Since the Fall, sinful humanity has used and abused language to promote their sinful designs. Today, our liberals call themselves "progressives", and suggest thereby that if we would all follow them, all would be well. Reason and reality, however, say otherwise: and they — reason and reality, by which we trace causes and effects -- clearly show that the thinking and feelings of liberal "progressives" are actually delusional and perverse inversions of reality that, if adopted as personal or public policy, lead to perdition.
All good-hearted and right-thinking people approve of and desire real progress, if by "progress" is meant improvement in the physical and moral and intellectual and spiritual condition of humanity. But the struggle between good and evil in this fallen world is so deep-seated and fundamental that it includes a prior struggle over the very definition of "good" and "evil" and of "progress" and "regress." And, in our age of mass communication and propaganda, he who controls the language controls, for good or for ill, the fate of millions and of nations.
Carnal, unregenerate minds do not know real progress when they see it. They call good "bad" and bad "good" (Isaiah 5:20). They call better "worse" and worse "better." They call the best "the worst" and the worst "the best." They call progress "regress" and regress "progress". In short, as haters of God and His creation, as haters of reality, they get it all wrong. Because these haters are, at root, in metaphysical rebellion against God, their opinion of what is moral is fundamentally wrong and twisted, because their conception of the real and the good is inverted and depraved. And so our self-proclaimed "progressives" are those furthest from understanding and desiring real progress.
To understand what real goodness and real progress are, we must consult the ultimate Source and Author of all goodness and progress, the one and only (Triune) God, in both His Written Word (the Bible) and His Spoken Word (created nature), together with the aid of the best philosophical and theological interpreters or exegetes of both of HIs Words — the Bible and nature.
The two men who have made the most real progress in understanding real progress are the German philosopher and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) and the American philosopher and statesman John Caldwell Calhoun (1782-1850). Some of their ideas on progress will be examined below, but first we must consider the promise of progress found in Scripture.
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One of the best summary statements of God's Biblical promise of progress is found in the Savoy Confession, a Reformed Congregationalist confession of 1658. It says:
"As the Lord in his care and love towards his Church, hath in his infinite wise providence exercised it with great variety in all ages, for the good of them that love him, and his own glory; so according to his promise, we expect that in the latter days, antichrist being destroyed, the Jews called, and the adversaries of the kingdom of his dear Son broken, the churches of Christ being enlarged, and edified through a free and plentiful communication of light and grace, shall enjoy in this world a more quiet, peaceable and glorious condition than they have enjoyed."
Notably, this statement posits a period of history before Christ's Second Coming and Judgment that will be "a more quiet, peaceable and glorious condition that they [the Church] have enjoyed" prior. And it is precisely such a period that is the nub of the eschatological or end-times debate between premillennialists, a-millennialists, and post-millennialists that has exercised Christians for centuries now. The Savoy statement is postmillennialist because it declares that Christ will be coming after this period of peace. In contrast, a-millennialists claim there will be no such period; and premillennialists declare that Christ will come down to earth HIs second time to inaugurate and to rule men directly during the period in question. And so, as in all differences over Biblical meaning, appeal must be made ultimately to God's Word itself.
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A wit has aptly joked that the millennium is that period of peace about which Christians argue and fight (among themselves). But every internal quarrel among Christians, whether Catholic v. Protestant or Arminian v. Calvinist or pre-mill v. post-mill, is a part of God's sovereign plan, predetermined before creation in its prosecution and outcome, as iron sharpening iron, for the good of HIs and for His glory.
And so the fact that eschatological debate between essentially three camps has raged for so long suggests that both sharper focus and broader circumspection, both microscope and telescope — combined with honesty and common sense -- are needed in examining God's Word, in order to adjudicate the issue. Before turning to directly consider Bible passages and verses touching directly on the whether and the what of such a period of history, let us first consider the most profound and Christian reflections on history in general that are available.
Our foil for this demonstration will be Professor Thomas Ice, a pre-millennialist, from Liberty University and author of the essay "What is Postmillennialism?". Arguing against the postmillennialist view that history, as God's Providence, involves deep and ultimate and steady progress, for man and for created nature generally, to God the Good, Ice says:
"If a viewpoint truly represents Scripture then it is not too much to ask it to be able to correspond to history. Postmillennialism teaches that this current age will be a time of steady and upward growth. However, this is impossible to defend from history. While the gospel frequently expands to new territories, at the same time so many areas where the gospel has dominated society and culture there has been regression and relapse, not progress. It appears that wherever Christianity has come to dominate the culture, and has lost that dominance, it has never been revived as a significant force. This is not progress, it is regression. At this point in time, history supports the premillennial notion of the global spread of the gospel, while at the same time the church becomes increasingly apostate."
We note in passing that Ice commits a self-contradiction in his last sentence. since his claim is that the church is somehow both advancing and apostate at the same time. However, our main concern here is addressing the historical pessimism buttressing his pre-millennialism.
Writing over 325 years earlier, in his essay "On the Ultimate Origination of the Universe" (1697), the great Christian philosopher Leibniz, in crushing refutation of historical pessimism like that of Professor Ice, said:
" It is unjust indeed, as the jurists are wont to say, to judge before having studied the entire law. We know only an infinitesimally small part of the eternity which stretches out beyond measure, and the memory of a few thousand years which history preserves for us is of little avail here. Yet from such small experience we cast judgment with temerity on the immense and eternal, behaving in this respect like men born and brought up in prison, or, if you prefer, in the underground salt mines of Sarmatia, who ould believe that there is no other light in the world than that miserable lamp which hardly suffices to direct their step."
This intellectually overpowering passage from Leibniz suggests the ultimate narrowness and shallowness and falsity of historical pessimism. To the more learned, it recalls and invokes Plato's Allegory of the Cave, from the Republic (Book VII, 514a-520a).
But in refuting historical pessimism in general, and premillennialist pessimism in particular, Leibniz goes beyond literal and analytical method and employs metaphor and imagery. His first image is a beautiful painting or picture. Thus:
"Let us view a very beautiful picture and then cover it up, leaving visible only a tiny particle of its surface. What else will thenappear to us, even if we inspect it from very near -- indeed, the more so the closer we get to it — what else will we see, but confused patches of color without meaning and art? Yet, once you have removed the cover and contemplated the whole picture from a suitable distance, you will understand that what looked like color patches made at random had been created with art by the author."
