It has been over a year since Robert Felix (Not By Fire, But By Ice) has passed. His legacy can be found in the relevant work of Ben Davidson and the Suspicious Observers community. Rob Skiba’s death was just a year ago circa. October 13th/14th. Questions surrounding his hospital care and his death from a covid infection remain unanswered. While Felix’s permanent legacy was left in his books, Skiba’s contribution was mainly in his video and YouTube productions, which thankfully, his wife continues to maintain.
For the legacy of men to cross the generations, to exist longer than a footnote in someone’s history book or the fading memories of the living who are eventually dead themselves, men must institutionalize their work. That is how great men perpetuate their legacy: in constitutions, corporations, colleges, libraries, seminaries, religious denominations and so on. Everybody knows who Martin Luther is because he founded the Lutheran Church.
In 1978, I became a postmillennialist . . . before I had ever heard of the term. I was 19 years old. I was a young Pentecostal preacher who was teething on the life and message of the renowned 19th Century Evangelist and long-time President of Oberlin College, Charles G. Finney. Anyone who pays attention to controversies of our day will recognize Oberlin College as the rich kid’s University of Wokeism. It bears no resemblance and holds no regard for its charter founder.
Gordon C. Olson, who was responsible more than anyone in reviving Finney’s legacy during the latter half of the 20th Century (even more so than the mysterious Jack Chick of Christian comic book fame), discovered this the hard-way upon his pilgrimage to Oberlin during the 1950s. Finney’s works had been relegated to the library attic gathering dust of which it was he who began the process of what we might call an “archaeological recovery.” He would sometimes mourn Oberlin’s apostasy in his lectures, one in which he related a conversation he overheard among two Oberlin students in the men’s room: they had concluded that there was no such thing as absolute truth!
Many old-school YWAMers (Youth With A Mission, International) will remember Gordon Olson and his benefactor, Harry Conn, who financed the republication of Finney’s works by Bethany Publishing House. For a time, Conn’s activities in YWAM and conservative Evangelical churches created a market for these books. Holders-on, like George Otis, Jr. (The God They Never Knew) have since devolved into – as I predicted long ago – a Frank Peretti-style mysticism with a “ghost and goblin” demonology in which they have literalized C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters into an ideology of “spiritual warfare” akin to the medieval mythology supporting the Crusades. I consider Frank Peretti’s novels (This Present Darkness, et al) to be about as doctrinally sound as were Dan Brown’s (DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons, etc.): fantasy writers. Need I say more?
I am not trying to pick a fight with these men; they are probably smarter, more talented, and successful than I can ever hope to be. I bring it up to make a point: their life’s work will be lost in the mists of time because they are not in this for the long haul. Fame and fortune are a flash in the pan. When I became a postmillennialist I had to confront the reality of my mortality and the likelihood that my ministry would be a failure. What does a man do who expects to fail? Answer: Establish a line of succession to the calling. In my case, I must reformat my writings into useful textbooks, produce an updated catechism, and create a pedagogy. My family will be the guardians of my library, writings, and whatever else can be called a legacy. The doctrine of succession grows from the biblical doctrine “of the Father and the Son.”
We must ask the questions pertaining to how civilizations are made and perpetuated. Civilizations can last for a thousand years.
There it is again: that word that means a thousand years – millennium. What does it mean to be a postmillennialist?
The postmillennialist believes that the glories of the Millennial Kingdom of Jesus Christ as described in Revelation (and in the books of Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel) come from the blessings bestowed upon covenant-keeping societies, irrespective of a discontinuous historical event. In other words, as Finney argued, all the necessary antecedents for the Millennial kingdom were provided in the work of Christ. The “second-coming” will occur at the end of the Millennium.
Loraine Boettner’s classic, The Millennium, is a good introduction to the subject. Follow that up with the works of R. J. Rushdoony, which are still available at the Chalcedon Foundation. And then, David Chilton’s books available from Dominion Press. If you want Finney’s input, get the Bethany compilation, The Promise of the Spirit, published in 1980.
These men believe the church is the institution which does the work of the Kingdom. I differ from them and argue that it is the family, the family organized as an institution, which does this Kingdom work.
Because men do not live a thousand years, civilizations require a strong doctrine of succession. It is possible that a time will come when the human life-span will be lengthened to a thousand years. If it does, I don’t believe that will happen any time soon. We must first overcome the temporal defilement of Original Sin. Perhaps Christians are free of it judicially, and certainly the time will come when the infirmity it has caused will be eliminated (as in the Resurrection, for example), but I do not believe we can be free of it in terms of our sanctification, not until the pertinent statutory laws of the Mosaic Code have been successfully obeyed for the required “four generations” (see the forthcoming, Day of Trumpets Pesher, 2022) – a thing which has never happened in the history of the human race. We love our sin too much to even recognize it as such. We perversely think Original Sin is the law of nature.
In contrast, Transhumanists believe that we can manipulate the genetic code to overcome the human condition. For them, the wave of the future is the chimera and the cyborg. The reader is invited to watch Rob Skiba’s presentation on “2045: The Year We Become Immortal” which still can be found on his YouTube channel. He exposes the elitist’s plan or you can read my archived book available here: The Seed of Cain & the Revival of Mystic Humanism (1987).
Of course, most Christian denominations think this deliverance will come from a sovereign act of God at the return of Christ. They have no answers we can take with us into the world which follows God’s Great Eschaton at the next solar nova in 2046 AD.
As a postmillennialist, I believe God will someday end history at what Christians call “The Great White Throne Judgment,” but God also judges in history to further His kingdom. Extinction level events are possible in the Postmillennialist scheme as a prelude to a new sacred history, a new heroic age. That is really what the Millennium will be.
A solar nova and its subsequent ice age will be a just such a disaster followed by a new geological winter. It will be an age which will belong to a remnant: those who endure unto the end. It will require a faith which teaches self-sacrifice to make-way for a new generation. In other words, as in every heroic age, men will die saving their families from nature’s wrath. Women will conceive children, knowing they will die in childbirth.
[I]n the kingdom of Christ there shall be evil and filthy days, in which however we shall be saved . . .(Epistle of Barnabas 7:8, an early Christian writing).
James W. Stivers, October 2nd, 2022
