Review: The Worship of the American Puritans by Horton Davies

In The Worship of the American Puritans, Horton Davies provides an in-depth study of the theology and practice of the Puritans in New England in the seventeenth century that is useful as a historical study, as an aid for any Christian who wants better to understand the background for many Reformed worship practices today, and as a glimpse of the wholehearted devotion of a people perhaps more dedicated to Godliness than any other in American history. As he examines their religious calendar, sermons, singing, prayers, administration of the sacraments, marriages, funerals, ordinations, and even their architecture, several themes or beliefs emerge that pervaded Puritan life and shaped every area of their public worship. Among these are their belief in divine sovereignty and predestination, their concern for “visible sainthood” and maintaining a pure church, and their application of the regulative principle which resulted in a relentless determination to subject everything they did in worship to the rule of Scripture.

Davies seems to make much of what he regards as a paradox in Puritan theology. On one hand, they were rigorous Calvinists, with a firm belief in man’s natural depravity and the complete sovereignty of God in electing men to salvation. On the other hand, their extreme emphasis on holy living made it seem as though good works were an essential part of salvation. Furthermore, very few Puritans seem to have had much assurance of their salvation, as they often subjected themselves to intense soul-searching, wondering if their professed faith were true and they were indeed among the elect. To Davies, the very idea of a covenanting Calvinist—one who commits to live a life of visible sainthood in the community of believers—is somewhat paradoxical.

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The Reformation of the Church

The Protestant Reformation was a world-shaking event. It changed the structure of society wherever its doctrines took root, and the recovery of the Gospel which was its central focus brought millions of people out of spiritual darkness and into the light of Christ. The doctrine of justification by faith alone, which Luther called “the article by which the Church stands or falls”, was at the center of the radically different Protestant understanding of what it meant to be a Christian. Three important areas of thought were particularly affected by sola fide: the understanding of the church, the pastor and his role, and the sacraments.

First, the Reformation turned upside down the doctrine of the church. In medieval Roman Catholicism (and in the Roman church to this day), the church was understood to be the visible structure of priests, bishops, cardinals, monks, nuns, and other ordained officials who all owed allegiance to the Pope, the Bishop of Rome and the Vicar of Christ. The Nicean attributes of the church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic—were abused by Catholic theologians foundational to the claim that Rome’s visible structure was the only true church and that salvation could only be found in obedience to Rome and her dispensation of the sacraments.

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Fundamentalism

In 1922 in New York City, Harry Fosdick preached a sermon entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?” At the time, Protestants were embroiled in a debate between liberal theology that had been on the rise for at least half a century and Fundamentalist theology, so named for its emphasis on “fundamentals of the faith” such as the inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth, divinity, resurrection, and second coming of Christ, and the substitutionary atonement. In his sermon Fosdick rails against the supposed intolerance of the Fundamentalists, arguing that Christians on both ends of the spectrum should be tolerant of each others’ views and avoid breaking fellowship with those of different opinions on these matters.

Though Fosdick has many good things to say, and his seeming zeal for spreading the Gospel is admirable, he ultimately is guilty of a dangerously errant view of the Scriptures, the Christian faith, and the place of tolerance in the Church. First, he has a poor understanding of the doctrine of Scripture and the nature of God’s Word. Fosdick accuses Fundamentalists of believing that the entirety of the Bible was “inerrantly dictated by God to men.” While there may have been a very small minority of Fundamentalists who held to this view in Fosdick’s day, it has never been the dominant or orthodox understanding of the mode of God’s inspiration of the Scriptures. This is simply a caricature by Fosdick that has little to do with the true Protestant doctrine of the plenary verbal inspiration of the Bible..

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Coming posts

Since August, and through this December, deo volente, I am serving as a pastoral intern at Capitol Hill Baptist Church. I'm reading quite a bit on ecclesiology, and writing 800-1000 words nearly every day, so I'm staying quite busy.

A friend encouraged me to post some of the papers I've been writing in this space, so I think I'm going to begin doing that. Not because I think many people will be particularly interested in what I have to say, but simply so that you all can see that I am keeping quite busy and writing regularly (which was, after all, the reason I started this blog).

St. Bartholomew's Day

Today, August 24, is known in much of the Christian world as St. Bartholomew's day. Bartholomew, also known as Nathanael, was one of Christ's Twelve Disciples. After Christ's resurrection and ascension, Christian tradition tells us that St. Bartholomew worked to carry out Jesus' Great Commission by going on a missionary trip to India, taking with him a copy of the Gospel of Matthew. He also is believed to have traveled in Asia Minor--modern-day Turkey--and in Armenia, where he is understood to have brought the first news of the Gospel.

