discipleship of somebody with a radical long-term
00:40:40.100post-millennial type view which is right now currently ascendant secular humanists yeah and
00:40:44.540there definitely are periods like that you can think of people who are like you know bent on
00:40:48.420surviving the holocaust and and so you're in survival mode yeah and you find your way out
00:40:53.040Well, it's like the whole point of survival is so that you can go and build a culture once you've gotten out of that situation.
00:40:58.380This is something like Jordan Peterson has talked about.
00:41:00.520He said one of the problems with evolutionary theory is we're looking at humans in a survival situation as that's the best of humanity.
00:41:08.320And in really a survival situation, that's kind of like humanity at its worst.
00:41:12.400That's where you see the worst parts of people.
00:41:14.900And again, I would say this is the beauty of Western Christendom.
00:41:17.380Like we've built a culture where you have, in the Greek sense, leisure.
00:41:21.120You know, you have time to do art and be creative and think about the music.
00:41:27.140Yeah, if literally like all our pastors are being put in jail and we're being shot in the streets, we're probably less concerned with psalm writing or have time for it.
00:41:38.780So, Dan, you asked what changes in your worldview would an optimistic versus pessimistic eschatology produce.
00:41:46.360And I think one of the things that we're circling around here a lot that's essential to this is that if you actually have an optimistic eschatology, you will believe in the normativity of progress through covenant succession in families, tribes, and nations.
00:42:02.900And I'll explain what I mean, and then I want you guys' thoughts to see, is this true or not?
00:42:05.740So when I say covenant succession, I mean that one of the means through which God has appointed for the covenant to continue being handed on is not just evangelism, but it's also very blue-collar normal things like having children, raising them to be Christians, teaching them how to be humans in all aspects of life, the paideia, new thesia of the Lord, to use Paul's terminology in Ephesians 6, and that you actually expect for that to work.
00:42:29.480Like you have kids with the expectation. God intends to say this because he said he loves to show his faithfulness to a thousand generations, to those who love him. He said, raise a child up in the way you should go. And then when they're old, they won't depart from it. And even though that's a proverb and we want to qualify it to death until it actually means raise your child up in the way that he should go. And there's a good chance. Flip, you know, flip a coin. That's not what it means, right? If that passage means anything, it doesn't mean that.
00:42:50.920So when you have an optimistic eschatology, one of the things that follows is that you don't necessarily just have this glorious view of charging the gate as like this battle mentality.
00:43:03.060You also come with a plodding God working through normative, boring means over long periods of time through ordinary things like the family, tribes, nations, culture, politics, all that kind of stuff.
00:43:14.860Yeah. And I've heard this argument from atheists and maybe you guys have heard this before. It's like, you wouldn't be a Christian if you weren't born a Christian, if you weren't born into this house or into America. And a lot of times you have the heads, you know, like, oh, I don't backpedal. Oh man, they got caught out. No, the answer is yes. Yeah. God meant it. Yeah. If I was born in the Middle East to an Islamic family, I would not be Christian. And God has blessed me in that.
00:43:41.700Yeah, it's like saying you would not be a fruitful apple tree branch on this apple tree if it wasn't for the stump.
00:43:48.660And you're like, well, you see the roots and the apple tree that was planted there.
00:43:53.140When the apple tree fell down from the tree and the seeds went into the ground, it grew another apple tree.
00:43:57.820And it's like, I do think that's one of the problems in a lot of the dyspe type, that type of, we've called it loser eschatology.
00:44:09.680If you have to start over every generation and you don't genuinely believe that God is actually going to do something through your children, it makes the work like monumentally harder than I think it needs to be in what scripture commends to us.
00:44:23.460So one quote I was thinking of was Herman Bavink, and he said,
00:44:26.960The covenant of grace does not randomly jump to and from one individual to the next, but is maintained through families, generations, and nations in an organic fashion.
00:44:37.400Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
00:54:38.740Exactly. And James Hamilton also has great work that the Proverbs are Solomon's obeying
00:54:45.300Deuteronomy 6. James Hamilton also has great work on the biblical theology of the transposition or
00:54:53.000the reversal of the curse where the woman's desire in Genesis 3 part of the curse is that
00:54:59.000her desire would be for her husband is the literal Hebrew word. And in the ESV translated
00:55:03.680said like over or against, like her desire will be to rule over her husband. Because it's the same
00:55:07.980word in genesis 4 that uh god uses to describe the sin sin is crouching at the door cain its
00:55:14.880desire is to rule over you its desire is for you what else do you find in any eric do you find
00:55:19.380anything else interesting that's not relevant to our topic no this is relevant in song of solomon
00:55:23.940then uh-huh the bride's love for the davidic king for the solomonic davidic king is heard that she
00:55:30.620it's used as the same word for it says her desire is for him but now it's been restored in christ
00:55:35.500And so the woman's desire to rule over her husband becomes, through the resurrection and through the work of Christ, it becomes actually now properly for her husband in love.
00:55:46.720And so instead of desiring to be autonomous and rule over him, she desires to actually have him as her Lord and her husband.
00:55:52.800And so it's just glorious, like all these threads.
00:55:55.240Now I'm going to connect this perfectly so that Dan will see the connection that's actually what really was.
01:07:44.700So, you know, something like 2 Peter 3, you know, what's the answer?
01:07:49.800Well, you know, somebody asked me that question, I type it in, a few people I know, I ask Gary DeMar, you get an answer.
01:07:55.040it's like okay there is an answer but then you look at like what the disbies say we say and it's
01:07:59.880not the same thing no what do they say i i don't remember exactly on that one i know that the post
01:08:05.360mill to like second peter three is what we're talking about the fall of uh jerusalem it's using
01:08:09.980similar language to what the old testament prophets used for the destruction of assyria
01:08:14.280yeah and you can check out like peter lightheart's got a commentary on it uh gary damar has some great
01:08:19.940stuff on American Vision on that. And what you'll find, like this really helped me because I was so
01:08:25.700steeped in dispensationalism, and I was taught that dispensationalists love the Bible, and they
01:08:30.960just let the Bible talk, and that these other folks all spiritualize the Bible. And I found
01:08:36.060some of that to be true about certain non-millennialist interpretations, but man,
01:08:39.560post-millennial theologians bleed bibline, you know, like the Spurgeon quote. They bleed bibline.
01:08:44.760When you talk to a James Jordan or a Gary DeMar or a Kenneth Gentry or a Douglas Wilson about these things, they are rattling off passages like a machine gun.
01:08:56.980I mean, they're just like, well, it's like this psalm and this biblical theological connection, this historical theological connection, and this New Testament interpretation of this psalm.
01:09:03.840And then, oh, did you see the way that this was quoted by Hosea?
01:09:05.980And it's like they deeply love and appreciate the tapestry of the Bible as a whole work.
01:09:12.820And even to Baptists, if you don't want to listen to any of those guys, you can look at Jeff Durbin.
01:09:17.960He has some good videos on the YouTubes if you're curious about that.
01:09:22.800And so in conclusion, I think that when what we're posing is that the pessimistic view of the church and of Christ's reign is not only unhelpful, but is also incorrect and it's actually doing harm.
01:09:37.700So the way forward is to actually believe the scriptures, Jesus' rule and reign will be from sea to sea, from the river to the ends of the earth.
01:09:45.900And next time, I'm going to drop a teaser for our next episode, we have a very special guest that is going to be talking specifically about post-millennialism.
01:09:56.920And so that's going to be with you, Eric.
01:09:58.680Man, I can't wait to figure out who this is.