111. C.R. Wiley Interview | A Practical Postmillennialism Series

The world that we live in is always falling apart. And the reason is, is because people build on sand. So the stuff that they build on sand is going to collapse.

Introduction to the Interview and Book Recommendations

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the broadcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode 111, My Interview with Pastor C .R. Wiley.

Well hello everyone, welcome back to the broadcast.

For a special episode where we're gonna be interviewing a new friend of mine I just met just a moment ago. His name is C .R. Wiley. If you haven't heard of him, he's authored several good books. One, the title alone of this book is epic.

The Household and the War for the Cosmos, which like, just honestly by the title, you should buy that book. It's where C .R. is really trying to get at how does the home have a centrality in the battle for retaking the world that fell.

So that's an excellent book I recommend to you. I've read that. Man of the House, which is presenting sort of the same themes, but it's talking specifically to men. Men, how do you reclaim your role as a man in the household?

How do you organize a house? How do you lead a house? These are things that men really need to understand, especially today in our confused world. And then, probably my favorite book, In the House of Tom Bombadil, interacting with the legendarium of J .R .R. Tolkien and really looking at this enigmatic figure called Tom Bombadil.

What does he mean theologically, mythologically, all these things? So, brother, welcome to the show.

Well, thanks, Kendall. I'm really glad to be with you.

Yeah, well, in case I didn't do a good job on that, tell us who you are, brother. Give us a little bit of background on who you are, what you've been working on, just so that we can get to know you.

Sure, well, I'm a pastor. I serve a church in the Pacific Northwest. And I've got a home here, but I also have one back in New England, not too far from you. I have a home in Connecticut. So I go back and forth.

I travel a lot, speak a lot of places. But I've been a college professor and a real estate investor, a home improvement contractor, written some things, as you noted. I'm also an illustrator. I've illustrated books and stuff.

The illustration on the front of the, in the House of Tom Bombadil is something I did. And I've got three grown children, and they're all married and have homes of their own, and I've got five granddaughters.

Wow.

That's awesome. You're building the pillars of Christendom.

Yeah, right, right. Have been happily married now, going on 40 years.

Praise the Lord, brother. All right, before we get started, I have to ask you the most pressing question, on my heart at least, and I'm pretty sure you're not gonna wanna answer this question. So it's gonna be one of those.

Okay.

Who is Tom Bombadil?

Yeah, well, if it were an easy answer, then there wouldn't have been a need for a book, I guess. Well, as you know, because you've read it, I guess you've read it. You know, you've got a lot of speculation, but Tolkien was intentionally cagey on the subject.

He was, he said he's enigmatic on purpose. So if you try to nail it down too much, you actually are defying the will of the master, Tolkien himself.

That's a great answer.

But I think that there are things to work with, and that's what I try to do in the book.

Yeah, I have no idea who Tom Bombadil was. For one season of my life, I thought it was the incarnate version of Eru Iluvatar.

Yeah.

I thought he was a Maya, a Val. I have no idea, but I think your answer probably is the best.

Well, yeah, I think that, you know, if people are interested in sort of nailing it down in the legendarium, his identity in the legendarium, there's no hope. But if you're interested more in how he functions in the story, in other words, what his literary role is in the telling of the tale, I think there's a lot to work with.

Yeah, and recommend your book for that. Certainly explores those themes very well.

Thank you.

Postmillennialism, Eschatology, and the Shape of Christian Hope

Speaking of endeavors that actually can produce hope, as opposed to trying to nail down Tom Bombadil, I'd like to talk to you today about post-millennialism. And for my listeners, as you know, we've been going through a series called a practical post-millennialism.

We don't want to talk about theological concepts that are a hundred thousand feet in the air and you can't, only the most aloof and erudite theologians can possibly understand them. We want to bring these things down.

We want to understand them so that they have real impact on our life. Because as I've noticed, and I've been dispensational, I then moved to millennial and then now I'm graduated to the correct view of post-millennialism.

I've noticed that eschatology matters so much more than what people actually think, that it actually does impact the way that we live and it does impact the way that we interact in culture and the world.

So brother, tell us, first of all, let's just get started. How did you get started in eschatology? Have you held different views? How did you come to post-millennialism? Let's hear a little bit of that.