Another image is music, and here Leibniz reveals connections between creation by the Perfectly Good and Great, on the one hand, and merely human virtue, happiness, and joy, on the other hand. He observes: there are currents and counter-currents in history, and also, in believers, in their struggles with sin; but ultimate progress in both are promised and achieved, as planned and determined by Him from before the beginning of the world. And speaking about the negative counter-currents God allows within the ultimate progress of His history or Providence, including the original and greatest of all counter-currents — the Fall of man — Leibniz says:
"What the eyes apprehend in a painting is apprehended by the ears in music. The greatest composers, indeed, are accustomed to mixing frequent dissonances among the consonances, in order to excite and to shock, so to speak, the auditor, who becomes anxious about what is going to happen; when after a short while all returns to order again, his pleasure will be so much more intense."
At this juncture, Leibniz drives home his argument for ultimate historical optimism by a series of commonplace human experiences, in which he descries a universal, Providential law of pleasure.
"Similarly, we enjoy insignificant dangers and painful experiences, because they give us a proud consciousness of our power and our happiness. Similarly also, when we see tight-rope walkers or sword-dancers performing, we draw pleasure from our shivers of fear. And frequently when playing with children, we laughingly pretend to throw and almost drop them. So it was that a female monkey once seized King Christian of Denmark, then still an infant in swaddling bands, and carried him to the top of the roof; then amid general anxiety the monkey — apparently enjoying the joke — carried him back, safe and sound, to his cradle."
So without pain, pleasure would not and could not be so sweet. Without the reality and possibility of disorder, order is not prized. Without sin and evil, good could not be clearly seen or fully appreciated. And so a world of greater goods is possible only in a world where evil is allowed to exist. And, at metaphysical bottom, that evil, as the Platonists rightly teach, is actually privation, or the absence of existence or actuality. And so contrasts in our experience highlight the better and the more real. Hence:
"For the same reason one becomes tired of eating nothing but sweets; acrid, sour, even bitter ingredients have to be added to stimulate the taste. Who has not tasted bitter food does not deserve sweets, and will not even appreciate them. This is the very law of pleasure, that uniformity does not allow it to continue with the same intensity, but produces satiety and dullness instead of enjoyment."
So the historical pessimists, including Professor Ice, failing by myopia to see the forest for the trees, or the macro for the micro, misunderstand historical counter-currents and are blind to general progress in history. The reasons for this blindness are explored below.
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When we step back and fully register the intellectual distance between a world-class Christian metaphysician like Leibniz and a typical modern-day theology professor like Ice, one is reminded of the great Augustine's warning to his fellow Christians in his essay "The Literal Meaning of Genesis." Augustine reminds us that unbelievers overhear internal Christian debates. They overhear our quarrels; and they are especially on the lookout for Christians committing errors in fields or disciplines of which they, the unbelievers, by virtue of the common-grace mental gifts God has given them, have some knowledge.
Long-running eschatological debate among Christians, like the Catholic-Protestant divide and the Arminian-Calvinist divide over election, are Providential divisions that will ultimately be resolved into Church unity. But individual Christians will be held to account for their own conduct and performance in these debates and divisions. And that very fact should rouse Christians to all the more care and circumspection in "rightly dividing the Word of Truth" (2 Timothy 2:15), where Paul instructs Timothy to handle the Word with accuracy and precision. Expressing a righteous disgust when Christians evince to the unbelieving world a vast ignorance, an ignorance that undermines Christian witness and the prospects of His Church for growth and edification, Augustine says:
"it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense ... and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh [the faith] to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men."
Christian ignorance and error on subjects in common with the world, like astronomy and biology and geology and history, is ignorance and error about God's Spoken Word, created nature. It is as serious a matter as Christian ignorance and error about the Bible, God's Written Word. Indeed, as we shall see below, neither nature nor the Bible can be more fully understood when studied in isolation one from another. History, both natural and human history, is the Providential unfolding of nature from the Six Days. The human science that is the study of history is a subject, like all other subjects, in which Christians, in the manner of Leibniz, must take the lead by following His command to take all truths captive (2 Corinthians 10:5).
Augustine's warning about the disgrace and danger of Christian ignorance should be inscribed in plain view on all sides of every pulpit and on the walls of every Sunday School room. He concludes thus:
"Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion."
Davy Crockett summarized and generalized Augustine's warning when he said: "First, make sure you are right -- and then go ahead." But all of us are fallible, and there is only one perfect man. And without the love of truth that the Lord implants in HIs, there is no hope of our reaching down to grasp His deeper truths, or reaching up to grasp His higher truths.
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Among the learned today, Leibniz is considered the last universal genius of the modern age. He was a pioneering mathematician, physicist, and philosopher who made signal contributions to those fields as well as to other fields as disparate as geology, game theory, psychology, and library science. More recently, scholars have uncovered how Leibniz invented a pre-electronic calculator, and how he predated Newton in the invention of the calculus. And Einstein himself credited Leibniz, in preference to Newton, with inspiring his relativity theory of space and time.
But Leibniz' greatest contribution was not in math or physics. His greatest contribution was his true or Christian metaphysics; it was his unequalled ability to discover and to describe the deeper relations and connections between God's written Word and God's spoken word, Nature. Lacking faith and deeper understanding, nearly all Leibniz' scholars have failed to understand and to accurately characterize Leibniz the thinker and Leibniz the man. As we shall see below, Leibniz revolutionized Biblical exegesis by exploring and explaining the Divinely ordered dialectical and causal connections between the Bible and Nature. But, by insisting on the interconnections between the Written and Spoken Word of God, Leibniz revolutionized scientific study as well, stressing how intermediate causes in nature cannot be truly and fully understood apart from the first and final causes that, quite literally, are God Himself.
Implicit to Leibniz' Christian metaphysics are two axiomatic exegetical and scientific principles: higher Biblical exegesis is impossible apart from a close study of nature, understood as creation; and higher scientific inquiry into the causes and operations of nature is impossible without Christian faith. Biblical exegesis and scientific inquiry are blinkered and blind without faith in and close study of the first and final causes that are God. Science without Biblical faith and understanding is merely poor and inferior description of intermediate causes, a description that is itself blind to the causes' intermediacy. Biblical exegesis apart from the close and faithful study of created nature is the empty and futile and incoherent study of God's commands apart from whom and what He commanded, first into existence and then when and how to proceed.
In the year 1697, in a single day, Leibniz wrote De rerum originatione radicali (On the Ultimate Origination of the Universe).
In this work, he declared: "... the (created) world is physically or (if you prefer) metaphysically perfect — that is, ... the series of things which has been produced (by the Creator) offers the greatest possible sum total of actual (and not merely possible) reality — but ... this (created) world is also morally the most perfect, because moral perfection is indeed the natural perfection of minds."
Leibniz continued: "Hence the [created] world is not only the most admirable machine, but in so far as it consists of minds, it is also the best Republic, that in which the minds are granted the greatest possible happiness and joy; for in this consists their natural perfection."
