Kingdom Come: The Politics of the Millenium

[Draggingtree]

Ludwig von Mises Institute:

 

Kingdom Come: The Politics of the Millenium

 

Mises Daily:Friday, December 21, 2012 by Murray N. Rothbard

[First published in Liberty Magazine, 1990]

 

Christianity has played a central role in Western civilization and contributed an important influence on the development of classical-liberal thought. Not surprisingly, Christian beliefs about the "end times" are very important for us right now.

Christian Reconstructionism is one of the fastest growing and most influential currents in American religious and political life. Though the fascinating discussions by Jeffrey Tucker and Gary North (in the July and September issues of Liberty) have called libertarian attention to, and helped explain, this movement, to clarify Christian Reconstructionism fully we have to understand the role and problem of millennialism in Christian thought.

The problem centers around on the discipline of eschatology, or the Last Days, and on the question, How is the world destined to come to an end? The view that nearly all Christians accept is that at a certain time in the future Jesus will return to earth in a Second Advent, and preside over the Last Judgment, at which all those then alive and all the bodily resurrected dead will be assigned to their final places — and human history, and the world as we know it, will have come to an end.

So far, so good. A troublesome problem, however, comes in various passages in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, and especially in the final book of Revelation, in which mention is made of a millennium, of a thousand-year reign of Christ on earth — the Kingdom of God on earth (KGE) — before the final Day of Judgment. Who is to establish that kingdom, and what is it supposed to look like?

The orthodox answer to this problem was set forth by the great Saint Augustine, in the early 5th century; this Augustinian line has been accepted by all the orthodox and liturgical Christian Churches: the Roman Catholic, the Greek and Russian Orthodox, high-church Lutheran, and Anglican, as well as by the Dutch wing of the Calvinist church (where Calvin himself stood is a matter of dispute). The Augustinian line is that the millennium, or thousand-year reign, is solely a metaphor for the creation of the Christian Church; the millennium is not something to be taken literally, as ever to take place, temporally, on earth. This orthodox position has

[Valin]

God will send us Armageddon, the final War of Good against Evil

 

A many, many, many years ago I taught a series on "End Time" for a small bible study group I belonged to. I to my surprise (I was young and just coming back to the faith) discovered there were different theological eschatological positions. And they all had Scripture to back them up and they were all mutually exclusive. So after my study ended I simply said on this subject...Or Not.