94. INTERVIEW w/ Michael Foster (A Practical Postmillennialism. Section 1. Part 4)

Well, hello everyone, and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 94, an interview with Michael Foster.

Well, hello everyone, and welcome back.

Postmillennialism as a Practical Hope for the Future

To a special episode of the podcast where we're getting to sit down with some great men of God and we're getting to hear a practical view of what post-millennialism is. If you remember, that's what our series has been all about, is understanding what post-millennialism is practically.

And today, it is my pleasure to invite my friend, my brother in the CREC, a guy that I've enjoyed getting to know, my friend Michael Foster to the show. Michael, how are you, man?

I'm doing well, thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Absolutely, man. Hey, for those who are watching, maybe who don't know who you are, don't know the things that you're passionate about, you're working on, where you're from, where you minister, all of that, man, help us know, who is Michael Foster?

Well, I, just kind of a quick overview, I became a Christian in my late teens, come from a non-Christian family, and then met my now wife, why I was teaching kind of community Bible studies, I was involved in these huge youth Bible studies and skateboard ministry.

And then Em and I got married and we've had eight kids. One is in heaven and another one's on the way, so it'll actually be nine kids that we've had together. It's pretty bonkers. So I'm a Christian, I'm a husband, I'm a father.

Then I've also, I write quite a bit. So I'm an author, I published a book called It's Good to Be a Man. And I've got two other books that I hope to have published this year. And that'll be great. And that was a ministry, It's Good to Be a Man, was like a project that me and my friend, non-tenant did to help, in particular, young men, but just men in general, kind of wrapped their head around the destruction of kind of biblical sexuality that's happened in the last couple centuries and how to reclaim their manhood and not feel ashamed about it, but be godly, virtuous, masculine men.

So I've written quite a bit on that. I think that's probably, I'm a public platform, but I'm known for more than anything. But my real passion is the church. I love being a pastor. I love planting churches.

I've planted two churches directly and helped plant two others. And so East River is where I serve as a pastor, which is here just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. And yeah, God's been really good. That's the sort of stuff I'm caught up with at any given time.

That's awesome. I don't know if everybody knows this or not, but your documentary that you did on It's Good to Be a Man can be found on Canon Plus, which is excellent. We had a men's group get together and watch it.

It's fantastic. So I would totally commend that to you. Also, you've got This is Foster, new podcast that you've been doing, which has been really good as well.

Yeah, so that's gonna pick up to get back up to three episodes a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. But I really just focus on kind of practical theology with an eye towards men, fathers and sons in particular.

So it's usually pretty short episodes that focus on some topic with a goal of just giving you something. The goal is that you'll walk away being able to take some sort of action, right?

Why Eschatology Should Be Practical

Yeah, that's a wonderful segue, Michael. Practical theology. We wanna make eschatology practical. You and I have been in the church for a while. I've been, whether volunteering or part-time or full-time in ministry now for like 12 years.

And one of the most avoided topics in theology is eschatology. You hear many folks who will say, well, I'm a pan-millennialist. I hope it's all gonna pan out in the end. And then you've got, especially in this country, some of the dispensational, pre-millennial, left behind sort of eschatology that leads to a lot of defeatism and pessimism.

So for many, eschatology is scary. It's about how the world's gonna continue to get worse and worse and worse. But we have a different view on this show. You have a different view. I wanted to just ask right off the bat, what is your view and how would you sort of very simply define it as a practical theology?

Yeah, so I am a post-millennialist, but I am not as maybe intense as some. That's usually where I am on most things. So I became a Christian in dispensational churches. That's the majority of America these days, especially if you're non-Denom, Baptist, or any form of charismatic.

And I was in the Calvary Chapel movement for a long time. The Calvary Chapel movement is quite, like especially during the 90s, preoccupied with eschatology, I would say. They talked about it a whole lot.

And really looking forward to the rapture. Chuck Smith had even predicted it several times, only to be wrong. I think 1981 was one of those times. But so they talked about it a whole lot. And I had an interest in it because the men I looked up to had an interest in it, but it got confusing.

Like when you'd read, like I'd read Revelation, the sort of hermeneutic they would use was all over the place. And it's like, why do we start interpreting it literally here but metaphorical there? You know, that sort of stuff would really throw me for a loop.

But I remember I was at Chuck Smith's church. I was like 20-something, 21, something like that. And it was the evening service, and he was going through the book of Matthew, and he gets to Matthew 24.