Passages like these, from the greatest philosopher and metaphysician of the modern period, the man whom the weightiest minds since have called "the last universal genius", set shallow moderns to howling. Lacking both Christian faith and intellectual depth, including ability and acumen in metaphysical reasoning, heathen moderns gnash their teeth in impotent fury at Leibniz's unshakeable cosmic optimism. And what the heathens hate most about Leibniz are his deep and profound and irrefutable arguments about God's absolute sovereignty over all creation, including, especially, themselves.
But fools aside, those serious about truth and understanding will note well Leibniz' careful and deliberate use of the word "possible", because for Leibniz, the world that God created is the best of all possible worlds, and in this particular world, as compared with other possible worlds, "... in the end there is more perfection in the whole sequence [of it] than if evil had not occurred."
Leibniz had arrived at these happy conclusions about ultimate reality after the closest and most careful consideration of the nature of God. He emphasized how the one true God possesses both perfect goodness and perfect greatness, and that grave theological errors are committed when His goodness and His greatness are not considered together as coequals. In 1686, within the span of a few days, Leibniz wrote a short Discourse on Metaphysics. In it he observed, "there are several entirely different perfections in nature, [and] God possesses all of them together, [and] each of them belongs to him in the highest degree." Then, speaking as a man of superior intellect and faith, and therefore as one melancholic because doubtful of the ability and willingness of others to follow and to understand, Leibniz declared: "God is an absolutely perfect being; yet the consequences of these words are not sufficiently considered."
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Leibniz' metaphysical reasonings are so deep and abstract and subtle and strong that they are never explored in theological seminaries today. In our time, his reasonings and profound insights are raw meat in a mentally infantile, milk-drinking world.
The Bible, of course, uses the metaphor of milk and meat to describe different levels of spiritual maturity and understanding (1 Corinthians 3:2; Hebrews 5:12-13). Milk represents the basic teachings of the faith that are easy to digest and understand, while meat and other solid foods represent deeper, more complex truths that require a greater level of spiritual maturity to comprehend. The Bible encourages believers to start with milk and then progress to solid foods as they grow in their faith. It also warns against remaining stagnant in one’s spiritual journey and urges believers to continually seek deeper understanding and growth in their relationship with God.
Ultimately, the goal of course is for believers to progress from being spiritual infants who suckle milk to fully weaned and mature adults who can chew and digest the meat of God's Word and gain thereby the greater nutrition and growth He intends for His. And so at Peter 2:2 there is a warning and a scolding: "For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child."
When Leibniz was not masterfully and decisively refuting impious and anti-Christ skeptics like Hobbes and Spinoza and Pierre Bayle, he was addressing his fellow Christians, including spiritual milk-drinkers like our modern premillennialist and a-millennialist historical pessimists.
After having asserted, in his ultimate origination essay, the physical and moral perfection of the created world, Leibniz says, "but experience in this world, you may object, shows us the contrary. For the best people often have the worst lives; innocents — not only beasts but also men — are cruelly afflicted with evils and even put to death; and finally, the world, particularly if we consider the government of the human race, looks like a confused chaos rather than like the well-ordered work of supreme wisdom. That prima facie (or at first glance) this may be the impression you gain, I do not deny. But on closer inspection, the contrary must be stated. It is a priori certain . . . that all things, and especially minds, obtain the greatest possible perfection" in this best of all possible worlds.
[Here the reader is reminded that a priori knowledge is knowledge derived from theoretical deduction; whereas a posteriori knowledge is knowledge derived from observation or experience.]
From the nature of God as revealed in Scripture, Leibniz and other great philosophers and theologians have been able to deduce fundamental truths about man and creation and history that confound our lesser lights of today who are perennially looking for and demanding explicit verses in the Bible addressing this or that pet subject -- be it election or the end times or whatever. The irony is that oftentimes, due to a combination of sinful partisan prejudice, intellectual incapacity, and spiritual blindness, those demanding proof texts are unable to receive them when presented. And the reasons for these things should become clearer to the reader as our present discourse unfolds.
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Above we saw Leibniz the Christian philosopher refute the historical pessimism that characterizes pre-millennialism. Let us turn now to another criticism lodged against post-millennial optimism, a criticism that, if true, is far more serious. Again we quote Professor Thomas Ice:
"The greatest problem with postmillennialism is the fact that the Bible just does not teach it. Where is a specific passage that teaches the postmillennial concept? Not a passage that they think it their best [sic], from which they attempt to develop a postmillennial theology. I am asking for a passage that teaches the idea of postmillennialism. It is nowhere to be found in the Bible. Lack of specific biblical support is fatal to postmillennialism for any Bible believing Christian."
And such a criticism, of course, can only be rebutted by direct reference to Scripture itself. And so iron sharpens iron, and one person sharpens another (Proverbs 27:17), and the principal Providential value of the premillennialist and a-millennialist views, analogous to other errorist views like Papal headship of the Church and Arminian self-salvation, is that they serve as useful foils for the exhibition of postmillennialist truth.
But the best foils are those with the greatest plausibility or appearance of truth, those in which particular truths and errors are most intimately comingled and interwoven, so that they press the defender of the true position to maximum effort in penetration and circumspection of thought, and in clarity of refutation. The philosophical and theological lover of truth, in his sacred code, eschews the straw-man tactic and all the other fallacious and Satanic discursive stratagems of dishonest and sophistical reasoners.
The famous probing method of assertion and counter-assertion typified in Aquinas' summa works, together with the canonical test method of the advocatus diaboli (Devil's advocate), were conventions introduced to test mere assertions of truth for ultimate veracity. Leibniz himself, a man of the widest and most cosmopolitan and intelligent correspondence, anticipating the millennium, envisioned a universal language of truth rooted in the analysis of complex ideas in terms of simple and universally-recognized concepts; righteous analysis that would expose error and unite humanity in the common public recognition of truth.
In this spirit of open debate, in a recent edition of Themelios (48.3), we find Pastor Jeremy Sexton criticizing, with admirable vigor, the post-mill position; and then at Blog and Mablog, in a piece titled "A Seven-fold Rejoinder to Jeremy Sexton", we find Pastor Douglas Wilson, with his characteristic insight and wit, effectively responding from Scripture in behalf of the post-mill view.
In passing I would add: As a philosophical bystander in this theological debate between very able pastors, I was encouraged by both their level of intellectual discourse and by the Christian civility of that discourse, and my hope is that the Biblical truth about the end-times, so far as created and fallen man is given to know it, may emerge from such constructive debate. My hope, too, is that Reformed thinkers of our day will be open to both the exegetical and metaphysical insights, suggested in this essay, of the general Western philosophical-theological tradition — ancient, medieval, and modern -- that bear on the ongoing eschatological debate.
