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Rushdoony’s Impact on Eschatology

​Postmillennialism. The eschatology that taught that the entire world would be converted to Christ prior to His return in glory and the ushering in of eternity. The view that treated the Great Commission as being greater than the span of man’s enfeebled imagination. The idea that Jesus Christ would one day literally be the Savior of the World (John 4:42) by having drawn all men unto Himself (John 12:32).

Martin G. Selbrede
  • Martin G. Selbrede
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Postmillennialism. The eschatology that taught that the entire world would be converted to Christ prior to His return in glory and the ushering in of eternity. The view that treated the Great Commission as being greater than the span of man’s enfeebled imagination. The idea that Jesus Christ would one day literally be the Savior of the World (John 4:42) by having drawn all men unto Himself (John 12:32).

Postmillennialism. In the early 1970s, it was the Rodney Dangerfield of eschatologies: it didn’t get any respect. It was the eschatology that nobody took seriously. Postmillennialists were seen as the flat-earthers of the world of eschatology. They were dismissed as unbiblical on the authority of scholars of the other camps who labeled postmillennialists as seriously out of step with both Scripture and with the world we live in. The theory was unrealistic, discredited, groundless, and deprived the church of the blessed hope (as the opposing scholars defined it).1

Postmillennialism was declared to be dead, with no living voice raised in its defense. If seminary students encountered vestiges of it in the works of the Puritans or scholars like Hodge and Warfield, they were advised to overlook this weakness in the otherwise impeccable Biblical scholarship of those men. “We know better now.” As Hal Lindsey said of the Reformers, they were all in darkness when it came to prophecy and its interpretation.

Things deteriorated to the point that postmillennialism was effectively handed its hat, as evidenced by the title of the book Premillennialism or Amillennialism?2 a title that implicitly denies that postmillennialism was a legitimate option worthy of consideration. Not only was postmillennialism not a player, it wasn’t even on the bench. Oswald T. Allis elected to keep his postmillennialism to himself, preferring the more respectable label of “anti-chiliast” (anti-premillennial) at least up until the time Roderick Campbell’s Israel and the New Covenant first appeared in print. Postmillennialist Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, a highly respected theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, died in 1921. Dr. Loraine Boettner didn’t enter Princeton until eight years later—Warfield and Boettner never met. But Boettner went on to become the lone postmillennialist with sufficient spiritual testosterone to write a mid-twentieth-century book that actually defended the postmillennial position. Was he a lone voice crying in the wilderness,3 or just an irrelevant fossil? In terms of influence at the time, this aged Christian gentleman, steeped in the values of an earlier generation, was conveniently pigeonholed as a quaint throwback to a less-informed era. Judgment: fossil.

But then someone new appeared at the theological party. A short dark stranger stood silhouetted in the doorway. The music stopped, and the bouncers looked confused. One of the most accomplished Christian scholars of the late twentieth century had weighed in on the matter of eschatology. Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, who had read Warfield voraciously in his youth, who had personally known Boettner, not only was a postmillennialist, he started actively promoting the position.

In 1970, his commentaries on Daniel and Revelation (Thy Kingdom Come) were published. In 1971, his foreword appeared at the head of a J. Marcellus Kik anthology entitled An Eschatology of Victory. The Journal of Christian Reconstruction, which Chalcedon published, issued a Symposium on the Millennium in 1976, while 1978 saw the publication of a short but powerful booklet, God’s Plan for Victory: The Meaning of Postmillennialism.

Because postmillennialists leverage long-term thinking, Rushdoony wasn’t bothered by the absence of instantaneous results, but patiently labored to build foundations that would stand the test of time. The slow rebirth of postmillennialism mirrored the trickle-to-stream-to-river miracle recorded in Ezekiel 47:1–6: we’ve moved from virtually no postmillennialists to being ankle-deep in them, to being knee-deep in them, and soon will be waist-deep in them and more. “Son of man, do you see this?” (v. 6, NIV). Other notable scholars were swept up in the train, writing, teaching, publishing, persuading, being either directly or indirectly influenced by Rushdoony’s (and Chalcedon’s) lead. It may have been true in the 1960s, as Hal Lindsey asserts in his best-selling The Late Great Planet Earth, that no self-respecting scholar looking at world conditions would call himself a postmillennialist. It took someone more concerned with the Scripture than his self-respect, more concerned with God’s law-word than with world conditions, to alter the direction of eschatological discourse. Rushdoony changed the face of the millennial debate in the final third of the twentieth century, well before it was respectable to be a postmillennialist. In the process, he didn’t just make postmillennialism respectable. He made it formidable.

