Eschatology Matters
E11 - Sunday Short - Josh Howard and Tim Bushong: Optimism VS Pessimism
Dr Joshua Howard and Postmillennialist Tim Bushong discuss how biblical christianity must be optimistic in it's tenor.
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- Duration:
- 11m
- Broadcast on:
- 14 Jul 2024
- Audio Format:
- mp3
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There you come back to Eschatology Matters. I'm Josh Howard, and I'm here joined with Tim Bichang. Tim, thanks for joining me again on one of these short little conversation, kind of fly over introductions to a topic. In Eschatology, what I was hoping we could talk about today was optimism versus pessimism within eschatology. Optimism, a hopefulness, a confidence, maybe even we could describe it as a security in our eschatology versus a pessimism, a downtroddenness, a defeatedness, all those things like that. Walk us into this, if you could, for me, Tim, just kind of introduce our thinking into, because I'll put this shot across the bow at the front end. I think that the majority of Christian eschatology within the United States, I'm gonna make it real specific just to our context, but within the last few decades has been dominated by pessimism. I'm just gonna throw that personal subjective opinion out there. What are your thoughts on this? - Yeah, and I think I'm with you there. Having grown up in a 60s, 70s, midwestern evangelical church, the default position was, of course, dispensationalism. And the idea that in each of the ages in which God works with man and makes a covenant with man, at the end of each one of those is abject failure. And that's not really a thought that makes you wanna get up in the morning. Although, to be honest, many of the stalwarts of the 70s and 80s, you know, politically speaking, were in fact dispensationalists. They believed Jesus could come back at any second. The old joke when I was growing up was, Jesus is returning soon, look busy. - Right, yeah, yeah. - But I'll never forget, you know, reading some other literature that was outside of that dispensational framework, and then approaching my spiritual leaders at the time with this, and they would nod their heads for a while and say, "Oh, no, no, no." We can't hope to ever have that kind of influence. The Bible says that things are always gonna go from bad to worse. We can only expect to be rescued out of this sin-sick world. Now, okay, on a pragmatic level, that's not gonna help build for the future. But on a biblical level, that's even tougher for me now. Here I am, how many years into taking Christ at His word and living the Christian life and having studied the Bible, it just doesn't add up anymore to me. The promises that God made to Israel and the old covenant, now being fulfilled to the church, and those promises were always on the up and up. - Right. - Covenant faithfulness, yes, we're talking about your relative obedience to disobedience. But to take God at His word and then say, "Oh, but by the way, all of those laws and principles in the Old Testament, that's irrelevant. Jesus has come, now it's all about love and suffering." - Right. - Well, there's gonna be suffering. There's no question about it. We're not denying that, we're denying that Jesus is defeated in human history, in His mission. - Let me jump in there, Tim, 'cause that point you're hitting right at the home of what we wanna kind of flesh out right here. So when I think of the optimism versus pessimism in that regard, let's just lay the cards on the table. So you mentioned dispensationalism. I would say that most people would associate dispensationalism with the belief that things are going to trend downward and get worse. And the church, in essence, is going to be kind of defeated or at least not victorious in this age. Again, these are broad brushstrokes, but let's just put that out there. Historic pre-millennialism in a different vein, not the same as dispensational pre-millennialism, but at the same time, historic pre-mill is going to look for these promises to be fulfilled in a future messianic kingdom, not now, not in what we would consider the church age, right? Amil is a little bit harder. Now, you were describing post-mill, so I'll do that one first, or not describing post-mill, but we could just say post-mill, the expectation that Christ will be victorious through the church in this age. In other words, that when Christ says that all authority belongs to Him and heaven and on earth, that that will actually manifest itself in this age. - Fair enough for a broad brushstrokes. - Absolutely. - Amil, I would say, is a little harder in this regard because you have kind of an optimistic, you know, this is the general terms, optimistic, amil, and pessimistic, amil. So there are some within Amil who would say, no, everything will trend downward and it will, in essence, look a lot like defeat, but then you have others who have a much more optimistic upturn of a perspective. So Amil's a little bit of a mixed bag, I would say, in that regard, but what you were describing, Tim, this is what I want to really kind of hone in on is taking seriously the claims of Christ. It really started changing the way I read the New Testament. When I read the things that Christ said, when He said that all authority belongs to me and heaven and on earth, when He said, I've defeated all the rulers, powers, and authorities in this world, when He said I've evicted the ruler of this world, like all these triumphant, I am the warrior God who has conquered all things and they all belong to me, not in the future, but now it changed the way I read the New Testament, right? I'm getting all excited here, man. - There you, I need to pulp it. But it changes the way you look at it, right? Like when you talk about optimism, pessimism, we're not talking about like what we think you should feel. We're talking about what is the tenor of what scripture says, right? - Right, and so then take what you just said about all of those victory language. - Right. - And not spiritualize it, make it about everything in heaven, on earth, under the earth, every one of those knees bows to Jesus in a very real sense. In fact, as I mentioned in the earlier podcast, I'm preparing from the middle of Romans eight. We're getting to all creation, groaning for release, all creation, wanting to be set free from the curse that took place because of Adam's sin. I don't think those are just ethereal out there things. I think it means the mineral deposits are gonna just all of a sudden make themselves known. The insane amount of energy that is available but because of the fall, we're so wicked. I would just talk into a brother of mine. He said, you know, you said in one of your sermons, sin makes you stupid, boy is that true. Well, sin makes mankind stupid. And even as we try to push our way into the stratosphere with our inefficient rockets and all that stuff, the significance of culture as informed and ruled by Jesus, I don't think we have a clue as to what is actually possible because of the noetic effects of sin that is, you know, fallen in Adam, even our rational faculties are broken. And so when I say in history, Jesus victorious in history, I mean, until that resurrection of the dead. - Right, okay. - And that's because of our common structural setup with Amil and Postmill. - Okay, yeah. And so we could say this though and trying to keep this one kind of short 'cause this is man, we could talk a while about this. This is good stuff, but we could at least say between Amil, Postmill, Amil might tend more toward a spiritualized fulfillment in some of those regards, at least historically with Amil and Postmill may have more of an expectation that spiritually and however you wanna define it, but this worldly as in, we can expect culture itself to be impacted, the nations of this world, those type of things, would that be a kind of, kind of fair generalization of the two? - Absolutely, as soon as you start bringing culture and politics into it, civil authorities, that's when some people melt down. And I'm like, I don't know why, I don't know why not. - Okay. - But Jesus is king, right? - Exactly, and with either one of those, we would still encourage at least be like baseline optimism in our eschatology. I would think that would be a good just biblical baseline is if you're, and I'll just go out on a limb, if your eschatology is not optimistic, I'm not so sure it's biblical. Because the tenor of the message of the New Testament is not defeat. - That's right. - Suffering yes, persecution yes, but not defeat. - That's right, that's right. - Good. - I would also say you can't be a pessimistic theologian and say, well, I'm optimistic 'cause Jesus wins in the end anyway. That's kind of like, that's a given. Everybody thinks that. Now, between now and the resurrection, it's kind of a, that's one of those devices, I believe is used by my friends, that's all right. - No, big topic, I appreciate the overview though, this is good, just kind of settled that out there. As always, we welcome more questions and stuff like that. Perhaps we could follow up on this later, but Tim, thanks for the overview, and thanks for walking through it with me. - Good to be here, man. - It is Ryan C. Chris here. People always say it's good to unwind, but that's easier said than done. The exception, Champa Casino. They actually make it easier done than said, or at least the same. 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