Yeah, I, like many people, was converted in a evangelical setting where kind of the default setting was pre-millennial in outlook. In the 70s, Hal Lindsey was a big deal, like Great Planet Earth, all that kind of stuff.

And it really coincided with a real turn, even in the larger culture, to a kind of apocalypse. If you recall, in the early 70s, there were a number of films like Soylent Green or Planet of the Apes or Omega Man.

They all had Charlton Heston in it and the world was just like about to end in each of the stories. But that was because of some of the work done by the Club of Rome, which was a think tank, which had kind of a Malthusian population bomb, running out of resources outlook.

And so before the World Economic Forum, we had the Club of Rome. And as is often the case, kind of the larger cultural mood kind of colored the outlook of the church. Now, the pre-millennial view had been around for a while, but there's kind of an historic pre-millennialism and then there's kind of the American dispensationalist version.

They're different. And the dispensationalist version is the new guy on the block. I think that's one of the things that catches people by surprise. It's not the old view. But in terms of my own journey, that's where I began.

Later, I had what sometimes is referred to as Pamela, millennialism. It will all pan out in the end, just because I thought that the debates were just sort of difficult to resolve. But I'm, as you know, post-millennial today, and I had a kind of a millennial outlook.

And I think actually, a millennialism and pre-millennialism are, in certain respects, compatible. It kind of depends on how you're looking at the question. So post-millennialism is more concerned about history and amillennialism is more sort of influenced by metaphysics.

So they're kind of coming at it from different directions. But anyways, that's maybe too fine a, you know, hair to split at this point. But in terms of my own arrival at post-millennialism, I was influenced a little bit by David Chilton and some of the stuff I've read, you know, coming out of the world of the theonomist.

But this was even before I was reformed. So I was reading this stuff before that, but I was intrigued and I think won over to the post-millennial view, maybe paradoxically, even before I was reformed.

Yeah, what do you think it was about the way that, say, Chilton and maybe some of the guys in that group described it? What do you think it was that captivated you?

Well, I think if you have a high view of the created order as being, you know, the handiwork of God, and that redemption is about recovering what had been damaged or healing what had been damaged and restoring it, just like with human beings.

And then, you know, you take Paul's words in Romans 8 to heart concerning, you know, the creation longing for or groaning for the revelation of the sons of God, because it'll be, you know, released from its bondage into decay.

If you have, if you take all that to heart, then, you know, you can't help but hope, wish for it to be true, first of all. And then it really just, then at that point, it becomes a matter, can you believe it?

God can pull it off, because that's really what it's about. It's about God pulling it off. It's not about us. You know, we labor and it's important for us to have hope, but ultimately it's God achieving his purpose and, you know, his objectives.

And he can do anything, even when it looks like it's impossible. I mean, when Christ was, you know, in the grave, you know, when he was in the, you know, the disciples had lost hope, that that didn't mean that the, you know, the resurrection wasn't gonna happen.

Yeah, amen.

Sounds like that some of your thinking goes all the way back to Genesis 1, even. I know for me, I don't know if this is typical of other guys, but I know for me, Genesis 128 was so key in bringing me to the post-millennial view, because I just thought to myself, here's a plan that God called very good.

And yet in no eschatological view, except post-millennialism, does it actually come to pass?

Right, right. Yeah, that's right. And I think that, you know, the, there's a kind of pessimism to premillennialism that I don't think is Christian.

Yeah.

So now, I'm not saying that, you know, premillennials aren't Christians. I'm not saying that, but I'm just saying that there's something about it that strikes me as, you know, despair, if not hatred, you know.

Sometimes premillennial people are accused, and I'm not saying that this is the case, but sometimes the premillennial view smacks of Gnosticism, kind of a contempt for the physical world.

Why do you think, so I'm sort of seeing connections here, like we live in a world where murder and violence and everything, all that sells, like negativity, the hate, the violence, all that. Why do you think that premillennialism in particular sort of thrives so well in the American ethos?

Well, you know, one respect, you just already noted why, and that's because we have a hunger for, I guess, disaster films. We kind of think of the world, you know, there's a kind of a fascination with any kind of thing that is large, significant, and so forth being brought to nothing.