This Isn’t Your Father’s Postmillennialism. Or Is It?

Now that postmillennialism is back on the theological scene, its critics have discovered they have an unwelcome third-party candidate on their hands. Weren’t two world wars sufficient to kill this unrealistic, overoptimistic theory? Apparently not.

Nineteenth-century postmillennialists had to learn some lessons from history they could have more easily learned from Scripture concerning the course of worldly empire as postmillennialism conceives it. They thought God was just about finished shaking the heavens and the earth (Heb. 12:26–27), that the Stone cut without human hands was done crushing the nations and consuming them, that uninterrupted straight-line progress was assured. They tended to read Scripture in terms of the times (a phenomenon still rampant today among other eschatologies).

Today’s postmillennialists have been weaned from this tendency to walk by sight, to organize the scriptural data to comport with the existential moment in lieu of indicting the existential moment in terms of the prophetic Word of God. It took two world wars to purge out this leaven, to raise up postmillennialism solely on the authority of the Word and reject the temptation to build eschatologies out of the shifting sand of world events. Even its critics agree that modern postmillennialism reposes its entire confidence in its understanding of the Word and not in man’s doings on the earth. The in-your-face comment of Greg Bahnsen, quoting Romans 3:4, tended to mark postmillennial faith in God’s promises: “Let God be true, but every man a liar.”

In the face of a reinvigorated postmillennialism, critics have approached the theory from some new angles, looking for a convenient chink in the armor. In the case of Rushdoony, it was impossible to saddle his postmillennialism with the social gospel millennialism of Rauschenbach or the Unitarians (postmillennialism built not on the Word but on humanistic confidence in a fundamentally statist gospel). But Rushdoony’s involvement inspired a new label, a new pigeonhole.

Suddenly, Rushdoony’s postmillennialism was labeled theonomic postmillennialism to distinguish it from the “kinder, gentler, milder” postmillennialism of the past, affectionately labeled evangelical postmillennialism.4 Polemicists for amillennialism and premillennialism really had no affection for the earlier form of postmillennialism, of course, but by nostalgically referring to it as “milder,” they served notice that Rushdoony’s postmillennialism was implicitly harsh: a new animal entirely. The polemicists drove an argumentative wedge between theonomic postmillennialism and evangelical postmillennialism. They were effectively saying, “If you must be a postmillennialist, be an old school postmil like easygoing Boettner or Hodge or Warfield,5 the nice guys on the block who didn’t make waves.” Since theonomists are nasty and divisive, theonomic postmillennialism is just more of the same. In fact, it’s probably worse: it teaches the triumph of theonomy. What further need have we of witnesses?

The implication is raised that since the earlier form is “evangelical,” the modern form is not evangelical. The choice of terms was not accidental, but designed to cast today’s postmillennialists in a negative light, by innuendo if not explicitly.

It cannot be denied that Rushdoony provided a backbone for modern postmillennialism. Was this truly innovative? Hardly. Most Puritans were postmillennial, and most were far closer to Rushdoony’s ethical teachings than to the law theories propounded by modern evangelicals (e.g., Dr. Norman Geisler, etc.). Apart from its loyal-opposition antinomian contingent, the majority of the Puritans represented a remarkably strong incipient theonomic movement.

Many key postmillennial passages have obvious theonomic content. The New Covenant not only involves every one, from the least to the greatest, knowing the Lord, but also entails God writing His law into their hearts and minds (Jer. 31:33; Heb. 8:10, 10:16). The prophecy in Isaiah 42:1–4 concludes by affirming that the isles shall wait for God’s law, while Isaiah 2:3 speaks of the law radiating into all the world. Dozens of such passages exist, and their significance was surely not lost upon the Puritans.

The “theonomic postmillennial” package isn’t new, and Rushdoony didn’t invent it. He merely helped put postmillennialism back on its proper feet after advocates for the milder evangelical form of the theory saw their views appropriately crippled by the bloodiest century in recorded human history. Postmillennialism had evolved away from the theonomic component at the heart of the Puritan hope. Rushdoony merely reassembled what previous post-Puritan theologians had allowed to drift apart. In the language of Isaiah 58:12, Rushdoony became the repairer of the breach.