Protestants have other reasons to remember St. Bartholomew's Day, as well. On this day in 1572 began the mass slaughter of thousands of French Huguenots. The Protestant influence of John Calvin's French-speaking Geneva had spread widely throughout Calvin's homeland, and France seemed about to follow England, much of Germany, and the Low countries in becoming mainly Protestant nations. Under the authority of Catherine de Medici, several important Protestants were assassinated, and as many as seventy thousand Huguenots were murdered in the mob violence that ensued.

Also, in 1662, the English Parliament passed the second great Act of Uniformity, requiring all ministers of the Church of England to subscribe to a narrow set of practices and doctrinal beliefs. Nearly a third of the clergy--nearly all of the Nonconformists--lost their posts for objecting to doctrines and practices they believed were not Reformed enough. This great expulsion resulted almost immediately in the coalescing of distinct Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. The American iterations of these denominations trace their history back to this time.

Church and College

It's that time of year again, and many of my friends are either heading back to college or attending for the first time. College can be a very fruitful time spiritually, or it can be very challenging, depending on how you approach it and what your priorities are. As I indicated in my last post, this often can have very little to do with whether you attend a "Christian" college or a secular school.

There are perhaps many things you can do to help ensure that your college years see growth rather than stagnation in your walk with God. Regular personal devotions and study of God's Word, for example. Or deep, Christ-centered relationships that provide mutual discipleship, accountability, and encouragement. One of the most essential, however, is membership in a healthy local church.

The church is, more than any other earthly institution, God's chosen arena for displaying His glory and working out His plan of redeeming a people for the praise of His name. God identifies Himself with the church to such a degree that when the risen Christ appears to Saul on the road to Damascus, he asks him, "Why are you persecuting me?" In a very real sense, to follow Jesus means to love His Body, the church.

For more on this, pick up a copy of Joshua Harris's book Stop Dating The Church!. For information on what to look for in a church, see Mark Dever's book 9 Marks of a Healthy Church or visit the website of 9Marks Ministries. Though 9Marks is primarily aimed at pastors and church leaders, it is also an invaluable tool for anyone who wants to know what a healthy church looks like. If you've just moved to a new place--such as for college--and are visiting different churches, these resources can give you ways to evaluate them.

"Christian" Colleges

There's an interesting discussion of Christian colleges going on over at the Zeitgeist blog of World Magazine.

Jack Crabtree has a long post on the phenomenon of many "Christian" young people losing their faith at college. Money quote: "Christian parents are being naïve and ignorant if they send their children to Christian colleges under the belief that there—at a Christian college—their children’s faith will be preserved." He also has a plug for Gutenberg College, a Christian school with a Great Books emphasis in Oregon. Gutenberg has an all-Christian faculty, but, interestingly, they don't require students to be Christians, they allow "complete freedom of thought and faith," and they have "few behavioral standards." This is pretty interesting, having graduated from Christian college where these are decidedly not the case. Without knowing anything more about the school, it seems on the whole to be a healthier way of constructing a Christian institution--though many in the culture out of which my alma mater arose would dismiss it as being too liberal, perhaps not really Christian at all.

There is a tremendous difference, as Crabtree points out, between faith in Christ and membership in a Christian sub-culture. A school where students are assumed to be Christians, where they are told what wonderful Christian young people they are, and where they are expected to live according to that sub-culture's idea of what the Christian life looks like is not necessarily the same thing as one that actually encourages students in their sanctification and pursuit of godliness. A college that zealously (some might say frighteningly) stresses conformity to The Christian Worldview is not necessarily the same thing as a college that encourages students to work through and work out their faith in the intellectual realm, helping them become men and women who can think critically to the glory of God.

PHC students and alumni: how do you think PHC fares in these areas? Is attending there actually a good thing for your faith? If not, why not? If so, is it simply because you developed good relationships or because the school played an active role in making the experience a good one?

Just how alone is faith alone?

(Finally found the blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago while at work.)

