Category Archives: Optimism

OUR EARTHLY HOPE

Optimism August 12, 2025 Leave a comment

PMW 2025-066 by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr.

In his letter to the troubled Corinthian church, Paul lists three Christians virtues while exhorting them to a closer walk with Christ: faith, hope, and love (1 Cor. 13:13). This three-fold cord of holy values provides a strong bond of commitment for the Christian, and has tied the Church of Jesus Christ together throughout the ages.

Faith and love are not only beautiful threads knitting together the fabric of the Christian life, but are easily recognized as such. They weave a strong carpet for the Christian walk; they serve as dual strands tugging us forward in our holy calling. And though hope is certainly not a detached thread from the Christian garment, it has been snagged loose and at best is only partially visible to the eye of faith today. Continue reading →

POSTMILLENNIALISM FOR DUMMIES

Optimism May 20, 2025 Leave a comment

PMW 2025-039 by Uri Brito

Gentry note:
This posting was written by my friend, Uri Brito, about three years ago. I would like to promote its wider reading, especially to my PostmillennialWorldview readers. It is an excellent, brief presentation of the importance of serious postmillennialism.

Postmillennialism for Dummies

One of the joys of speaking loudly around here is that I get to see some fine china broken in real-time. That’s a metaphor for views being shattered and replaced by something else, for those of you just tuning in.

The thing broken is a variation of pessimistic eschatology and it is being replaced with some happy, hopeful, and hosannah postmillennialism. Mind you, I am not so much concerned about the loyalty to the systematic category, but to the heart of the matter. Because es-cha-to-lo-gy has consequences for casuistry. Say that three times.
Continue reading →

COMPREHENSIVE HOPE IN ESCHATOLOGY

New Creation, Old Testament, Optimism March 28, 2025 Comments: 8

PMW 2025-024 by Donald E. GowanGowan eschatology

Gentry note:
The following is a series of thoughts selected from a very helpful book by Gowan on Eschatology on the Old Testament (pp. 122 ff.). Though he is not writing as a postmillennialist, he has many helpful observations that this article will share. His book basically argues for a holistic concept of redemption, both man (body and soul) and the broader creation (new heavens and new earth). He is not a conservative evangelical (as far as I can tell), but he is a good scholar insightful analyses of important eschatological issues.

Gowan’s Observations
The OT’s expectations and longings are distinct from those to be found in other religions and cultures. Thereby they offer a challenge for alternative forms of hope — Christian and otherwise — and insight into the nature of the eschatologies of the Western world.

1. Old Testament eschatology is a worldly hope. The OT does not scorn, ignore, or abandon the kind of life which human beings experience in this world in favor of speculation concerning some other, better place or form of existence, to be hoped for after death or achieved before death through meditation and spiritual exercises. This sets the OT in sharp contrast to Gnosticism, to the otherworldly emphases that often have appeared in Christianity, and to the concepts of salvation taught by Hinduism and Buddhism. Whether it is better and truer than those other forms of hope, or is just irredeemably “unspiritual,” remains, of course, a matter for faith to decide. But this quality of the OT hope surely ought to commend its outlook to an age that is equally worldly in its concerns. Continue reading →

CHRISTIANITY AND FUTURE REVIVAL

Optimism, Theologians March 7, 2025 Leave a comment

PMW 2025-019 by O. T. AllisAllis

Gentry note:
O. T. Allis (1880-1973) was an internationally recognized philologist and Reformed theologian who helped found Westminster Theological Seminary, along with J. Gresham Machen, Robert Dick Wilson, and others. He is noted especially for his work in the Old Testament. Allis was a postmillennialist, as we can see from his Foreword in Roderick Campbell’s Israel and the New Covenant, a powerful postmillennial book. The following is his Foreword in full.