Rushdoony and the Hermeneutic Isms

Rushdoony had his preferences in dealing with the book of Revelation. He adopted the idealist approach. Idealism treats the majority of the book as dealing with the entire period of time between Christ’s advents, not necessarily in chronological order, with some passages dealing with heavenly things rather than earthly things. In other words, idealism is a Big Picture approach: Revelation spans many centuries of time.

Historicism agrees with idealism that Revelation describes the inter-advent period, but unlike idealism it sees a clear chronological succession in John’s narrative. Dr. Francis Nigel Lee’s commentary on Revelation is a strong example of a postmillennial work written from the historicist perspective. Dr. Rushdoony and Dr. Lee were on the best possible terms, and Rushdoony was respectful and supportive of Dr. Lee’s historicism despite his own continued preference for idealism.

Partial preterism treats Revelation predominantly as a description of God’s divorce from, and dispossession of, Israel. The book is understood to have been written before the fall of Jerusalem based on some admittedly strong internal evidence. In that light, most of Revelation would be considered fulfilled in the first century A.D. Rushdoony was not only respectful of partial preterism, he supported the publication of commentaries promoting this approach to Revelation. He did so while ultimately disagreeing with these volumes, which indicates what importance he attached to extending Biblical scholarship in all plausible areas relevant to the postmillennial question.

The reader should note that none of these three approaches to interpreting Revelation are intrinsically postmillennial. For example, among the amillennialists one can find idealists (e.g., William Hendricksen) and partial preterists (e.g., Jay Adams). Futurism (associated primarily with premillennial scholarship) can also cross theological borders.

Therefore, any given hermeneutic approach to Revelation can take one of several millennial forks further down the road. Rushdoony’s theological tent is bigger than most of his disciples would be willing to entertain. A significant fraction of them have co-opted partial preterism as the last word on prophetic interpretation, a view that Rushdoony would have recoiled at. He tended to agree with my assessment that under friendly cross-examination, partial preterism must often be moved off the Pedestal of Certainty onto the more modest Dais of Plausibility, i.e., that it was premature to treat partial preterism as if it were canonical.

But Rushdoony earnestly desired for that spirit of internal cross-examination to continue and to be pursued in the best spirit of conservative Christian scholarship. His big tent approach could only strengthen postmillennialism, as he saw the matter. Today’s entrenched camps don’t adopt Rushdoony’s  inclusive approach. Rushdoony’s heirs have inherited his postmillennial perspective but have otherwise placed their hermeneutic eggs exclusively in one basket. The big miracle is that there are even enough postmillennialists around to disagree over the matter. We’ll be in good shape if more postmillennial scholars adopt Dr. Kenneth Gentry’s stance that he is a postmillennialist first, a partial preterist second. Where wise priorities prevail, continued progress will follow.

What about Replacement Theology?

Many Christians are sensitive to Israel’s place in the scheme of the future, particularly in regard to the promises of old that God had solemnly made. Many (but not all) dispensationalists are disposed to criticize any perceived usurpation or encroachment upon promises made to Israel, promises they assert the church has no right to. It is held that by confusing the church and Israel, theology becomes dangerously distorted. If promises perceived to have been made to Israel are applied to the church, these scholars reason, then what we have here is an illicit substitution or replacement of Israel by the church. The criticized position has received many labels: replacement theology, substitution theology, supercessionism or supersessionism (the church supercedes Israel), etc., but the core idea being criticized is the same: such a position robs Israel.

At first glance, a parking lot doesn’t look like a very good seminary, but R. J. Rushdoony briefly turned a Los Angeles parking lot into a seminary for my benefit in 1981, explaining the significance of Isaiah 19:18–25 to me as the traffic roared past us. The final three verses run thus:

23  In that day shall there be a highway out of Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian shall come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians shall serve with the Assyrians.

24  In that day shall Israel be the third with Egypt and with Assyria, even a blessing in the midst of the land:

25  Whom the LORD of hosts shall bless, saying, Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel mine inheritance.

Why isn’t Israel first? Why is Israel listed as “the third” (v. 24)? Because Isaiah’s prophecy teaches that Egypt and Assyria shall faithfully serve God prior to Israel doing so. In fact, Egypt shall build an altar that God will honor (v. 19) and swear by Jehovah’s name and perform oaths and offer gifts to Him (v. 21). The enemies of Israel enter His Kingdom first. Paul’s discussion in Romans 11 is an extended commentary on this passage of Isaiah 19. All the Gentiles shall come in (represented by Egypt and Assyria), and then Israel shall be saved (becomes the third part, sequentially).