So if we think about like the end of the Roman Empire, or we think about, you know, even something like, here's another thing. So I remember in the 70s, back at the same time when the late great planet Earth was a big deal, we had a lot of disaster films.

It was like earthquake, towering inferno, you know, it seemed like, you know, we were just wanting to bring it all down, burn it all down. But there is a kind of pyromania, you know, people love to see things kind of get burned up.

And I think it's true for all of us, there's a kind of fascination with that. So it sells, and it alarms you. I mean, I think that there have been good things that have come out of the, kind of the dread, the impending, the sense of impending judgment.

Now, we still believe in judgment as post-millennial, you know, Christians. But we believe there's another side to the judgment. Judgment is kind of a purgation, not just an obliteration. But the fact that people feel that dread, and the need to, well, have a come to Jesus moment, because they need to get right, is the upside of the pre-millennial view.

Right.

What is that dread? And I'd like to get into sort of the biblical case for optimism as well. But what does that dread ultimately produce? Obviously, we said it's an un-Christianly sort of emotion. It doesn't really fit with what we see, that we're encouraged to be hopeful, and do not fear, and all these things.

In Scripture, do not fear is 365 times, I believe, it's mentioned in the Scriptures, right? One for every day.

But what is this? That's great, I never thought about that. I'll have to remember that.

Well, I think that's true. If it's not, don't quote me. But what is dread, that dread that we're talking about? What does it actually produce in the church? I mean, what does it cause us to do or to not do, that we should have not been doing or been doing?

Yeah, well, the first thing that's an upside is that you address the state of your soul, which is a good thing. The bad thing is that it discourages any kind of long-term projects, including the evangelization of the world.

Now, the evangelization of the world can be impelled or sort of motivated by a fear that we gotta get the word out before the end. I think that that's true. But there's no sense that the good side is going to win short of the destruction of the world.

Now, it depends what we mean by the destruction of the world. There's the world that we have made, which is under God's judgment. It's a Babel tower, it'll come down. But the world that God has made is what we're talking about here.

The restoration, the healing of it, and the future in which the church has discipled the nations. And that's obviously a long-term project. And that's one of the things about post-millennialism that I think takes some getting used to, because when we're talking timeline, many post-millennialists are realistic in this particular sense.

It may take a long time, with a lot of ups and downs along the way. So anyway, what it does is it gives you a sense of sort of I'm a part of a long-term project, and we're gonna win.

I was gonna ask real quick with what you just said. Do you think that pre-millennialism gratifies that sort of instantaneous inclination that we have in 24-hour news cycles and stuff like that?

Yeah, there is a kind of yellow, there's a similarity to yellow journalism, as they used to be referred to, like the National Enquirer and all that kind of stuff. The stuff that is schlocky and shocky, it does satisfy that.

We have an appetite for that kind of stuff. That's why whenever somebody is about to share some salacious bit of news about some person we don't like who's a public figure, we like our ears, we kinda lean in and wanna hear some more.

That's not a good thing about human beings, by the way.

It's not a redeeming quality.

That's right, that's right.

That's one of the things that we need to be, we need to repent with regard to. But when it comes to getting back to your, why is it that we think in those terms? Well, we don't think in those terms about ourselves.

We think in those terms about other things. When it comes to us, we want the happy ending, right? And what we're told and what's held out for us in post-millennia has been the prospect that it's not just a happy ending for human beings, but for the whole creation.

Yeah, it's so funny. I hadn't thought about it in that way before, but most folks who see a catastrophe upon the horizon for the culture or for the world really believe that they're getting better. And they work like they're wanting to get better.

They add hobbies or exercise or diet. The precondition is I need to get better, but the world's getting worse or collapsing.

Yeah, yeah. So now at a personal level, that's great, but I think that at an institutional level or at a social level, what it does is it discourages us from getting involved with things that are significant and lasting and so forth.

The most obvious illustration that's used has to do with church architecture. People will say, why don't we build cathedrals anymore? Well, your really hardcore dispensationalist will say, well, because the world's about to end, why should we invest ourselves in something like that?

Right.

