Rapture Fever

62 RAPTURE FEVER
But thou shalt remember the LORD thy God: for it is he that
giveth thee power to get wealth, that he may establish his covenant
which he sware unto thy fathers, as it is this day.
This is positive feedback: covenantal faithfulness brings external
blessings from God, which in turn are supposed to reinforce
people’s confidence in the covenant, leading them to greater
faithfulness, bringing them added blessings, and so forth. It was
the postmillennial optimism of early Calvinism and English
Puritanism that first introduced this worldview of culture-wide,
compounding, covenantal growth to Western civilization. 1 The
vision of Deuteronomy 28:1-14 captivated the English Puritans:
the external cultural blessings that inevitably accompany covenantal
faithfulness.
The development of the Calvinistic and Puritan doctrine of
both spiritual and cultural progress reshaped the West. For the
first time in human history, men were given a full-blown idea
of progress, which was above all a doctrine of ethical progress.
This vision was secularized by the philosopher of the Enlightenment,
but that secularized version of progress is rapidly fading
from the humanist West.* Belief in the universality of entropy
(meaning inevitable decay) is only one of the causes of this
growing pessimism, but it is a powerful one.
In the twentieth century “pessimillennialism” - a term
coined by Nigel Lee to describe both premillennialism and
amillennialism – have been the dominant eschatologies. Those
who hold such views have self-consciously rejected the idea of
visible, institutional, social progress. They insist that the Bible
does not teach such a hope with respect to the world prior to
Christ’s personal, physical return in judgment.
1. The Jounrul of Christian Reconstruction, VI (Summer 1979): “Symposium on
Puritanism and Progress.”
2. Robert A. Nisbet, Histmy of the Idea of Progress (New York Basic Books, 1980),
ch. 9.