And Chuck's a weird dude in that sometimes he'd sound like a Calvinist, sometimes like Arminian. You know, Chuck would contradict himself all the time and be kind of okay with it. But he made some sort of side comment that the people that are being taken away in the flood were being taken away in a flood of judgment, and the people being left behind were the ones that were not being judged.

And it was like a weird moment where Chuck was inconsistent, but I was like, wait a second, what does that mean? And so then I looked at that and I said, well, that kind of really starts blowing away a part of the rapture theology.

And I started to look at the proof texts on rapture theology and started to realize that the vast majority of them were referring to something else, almost always the second coming. And so then I did what a lot of people do who have been in heavily eschologically preoccupied churches, especially the dispensational sort where you have all these charts, it's super complicated.

I became an all-millennialist. Now, I tell everyone that all-millennialism is theology or eschatology for people who don't like eschatology. You kind of had it, right? And, but all-millennialism is right because basically, right, a millennium, the question is when does the millennium happen, right?

Is it before the second coming of Christ?

Is it after?

Is it leading up to it?

Is it symbolic?

And of course, 1 ,000 years has to be symbolic. 1 ,000, every time it's used in scripture, is used in a figurative way, right? It's like cattle on 1 ,000 hills. God actually has more than that. Better is one day in your course than 1 ,000 elsewhere.

What, 1 ,001 is not? So 1 ,000 is like when you're a little kid and you say, you know, gazillion, right, a bazillion. It's just a huge expanse of time. And so all-millennialism kind of made it all a sort of heavenly spiritual drama, this sort of figurative metaphor that applies to every age.

Problem I started running into is when I looked at apocalyptic books and sections of scripture, these things always tend to correspond to actual historical events. And I slowly realized that actually pre-mill or post-mill was about the only way you could go because they locate this stuff in actual history.

And there's no way to look at the passages as the honest exegete, in my opinion, and arrive at a almost purely spiritual or figurative or metaphorical sort of conclusion. These are things that actually happen in one way or another.

And so pre-mills and post-mills, both agree, these are things that happen in history. It's question is, when do they happen in history? What order are the events and all that? So that's started to put me, make me at odds with all-millennialism.

So I think it was probably around 2013 or so, that's when I switched to being a paedobaptist, might've been a little earlier than that, and to a post-millennialist at the same time. And it was largely through the writings of Ken Gentry.

I found him to be really helpful, like all his, he had Postmillennialism Today, I think it's been renamed to something else, which is a website, but he also, there's like three or four reviews book that he contributed to that was helpful.

And so I became a post-millennialist that way, this kind of a slow, slow march. And I think in terms of practical consequences, of post-millennialism for me, is it delivered me from being obsessed with the news.

Now, the fact that news is almost entirely propaganda and lies certainly helped me be fully delivered. But when you're a pre-millennialist, you're always kind of obsessed with what's happening, and you treat the news like, oh, this is exactly what the Bible talked about.

Look how many earthquakes there are, right? There's so many wars and rumors of war. And do you think the European Union is the one world government? And you're always like really caught up with that. Yeah, right?

And who's the Antichrist? And I think when I realized that history moves in really huge increments, why God moves not like day by day the way we tend to think about it, but decades and centuries these things happen, things like that really change the way you think about that stuff.

And it delivers you from a sort of anxiety. And what I would say is one of the great weaknesses of dispensationalism and pre-millennialism from a sort of pastoral psychological perspective is that the people tend to be very anxious people.

They tend to worry a whole lot. I mean, you and I, I'm 43, how old are you?

40.

40, so we're in the same sort of bracket. We were around for Y2K, right? People were freaking out during Y2K. And I had a friend who was influenced by this guy, Monty Duda, I don't know if he's still around, but it was like some sort of weird pre-mill, messianic Jew thing going on.

And my friend actually built out his entire farm and got all this food and on Y2K locked himself down in like a bomb shelter sort of thing with his family. Very normal guy, very smart guy otherwise, but it just got, it all got into his head.

And I, so I was out with my wife, we were dating on Y2K and nothing happened. And I called this friend up the next morning, he didn't answer his phone. And I was like, so you got some livestock for sale?

And he was actually really kind of broken. He was waiting for the world to fall apart. And it's like dispensationalism gives people permission to worry and be uptight. And as a post-millennialist, I know that bad things are going to happen.

I do think all millennials and post-millennialists can have very similar mindsets because on the ground, it can almost be the same, right? Like God, the church is going to have the victory. God's going to have the victory.