Well, let's say it doesn't end tomorrow. Wouldn't it be great to have something that still speaks? So if we think about the stones crying out, if we look at a cathedral, the stones literally are speaking to us.

Yeah, there may be an environment within which that cathedral is the only thing that's proclaiming the glory of God, but it's still doing that. And it's a reminder that there are things above. So is that worthwhile?

I think so.

Yeah.

It sort of seems like that the view that we're talking about would say, if you don't finish it in time, Jesus returns before that, that you've wasted your effort. And maybe the master, when he comes to evaluate the slaves, he's gonna say that you were foolish and a wicked servant.

But isn't it really the one that buries the talent that doesn't end up doing what Christ said, that it's the one that Christ is the most harsh with?

Yeah, and another dimension to this is, do we believe that mundane things matter to God that we can glorify? So sometimes we can be put to shame by unbelievers. An example would be Steve Jobs, who obviously wasn't a believer, but he wanted the products that his company Apple produced to be beautiful on the inside where people couldn't see, or on the back where it was against the wall, or things like that.

And our ancestors in the cathedral builders, they had that in mind too. If you go into some of the cathedrals and you go up into some of the truss work, you'll see sculpture that can only be seen by God.

In other words, it looks up. People down below don't see it.

That is so cool.

Yeah.

The Biblical Case for Postmillennial Hope

Well, let's jump from here, because I wanna get to the practical stuff in just a moment, because that's ultimately where we need to land. But the foundation for all of that is the Word. So how did you come to this biblically?

If you could, just what are some meaningful verses? How do you see it? Do you see it biblically, theologically, from Genesis to Revelation? Are there key verses that were really impactful that unlocked this for you?

Help us understand that sort of biblically.

Yeah, well, it's a theme that runs through scripture. So if we're talking about proof texts, I would say it's Romans chapter eight. It's awfully hard for you to read the things that Paul is saying there without sort of noting that this is a creation-wide effort, that creation itself is being redeemed.

We are certainly super important in that whole process, because we were at fault in the beginning. And so it's the restoration of our place in the order of things that's key. And that's also brought up in Romans 8.

But I think that once you, that would be the go-to thing for me, that passage. But really, the thing that's, I think, worth, but this kind of dates me, I guess. When I was a young Christian in the late 70s, early 80s, if you said post-millennialism, the liberals came to mind.

It was the social gospel people. Now, they're all long gone and dead, so people don't think about that anymore. But that's kind of the brush that tarred the term back in those days, because there was a kind of human-centeredness to it.

But the post-millennialism that we're talking about is a God-centered thing, where this is God's activity and he's at work. And he's not trying to, or he's not up to some of the things that maybe people in the late 19th century and the early 20th century were thinking.

So kind of a publication that was a really big deal once upon a time, and it's just sort of like running on fumes today, is the Christian Century. I don't know if you're familiar with the name or the publication.

Yeah, I've heard of it.

But it was kind of like the Christianity today of its era. And the Christian Century was supposed to be the 20th century. So they were a little bit presumptuous. They didn't anticipate the Bolshevik Revolution or the First World War, or the Depression, or the Second World War, or atomic bombs.

They didn't.

So that kind of human-centered optimism more or less died out after the 1940s, and there really wasn't much of it left. But it was, nevertheless, if you go further back into the 19th century and earlier into the 18th, the post-millennial view was the prevailing view, particularly in the reform world.

You were either amillennial or post-millennial in your outlook. Premillennialism just wasn't much of a thing at that time.

In my study on this, you can correct me if I'm wrong, after about the third to fourth century, premillennialism sort of faded as a prominent view, and it really didn't come back until the 19th century.

It was in seed form in the 17th and 18th century, part of radical reformation movements and stuff, but it kind of got lost for over 1 ,000 years, which is kind of funny that it's 1 ,000 years.

Yeah, that is.

Yeah, but that's what I've noted as well or seen as well.

Historical question, just because I know you know Glenn Sunshine, so maybe you know history too.

I don't know as much as Glenn.

He's great. I'm actually trying to get him on the show as well.

Oh, good.

But post-millennialism, for a lot of people, especially people that I talk to about it, they've never heard of it, and it feels like an invention, kind of like it just popped in out of nowhere and that it's the new kid on the block.

