Postmillennialism and the Visible Kingdom

Looking back, I think my move toward a sacramental and visible Church was probably influenced more by postmillennialism than I realized at the time.

That may be to the chagrin of some of my postmillennial friends, because following those instincts did not lead me deeper into low church Reformed Presbyterianism. It eventually led me toward Orthodoxy.

What Postmillennialism Gave Me

Postmillennialism gave me a vision of Christianity that was tangible. It rejected the idea that the faith is merely private, inward, invisible, or concerned only with escaping the world after death.

Christ is King now.

His reign matters now.

The nations, cultures, laws, families, institutions, and physical world belong to Him. The gospel is supposed to have actual consequences in history. Christianity is not merely about saving individual souls out of the world. It is about the restoration of the world under the reign of Christ.

That vision formed my imagination.

It taught me to look for a Christianity that was public, historical, physical, and visible.

In that sense, postmillennialism has something in common with Catholic and Orthodox eschatology. All three resist the tendency to reduce Christianity to an invisible spiritual reality that exists only inside the believer’s heart.

They all understand, in different ways, that the kingdom of God has to become visible.

It has to take flesh.

It has to be manifested in worship, culture, families, communities, institutions, and eventually the whole created order.

Where Is the Kingdom Made Visible?

The difference is where that visibility is located.

The postmillennial vision often sees the kingdom becoming visible through the gradual Christianization of society. The gospel spreads. Families are discipled. Laws become more just. Cultural institutions are transformed. Eventually, a Christian people begin electing Christian leaders and ordering society according to Christian principles.

This is usually imagined within some form of democratic or libertarian society. The state is not necessarily the Church, and there is generally no established sacramental Church governing the spiritual life of the nation. Society becomes Christian because the people become Christian and then shape the culture from the bottom up.

There is much about that which is attractive.

The Church as One Association Among Many

The problem is that the Church often remains exactly where modernity has placed her.

She remains one voluntary association among many.

She may influence the culture. She may produce voters. She may disciple families. She may even become numerically dominant. But she does not necessarily possess a visible unity, a common altar, a shared sacramental life, or an authority capable of binding the whole Christian people together.

The culture becomes Christian, but the Church remains divided into countless private and competing communions.

This began to feel like a loose end to me.

If Christ’s kingdom is truly visible, where is its visible unity?

Where is its visible communion?

Where is its visible authority?

Where is its altar?

Postmillennialism gave me an incarnational vision of history, but it did not always give me an incarnational vision of the Church.

The Kingdom Already Present

Orthodoxy begins somewhere different.

The kingdom is not merely something Christians hope to produce through successful preaching, cultural influence, or political action. The kingdom is already present sacramentally in the Church.

It is announced in the liturgy.

It is manifested around the altar.

It is entered through baptism.

It is tasted in the Eucharist.

The Church does not merely preach about a coming kingdom or work toward a future Christian civilization. She is already the visible and sacramental presence of that kingdom within history.

Not its fullness. Not its final consummation. But its real presence.

A Theanthropic Church

This is where the Orthodox understanding of the Church as theanthropic became important to me.

The Church is both divine and human because she is the Body of Christ. She is not merely a collection of individuals who agree with certain doctrines. She is not an invisible network of all true believers known only to God.

She has bishops.

She has sacraments.

She has councils.

She has discipline.

She has boundaries.

She has a history.

She has a physical gathering around a physical altar where physical bread and wine become communion in the Body and Blood of Christ.

That is a visible kingdom.

Symphonia

The Orthodox vision of Church and state also flows from this same incarnational instinct.

The double-headed eagle is a helpful image. Church and state are distinct, but they are not imagined as belonging to two completely unrelated worlds. Both are ordered under God. Both have a role in the life of a Christian people.

This does not mean that the state becomes the Church or that bishops become civil rulers. It means that society is not divided into a supposedly neutral public realm and a private religious realm.

The Church cares for the sacramental and spiritual life of the people. The state cares for civil order and the common good. Ideally, they work in harmony rather than treating one another as enemies or strangers.

This is often called symphonia.

Of course, this has not always worked perfectly in history. Nothing involving fallen human beings ever does. Emperors have abused the Church. Bishops have compromised with rulers. Political power has been mistaken for holiness.

Still, the underlying vision is important.

The answer to the abuse of a Christian society is not necessarily the permanent privatization of Christianity.

Christian in Culture, Protestant in Structure

The postmillennial solution often seems to be that we keep the modern political framework, preserve religious voluntarism, maintain the absence of an established Church, and then hope that enough Christians change the culture to elect godly leaders.

But even if that project succeeded, we could still end up with the same ecclesial problem we began with.

A Christian culture made up of Christians who cannot agree on what the Church is.

A nation full of believers with no common bishop, no common Eucharist, no common discipline, and no authority capable of actually speaking for the Church.

It would be Christian in culture while remaining Protestant in structure.

It would still be private and ecumenical in the modern sense. Each individual congregation or denomination would participate in the public square, but none could claim to be the visible Church to which the nation itself belonged.

Following the Instinct Further

This is why I do not think my movement toward Orthodoxy was a rejection of the instincts I learned from postmillennialism.

In some ways, I think I followed them further than I expected.

Postmillennialism taught me not to settle for a disembodied kingdom.

It taught me that Christ’s reign must become visible in history.

It taught me that Christianity concerns nations, cultures, bodies, families, worship, and the created world.

But once I accepted that, I had to ask why the Church herself should remain invisible, fragmented, and voluntary.

Why should the kingdom be tangible in politics and culture but intangible in ecclesiology?

Why should Christ visibly rule the nations while His own Body remains institutionally divided?

Why should we labor for a Christian civilization while accepting that Christians have no common altar?

The same incarnational instinct that made postmillennialism attractive eventually made low church Protestantism more difficult for me to sustain.

I was looking for a visible kingdom.

What I found was a visible Church.

Not a Church waiting to become the kingdom after enough cultural victories.

A Church in which the kingdom is already present, already announced, already embodied, and already given to us as communion.

Postmillennialism taught me to expect the reign of Christ to become visible.

Orthodoxy taught me where to look.