Bad things can happen. There's good periods, bad periods. But as a post-millennialist, I'm not really stressed out about the news or anything. I know the church is going to win. I know that Rome is dust.

I know that Egypt is dust. I know that the church is covering the whole world. I know America could rise, fall, rise again, whatever. The church is going to keep on going. Bad things are going to happen.

But in the scheme of things, there's a sort of upward movement towards seeing the kingdom of God spread across the world. And so I just kind of put my hand to the plow where I'm at. And I don't follow the news.

I don't care about blood moons.

I don't care about any of that stuff.

So

Church History, Incremental Change, and the Growth of the Kingdom

It's so important what you're saying, Michael. So many things we could jump in on there. But why do you think a view of church history is so important when it comes to this? Because what you're saying is God moves in centuries and millenniums.

Why is it so important for us to have at least a basic view of church history when it comes to even our outlook on where the world is heading?

Yeah, it changes a whole lot. So one big way is that the way God affects things is small and incremental, and it grows and gets bigger and bigger, right? That was true of just, you just go through a list of all sorts of things in the scripture where it's like that.

And I think that is helpful for those of us that are reformed-minded, not reformed in theology, but wanting to see institutions and movements reformed. And so there's a revolutionary impulse that wants to kind of burn down institutions and build back up from the ground, as if that's an easy thing to do.

It's not.

You know, you should never, you should always try to work where you're at as long as you can until you realize like, hey, this is unreformable. And, you know, Wilson does a pretty good job in Rules of Reformers of laying out that sort of mindset.

But when you look at like false doctrines, Christological heresies and Trinitarian heresies, that was really worked out by the church over centuries. Right, you know, when you look at the ecumenical councils and all that sort of stuff, that didn't happen overnight.

It's pretty wild how people try to resolve a lot of things like this week or in a month or, you know, and they talk about like, as if these are things, well, like, well, they worked it out in the early church.

Yes, over the greatest minds over decades, if not centuries. And so I think when you start to think of reformation happening over long periods of time, again, you take the wins you can get where you're at.

And, you know, there are times where you plod and you only gain inches. It's like in football, you think about where sometimes you're just getting a couple yards, you're running back, pushes the line a little forward.

I used to be a Bengals fan.

I don't follow football anymore.

But I always hated Jerome Bettis who played for the Steelers because he just would fall forward and get four or five yards, right? Sometimes the like change works like that, where it's four or five yards.

Other times the line breaks open and the dude runs all the way down the field, right? And these like huge changes happen like quickly. So the great awakening would be an example. 2020 is probably going to end up being one of those historical breaks in the line,.

So to speak.

So when you start thinking about history in that sort of herky-jerky, incremental, slow, but upward promising changes, like I treat post-monialism like I treat cessationism, which is there, it's undeniable if you look at history.

Like, for example, with cessationism, so the ceasing of the power gifts, the sign gifts in the first century, they ceased. We know they ceased because Christosom, and I think even Augustine, like just a few centuries later, like, yeah, this part of Christians is hard to understand because we don't see this anymore, right?

And that's why these guys have to say, there's this latter rain when the gifts came back. Well, wait a second, so you are conceding that the gifts left, right? So when you look at church history, did things get worse and worse or have they gotten better and better?

Numerically speaking, there are more Christians than ever before.

Numerically speaking,.

There are more churches than ever before. Right now, the West is certainly in a gully, in a downtime, in a pretty dark one, but a Christian worldview has gained ground globally in a undeniable way over the last couple thousands of years.

And so you start to look at church history and look at this stuff, it changes the whole way you think about everything. And I don't think about things in days and weeks and years, like when I'm doing Reformation.

Right, what a helpful thing. And just the sort of plod of everyday faithfulness. And I heard an analogy one time of a father and son, the father worked his entire life on building one corner of a cathedral and he handed his hammer and he handed his tools off to his son and never got to see the cathedral finished, his son probably never did either, but just that faithful building over generations of time and just that's so helpful because we live in that microwave sort of culture where we wanna fix everything today.

Why Postmillennialism Is Resurging Now

Michael, why do you believe now that post-millennialism is starting to, I feel like it's starting to get a little bit of a resurgence. You've got guys like R .C. Sproul and Ken Gentry, Lorraine Bettner, Doug Wilson in the former generation who really started bringing what was kind of starting to become a dead view back.

