A Study of Matthew Chapter 24, Part 5 -- Matthew 24:4(Stay tuned for more posts until study of Matthew 24 is completed.)And Jesus answered and said to them, "See to it that no one misleads you." (Matthew 24:4)
The disciples who came to Jesus privately on the Mount of Olives had just asked Jesus a question about how the destruction of the temple would fit in with the rest of God's prophetic plan: specifically, the end of the age and the Coming of Christ to rule His prophesied kingdom. Jesus introduced His response with a caveat: "See to it that no one misleads you." In order for them to cope with the unique seven year period prophesied by Daniel (Daniel 9:24-27), Daniel's seventieth "week," they would need to accurately understand the nature of prophetic events and their sequence. Although the Church, Christ's Body, will no longer be on earth during Daniel's seventieth week (1 Thessalonians 4:16-17; 1 Corinthians 15:51), it is important for us to not be misled as to the events of eschatology (future events leading up to the consummation of history), so that we may see how the unique dispensation in which we live fits into the framework of God's overall plan for mankind. It is unfortunate that the Church, on the whole, has been misled in the area of eschatology since the fourth century.
More than twenty years ago, one biblical truth that became ever so clear to me personally is that God has a plan that involves a specific agenda for Israel, the spiritually regenerated, racial species of Abraham; and an entirely different agenda for the Church of this present dispensation, a dispensation about which nothing had been disclosed until the ascended Christ conveyed the details to Paul by direct revelation (Ephesians 3:2-9). In the early fourth century, a paradigm shift in theology obscured this distinction between Israel and the Church. In my book, Then the Proconsul Believed, I explained the concept of the paradigm shift:
The word paradigm comes from the Greek word paradeigma, a pattern. A paradigm, in a general sense, is an example serving as a model. The word is commonly used today to mean an assumption; a frame of reference; the way we perceive things to be. In 1962, Thomas S. Kuhn was responsible for popularizing the term in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which shook the foundations of the scientific community. In it he described how the real scientific breakthroughs of human history are the result of breaks with traditional ways of thinking, in which old paradigms are replaced by new and competing ones.
For example, in the 2nd Century, Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy's paradigm was a universe with the earth at its center and the sun revolving around it. This notion was defended for centuries, even as conflicting evidence increased. Over a thousand years later, Copernicus replaced Ptolemy's model with the new and controversial theory that the earth and the other planets revolve around the sun. In Kuhn's view, science is not a steady and cumulative gathering of information, but a series of relatively peaceful periods of time broken by revolutions of thought through which new paradigms replace old ones.
Kuhn described the change which causes scientific revolutions as a "paradigm shift." Though Kuhn believed that existing paradigms must be lived in and explored before a break can be made, a scientific revolution occurs when an older paradigm is replaced in whole or in part by new and incompatible one. In a paradigm shift, the new paradigm does not build on the preceding one, but supplants it.[1]
In Theology Adrift: The Early Church Fathers and Their Views of Eschatology, Matthew Allen notes Kuhn's coining of the term, "paradigm shift," and suggests that paradigm shifts have "changed the world of thought (some for better, some for worse) in a fundamental way."[2] Allen then goes on to describe a paradigm shift in history and another in theology, both of which changed the world of thought for the worse. The historic paradigm shift Allen recognized was initiated by Constantine's Edict of Milan:
From a political perspective, Constantine's Edict of Milan, issued in AD 313, constituted the formal beginning of a major paradigm shift that signaled the end of the ancient world and the beginning of the medieval period. That edict legitimated Christianity and impressed upon it the Empire's stamp of approval.[3]
"Hi, I'm From the Government and I'm Here to Help You!" was a post in which I wrote about the profound change brought about by Constantine's Edict of Milan (click here to read). Under the edict, religious persecutions were abolished and liberty of worship was declared for all. Constantine himself had professed faith in Christ and invited his subjects to join him. Three centuries of the cruel persecution of Christians had been ended.
It looked like the principle of freedom to obey God without interference had finally been recognized and embraced by the human race. But alas, Constantine turned out to be the quintessential politician, seizing every possible opportunity to gain the political support of both Christians and pagans throughout the Empire. Constantine went out of his way to make concessions so that Christianity would be more appealing to the heathens. Sunday (named for the sun god), the weekly holiday of the pagans, was declared to be a legal holiday ("holy day"). With the exception of farming when necessary, work on Sunday was outlawed, which made many pagans very happy.
But Constantine became very popular among Christians, too. He proclaimed Sunday the "Christian Sabbath," and more and more legislation provided privileges for Christians. The Church received large gifts of financial support from the State. The State payed for lavish church buildings (which happened to resemble pagan temples). The Roman government also provided tax exemptions, political appointments, exemptions from military proscription, and other benefits to those who converted to Christianity.