What would you say to that?

Well, just that generally speaking, American Christians don't know much church history. You know, it's just a fact. I mean, I'm not trying to beat up anybody, but we just don't know very much. When you have a better kind of appreciation for you know, believers in the past and become aware of what they thought and how they contributed so much to our world and you know, the church, even with all the shortcomings today, you know, you realize that it's not new and that it's a very, I guess, cogent and significant movement within the church or in theology.

One of the things, too, of course, is when we're talking about these things, when we're talking about eschatology, we're not talking about first order things in a certain sense, but we can say, you know, your theory or your understanding of the end is not as important as, you know, salvation by grace through faith alone in Jesus Christ.

That's the main thing, you know. And someday, all those pre-millennial people will find out how wrong they were and they'll be glad.

And we'll all rejoice together.

That's right, right.

So, but it's still important. And I think your, you know, your suggestion that it makes a big difference practically is absolutely right.

The Household as a Preview of the World to Come

Yeah, well, let's dive into that, brother. You've been thinking this way for a little while. You're a pastor. You've written books on the family and on, you know, how to help biblical manhood, womanhood, these things.

How would you say just, you know, an important view like this, how would you say that it's important to the life of the Christians that you're ministering to and an understanding of this sort of invigorating folks?

What would you say practically to that?

Well, particularly at the level of the household, there are at least two things that are important in terms of how this doctrine influences households. One is that we are bringing children into the world to participate in a long-term project.

So having children is not just something that makes you happy, it makes God happy. And it's about building out a church that is gonna be around after you're gone. So, you know, if God blesses my grandchildren, they will, you know, far outlive me.

And hopefully they'll, you know, by God's grace, carry forward, you know, things that they've received and then pass those things on to their children. So there's a kind of covenantal outlook that post-millennialism is in harmony with.

That you really don't, you really have a hard time reconciling that with pre-millennial thinking. Pre-millennialism almost could get you in the same frame of mind that you see with some of these, you know, people who think that we shouldn't have children because it creates a greater, I guess, carbon footprint, you know, in the world.

So it's better not to have them because it's better for the environment or something like that.

That's very popular where you're living.

Yeah, that's right, that's right.

And in Massachusetts.

Yeah.

But what that means is that these people have essentially given up on the future. Now, many times people don't live fully consistently. You know, you could say to say a person who's a pre-millennialist, why are you having children?

Aren't you, you know, bringing them into a world that's just gonna get worse and worse, you know? But many pre-millennial people have them anyway. And I'm glad they do. So don't get me wrong. But if we were to try to make everything sort of consistent, there are certain questions that arise.

Why? Why are you doing it? Well, the person might respond, well, it's God's command. Okay, great, I agree. But why is God doing that then? You know, if you get my drift. A lot of times people don't follow the stuff out or think it through, but it does, even things that we've not sort of fully seen, sort of reconciled in our theology or in our way of looking at things, do have unforeseen or sort of unintended consequences.

So there are things that, you know, we have to worry about there. So the covenantal aspect of it is really important. The other thing is that a household, if you're familiar with my book, The Household and the War for the Cosmos, is a picture of the world to come.

So when we look at Ephesians chapters five and six, what we're given there is the household code, you know? And the household code is justified not just simply because of its functional character, but because it foreshadows something.

It foreshadows the end of the world. What's the end of the world? Well, there's a correspondence. Husbands are like Christ. Wives are like the church. And there's this reference that, or this statement that Paul makes where he says, you know, that there's a mystery.

And the mystery relates to the one flesh union of a man and a woman. And then he starts talking about the resurrection. And you're like, what in the world does that have to do with anything? And then you realize that it's because Christ has been raised that the church will be raised.

So there's a connection there between a husband and a wife that reflects this hope that we have of the resurrection from the dead and the world to come. So there's just a kind of ongoing daily significance that we try to embody the world to come in the present.

That's so good because there's plenty of things we can do. If we're talking about like what can the average Christian do in the mission, in the ministry, whatever that God has called you to do, there's so many things.

And oftentimes we think big. We think I need to sell everything and go move to Timbuktu or I need to start a business. All these, we have these big ideas and then we sort of convince ourself we can't do them.