Insights from this broader philosophical-theological quarter may help to break up and to resolve the current stand-off between the pre-mill and post-mill camps — an unprofitable condition of hostile irreconcilability Wilson aptly described as "paradigm bumper cars", and which philosophy calls epistemological poly-logism, where opponents are so divided, by passions and prejudices, that, for want of common ground, even the brilliant enthymeme strategy of Socrates fails to persuade and to unite. But only God Himself can bridge deep spiritual differences. In the meantime, as mere humans, our best hope for eventual resolution and rapprochement, aside from prayer, begins with the clear and competent exploration of the underlying premises or assumptions of the different eschatological camps, in the best spirit of pre-suppositionalism.
Beyond examining premises, as a philosopher schooled in the Western philosophical-theological tradition, I recommend the difficult but richly rewarding task of studying the Christian metaphysics and Christian apologia of Leibniz. In his lifetime, the great Leibniz worked mightily to reunite the Christian church on a solid Scriptural foundation, and not on the puerile and heretical foundation suggested by modern ecumenicalism. The success of that great enterprise, as Leibniz himself would be the first to concede, would have to wait until a later day, a day we are presently discussing, in accord with the Lord's plan.
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Contrary to the counter-Scriptural and counter-factual assertions of Ice and Sexton, God's Written Word is rife with expressly post-millennialist verses. This is why the great Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564), a towering intellect of the highest Biblical learning, declared it childish to believe, as pre-mill folk like Ice and Sexton do, in God's direct rule on this earth before the Judgment, a view Calvin considered unworthy of refutation. And so, the fact that this direct-rule notion is now entertained and that there are today premill believers holding positions of authority in seminaries and pulpits reflects the present degraded level of Biblical learning and theological discourse.
Again, both testaments contain many specific verses proving post-millennialism, and what follows below is a mere partial list gathered in a mere cursory reading. But sadly, in all likelihood, even a fuller, voluminous list would not persuade anti-postmill dogmatists. So what is needed, along with much prayer, is an exhaustive exegetical study that would include the Leibnizian metaphysical method and the philosophical insights touched on, above and below, in this present essay.
The partial list of postmillennial verses includes:
Ephesians 4: 11-13: "So Christ Himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors, and teachers, to equip His people for works of service, so that the body of Christ [the Church] may be built-up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ."
So the Church is built up over time in history, and its edification is continuous despite apparent or ostensible setbacks or reversals.
So, in the period of history immediately preceding the Second Coming of Christ and the Judgment, the Church will achieve unity and believers at that time will reach an apex in knowledge of Jesus, and attain an unprecedented maturity, with its members being eaters of solid food, and not spiritual babies or milk-drinkers. In this way, Leibniz' dream of a re-united Church, with the end of the Catholic-Protestant-Orthodox divide, will be achieved.
This is work that God accomplishes before His return for the Judgment. After all, in heaven, with the elect under Jesus' direct government and tutelage, there will be no need of the merely human offices of evangelist, apostle, prophet, pastor, or teacher. "Attaining the whole measure of the fullness of Christ" is the very definition of human progress. It is the full flowering of human potential rightly actualized. It is moral and intellectual virtue at its earthly apex. Notably, attaining the full measure also involves understanding, at a high level, the relation between God's Written Word and God's Spoken Word, created nature.
1 John 2:8: "Yet I am writing you with a new command, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining."
The speaker is describing a passing away of darkness, and a light shining, that is occurring in the world at large but which is centered in the Lord's spiritual transformation of elect individuals. Here, verb tense is everything — "is passing" is ongoing action in the present, in John's present and in ours. The progressive aspect of the present tense is used. It is a passing away of darkness more and more day by day. Moreover, the verse describes a passing out of the darkness and into a light — the true light -- that is already shining, as of the First Coming.
The passing away of darkness before the true light (Jesus) that is already shining bespeaks a darkness progressively fading in the Church and in the world at large; it is not merely spiritual transformation within individuals without broader impact and import in the Church and in the world. There had been individual believers since Eden, but now, in the new age since the First Coming, there is a new command.
Isaiah 49: 6: "I will make you a light for the Gentiles, that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth."
Light is hope and guidance and clarity. Darkness is confusion and despair and sin. As the light spreads to the ends of the earth, it is not and cannot be kept under a bushel.
Isaiah 43:19-20: "Behold, I will do a new thing, Now it shall spring forth; Shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The beast of the field will honor Me, The jackals and the ostriches, Because I give waters in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, To give drink to My people, My chosen."
Again, what need is there of "a new thing"? It is the new thing, the progressive spiritual conquest of the world, inaugurated by his First Coming.
Prov. 4:18: "The path of the righteous is like the morning sun, shining ever brighter till the full light of day."
There is a progressive fading of darkness within believers, and a progressive fading of darkness in history the world over. The Son rises and shines ever brighter across history. The Fall was the nadir, the low point of humanity, to demonstrate the radical dependence of finite man on infinite God, and all since has been dawning and growing light, but especially since His First Coming. Created nature moves toward consummation in Him. The invisible Church moves toward consummation in Him. How can the Church, as the highest manifestation of created nature, follow their destinies while other created things, including the residuum of created humanity, do not? How can the growth of the Church not occur in tandem with a general progress in nature and in the world?
Romans 13:12: "The night is far gone; the day is at hand. So then let us cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light."
So does HIs apostle to the Gentiles write soon after His First Coming and ascension.
Matthew 5:5: "Blessed are the meek, For they shall inherit the earth."
This, from the Lord Himself. from His Sermon on the Mount. And what is the "earth" referenced therein? The reference is a double one. First, "earth" is this present earth at the period just before the Second Coming, inherited by the elect then living; and secondly, "earth" is the new earth that is the City of God in heaven after the Judgment, that is inherited by the full number of the elect in the After.
And then many, many other verses from both testaments of the Bible could be marshalled as incontrovertible proof texts of postmillennialism.
Douglas Wilson has suggested this in his response to Jeremy Sexton, especially in his discussions of the Lord's Prayer ("on earth as in heaven'), of the Lord's Parable of the Leaven (where the loaf is leavened gradually, the loaf being the world and the leaven being HIs Kingdom), and his explication of what actually constitutes God's loving of the world (John 3: 16). Then, there is the parable of the seed, where only the good seed on good ground produces, whereas the other seed-soil combos languish; and the parable of the mustard seed, which teaches how God's Kingdom, from a very small beginning, will grow in history and become so predominate in the world as to bring peace.