Sola Fide, or justification by faith alone, is often said to be the central tenet of the Protestant Reformation and the heart of the Gospel. Martin Luther said it is "the article by which the Church stands or falls" (articulus stantis et cadentis ecclesiae). Some writers have challenged the traditional Protestand soteriology that makes a distinction between justification and sanctification; others, like N.T. WRight, have challenged traditional ways of understanding jsutification. I'm not going to go into that here, though they're interesting questions. Assuming the traditional statement of sola fide to be accurate and true (forensic justification of the believer by the Father based on the imputed righteousness of Christ, the merits of which are appropriated by the believer through faith--or something like that), I'm interested in how one understands the "alone" part of faith alone.

Is it that we're saved by faith, alone, in Christ? Or is it faith in Christ alone? That is, am I saved by my faith in Christ, and any other belief is immaterial? Or must I believe that Christ alone (and nothing else)can save me? First of all, it is clear that we are saved, as Wright has so keenly observed, by faith in Christ, not faith in faith alone. The one who has never heard of the Reformation and doesn't know the difference in significance between "faith alone" and "go Yankees!" is still made righteous in God's sight and gains eternal life when he hears the gospel and trusts in Christ.

But what of, say, the Roman Catholic who does believe and trust in Christ for forgiveness of sins and salvation, but also thinks that works are necessary, who believes that the merits of Christ are obtained by the sacraments as well as faith? DOes the fact he does believe in Jesus make his faith a saving one? Or is he damned nonetheless because he doesn't believe in the right way? If the latter, what does that mean for those whose faith is less than pure and perfect (which group of course comprises all of us, sinful as we are)?

The answer, I think, is that the blood of Christ is sufficient to cover all sins--even impure faith. If the individual in question is the object of God's electing mercy, His grace is effectual to reward and perfect his faith. I suppose, then, that this means I must disagree with those who say that Roman Catholics cannot be saved if they believe their Church's official teachings. If the RCC teaches "Christ, plus" (as most Protestants claim, a claim many Catholics deny and about which I am skeptical), then the believing Catholic has met the the necessary and sufficient condition of salvation: faith in Jesus Christ. This doesn't mean that the RCC is any less wrong or its teachers in any lesser degree of sin for their distortion of the Gospel, but it does mean that evangelicals should be a little more careful in assuming that Roman Catholics aren't our Christian bretheren.

Review: When People Are Big and God Is Small by Edward Welch

The following is a book review I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It was the first assignment for the pastoral internship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, which I'll be starting in a couple of weeks.

Edward Welch’s book When People Are Big and God Is Small: Overcoming Peer Pressure, Codependency, and the Fear of Man is an insightful, convicting, and thoroughly biblical treatment of a problem that affects every person and is of particular relevance for pastors and other Christians who are regularly involved in spiritual counseling. Welch does an excellent job of debunking many common unbiblical ideas about so-called “psychological issues” using a biblical perspective and showing that at the root of all self-esteem issues and relational difficulties lies one common problem: sin.
Welch describes a common issue that manifests itself in many ways, but generally involves a feeling of a lack of personal or relational fulfillment, a craving of love and attention from other people, and profound emotional trauma that results from rejection or stress in relationships. The common thread is that people affected by this problem—often called “codependency” or sometimes “peer pressure”—are all controlled by other people in their lives and emotions.

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AWOL

My blog is missing. I don't know where it went. It snuck off under cover of darkness one night, and hasn't been heard from in a couple of months. Maybe it's off summering on Nantucket. Maybe it's on safari in the Congo, or hiking the Andes. I don't know. At any rate, I hope my blog comes back soon.

Difficulties

If you've tried to visit my blog in the last couple of days, you will have noticed that it wasn't available. Somehow my template got corrupted and I had to redo it. This means that my customizations and sidebar are gone, so I'll have to think about how to re-create those. I'm thinking of switching to a different blog apparatus (perhaps Moveable Type or something like that), but for now I'll stick with Blogger 'cause it's free and relatively easy--even if it does do annoying things like randomly deleting your template.

Christ's Lordship and Christian Education

This is the text of the message I preached in PHC's chapel service this morning.

Patrick Henry College, for all the long years of its existence [Note: PHC was founded in 2000], and especially in recent months, has been at a point of institutional crisis—a crisis, you might say, of self-definition. What, we ask, is PHC supposed to be? What is its purpose, its role, and its goal as an educational institution? What does the “ideal” PHC student look like, and how do we go about producing him?

We can begin to formulate an answer to all of these questions, and some related questions that have not yet been raised, by thinking about what Wheaton College President Duane Litfin has called the challenge of the Christian college: to see more fully Whom we serve. If we begin to think together about what it means to be distinctively Christian, and just who this Christ whom we serve, it will put our thoughts about what PHC is and should be in the proper perspective. So, now, for a few minutes, let’s think first about who Christ is to us, and then apply those considerations to our experience here at PHC.

