A Practical Postmillennialism: An Interview With Glenn Sunshine
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TRANSCRIPT FROM THE INTERVIEW
Kendall Lankford (00:01.398)
Well, hello and welcome back to another episode of the broadcast. This is a special edition. We've been doing interviews throughout this series called a practical post millennialism where we're just trying to look at what is post millennialism practically. It's been my contention throughout this series that your view of the end times will affect the way that you live in our time. And we've been looking at a variety of different views. What a day I'm so blessed that we're going to have Dr. Glenn sunshine on the podcast.
We're going to be talking about a view called radical two kingdoms. But before we get there, I just want to introduce my guest. Um, I got to know Dr. Glenn sunshine, uh, probably eight, nine years ago, maybe at, at a church in new England where he came to teach a class called perspectives. I went to the book table, bought a couple of books, very much enjoyed them. The one that I remember the most is why you think the way you think. Which it's a great book. I would totally plug that for anyone who is listening.
Also since then, Dr. Sunshine has written a book called Slaying Leviathan, which is sort of a, uh, a modern update to Lex Rex and some of those with political theory. It's a lot of that. I very much enjoyed that learned a ton from that and brother. What else is there? There's the podcast that you have. There's you were a university professor. Now you're busier than ever. Help fill in the gaps of who you are for our audience, my friend.
Glenn Sunshine (01:23.706)
Okay, well, you know, the standard, my standard introduction, I'm a retired history professor. I am a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, which means I write a few articles every month for breakpoint and teach in the Colson Fellows Program. I do a monthly Q&A that in-house is called Stump the Chump for them. That's in my house.
Along with that, I'm a ministry associate at Reflections Ministries doing curriculum development and helping produce content. And I have my own 501c3 called Every Square Inch Ministries where you can find a lot of my teaching anything that comes out on video. Like for example, this podcast will show up with a link there. I also have a number of things that I've written, videos I've produced, those kinds of things up there as well.
Kendall Lankford (02:18.862)
It's incredible. Um, definitely a busy guy. So we're so thankful that you're here today with us to be able to help us. Uh, last week on the show, we talked about all millennialism and we had to paint with broad strokes. The show was over an hour. Um, and we just had to basically kind of, uh, talk about some of the trace elements that show up in all millennialism that could produce defeatism, discouragement and cultural uninvolvement. And I wanted to take a specific episode to
bear to burrow down into one particular strain of all millennialism that I didn't have time to cover and I'm glad we're doing this today called radical to kingdoms view or radical to kingdoms all millennialism. And since you're a historian, I think this is going to be incredible. So I'm going to sit back. And we're going to find out, I'd love to hear where it came from, how it developed who were kind of the critical thinkers in the movement.
And where does it go wrong? And, and then we'll jump in from there, but brother, if you would, uh, we'd love to learn from you today.
Glenn Sunshine (03:17.134)
Yeah, okay. Really, we need to get a running start if we're going to understand what's going on and why. And I'm actually just going to go back, well, we might as well go back to the early church. And, you know, when you look at the early history of Christianity, it exists for 300 years, roughly, as a persecuted minority religion before Constantine decriminalizes it.
Although to be more precise, what Constantine did is he took the arguments of early church fathers mediated through a guy named Lactantius, who was the tutor to his kids, and made the argument that worship to God has to be offered voluntarily for it to be pleasing. Compelled worship isn't pleasing to God. Therefore, you have to have religious liberty. And once he does that, it has the effect of decriminalizing Christianity, but what he really did was set up religious liberty in the empire. Now, under Theodosius, Christianity becomes the imperial religion, but they still don't persecute the pagans. You get to Augustine. Now, with Augustine, you have the sack of Rome by the Visidoths, and the argument from the pagans was the reason why Rome was sacked is that they'd given up on the pagan gods, so they'd withdrawn their protection.