After his resurrection, the Son receives all authority from the Father and sets about bringing all peoples, all nations, and all languages into His service. In heaven, sitting at the Father's right hand, the Son's enemies are by degrees over history made his footstool. By the Great Commission (Matthew 24:14), all nations are taught and disciplined by Jesus through His Bride, the Church. In history, by degrees, the wicked are smote and made His footstool, and the righteous are thereby progressively delivered from evil, and Abraham, the heir of the world, rejoices to see the day of Christ (John 8:56), and then the Judgment (Daniel 7,9; Matthew 28:18-20; Psalm 110:1; 1 Corinthians 15:24-28; Acts 1).
In his counter to Sexton, Wilson also briefly but aptly touches on how much of the Book of Revelation, in its prophecies, can be understood only by reference to the destruction of Jerusalem (70 AD) and the dispersal of the Jewish people from Palestine by the Lord, acting through Gentile-Roman imperial might.
This last point is one that some of the more prominent evangelical pre-millennialists now strenuously resist. And it is here that we find a major intersect between ivory-tower exegetical debate on eschatology and current political issues centered around geopolitical conflict in the Middle East, now gone genocidal ,and near the nuclear precipice. Indeed, in eschatological debates today, the explosive elephant in the room is Christian Zionism, a view passionately favored by many opponents of postmillennialism.
Providentially, this emotionally-charged political view, supercharged for proponents and opponents alike, now serves as both a catalyst for debate and a strong temptation to sinful and dismissive dogmatism. As Wilson himself might quip, exploding elephants make a big mess. And one irony here is that anti-postmill political quietists, quietists on the American domestic front, often complain that the post-mill view tends to fuel culture warriorism, while many of these same anti-postmill folk blindly and uncritically support even the bloodiest acts of Israeli imperialism.
So contemporary issues are now, by His plan, in some wise energizing eschatological debate, but the truth about the end-times, as a part of His plan, is unalterable, since grounded in His Written and Spoken Words, and therefore is not, of course, a matter of human preference or choice.
And so, in the period immediately preceding the Second Coming and the Judgment, the preponderance of the people then living will be Christian. So there will be more elect and believing per capita than at any previous period. And as compared with prior ages, it will be a time of truth, righteousness, peace, and prosperity.
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But the case for the truth of post-millennialism goes far beyond rebutting historical pessimism and proffering proof texts. Indeed, viewed rightly, both the Bible and Nature are big arrows pointing first toward each other and then toward and beyond the millennium that will come just before His Second Coming and the Judgment. Understanding these interrelations and the intersections between the Bible (God's Written Word) and created nature (God's Spoken Word) is essential to Scriptural understanding in general and to eschatological insight in particular.
Post-millennial truth as a central element of Scriptural understanding can be descried and firmly understood only in reference to God the Creator's multiple and manifold and ongoing and progressive commands to His creation. These are the divine commands that activate, according to HIs plan and schedule, latent and potential and original creation. What follows is a partial list of these great commands.
First, there are the original commands to Adam and Eve and to all living creation.
Gen. 1: 24: "And God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.' And it was so."
Gen. 1: 28: "And God blessed them [the first man and the first woman] . And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
And then, having winnowed down sinful humanity after the Fall and by the universal flood, God commanded Noah and his sons.
Genesis 9: 1,7: "And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.' . . And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.”
And then, having promised by the sign of the rainbow no further universal destruction of sinful humanity, and with the earth having been repopulated across various nations speaking in various tongues, and having removed the seat of His Church from the Jewish nation, and having prophesied the immanent destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple (70 AD), and after His loving sacrifice on the Cross to save His elect and the world, Jesus, commanded His followers with the great commission of evangelizing the entire world until His return at the Second Coming.
Matthew 28:18-20: "And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.'”
Mark 16:15: "And he said to them, 'Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.'"
Here it is critically important to notice the progressive or ongoing nature of these commands. These are commands that both set long trains of events in motion and keep those events in motion. They are not commands of the sort that, once obeyed, are no longer in effect beyond some discrete and pre-specified period of obedience. They are commands to humanity of perpetual, cross-generational application. These are primal ontological commands to nature in general and to human nature in particular. They are commands by the Creator to His creation to obediently unfold.
In his own day, Leibniz noticed the tendency of men, even of highly intelligent men, to overlook the progressive and ongoing nature of these commands. He saw how a failure to grasp the progressive character of many of God's commands has led even to the false conclusion, when immediate and complete results are not evident, that the commands are therefore empty of force and go essentially unobeyed and unfulfilled. So, because finite man sees no immediate and full result, he wrongly concludes that there are no powers continuously and inexorably at work, outside of his limited sight and apprehension, in obedience to God's commands.
In his brilliant essay titled "What is Nature? Reflections on the Force Inherent in Created Things and on Their Actions", Leibniz says: "... it is incompatible with the Divine power and will , which are pure and absolute, to maintain that God wills and that yet nothing be produced and changed thereby, that He always acts but never achieves anything, and that He never produces any accomplished work [apotelesma] . Certainly, if no trace were impressed on the created things by the divine order: Let the earth bring forth, and Let the living creatures multiply, if thereafter the world had moved as though no commandment had occurred, it would follow — since there has to be some connection, immediate or mediated, between cause and effect — either that nothing happens now in conformity to the commandment, or that this commandment operates in the present only and must be constantly renewed in the future. But this latter opinion is rightly rejected by the author [the French cleric Malebranche]."
And then Leibniz explains how God's original creation, consisting of existents with determinate identities and potentials and potencies, is activated and unfolds as the Creator commands. He continues:
"If, however, the law enacted by God has left some vestiges impressed in the things, and if these things are so constructed according to the commandment that they are able to fulfill the will of the legislator, then it must be recognized that these things contain in them a certain efficacy, form, or force. It is this efficacy, form, or force we are accustomed to call by the name of nature, and from this nature the series of phenomena follows in conformity to the original commandment."
So created nature responds to the Creator's commands because it was made to do so. And even rebellious angels and rebellious men, in their rebellion, even in their self-condemning and impotent disobedience, act their pre-determined parts within His sovereign plan.
History is positive or progressive in its direction because created nature, which is what history is the history of, is the positive or progressive unfolding of nature in obedience to HIs commands. To be negative about history is to be ignorant of nature as created and ignorant of His commands for nature's and history's progressive unfolding.
Distracted by the world and by the external and the physical, lesser exegetes fail to note and to remember and to track the impress of God's diverse commands in our natures. This is so, in large part, because after Eden, nature, including human nature, is in a fallen and fractured condition. And when fallen man looks externally and internally at fallen nature, it is with fractured faculties that he looks at fractured objects, and, in this condition of seeing through a glass but darkly (1 Cor. 13:12), the nature of all natures is far more difficult for him to descry than it was before his fall, when Adam, with a far clearer eye, at God's command, named creatures (Gen. 2: 19-20).