For postmillennialism agrees with Paul that many branches have been broken off due to unbelief (Rom. 11:20), but God is able to graft them back in. If God grafts Israel back in, then how is it that Israel loses any of its promises? Rushdoony, by supporting the Puritan approach to Romans 11:25–26,6 has turned the flank of his critics. If there’s any replacement going on, it’s sanctioned by the great Old Testament prophet Isaiah, and is clearly temporary. God is able to graft back in the natural branches, just as He grafted in the wild branches (Gentiles). That He will do this in the full literal sense of the words appearing in Romans 11:25–26 is what the purest forms of postmillennialism unfailingly teach.

Postmillennialism, as we receive it from Rushdoony’s latest writings on the topic, doesn’t so much give us a replacement theology as a regrafting theology. This return of Puritan thinking into postmillennialism is perhaps another reason that Rushdoony’s version was labeled theonomic postmillennialism to distinguish it from evangelical theology, which was closer to an optimistic amillennialism in tone, and in regard to the issue of supersessionism as well. By clearing the brush off the trail forged by the Puritans, postmillennialism became more immune to the charge, which could be seen to be, at the very least, seriously misplaced. This is especially true in regard to Rushdoony’s exposition of Galatians 4:22–31.7 It is because the physical Jerusalem corresponded to the bondwoman Hagar (v. 25) and thus must be cast out and not become an heir with the son of the freewoman (v. 30), that the promise to genetic Israel cannot be realized apart from the regrafting of the natural branches spoken of by Paul in Romans 11.

In short: Rushdoony didn’t promote a replacement theology so much as he did a regrafting theology. Between these two is all the difference in the world.

Rushdoony the Innovator: Taking the Red Pill

In the movie The Matrix, people enslaved to the system were given an opportunity. A red pill and a blue pill were presented to them. Take the blue pill, and you wake up believing what you want to believe, with the status quo preserved. Take the red pill, and you see how far down the rabbit hole goes, and your life changes radically as a consequence of the concomitant awakening.

Rushdoony’s forty-one-page monograph, God’s Plan for Victory: The Meaning of Postmillennialism, is such a red pill. It is short and unassuming. It’s actually a pretty poor exposition of postmillennialism, particularly from an exegetical standpoint. That’s not this short book’s purpose: that task is left to other volumes and other scholars. This book has set itself an absolutely unique and remarkable task, and hits the mark in a revolutionary way. In this volume, Rushdoony sets forth the real-life meaning of an eschatology, its effect on the Christian walk and the world at large. A shallow read might lead the uninitiated to think of it as a theological puff piece. A careful read reveals that Rushdoony has brewed some cultural dynamite in highly compacted form. It comes close to being a book “for those who have ears to hear.”  Those wedded to eschatologies first and Biblical ethics second will dismiss it. Those who realize God judges us by our deeds and not our theological orientations continue to find food for thought here, be they amillennial, dispensational,8 or unaligned. Men who govern their lives, not by what they feel Scripture predicts, but by what they know the Scripture commands, have Rushdoony on their side. It is fitting that his criticisms were necessarily directed at the middle of the bell curve, but didn’t extend to those faithful to His Word.

Consider these important insights Rushdoony shares in God’s Plan for Victory (emphasis added):

If in terms of Matthew 6:33 we believe that the Kingdom of God and his righteousness or justice must have priority in our lives, then we will not have a self-centered view of salvation

All too often men retain aspects of this original sin in insisting that their salvation is the center of God’s plan. God seeks His own glory and purpose; our place in His plan is not at the center

It is arrogant for man, in plain divergence from God’s words, to see himself as more important in God’s plan than God Himself! Such a view is an echo of man’s original sin. (p. 3)

[An antinomian] attitude guarantees impotence and defeat to all churches who hold it. They may prosper as convents or retreats from the world, but never as a conquering army for God.