Augustine's argument is no Rome wasn't sacked because it was not pagan enough. It was sacked because it was not Christian enough. And he develops a rather, well, an incredibly long and detailed and very important book called the city of God in which he outlines his theory of society. So it's basically society's built around two theory, two cities, excuse me. You have the city of man. and you have the city of God. The city of man is characterized by aggrandizement, self-aggrandizement, lust for power, it enforces its will by the use of force, all of these kinds of things. The city of God is based on love, it is based on penitence, and it advances by preaching. Now the two of them exist side by side in the world, and they can cooperate in many ways, although they operate with different means and for different motives, often they want the same kinds of things. They want a peaceful, settled society. So they can cooperate, but they're really in principle two different things. Now later, a pope by the name of Galatius I, who was the, if I remember right, the last of the Berber popes in Rome, in other words, he's from North Africa, like Augustine himself, he equated the city of God with the church and the city of man with the state. Augustine never did that. And so what we do here is this sets up, you know, really with Constantine, already with Constantine, we see sort of an issue in that under the Roman Empire, everything was under the authority of the state. Everything was fundamentally under Caesar's authority. But the fact that you now an illegal religion for 300 years that suddenly legalized, this sets a precedent that church and state are separate institutions, that the church isn't under the state. that plus what Galatius does, it takes a while, but it sets up a tug of war between church and state over which one is really the top dog in the Christian world. Okay, so that's going to be a major theme politically throughout the Middle Ages and actually continues to today, you know, in American jurisprudence, among other things. But I'm going to jump ahead to Luther at this point. Friar before he became a university professor and then ultimately started the Reformation. So he knew Augustine inside out. He was thoroughly familiar with him. And what he will do after he rediscovers the idea of justification by faith, I think it was B.B. Warfield that said that the Reformation represented the triumph of Augustine's doctrine of salvation over Augustine's doctrine of the Church. What Luther does is he... rediscovers justification by faith, then he has to rethink the role of the church, and particularly the role of the church with respect to the state. Where do you draw the line? How does that work? His conclusion, now in the Middle Ages, the popes argued for what they called the two swords. God has two swords in the world, the sword of the church and the sword of the state. The popes argued that since the state exists to enforce righteousness in the world. The Pope, as the vicar of Christ on earth, is the representative of God on earth and all of that, he's the one who determines what's righteous. So the sword of the state must operate under the sword of the church. Luther comes along and replaces the two swords doctrine with something called the two kingdoms doctrine. This is really different from the R2K version.
Kendall Lankford (08:53.253)
Mm.
Glenn Sunshine (08:53.698)
What Luther said is that there are, God has two kingdoms in this world. What he called the left-hand kingdom and the right-hand kingdom. The left-hand kingdom is the state, the right-hand kingdom is the church. Both of them are ordained by God. Both of them exist to... produce a righteous and just and holy society. Each of them, however, operates using different means. So the state operates within the secular realm. They're the ones who have really a monopoly on the use of force in defense of the society to promote the good, to punish the wicked, and so on. The church operates in coordination with the state. but does it differently. It does it with worship. It does it with prayer. It does it with preaching. It does all of these kinds of things. Both of them are working in coordination toward the same end. Each of them, however, approaches this end in a different way. And Luther was actually quite content to allow the state a great deal of authority over the church in terms of regulating worship, in terms of appointing bishops, all of those kinds of things. When we get to Calvin, we're skipping a lot of stuff here, but when we get to Calvin, Calvin really adopts Luther's Two Kingdoms idea with one modification. He says that the church must operate independently of the state. So for example, in a lot of places, the state determined things like excommunication.
Calvin insisted that is an ecclesiastical function, that's something for the church to do. They're the ones who have to administer that. So he has a much clearer separation between church and state than Luther does. And these ideas will then pass to the Huguenots, to the Puritans, sometimes directly from Geneva, sometimes from the French. And this is going to inform a lot of the thinking of the Puritans with respect to church-state relations. The state exists to promote Christianity, to promote the true gospel. That is part of its purpose. It's got other purposes as well, but that's part of it. And that means that the state and the church must work together and the state has to cooperate with the church as much as the other way around.
That's essentially the idea that you're getting coming out of the Puritans. That gets brought into America. Now I should note briefly here, back to the Reformation for a moment, that there's a third view out there of church and state. You've got the Catholic view, of course. You've got the Lutheran. You've got the Calvinist modification of it. You then also have the Anabaptist view. And the Anabaptist view basically says, there's a lot of stuff in scripture about two ages. We've got this age and we've got the age to come. And to the Anabaptist mind, this age corresponded to the state, to society, all of those kinds of things. The age to come was the province of the church. And so the Anabaptists, takes a little while, they're not here immediately. But the Anabaptists will ultimately develop the idea that church and state are each a hermetically sealed institution where one does not interfere with or touch the other. The church is something totally different from the state, it's totally different from society, all of those kinds of things. Technically, if you follow a sociologist, Ernst Troutch… This makes the Anabaptists sectarians. Sectarians see, by Tralch's terminology, a sectarian sees, they see themselves as an elite religious minority, moral minority in a sinful age. And sectarians tend to have high standards for becoming a member, you have to prove you're worthy, high standards for staying in, all of this applies in spades to the Anabaptists.
But again, this notion of a radical dualism between church and state is really an Anabaptist phenomena. Okay.
Kendall Lankford (13:40.71)
A modern day example maybe would be Hutterites and Amish, as far as the Anabaptists.