Finally, Genesis 1:24 and Matthew 28:18-20 are, respectively, the first and final commands of Jesus the Creator and Jesus the Savior. The Great Commission is the culmination of the process of multiplication and increase commanded in Genesis. It points to a final global spiritual conquest premised on the prior propagational multiplication and moral and intellectual cultivational increase of humanity. So Providential progress is hardwired or embedded in God's creation, Nature. There is no stopping it. It will happen. It is predetermined and sure and commanded by Him.
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And now, dear reader, it is time to get more metaphysical. And since metaphysics, a part of philosophy, is the most difficult and demanding of all the human sciences, the reader must now strain to follow to some of the depths and heights where His truths lead.
The darkness is now fading, and the creation that God created in the six days was a creation of incipient actuality and radical potentiality. It was God's commands to "Let the earth bring forth ..." and "Let the living creatures multiply ..." that started the unfolding and actualization of the potential of the first created things, an unfolding that continues today and which will continue even after Judgment in perpetuity, or for as long as God wills a creation to exist.
Original creation was a creation of seeds in which forms dwelt. God created the world in a largely potential state that would allow for the development of various new forms over time. Things not existent in an actual state, or state of actuality, but only in potential would be produced in the course of time. Original creation was created pregnant with subsequent existents. Augustine spoke of seeds within seeds and forms within forms and forms within seeds and seeds within forms. Aristotle had spoken of entelechies, or of things with determinate identities having innate direction and goals embedded in them by God. Entelechy [from the Greek en and telos, meaning goal or end embedded inside] is the identity and goal-directedness embedded in all created things by the Lord. The acorn of an oak, by its distinctive identity and entelechy, will, given favorable conditions, generate an oak tree and never a maple, and so on -- each according to its kind (Gen.1:24-25).
To be a created thing is to be a thing whose direction and destiny was determined before the beginning of the world and implanted in the first created things. God initiated the unfolding of nature and history by his commands to bring forth and multiply. He commanded humanity, made in His image, to fill and to rule and to subdue and to protect the earth and all things on or of it. Man was commanded to form families and communities. He was to procreate his race and to steward the world — all to God's glory. God's commands are continuously obeyed by created nature, in its inexorable unfolding.
In the six days (In Hexaemeron), God spoke Nature, including man, into existence ex nihilo, and thereby commanded the original, potential-state creation into existence. These commands, issuing in the creation of original creation ex nihilo, were effectual. And though miraculous, and widely different from ordinary human experience, in which, for example, things that are made, even including humans, are made from pre-existing materials, this creation of things in discrete instances ex nihilo within the six days is somehow more understandable and memorable to finite human minds than the commands of progressive unfolding of creation that followed. Leibniz, the greatest metaphysician of modernity, said: "The first question that must be asked is, 'Why is there something rather than nothing?'"
And then he answered his own question: "the reasons for the world are ... concealed in some entity outside the world" "something endowed with absolute or metaphysical necessity, for which no reason can be given", "a being [the Triune] whose essence implies existence."
And so, by a combination of creating and of commanding things, God gives these things, pregnant with later things, identity and purpose and direction and movement to their individual destinies. For humans, made in His image, there are individual or personal destinies, according to His sovereign will and plan. True philosophy cannot penetrate to knowing precisely what and how much of being and identity are imparted by God to things through original creation and through continuous command respectively. What is clear, however, from Scripture and from right reason, is that all created being begins and continues by divine command. And all of creation, excepting only the fallen angels and fallen humanity, is ever mindful of this condition of original and complete and total and unending existential dependency on God, the Creator and Sustainer. Hence Luke 19:40, where even the rocks and the trees cry out to Him. And they cry out to Him, as members of this world He first created and then saved by His loving sacrifice of Himself (John 3:16), by powers unknown to and indiscernible by limited, finite man
So the Word of God is more than the Bible, God's written Word. Created nature is God's spoken word. And so grave and fundamental theological errors are made when the two are not viewed together, as the full Word of God. And if most of the errors in theology stem from a failure to grasp and to fathom the Fall of man and its systemic effects on his nature, as J.C. Ryle has quite aptly noted, a large portion of the remaining errors result from forgetting that nature is the spoken word of God, a system whose every constituent element bears His imprint, an imprint that the modern secularization and barbarization of science has succeeded in concealing or masking. And the failure to understand human fallenness is an aspect of a prior failure to grasp the reality of nature as created and of nature as a whole as fallen.
And this imprint of God in created things is no mere vestigial trace, devoid of causal power. Instead, it is the determinate identity and potency of each and every created being, acting in ways predetermined by the Creator Lord, through all history. Indeed these two sets of theological errors — concerning nature's fallenness and unfolding -- are overlapping and interconnected. The Divine imprint in created things includes forms within forms and seeds within seeds. By these imprints, created nature unfolds in and over time, and even into eternity after Judgment. So the unfolding of created nature is history, and history is nothing more and nothing less than that Providential unfolding of nature, and human history is the center of natural history, as man is the center of God's creation.
And this progressive unfolding of nature, seeds within seeds, forms within form, potency to actualization, includes and encompasses all evil (which metaphysically, is privation or lack of being) and all local and ostensibly retrograde movements of history. Progress is global or universal and regress is local and part of the general progress; so all apparent regress, including the Fall, is in fact part of a general progress. As Leibniz put it: "... disorder in certain parts, ... may well be consistent with the harmony of the whole." But this disorder in certain parts does not mean "the parts were not taken into consideration at all, as though it sufficed that the world as a whole be perfect; for if this were so, the entire human race might be miserable. Nor does it mean that no care has been taken to safeguard justice or to protect our own interests. "
For the created world is in fact "... the best-constituted republic [where] care is taken to grant everyone the greatest possible good, and that, analogously, the universe would not be sufficiently perfect unless the interest of everyone were taken into consideration, without prejudice, of course, to the [general] harmony." And "... the very law of justice ... ordains that each one should have his share in the perfection of the universe, and that his happiness should be proportionate to his virtue and to his voluntary contribution to the common good; this is what we call charity and love of God, and in this alone consists also the essence and power of the Christian religion."
Leibniz continues: "Nor should one be surprised that in the universe spirits are the objects of so much solicitude, since they most faithfully reflect the image of the Supreme Creator, and since their relation to him is not so much that of a machine to its artificer (as is the case with all other created things) as it is that of a citizen to his prince."