[Consequently], the role of the church … is to be not only a soul-saving agency but also a convent, a retreat from the horrible world around us … Protestantism has turned the whole church into a retreat from the world minus only sacerdotal celibacy. Men are summoned to withdraw from the world into the church. (p. 11)

A secular scholar, George Shepperson, commented, “Premillennialism always means a deep distrust of the orthodox forces of reform open to a society.” This is a point of very great importance … millenarian groups are hostile to reform and reconstruction … In my own experience within a major American church, I saw premillennialists deliberately, and by avowed statement to me, come late to key meetings where their vote could have led to the recapture of a synod because they refused to be involved in trying to “reform” the church; it was to them “unspiritual” activity, and they felt assured that apostasy was ordained of God as a prelude to the “rapture.” (pp. 20–21)

Pietism saw life in essentially emotional and personal terms … the goal of man was seen as an eternal vacation with the Lord. Pietism produced a shallow life, intellectually and vocationally. (p. 27)

A central fallacy of premillennial and amillennial views is the common assumption that the Fall somehow frustrated God’s original purpose as set forth in Eden. But God is never frustrated, nor can He be. To believe this is to be a humanist, and humanism, wherever it is, must be strangled, because it assumes that man’s way can prevail over God’s way. (p. 28)

Retirement is a modern principle, the secular counterpart of the idea of a rapture … The rapture and retirement are falsely premised and mean a surrender; they treat a retreat from dominion as a privilege rather than a tragedy or grief. (p. 29)

The rapture generation is the useless generation. (p. 38)9

For exegetical support for postmillennialism, there are a multitude of excellent resources: the historic ones from great Biblical scholars of the past centuries and an increasing number of ever-improving modern books and lectures. But to understand the meaning of this approach to Scripture means grasping the implications of this trailblazing monograph by Rushdoony.

The End Point

In the second volume of Rushdoony’s Systematic Theology,10 he probes the meaning of the term eschatology (and is even more diligent in this regard during the taped lecture on which the written text is based). On pages 785–786 he observes that the term can relate to, not just the end-times for the world, but to an end point. As he says, “the end-point can come with the death of a man, or the judgment of a family, an institution, or a people. In this sense, history is continuously witnessing to end-points or eschatons” (p. 785).

Why is this distinction so crucial? Is this not a diversion or distraction from so-called cosmic eschatology, the end of the world, etc.?  Is this end-point stuff all that important?

Absolutely. Modern man uses many different models to describe, for example, the destiny of a nation or a culture. The ballistic model was popular in earlier days, in which we encounter the language of trajectories to describe cultures, as in The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. The organic model comparing cultures and societies to a living thing was also popular, which alludes to the birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, senescence, and death of a nation or culture. You will notice that all such models omit God and His providential government over the world. The destiny of human societies is not couched in terms of their covenantal faithfulness or lack of it, but rests on the assumption of God’s nonexistence or (what amounts to the same thing) His irrelevance.

This is where Rushdoony’s approach to eschatology breaks critical new ground, for it sees the hand of the Lord God in continual action, thereby reflecting His faithfulness to His own Word. Too many Christians today are gazing into the future awaiting a supposed end-times scenario to play out, but are blinded to the cultural, ecclesiastical, and personal end points unfolding from His throne room before their very eyes, end points that affect them directly.

Postmillennialism is often criticized for making eschatology irrelevant and distant, as if all it offers is a long undifferentiated haul to some far-off goal. One would wish this caricature were true. The reality is, Rushdoony has taken eschatology into the opposite direction entirely. Eschatology no longer means discerning God’s choreography at world’s end. Eschatology means God bringing an end to your culture, your church, and you yourself at such time as He appoints according to His covenant. Rushdoony has dragged the eschatology of Psalm 37 out of that presumably safe Psalter and unleashed its raw power in the middle of our comfortable living rooms, church sanctuaries, school rooms, and halls of government.

How, then, shall we sum up Rushdoony’s landmark influence on eschatology, his impact on the study of eschatons and end points?

A good start.

1. It didn’t take long after World War I for the published attacks on postmillennialism to appear. Postmillennialism and the Higher Critics by Andrew Johnson and L. L. Pickett was a scathing 445-page attack on postmillennialists published in 1923 by Glad Tidings Publishing Company of Chicago. The writers exclusively targeted scholars with liberal leanings, thereby associating postmillennialism with men who play fast and loose with Scripture, in contrast to whom the premillennialists appear as champions of fidelity to Scripture.

2. Charles Lee Feinberg, Premillennialism or Amillennialism? has seen printings by various publishers beginning in 1936 (Zondervan), then 1954 (Van Kampen Press), and finally 1961 (the American Board of Missions to the Jews).