The sad result was that many pagans "converted" only because of the incentives they received from the government. The Christian church had become thoroughly paganized, something that never would have happened had the Church and State remained separate.
If that wasn't bad enough, it was not long after the reign of Constantine that the ancient Roman practice of persecuting those whose religions were not permitted was suddenly applied in a different way: Emperor Theodosius I issued an edict in AD 380 that established Christianity as the exclusive religion of the Empire. Those who deviated from the form of worship approved by the State were punished as heretics. What had appeared to be a new era of righteousness and freedom of religion had turned into an era of corruption and religious tyranny.
Allen goes on to note the theological paradigm shift, but in order to make any sense of what he describes, we must recognize the three theological approaches to the one thousand year reign of Christ mentioned six times in Revelation chapter 20. They are Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, and Amillennialism.
Premillennialism (which I believe is the correct view) is based on a literal, or normative method of Biblical interpretation. In the premillennial view, Christ will return to the earth prior to the one thousand year reign, inaugurate His prophesied kingdom on earth, and reign over that kingdom for a literal period of one thousand years. The early Church was largely, though not uniformily, premillenial in terms of eschatology. The early Christian writers, Papias (who wrote in the first half of the second century and when young may have been a disciple of the Apostle John), Justin Martyr (who lived from AD 100-165), and Irenaeus (who wrote in the second half of the second century), were premillennialists.
Postmillennialism holds that man, through the effect of the gospel, will bring in the kingdom, and after one thousand years of man's progressive improvement, Christ will return. Postmillennialism is relatively new, being traced to Daniel Whitby, a minister who lived in the seventeenth century. Postmillennialism declined significantly in the second half of the twentieth century. Postmillennialists had been persuaded that the First World War had been the war which would end all wars, and the gospel was now going to purify the world. Then, two decades later, the Second World War came, which really took the wind out of their sails!
Amillennialism takes a non-literal view of the one thousand years of Revelation 20. The amillennialist views the thousand years as symbolic of a spiritual kingdom operating during an unspecified period of time, the time between Christ's two advents. The amillennial system was pioneered and developed by Augustine of Hippo (354-430), using Origen's allegorical method to interpret eschatological events.
Now then, back to Matthew Allen. Here is the theological paradigm shift he recognized:
From a theological perspective--specifically an eschatological one -- the Edict of Milan also signaled a monumental paradigm shift--from the well-grounded premillennialism of the ancient church fathers to the amillennialism or postmillennialism that would dominate eschatological thinking from the fourth century AD to at least the middle part of the nineteenth century. Yet ... the groundwork for this shift was laid long before Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in AD 313. In the two centuries that led up to the edict, two crucial interpretive errors found their way into the church that made conditions ripe for the paradigm shift incident to the Edict of Milan. The second century fathers failed to keep clear the biblical distinction between Israel and the church. Then, the third century fathers abandoned a more-or-less literal method of interpreting the Bible in favor of Origen's allegorical-spiritualized hermeneutic. Once the distinction between Israel and the church became blurred, once a literal hermeneutic was lost, with these foundations removed, the societal changes occasioned by the Edict of Milan caused fourth century fathers to reject premillennialism in favor of Augustinian amillennialism.[4]
Augustine thought that the Church is the spiritual kingdom of God and is presently in the Millennium, though not a literal millennium of a thousand years with Christ bodily reigning over the earth. Can you see the correlation between the historical and theological paradigm shifts described by Allen? Bad doctrine in the Church paved the way for the political antics of Constantine and the readiness of the Church to get into bed with the State--and in turn, the corruption that resulted contributed to more bad doctrine! As the Church became an instrument of the State, there no longer seemed to be an interest in the grand theme of Bible prophecy: the reality that Messiah will return to earth and establish His kingdom. People assumed that the marriage between church and state indicated that Christ's kingdom had come! Then, by the time Augustine was formulating his doctrine, he became disillusioned because the prophesied kingdom described in the Scriptures did not match the condition of the world in which he lived. Therefore he concluded that the one thousand year earthly reign of Messiah could not be literal. If it existed between the two advents of Christ, as Augustine supposed, the kingdom must be a spiritual kingdom only, existing in the hearts of believers who are faithful to Christ.
In the last 150 years, the truth of Premillennialism has, to a large degree, been recovered within the Church. However, Amillennialism is on the rise again, and the results could prove disastrous in both the political and spiritual realms. Let us heed the Words of Christ: "See to it that no one misleads you."
Footnotes:
1. Lee Griffith, Then the Proconsul Believed (Prescott Valley, AZ: Finished Work Fellowship), 2006, pp. 1-2.
2. Matthew Allen, Theology Adrift: The Early Church Fathers and Their Views of Eschatology, http://bible.org/article/theology-adrift-early-church-fathers-and-their-views-eschatology.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
Scripture quotations taken from the NASB.http://www.lockman.org/