Consider the phrase “distinctively Christian education.” This shows up in the literature of scores or hundreds of self-defined Christian colleges, but what does it mean? What are we saying when we talk about a college or educational program being Christ-centered? I think this phrase has become something of a cliché, something we don’t really understand because we’re so familiar with it. When we say that an education is Christ-centered, do we really mean that it is focused upon the second person of the Trinity? Do we really just mean God-centered, or is there some real sense in which a Christian liberal arts education is specifically Son-centered?

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How to Read the Bible

[This essay first published in Notes on the Times, the journal of the Alexis de Tocqueville Society.]

How do you read the Bible? That may seem like an odd question. What do you think the Bible is? What is it for? Is it a collection of stories with a moral point? Is it a book of doctrine, the basis for a systematic articulation of what you believe? Is it a book of solutions to the problems you face from day to day? Or is it far more than all of these?

Most of us are familiar with all the Sunday School stories of the Old Testament. We’ve all heard the stories of biblical “heroes” like Joseph, Joshua, Gideon, Esther, David, Daniel, Shadrach, Meschach, Abednego, and many others. All too often, however, these scriptural accounts are treated simply as stories, and the application drawn from them usually has something to do with how we’re supposed to follow the example of these brave people and be courageous, steadfast, faithful, and the like. The closest thing to a theme that most evangelicals see in these stories is “How to do great things for God.” This misses the point. The Bible is far, far more than a collection of stories. It is the record of what God has really done in history. There is one grand theme running throughout all of Scripture, and the point of the stories of the Old Testament can’t be properly grasped unless we understand the theme and read them with it in mind.


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I am a polytheistic idolator

I am a polytheistic idolator. No, really, I am. Not by confession--I believe firmly in the Trinity revealed in Scripture and confessed by the great creeds of the Christian faith. The Athanasian Creed is particularly good on this matter.
No, my problem is not that I don't know that God is one-in-three. I do. I just can't begin to comprehend that, and it affects my thinking about Him. I suppose there are two tendencies of the mind of finite man when he tries to think about the Trinity: either to think of God as one indivisible Being with no distiguishable parts or personalities (like the God of Judaism or Islam), or to think of three separate God beings, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who are each God, but more or less separate beings.
I find myself, when I'm not careful, slipping into the latter tendency. When I hear someone talk about "God," I usually, unthinkingly, assume he's speaking of God the Father. I never, for some reason, think of the Godhead. When I hear someone speak of "the Lord," I think of Jesus Christ. Whenever I'm not actively thinking about and affirming the particulars of the Trinitarian God, the three members of the Godhead are separate beings to me. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I can't reconcile using singular pronouns to describe three persons, as we often do when we say "He" and "Him" in reference to God.
I think this tendency is sinful. When you get down to brass tacks, it is idolatry, because it makes God out to be less than--or at least other than--He has revealed Himself to be in His Word. I don't know how to explain why I think this way, other than that my finite mind isn't able to understand the stunning truth of the Trinity. I don't know what to do about it, either--except simply to pray that God will reveal Himself to me more fully and open my mind to see the beauty of the truth of His divine perfections.

Christian Unity

The Nicene Creed says "I believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church." What does the one here mean? What is the unity of the church supposed to look like? As a Baptist, I have been raised with a firmly congregationalist understanding that unity in the church is spiritual unity. Congregationalists usually speak of "the invisible Church" and "visible churches." One of the main themes in Christianity today is unity--unity of structure, unity of purpose and mission, and, to a much lesser degree, unity of doctrine. If the Church really is one, what does its unity mean?

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Community values, cultural institutions, and globalization

A thought struck me while sitting in class yesterday afternoon: How would it affect the character and institutions of our culture if society at large came to understand the vital importance of community? Many occupations today require frequent travel or relocation. If it were generally understood that every person should be connected to a family, a church, and a healthy community, how might these occupations be different?

Consider a couple of examples: The globe-trotting journalist or foreign correspondent who works for a major news outlet spends most weeks of the year traveling between the various locations he covers. If he has a family, he's away from them for much of the year, and he certainly isn't able to be involved in a local church or a community. Or consider the career diplomat, who moves from country to country throughout his career, spending no more than a few years in each location. Even if his family is with him, they probably never have a chance to put down roots in a community with shared culture and values, and probably can't develop a sense of belonging to a particular home. These sorts of occupations are numerous. Members of the military usually move every few years. Businessmen who work for companies with branches across the country and around the world often spend much of their time traveling. These are just a few examples.