And then now you've got guys like yourself, me in our church, you've got Joel Levin and some other guys who are really trying to, as young men, bring this view back out. You get apology at church, you know what I'm saying.

So why is this sort of feeling like it's resurging now at this particular time?

Well, part of it could be just wanting to have a coherent, consistent worldview where we're the beneficiaries of kind of that broad apologetic that you can trace to like guys like Francis Schaeffer or whatever.

Now we are thinking about things like government, like history, like change, like all that sort of big picture stuff where we're moving out of that sort of evangelical. So being evangelical is a good thing if we mean that we believe that faith is necessary for conversion, okay?

But when we talk about evangelicalism, we're talking about the movement that came from the 1930s and 40s as a response. It's kind of like a parallel movement with fundamentalism. And it was a response to the liberalism coming in through the main line.

So evangelicals were all about, you know, kind of street preaching or like big conversion sort of stuff like Billy Graham, think of that. But it got mixed up with youth culture and being cool and mere Christianity and all that.

And it ended up becoming very like centered on the individual and therefore narcissistic. Like you don't have to have church. You can have church yourself. It's just you and your Bible. So that sort of just me and the Bible, individualistic Christianity led to incredible compromise that blew up from the 80s on to now.

And so sometimes people online talk about as like Big Eva or whatever, like Big Pharma, Big Eva. So I think the failure of that individualistic, Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior, but it has no consequences outside of me, made people start to say like, I want a more corporate, comprehensive faith and view.

And then you have kind of the apologetics movement that's willing to speak to all these different ethical and theological issues. All that's kind of coalesced and people are saying, all right, what does scripture say about these things?

And that's where you start to really consider the work of the church throughout history, right? And that gets you to eschatology really quick. So I think eschatology is something we've needed reformation on.

I do think ecclesiology, maybe even like eschatology, ecclesiology and anthropology all have been under attack or been kind of emaciated doctrines in the church. And because it's like, it's very simple.

You can get to post-monial convictions just through a good ecclesiology. All right, the church is the body of Christ. All right, so who is the head of the church? That's Jesus. All right, so the church is ultimately the Jesus working in the world through the church.

It's his body.

Like the church isn't headless.

It's got a body.

So will Jesus have the victory in the world? Will the body of Christ, Jesus, will he win? Yes, he always wins. That's all he does. And the church has been given this mission. And oh, will the church fail?

Well, yeah, if it was by itself, but it's not. It was given the Holy Spirit. God, the third person of the Godhead is the Holy Spirit. Does the Holy Spirit fail? No, the Holy Spirit does whatever he wants.

He's gonna get it done. And so when you, I think I backed into post-monialism probably through my growing Presbyterian sort of convictions and the way I thought of the church. And so I think that's what's going on.

I think people are wanting something that connects to all of life. And so when you have something like all of Christ for all of life, that sort of saying that you see coming out of Moscow, that was the right thing at the right time because people are like, yes, I want to be a Christian everywhere in every way.

Yeah, it seems just as you were discussing that, not only did the sort of defeatism that has pushed Christianity, I would say into hiding for the last couple of decades, but that hyper-individualism, I hadn't really connected that, that Billy Graham, Big Eva, all of that stuff has sort of done.

So it's sort of a twofold attack that has caused Christianity to be impotent. And when we're not salt, the world decays. When we're not light, the world grows in darkness. I mean, that makes really good sense actually of why we've inherited the world that we've inherited.

Yeah, so that's really good, man. With the time we've got left, it looks like we've got five or six minutes left. Man, sketch out as a pastor, as a guy who's been thinking about this for a while, somebody who is doing things in the kingdom, man, help me and help us understand how having a post-millennial underpinning to our theology actually helps us faithfully engage in culture.

And maybe talk about that, not theologically, but from a practical, how are you doing it? How are you encouraging people in their manhood or womanhood and their marriages and their family? I mean, brother, you're a post-millennial guy with eight kids and one on the way and one in half.

I mean, brother, help us understand practically how this affects every aspect of our life and what we can be doing right now.

Building for Generations Through Church and Family

So when we planted East River, I came up with a vision. So vision is a mental picture of a task completed. I came up with a vision that was so big that I could not complete it. It was my goal. I think the problem with modern churches is that they're built on personalities, which is, I think, kind of natural.

God works through certain types of people, but they become so tied to that person that when that guy dies or whatever happens, the church is like messed up. And I wanted a vision of church that was intergenerational.