And here Leibniz, as if reflecting on Romans 8:28, turns and says: " With regard to the afflictions of good people, in particular, it may be considered certain that these will turn to their greater advantage. This is true not only theologically but also physically, as evidenced by the grain of wheat fallen into the ground, which must die before it can bring forth good fruit (John 12: 24). In general, it may be affirmed that afflictions are temporary evils leading to good effects, since they are shortcuts to greater perfection. (italics added)
Then Leibniz the physicist chimes in: "Just so, in physics, liquids with slow fermentation also clarify more slowly, while those in which the disturbance is more violent eliminate certain particles with greater force and are thus clarified more promptly." And so, concerning the evils that afflict His elect, "it might be said of these evils that one steps back, the better to jump forward."
But the progress of elect pilgrims in this fallen world is part of a general progress of created nature, and meanwhile the reprobate, as a part of this best possible creation, get nothing less than justice, which is their due. Hence, "As the climax of the universal beauty and perfection of God's works, it must also be recognized that the total universe is engaged in a perpetual and spontaneous progress, so that it always advances toward greater culture. Thus a large part of our earth is now cultivated, and this part will receive ever-growing extension. Though it is true that meanwhile certain parts may return to the state of wilderness or be again destroyed or deteriorated, that must be interpreted in the same manner which we proposed a while ago, concerning the afflictions of good people; namely, that this very destruction and deterioration promotes the future conquest of a greater good, so that the damage turns, in a way, into profit."
And this is why, for example, in his superior Christian wisdom, the greatest American warrior, General Robert E. Lee, after the War, exuded quiet Leibnizian optimism concerning the ultimate vindication of the Southern Confederacy and of the Christian South.
But sinful men, in their sinful enterprises and causes, are forever claiming to have won and to hold the favor of God. And when they experience an earthly success, though it is by nature and by His design merely temporary and part of a deeper divine plan for good, they congratulate themselves and taunt their defeated but morally superior enemies. But by their taunts and persecution of the defeated righteous and by their blasphemous claims to God's favor, they merely heap judgment upon their own heads, to be issued before and/or at the Day, according to His perfect plan.
God's Providence is so deep and so complicated; such that good Christian men, supported by good Christian women, who together labored in good and noble enterprises that failed in their time, will, in the end, be vindicated and crowned by Him with glory.
Finally Leibniz, being ever circumspect, anticipates and rebuts a possible objection to the divinely-ordained cosmic progress he has described. Hence:
"To the possible objection that thus [by a continuous progress] the world would of necessity have long ago turned into a paradise, it is easy to reply, 'Many substances already may have attained great perfection; yet, the continuum being infinitely divisible, there will always remain in the unfathomable depth of the universe some somnolent elements which are still to be awakened, developed, and improved — in a word, promoted to higher culture. This is why the end of progress can never be attained.'"
And so progress will continue in perpetuity, after Judgment.
And so now, as we have just seen, Leibniz' account of progress is a sweeping metaphysical account encompassing all of Providential history. He describes all of nature unfolding at God's commands. But within this general unfolding of nature, there is an unfolding of human progress within human societies and polities. There, we find God at work through the constitution of man He created. We find God ordering man's nature, in his internal feelings and thoughts, so that humanity as a whole may advance, despite sin and its many delusions, by indirection, by invisible hand, and by spontaneous order mechanisms — by what Hegel called "the cunning of reason" -- rooted in human sentiment and the desire for survival and for happiness and for flourishing, to achieve a general material and moral and spiritual progress unto His Second Coming.
These social and political mechanisms of progress have been best described by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the greatest political philosopher, word for word and page for page, of the modern age.
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On the very first page of his shorter treatise called Disquisition on Government, Calhoun defines progress as the ". . . full development [of man] in his moral and intellectual faculties", development by which man raises "himself, in the scale of being . . . above the level of the brute creation." Calhoun's focus is on both the social and political conditions that best promote such progress and on the elemental features operating within human nature and between individuals that can give progress its greatest impetus.
Later on in the Disquisition, after laying the requisite groundwork, Calhoun gives a definitive philosophical account of the dynamics of material and general progress within nations. Calhoun argued that material and personal inequalities between individuals, combined with liberty, are the fundamental promoters or drivers of progress.
For Calhoun, the concurrent-majority or constitutional structures that preserve and cultivate and maximize the impulse to material progress are also structures that preserve and cultivate and maximize moral progress. (See my "Plato and Calhoun: The Quest for Best Government and The Voice of God" and also my "John C. Calhoun and the Providential Progress of Technology and Government").
In Calhoun's own words:
"... inequality of [material] condition, while it is a necessary consequence of [personal or individual] liberty, is, at the same time, indispensable to progress. In order to understand why this is so, it is necessary to bear in mind, that the main spring to progress is, the desire of individuals to better their condition; and that the strongest impulse that can be given to it is, to leave individuals free to exert themselves in the manner they may deem best for that purpose, as far at least as it can be done consistently with the ends for which government is ordained (i.e., the protection and perfection of society) — and to secure to all the fruits of their exertions."
"Now, as individuals differ greatly from each other, in intelligence, sagacity, energy, perseverance, skill, habit of industry and economy, physical power, position and opportunity — the necessary effect of leaving all free to exert themselves to better their condition, must be a corresponding inequality between those who may possess these qualities and advantages in a high degree, and those who may be deficient in them."
"The only means by which this result can be prevented are, either to impose such restrictions on the exertions of those who may possess them in a high degree, as will place them on a level with those who do not, or to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions. But to impose such restrictions on them would be destructive of liberty — while, to deprive them of the fruits of their exertions, would be to destroy the desire of bettering their condition. It is, indeed, this inequality of condition between the front and rear ranks [of society], in the march of progress, which gives so strong an impulse to the former to maintain their position, and to the latter to press forward into their files. This gives to progress its greatest impulse. To force the front rank back to the rear, or to attempt to push forward the rear into line with the front, by the interposition of the government, would put an end to the impulse, and effectually arrest the march of progress."
As Calhoun was writing these words, around 1848, he was well aware of the political revolutions then sweeping across Europe. He was especially concerned with how certain false philosophical notions about liberty and equality pervaded these revolutions, and how these notions had crossed the Atlantic to the Northern states of the American Union and were then proving, by their influence, unsettling and destructive and subversive of the constitutional Union and of true or ordered liberty in America.
The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, famous for its redistributive phrase, "from each according to his ability to each according to his need", was first published on February 21, 1848. As the atheists Marx and Engels were concocting their false-philosophical poison, a Christian Calhoun, as Providence would have it, was writing the thundering refutational words we just saw in his great Disquisition.
Subsequent history and political experience, including the horrendous and unprecedently blood-letting by liberal and communist regimes in the 20th Century, would underscore the Christian wisdom of Calhoun and the murderous atheist folly of Marx and Engels.