3. It would be appropriate to acknowledge that J. Marcellus Kik and a few other scholars also produced postmillennial works during this same period, albeit of even less influence than Boettner’s contributions notwithstanding their merit.

4. It must be pointed out that Rushdoony and other “theonomic postmillennialists” have found some of the rhetoric of the “milder” postmillennialists from the earlier generations to be stylistically embarrassing. Repeated appeal to the “sweet” influence of the gospel in the writings of Jonathan Edwards caused them to marvel that people didn’t go into diabetic seizures or insulin shock reading such excessively saccharine writing. This fact has been appealed to as evidence of the divide between theonomic postmillennialism and so-called evangelical postmillennialism, but it could hardly be denied that Edwards would have written very differently had he lived in the late twentieth century.

5. Warfield, it must be noted, was at least as theonomic as Rushdoony or Bahnsen. See his exposition of Matthew 5:17–20 in Biblical Doctrines (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2003; 1932), 293–299. The idea that the theonomists’ approach to Matthew 5:17–20 is a recent innovation of Rushdoony’s or Bahnsen’s is demonstrably false. Warfield’s view was based on the exegetical analysis of noted Greek exegete H. A. W. Meyer published before the American Civil War began. Warfield’s article first appeared in 1915, about the time chlorine gas was being deployed in World War I.

6. Rushdoony had been on something of a postmillennial odyssey throughout his life. He started at Warfield’s position as a young student, but was pushed off of its purity by pressure exerted by amillennial scholars (because Warfield argued scripturally against a final apostasy at the end of history). Since other postmillennialists adopted the final apostasy concept, Rushdoony was influenced to move in that direction. By the mid-1990s, he reconsidered the matter (as Boettner had in the 1980s) and saw Warfield’s case to be strong enough to overcome what Rushdoony called “this amillennial hangover,” that hangover being the final apostasy doctrine. Rushdoony had come back to his theological roots (namely, Warfield, who had built on H. A. W. Meyer’s exposition of Romans 11:25–26; see Warfield, op. cit., 623–624). Given this starting point, postmillennialism could now take far more Scripture literally than any other eschatological model. The appeal of dispensationalism (that it read the Bible literally whereas alternate theologies did not) was set on its head once the total victory of the gospel was grasped as the teaching of Scripture. Only then could verses like “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isa. 2:4), “[o]f the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end” (Isa. 9:7), that peace will endure until the moon be no more (Ps. 72:7), and all (not some) of the families of the earth shall be blessed (Gen. 12:3) find literal fulfillment. There are hundreds of such passages that amillennialists, premillennialists, and even a good portion of postmillennialists are obligated to dance around and qualify. But in his last decade of service for His Lord, Rushdoony had embraced the promises as they stood written. “Let God be true and every man—even earlier Rushdoony—a liar.” Rushdoony never lost his ability to be teachable because he was not a master of the Word, but was mastered by the Word.

7. R. J. Rushdoony, Romans and Galatians (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1997), 375–384.

8. It is noteworthy that there are dispensationalists who support Chalcedon, and it is without question that the Kingdom of God was always meant to cut across the lines drawn by theological distinctions. Where men place priority on His work, they can labor together notwithstanding eschatological differences. Rushdoony’s criticisms target those who use eschatology as a pretext for Christian inaction. Dispensationalists and amillennialists who lean forward in the saddle for the Kingdom know not to take offense at critiques aimed at the statistical means of their respective camps. Rushdoony’s advocacy favoring premillennialists John C. Whitcomb and Henry M. Morris proved pivotal in their creationist book, The Genesis Flood, being published. Rushdoony knew how to work shoulder to shoulder with others (Zeph. 3:9) and distinguished between men of character and men of sloth, regardless of eschatological persuasion.

9. Page numbers are from the reprint (Vallecito, CA: Chalcedon Foundation, 1997), not the 1977 original tract.

10. Rushdoony, Systematic Theology in 2 volumes (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1994), 785–898.


Martin G. Selbrede
  • Martin G. Selbrede

Martin is the senior researcher for Chalcedon’s ongoing work of Christian scholarship, along with being the senior editor for Chalcedon’s publications, Arise & Build and The Chalcedon Report. He is considered a foremost expert in the thinking of R.J. Rushdoony. A sought-after speaker, Martin travels extensively and lectures on behalf of Christian Reconstruction and the Chalcedon Foundation. He is also an accomplished musician and composer.

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