Some who do understand the importance of family, church, and community might say that Christians should just avoid these occupations as much as possible. If we want to see such values in society at large, however, I don't think we should simply leave these jobs to others. How would these jobs, and the institutions they support, change if community values became the norm and even the people in charge of the institutions tried to reflect them in their organizations' structures? How might this affect commerce and intercourse between various regions of a nation, and between countries in the international community? Would letting people stay at home necessarily result in less intercourse with other parts of the world? How might this affect the phenomenon of globalization that the world has seen in the last couple of decades?

If you know of anyone who's thought about, or even better, written about these issues, I'd love to hear about it.

Civil Religion

A while back I outlined my concerns with American Christians who too easily confuse the sacred and the secular, uncritically assuming America's moral superiority and divine favor as a "Christian nation."
In the latest edition of The New Pantagruel, Michael J. Baxter has written an article along much the same lines. He responds to a post-9/11 editorial by Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things. Baxter critiques Neuhaus's assertions that America is a "Christian nation" and that America fights on the side of godly truth and justice in its war against terrorism. He also has some very interesting things to say about Neuhaus's handling of the anonymous, second-century Letter to Diognetus, a commentary on the character of Christians as citizens in the ancient Roman world.

He says:

On this (properly contextualized) reading of the Letter to Diognetus, the church is the one community in which the obligations of Christians to the cities of this world are properly ordered to the love of God. For this reason, the cities of this world are never “under God” in such a way that Christians may pledge their allegiance to them. Such an allegiance is proper only to Christ and the church. Indeed, in view of the entire Letter to Diognetus, it becomes apparent that the primary concern of its second-century author is to enjoin Christians to avoid worshipping the false gods of the world’s cities, gods whose patronage are presented in the city’s mythoi as essential to their security and flourishing. But this is always accomplished by shedding blood, the blood of those who protect the city from its enemies. Beyond the danger of worshipping the gods of various cities, there was also the danger of worshipping the gods of Rome, a particular concern in the Letter to Diognetus. These gods plausibly promised a peace that would reign throughout for the entire empire, the Pax Romana, and yet, like the many forms of civil peace in the ancient world, it was a “peace” founded on imperial violence that was, as the Christians saw it, not true peace at all, not the peace of Christ.

All this talk of Christians worshipping the false gods of the Roman Empire would be quaintly irrelevant were it not for the fact that Roman civil religion, or what Augustine called “civil theology,” has its counterparts in modern conceptions of civil religion, such as the one articulated by Neuhaus, which promises, in effect, a Pax Americana. But unlike the Christians living under pagan Rome, Christians in the United States face the more challenging temptation of living in an imperium that claims to be Christian....

What is lacking in Neuhaus’s vision is an ecclesiology that relativizes the notion of “one nation under God” with the principle, so to speak, of “one church under God.” Such an ecclesiology is evident in the Letter to Diognetus in the analogy of the church as a soul that gives the world with a unity it would otherwise not have. Like all analogies, this body/soul analogy must be carefully interpreted so as to underscore that the soul can never be detached from the body, but rather is the form of the body. In this sense, the church is a soul that gives form to a body whose members are united to Christ and to each other by the power of the Holy Spirit and whose communal life is marked by a bond of charity that extends throughout the world. This is why the Apostle Paul describes baptism as being engrafted into Christ’s body. This is why he stressed the intrinsic link between the Lord’s Supper and the unity that is a mark of the Christian community (I Cor 11:17–34). This is also why he exhorted the members of the church to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice, dedicated and acceptable to God and not to conform to the world (Rom 12:1–2). The image here is of the priesthood of the Levites, the tribe designated by God to make animal or cereal offerings for the sake of the reconciliation of all Israel; but now Christians unite themselves with the offering of the Son to the Father, so that through the power of the Holy Spirit they become “a chosen race, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, a people set apart” (1 Peter 2:10). But if Christians themselves are “a holy nation,” then at times they will not conform to the aims and purpose of the modern nations, particularly when they claim to be objects of Christian allegiance in a time of war.