But what you're saying is that any Christian can be a part of the building of the kingdom of God through the building of their home.

Yeah, building up your household. Your household can be, like I said, kind of a snapshot or like a preview of things to come. Now, obviously that's pretty tough. You know, we're talking about, you know, fallen human beings and trying to live together on a daily basis.

At the same time, God's great.

That's right.

At the same time, God's grace is at work. And, you know, hopefully through a growth in grace, we're enjoying, you know, a growth in sanctification and that love between a husband and his wife in every greater measure reflects the love between Christ and the church.

So that's, but you gotta have a future in mind if that's gonna be made real in the present.

That's such a good point because I think, I could be wrong on this, but I think that a lot of times we don't end up building in the home, teaching family worship or catechizing the children or trying to build for something like multiple generations that I'm not even gonna see in my lifetime.

I think we miss that because our focus has been pulled out on all of the chaos that's happening around us. When, if we really think about it, like you've been saying and really trace that thread all the way back, the world can't produce offspring for the view that they're offering right now because it's a dead view.

Lesbians, gays and transsexuals and all these, they don't have children. So the only way their view works long-term is if we don't disciple our children and they steal our children.

Right, and even people who don't have those sexual inclinations are not having kids.

Yeah, that's true.

And it doesn't mean they're not having sex. It just means they're not open to what that they should be open to, which is the fruit of that union between a man and a woman. So yeah, I mean, we're at, what's the number here in the United States?

1 .8 births per woman. You need, if you just wanna stay static, if you don't wanna grow or shrink, I think you need 2 .1, they say, just because people die before they can have kids. So, and it's even worse in other parts of the world.

The old joke or the old sort of the old observation or the statement, in a world of blind people, the man with one eye is king. The United States is in a better spot than say South Korea or China or Japan, which are all in the midst of population collapse at a pretty dramatic rate, like hundreds of thousands every year, the population is shrinking in those places.

So, but Italy is the same way, Spain is the same way. And they've tried to incentivize having children by giving you tax breaks or free education or whatever, and it's not working. And I think it's because what you just noted, there's no hope, there's no future.

Progressives are misnamed. Progressives are not interested in the future, they're interested in the present. They wanna maximize in the present their freedom and pleasure.

Long-Term Faithfulness, Generational Hope, and Living by What Cannot Be Seen

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember in seminary, I remember reading a little, I think it was a preface to one of Jonathan Edwards' books, it was written by someone else. And it just had like a list of 100 years of the genealogy of his family tree.

Yeah, pretty impressive, isn't it?

Yeah, I was blown away, because he would have never known that. He died kind of relatively young, from a vaccine, I believe.

Yeah, smallpox.

Vaccines got him.

That's right, that's right.

That's the meme we needed during that COVID thing. Here's a man who believed the science.

Oh my goodness, we're gonna get banned from YouTube. That's funny. But it really impacted me, though, that here's a guy who I think had post-millennial leanings, but he would have never known what impact that his life had and his faithfulness had.

And it just was so refreshing to me to stop thinking like the disciples, after Jesus ascended, they're staring in the clouds, and the angels come down and say, men of Galilee, what are you doing?

Yeah, sure, right.

It got me out of that mode of thinking. It was really impactful.

Well, that's great. I'm sure that if Jonathan Edwards were aware of your take on that, he'd be pleased. Maybe he is, I don't know.

Yeah, well, brother, I know we're running short on time, but I did wanna ask you, just as a pastor, as a guy who's been doing this for a while, what would you say to young people who are living in this sort of chaotic time that we're living in?

There's a lot of pessimism. There's a lot of people talking about the downfall of America and things like that. What would you say to them, based off what we've been talking about, but just as a pastor, how would you encourage them?

Yeah, well, I think what I would say is you need to take the long view. The world that we live in is always falling apart, and the reason is is because people build on sand. So the stuff that they build on sand is going to collapse.

That's the story of the wise and the foolish builders, right, okay? So now, insofar as we bring in things that don't belong into the church, this is what Paul is getting at, and I think it's 1 Corinthians 3, and when you build with the different materials, the foundation is sound, but you might be using really shoddy materials, and those materials will be demonstrated to be shoddy when the day of fire comes.