Gems from the North (5) - Faith in Bureaucratic Power

Here is the inescapable social message of all forms of premillennialism, dispensational and historic, but without the sugar-coating: only a pure power play by God from heaven directly to earth is sufficient to create a Christian civilization. In this sense, the premillennial escape religionists are at heart power religionists. They see the history of civilization only in terms of pure power: (1) escaping anti-Christian political power today, thereby abandoning any attempt to build a Christian civilization; but then (2) exercising total, centralized political power during the millennium...

In his book, A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell makes this observation regarding fundamentalism, which he says is committed to an unconstrained (perfectionist, no trade-offs) view of society: “Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or ‘playing God.’ This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.” Sowell is correct on both counts. What he does not perceive is that the fundamentalist (i.e., premillennialist) defends a constrained vision of society and man today, on this side of the millennium, because Christ is in heaven and His enemies are on human thrones. On the other hand, during the millennium, Christ will sit on an earthly throne of total power. Then the fundamentalist vision switches to an unconstrained view: totalitarian power with a vengeance – God’s vengeance.

A Christian bureaucracy will rule the world. But this will still be a world in which Christians do not exercise independent authority on their own responsible initiative in terms of God’s law. They will simply obey detailed orders handed down from a master bureaucrat, Jesus. This debate is not over bureaucracy; it is over how powerful it should be, who runs it, and when.

Today, both the humanists and the premillennialist agree: humanists should run it.(Millenialism and Social Theory pp.151,152)

One thing has changed since 1990. Premillenialist Christians are happy with the power religion of George W Bush.