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Postmillenials

So there's a lot of discussion at the moment about why postmillenials are leaving the church. I'd like to suggest one possible reason, and that's an inappropriate explanation of the gospel. Evangelicals tend towards using a substitutionary atonement theology in their explanations: we're sinners, we deserve God's wrath, Christ took the punishment we deserved, and so on. The trouble with this is that it really doesn't resonate with a postmillenial view of the world. 

Firstly people don't think of themselves as sinners. To believe we are sinners means accepting a world where God is judge, there are clear rules, we have broken them, and that puts us in the dock, as it were. We're like criminals. But millenials don't feel that way.

Another option, according to Jayson Georges' book 3D Gospel, is that people see themselves as shaming their family or peer group or 'clan' (again, a kind of peer group), and that this causes a break in relationship. Certainly feelings of alienation from society are common in the Western world. 

A third option is that people are afraid of spiritual powers of some kind, though in the millenial world these are most likely to be in the realm of fantasy. Zombies are hardly real, one hopes :).

One solution people often experiment with is to make the gospel more me-focused, to fit in with the 'I' world of iPhones, iPads and so on. So Jesus (note the more familial address) died 'just for me'. Well, no, actually, he died for the sins of the world (1 John 2:2). 'Yes, but he would have died just for me', they reply. Well, possibly, but let's get back to reality shall we? And also, why do we have to stick with a paradigm that worked in the 17th century but clearly doesn't work today?

My proposal is that we re-work some of the older (and perhaps better) theologies of the atonement, such as Christus Victor, and the Ransom Model:
  • Christus Victor says that Christ one the victory over Satan and all the powers of evil, the proof of which is his resurrection from the dead. This is a very popular model with Charismatics and Pentecostals, for obvious reasons
  • The Ransom Model says that Christ paid a ransom for us, by dying in our place, and in rising again proved that he could not be held captive. It's not clear who the ransom is paid to (the usual suggestions are that it was paid to Satan, or Death) but it's clear that we were living in darkness, and the ransom paid brought us into the kingdom of light
There may be other models too which could be used. Whatever we do let's steer clear of the 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' mentality which keeps us stuck in a rut.

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  1. Dawut18 August 2017 at 01:54

    Re. other models - one suggestion I just received was to look at NT Wright's view. I'll try and summarise his view as I read it in Surprised by Hope: the cross and resurrection brought about a real change in history that resulted in something happening in the cosmic level. We can look forward to a future where there will be a new heaven and a new earth - and heaven will meet earth (heaven isn't a place you go to when you die). So his focus is on cosmic reconciliation. Colossians is a good book to read to find out more about that.

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