The author of this valuable contribution to Biblical Interpretation belongs to a class of writers which is not as numerous today as has sometimes been the case, the lay theologian. Being both an earnest and active Christian and a successful man of business, Mr. Campbell very naturally became, as he tells us in his Preface, deeply concerned over the economic depression and the moral degeneracy which followed in the wake of the first World War. Being a Christian he turned to the Bible for the answer; and he also consulted many of the ablest interpreters of the Bible, in the hope of solving this pressing problem. The answer which he found is the thesis of the present volume. It can be stated briefly and in a single sentence: The Christian church has for centuries failed to take seriously and carry out fully the Great Commission. Continue reading →

IAIN MURRAY AND HISTORICAL HOPE

Optimism March 4, 2025 Comments: 2

PMW 2025-018 by Iain MurrayPuritan hope

Note from Ken Gentry:
The following is an excerpt from Iain Murray’s The Puritan Hope, pp. xviii–xxii. He is explaining his conversion from premillennial thinking to a more hope-filled eschatology as found in many Puritans.

For some while after I gave up the millenarian view of future history the only truth respecting unfulfilled prophecy which I could regard as clear was this great one that Christ’s coming will be at the consummation of his kingdom. therefore all conversion-work yet to be in history must occur before the Second Advent. Of the certainty or extent of any future work I was entirely in doubt. I still retained the conviction that the testimony of Scripture on human depravity requires the expectation of an ever-darkening world and the signs of the twentieth century seemed to point me to the same conclusion.

Only very slowly did I come to believe that the Christian Church has indeed a great future in the world and this conviction came as the result of several lines of thought. For one thing all the scripture texts claimed as proof that the coming of Jesus Christ must now be close at hand have also been confidently so used in former generations. Not a few Christians in the past have been erroneously convinced that their age must witness the end. When the Teutonic barbarians overturned Rome and reduced a stable world to chaos in the fifth century A.D., many in the Church despairingly drew the wrong conclusion that the world could have no future. Even larger numbers did so at the approach of the year 1000, believing that the closing millennium would end the world. In the gloom of the fourteenth century such tracts appeared as The Last Age of the Church, and in terms very similar to that old title a great number have written since. Continue reading →

GENESIS PROVES POSTMILLENNIALISM

Creation, Optimism April 26, 2024 Comments: 16

How Genesis and PostmillPMW 2024-032 by Kendall Lankford

[Gentry note:

This nicely presented, insightful article appears on The Shepherd’s Church website (The Shepherd’s Church is located at: 10 Jean Ave. Suite 12, Chelmsford, Mass.).]

INTRODUCTION

If you have been with us over the last 8 weeks, we have been attempting to summarize what a failed eschatology looks like. From the hyper-defeatism of dispensationalism and premillennialism to the subtle apathy for cultural engagement that seeps in through amillennialism and the Radical Two Kingdoms, we have been attempting to show that a wrong view of eschatology will have an impact on how you live in the world. Because let’s face it, if you believe that we lose down here (As John MacArthur famously said), we will not work down here. If we believe the rapture is always moments away, then why waste your time doing the long work of making disciples and transforming culture? If we believe that all of our energy and effort should go into spiritual activities (the Kingdom of God) and that this work does not overlap with the physical world (The Kingdom of Man), then why engage at all? Why obey Jesus’ command to be salt and light in the world if the only aspect we will ever see redeemed is spiritual? Better to spend your time converting souls for a Gnostic utopia than Biblically discipling nations to live with Jesus in the New Heavens and New Earth. Continue reading →

POSTMILLENNIAL UTOPIA?

Culture, Objections, Optimism July 21, 2023 1 Comment

PMW 2023-057 by Kenneth L. Gentry, Jr.

One PostmillenialWorldview read asks: “What is your response to the ‘Utopia’ charge leveled by (especially) Premills? This is a common charge levied against the postmillennialist. And the erstwhile postmil would do well to consider the matter.

Unfortunately, in the eschatological debate, postmillennialism is the easiest eschatological option to misconstrue. This is due to its going against the prevailing pessimistic expectations of the other millennial views. Hope for our historical future seems like Utopia to these folks. And as we know “Utopia” comes from the Greek: ou (“not”) and topos (“place”) and means “no-place.” So if postmillennialism is utopic, it is going no place. Continue reading →