And so I think what's interesting to me, I'll get somewhere really edgy for a moment. So part of the problem with like, take a guy like Keynes, the economist. We know from his journals that he was a bisexual, if not a homosexual.

And his entire way that he built his view of economics is really not about the future generations because as a homosexual, he really just, that's not, that's a weak point with homosexuals. That's why they have to try to steal our kids.

So it's interesting to me, dispensationalism, since it's about, let's go, let's go, let's get out of here, man. Like, Jesus is gonna come down and bungee cord out of heaven, grab us and go right back up.

Let's go. And I don't think about it that way. I think, like, hey, I want this church to be here centuries from now, Lord willing. And so even from a church vision standpoint, we're building a church that will look very different.

Once it's completed.

And we might, you know, I think about this type of beech tree that if you plant it, when you're born, it doesn't reach full maturity, like until like 80, 100 years, right? Or actually 140 years, it's 140 years.

And so if you plant it, like in your 20s or 30s, your grandchildren will see it fully mature.

With dim eyes.

I like that. I like that idea. I like that it's a cathedral mindset where cathedrals are started by one generation and finished by the next or the one after. So post-mortalism allows for you to think generationally because you're not like, hey, it's all gonna burn.

We're all gonna be leaving any moment now, man. Like, it's the end times, it's the last days, like, you know, where we think like, well, I don't know, Jesus can come back whenever he wants. But this, we could still be in early church.

I don't know. This could be mid church.

It's so hard to say where we're at.

And so let's just build like it's gonna be another thousand years. You know, maybe we do send missionaries to Mars. I have no clue what's gonna happen. And so practically, it makes you think from generation to generation.

I like to think about my, at least my grandchildren is a focus of mine. And so practically, it helps you, a man and woman think about building an intergenerational household, I would say. And then the same thing with the church, an intergenerational church.

I think that's one of the main benefits of post-mortalism. Like if you read, It's Good to Be a Man or read a lot of our stuff, I don't, I'm not big on labels. I'll use them when I think they're helpful and clarifying, but people get like up in arms and dig their feet in when you say a label.

But if you communicate what it means, you'll find a lot of people like it. And so, and It's Good to Be a Man, we never say post-mortalism. I don't think we ever say theonomy, but you'll feel post-mortalism through it, the positive sort of like building.

And so I think post-mortalism encourages activity, action, building, because we know the church will have success. It has had success. And it will have ultimate success by the end of the age when Jesus comes back and consummates all that he's been doing in the world.

Yeah.

I think about the parable of the talents when it comes to this. The one who buried his coin in the sand is sort of the modern day, either dispensational or radical, Two King the Millennial, who's just waiting on, you know, Jesus to bungee cord us out of here.

I call it Wonka Vader, to Wonka Vader us out of here. But it's really the ones who get to work and who are building. And we can all do that. It's not just pastors. All of us can be doing that in our lives.

And really, honestly, it's pretty basic things. It's not, we don't go out and have to swing for the fences every single time we get up to the plate, right? If I lead my family in family worship, teach my children how to know who God is and equip them to be able to pass that on to my grandchildren, that is an incredible way to see the kingdom of God built.

And it's within, God developed it in such a way to where everybody could get involved in every level. And man, I'm so encouraged by the way you're talking about it and bringing it down so that we can understand it because it's so useful, so helpful.

And it's what's needed right now in the church.

Amen. Awesome.

Brother, where can we find you? What are you working on? What are you passionate about? Tell us where you're at right now.

I'm most active on Twitter. This is Foster. I've got that podcast that's rolling out. I've got, I'm gonna finish this book I've been working on forever called Surviving the Death of a Child. So that'll be done this year.

And then I have another book called, probably called Holy Ambition coming out sometime this year as well. And that's mostly done right now. So yeah, those are the things those books are I'm working on and then just hunker down here at Batavia helping church planters plant biblical, faithful churches.

Amen.

Brother, so thankful to have you on today. So thankful for you as a friend and I look forward to seeing you. I won't be seeing you at Augustine anymore. We've broken away.

Yeah.

But hopefully I'll see you again next council or whenever you're on your speaking engagements. We'll come out and support you brother.

Thanks so much.

God bless.

God bless you. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of the podcast. This show is made entirely possible by your support. So we thank you so much for that. Also, if you'd like to support the show further you can click like or subscribe or click the bell icon so that you never miss out when new content is delivered.

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He's got some great content that is sure to enrich your faith. Until next time, God richly bless you and we'll see you next time on the podcast.