Though Baxter's article critiques a Catholic and is written for Catholics, much of what he has to say remains true for Reformed Protestants. Though it is a good thing for Christians to seek to influence American culture and politics, we must be careful to proclaim the lordship of Jesus Christ, God as He has revealed Himself, over all areas of life--not the god of American civil religion. We must always remember that God's "holy nation" he has chosen is the community of the redeemed elect, not the United States or any other modern political entity.

Hmmm.

Testamental Hermeneutics

In his excellent Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace, by far the best articulation of a covenantal argument for believer baptism that I've yet come across, Paul K. Jewett outlines what he believes to be a serious hermeneutical error into which Reformed paedobaptists fall into. This error, in a nutshell, is that they fail to take sufficient account of the differences between the Old and New Covenants--or, more accurately, the Old and New administrations of the one everlasting covenant of grace--that arise out of the fulfillment and spiritualization of the covenant in Christ, and the extension of the covenant to the Gentiles with the establishment of the church. In this mode of thinking, the Paedobaptist Christianizes Old Testament Israel, focusing on the spiritual aspect of the covenant and its sign to the exclusion of the temporal, physical aspects of God's covenant with Israel. The Paedobaptist also, in some ways, Judaizes the New Testament Church, applying the Old Testament promise of a fleshly seed and deriving a concept of "covenant children." The Paedobaptist's hermeneutical structure causes him to read the Old Testament as though it were the New Testament (and vice versa), rather than properly reading the Old in lightof the new.

In a recent blog post, Douglas Wilson posts several points of a "Primer on Eschatology." Laying out some fundamentals of the postmillenial view (to which he subscribes), he describes preterism, the view that "Many of the prophecies of the Bible which premillennialists consider unfulfilled, postmillennialists believe have already been fulfilled." He says that we must look to the New Testament as a sort of "divine commentary" on the Old, telling us which Old Testament prophecies have already been fulfilled. As an example, he cites Isaiah 11:8-10 and Paul's commentary on the passage in Romans 15:8-12 and 15:15-18, about which he notes, "Paul places the fulfillment of Isaiah's prophecy squarely in the context of his mission and ministry to the Gentiles of the first century world. If the New Testament tells us that this is what Isaiah means, then this is what Isaiah means."

Now. As a general principle, we must always be careful to let Scripture interpret Scripture, trying as much as possible not to bring presuppositions or pre-conceived notions to the table when we seek to understand Scripture. However, I wonder if Wilson is perhaps exercising the same flawed hermeneutic in relation to eschatology that he does in relation to baptism and the Covenant (having read his To a Thousand Generations on infant baptism, I can say with some confidence that he thinks like the subject of Jewett's criticism). Is he reading the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, or as though it were the New Testament? Wilson contrasts his essentially literal, preterist understanding of New Testament passages about the end times being "now" or "soon," wherein one says that "the writers of the New Testament expected to see these things come to pass in their day, and that they were correct" with the view that "spiritualizes" the apostles' words and understand them as indicating that the end of times is unknown and to be expected at any time, rather than literally-temporally "soon." If Wilson (et al.) fail properly to understand the "spiritualization" of the covenant with regard to baptism, could not his cracked hermeneutical glasses also cause him to overlook the spiritual nature of New Testament end-times-related passages?

I confess I am not as skillful or practiced as Jewett in wielding the hermeneutical scalpel, so I can't adequately say whether I'm onto something here or trying to serve soup with a fork. I hope I'm wrong about Wilson, because postmillennialism is attractive and I'd like to believe it if it's Scripturally warranted.

Herman Dooyeweerd

Yeah, it's been a while. I've been busy.

Following up on my last post, in which I determined to learn more about Neo-Calvinism and what motivates it, I've just started reading Herman Dooyeweerd's In the Twilight of Western Though: Studies in the Pretended Autonomy of Theoretical Thought. His thesis is that only Christian philosophical theory can truly be critical. All non-Christian theory is limited to being dogmatical. All culture, particularly philosophy, is based on fundamental assumptions that are essentially religious in nature. A non-Christian thinker makes his own thought or experience absolute and everything else, including God, relative. The non-Christian, therefore, must consider everything from his own vantage point--which he knows he cannot maintain is absolute--and he has no objective or even consistent point from which to critique. He is reduced to skepticism about the existence of anything, including himself, and skepticism about his ability to know anything at all. The "pretended autonomy" of his thought--its ostensibly non-religious character and ability to critique--is the dogma he is reduced to asserting vainly.

This theory is interesting to me, and promises to be very insightful.