The classless society promised by Marx would never (and could never) come. As Calhoun explained, progress cannot come by "the interposition of government", or by egalitarian levelling. In the end, despite its many and seductive promises, and despite its pretended good intentions, atheistic communism — as a fell doctrine of metaphysical rebellion against God -- seeks vainly, but destructively and murderously — not to promote progress -- but instead to arrest the inexorable and Providential true progress of God's creation. But such efforts by anti-Christ forces are futile and self-defeating, since God's best of all possible worlds is one in which all forms of evil, including the delusional evil of liberalism and communism, are ultimately made to serve HIs higher purposes for real progress.
Calhoun the political philosopher brilliantly and concisely described the warf and woof of the mechanisms of progress operating within all human societies of this earthly life. What remains is to consider human progress in the After, for the elect in the state of glory in heaven, and for this account we return to Leibniz.
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The Bible, God's Written Word, teaches that God created the best of all possible worlds, and that in that world, in that creation, progress in goodness is perpetual for His elect. Creation or nature, God's spoken Word, as a Divinely ordered system of forms within forms and seeds within seeds, unfolds inexorably and unstoppably in time and thereby obeys His commands to progress toward perfection. But what about after Judgment, in eternity After?
The progress of nature and of the elect toward greater goodness and perfection continues from Eden through this earthly life to the Judgment and beyond, to the eternal after of heaven for the elect and hell for the reprobate. The progression from this present heaven (or skies) and earth to the new heaven and earth promised in Scripture is metaphysical, physical, and moral (Isaiah 65:17; 2 Peter 3:13; Revelation 21:1). At the Judgment, man's created natural setting is transformed and renewed to fit the transformation of his own spiritual status, whether in heaven in glory or in hell in damnation.
Leibniz argued correctly that our best of all possible worlds, our best of all possible creations, is one that generates the greatest glory for God and perfection. In his Theodicy (1709), or defense of the ways of God, Leibniz says:
"it is possible, and even a very reasonable thing, that the glory and perfection of the blessed [in heaven] may be incomparably greater than the misery and imperfection of the damned [in hell], and that here the excellence of the total good in the smaller number [of the elect] may exceed the total evil which is in the greater number [of the reprobate]."
This calculation of glory and perfection, and of excellence of the total good, is traced by Leibniz to the moral and intellectual effects of communion by the elect with God and by the reprobate with the devil respectively. He continues:
"The blessed draw near to divinity through a divine Mediator, so far as can belong to these created beings, and make such progress in good as is impossible for the damned to make in evil, even though they should approach as nearly as may be the nature of demons. God is infinite, and the devil is finite; good can and does go on ad infinitum, whereas evil has its bounds."
Leibniz' conclusion that the glory and perfection and joy experienced by the elect in heaven overbalances the ignominy and misery and imperfection of the damned in hell to generate a total good that surpasses that of all other possible worlds is premised on the Platonic conception, reflected in Scripture, of evil as privation, or as lack of actuality or existence. On this view, God did not create evil as a positive existent, but rather allowed evil to exist in creation as a feature endemic to finite human creatures. Leibniz agreed with Augustine and Aquinas that a creation without evil would inevitably be one where a great many goods would eo ipso be thereby precluded. And of those goods, the greatest is Christ as loving Redeemer and Savior of His fallen elect.
Infinite God is pure or complete Being or Actually. He is pure Act; and any change in His being, though impossible, would necessarily make Him less that He is, rather than more, since He is already and always has been, the maximum of all perfections. But created and finite man is a combination of actual existence and of potential to become more or less. He can become more by more grace or less by its subtraction from him. So, the more devilish the reprobate-damned become in hell, the less actual existence they will have, as they regress in the direction of complete non-being or non-existence. Contrariwise, the elect, in edifying communion by pure Being and pure Goodness, actualize to gain in being.
This moral-metaphysical dynamic in the After underscores, in a clear and unambiguous way, the intimate causal relations between the metaphysical, the physical, and the moral. In his work titled A Vindication of God's Justice, Leibniz cites the work of Johann Fecht (1636-1716), an eminent professor of theology and specialist on hell and on the state of the damned. Arguing for the eternity of hell, Fecht cites with approval Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles, where Thomas points out how "After death the souls of the wicked have a will unchangeable in evil." So, the penalties of the damned last on because the malice of the damn lasts on. In this way, the "door" to hell is locked, as it were, from the inside.
Reflecting on the respective states of the blessed and the damned in the After, Leibniz, with a metaphysical and exegetical rigor surpassing Dante, declares in his Confessio Philosophi (1672-1673):
"the blessed [in heaven]. . . . experience delight incessantly . . . because without perpetual novelty and progress there is no thinking and hence no pleasure . . . .[yet] those [in hell] who are furiously against the nature of things. . . .they will be continually irritated by new objects of indignation, of hatred, of jealousy and, to say it in a word, of madness."
So, in heaven, there will be no boredom and no satiety in the pleasures of the good. With their new bodies and renewed souls, there will be no end of progressive physical, moral, and intellectual pleasure in the good. In hell, the indignation and hatred and jealousy and madness about God and about His best of all possible creations will descend to greater and greater depths in the souls of the damned, as they become literally or existentially less and less, fading away, in their very beings, but are never, by His perfect will, wholly extinguished. For by His justice, He holds the atrophied damned, with their demon cellmates and satanic warden, in existence for eternity.
So the progress of the Christian Leibniz is not the progress of the atheist philosophe Condorcet. Real progress is not what a lost and hedonistic and proud world says it is . Progress is not carnal and self-centered pleasure.
Real progress, as Leibniz argued, is progress in goodness. It is rooted in the ultimate reality of God and His creation. The elect, and nature in general, progress in goodness. On the other hand, the reprobate begin their regression in utero, at the first operation of their errant and rebellious wills. In the state of sin, all through his earthly life, the reprobate man is non posse non peccare, not able to not sin. At the Judgment, after all chance of regeneration is past, and persisting in his rebellion against God, yet compelled to bow before God's throne in acknowledgement of his Creator and Judge, the reprobate is sentenced to eternal torment in hell. Hence there are no atheists as of Judgment Day.
Having now read the preceding, all Christians should note well how true philosophy, as just exhibited by Leibniz and Calhoun, is a great gift to man from God, as it is instrumental within His Providence — as the human study of ultimate reality -- in displaying His greatness and His goodness. This is why Augustine, in the City of God, described the true philosopher as the true lover of God.
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Dr. Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University and is a John C. Calhoun scholar. A native of Greenville County, South Carolina, he is the son of William Garrison McCuen, Sr. and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.