Glenn Sunshine (13:45.23)
Hutterites, Amish, yeah. Yeah, those are historical Anabaptist groups. They're coming straight out of that. Okay, so now we'll jump ahead a few more centuries. We get to the evangelical awakenings in Britain and in America. The characteristics of evangelicalism, according to, I think it's Bebington, he defined a number of things that characterize the evangelical movement.
One of them is an emphasis on conversion. Another is an emphasis on the Bible, bibliocentric. Another is a strong emphasis on the cross, crucicentrism. And the fourth is social action. Because they believed that just as you have to convert an individual to true faith and then that person has to live out that faith, so society itself really needs to be converted.
And so we need to go after the sins in society to try to correct them. A great example of this is William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was very much involved, of course, he's best known for his work on the abolition of slavery, the slave trade and then slavery itself. But he wrote in his diary one day, God has set before me two great, what was the word he used? Two great objectives, something like that.
The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Reformation of manners? Okay. What does he mean? 18th century language. But if you think about it, what are manners? Manners are how we show our respect to other people. How we think about other people is exhibited by how we behave toward them. So reformation of manners means a complete rethinking of the way we think of ourselves and the people in the world around us. And so Wilberforce got involved in over 60 different charitable organizations, ranging from the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he's one of the founders there, to all kinds of things dealing with education, dealing with, you know, prostitution. 25% of the women in London were prostitutes when Wilberforce got started.
Kendall Lankford (16:09.058)
Wow.
Glenn Sunshine (16:10.146)
You know, cleaning up the morals of society, which he saw as an essential accompaniment to the abolition of slavery. Why? Because society needed to be reformed. The sins in society needed to be corrected, just like the sins in the individual did. And so it was part of the job of the true believer, the one who has had his conversion experience. Part of his job is to see that those things get
embodied in the society. And so they create all kinds of intermediate institutions, charitable organizations, service organizations, things like that, to try to fix the problems in society. This gets carried over into the United States. And we see this, for example, in the Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening particularly, where there are pushes, well, abolitionism gets a lot of its
advancement in the United States through the second grade awakening. We see a push for women's suffrage. We see the temperance movement, which by the way is not exactly just a bunch of killjoys. You have to understand that Americans were famous around the world for being chronic drunks. I mean, this was part of what we were known for. You know, you get women's suffrage. You get all of these kinds of things emerging out of it. And then from there, that turns into the social gospel.
Okay, so when modernism takes root, people will abandon biblical faithfulness and all of those kinds of things in favor of a message of social reform. The backlash against that among conservatives was to get rid of social reform and emphasize the message of conversion.
Kendall Lankford (18:07.766)
So just to clarify for a second, that's a astounding thing. I don't think I've heard that before. The idea of reforming manners and customs in a society was God-centric until modernism, where the goal was maybe attached to humanism or something else, but same sort of action, but wrong foundation. Is that what you're saying? Wow.
Glenn Sunshine (18:30.35)
Yeah, yeah. And that's what leads to Protestant liberal Christianity in America. But the problem is the backlash against it on the part of what were then known as the fundamentalists was to say, no, it isn't about social action. It's about conversion. It's about faith. It's about personal morality. It's all those kinds of things.
Kendall Lankford (18:35.949)
Wow.
Glenn Sunshine (18:55.246)
And so the fundamentalists got out of the business that the traditional evangelicals had been in, and actually the church historically had been in, of combining evangelism, quote, religious activities, with social action. They didn't see a distinction between the two. Both of them were seen as expressions of the Christian faith.
Kendall Lankford (19:19.598)
So instead of reclaiming a theocentrism, they lopped off the action and went to a spiritual onlyism or something similar to that.
Glenn Sunshine (19:28.726)
Right, right. But then you get, starting in the late 40s with people like Carl Henry, then in the 50s with Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer coming along, things like that, you begin to get a reform movement, as it were, within fundamentalism that becomes known as evangelicalism, that is a more socially engaged version of it.
Now that is going to take us to the kind of work that I did for quite a while for the last eight years of Chuck Olson's life. I was working pretty closely with him on all the worldview stuff and the idea there is was fundamentally that the Lordship of Christ well, Jesus said he has all authority in heaven and on earth and the question I like to ask is what isn't included in all?
Kendall Lankford (20:23.058)
Good question.
Glenn Sunshine (20:23.534)
So if that's the case, then it's incumbent upon us as Christians to live out the Lordship of Christ in every area of life. And further, well, the way I would put this is if we truly believe that what God tells us, how God tells us to live, is right.
In other words, it is good. It is the best way to live. The degree to which you move away from that, you're going to be causing more and more trouble. Okay. If we believe that, then it is imperative for us out of love of neighbor to promote Christian values, these ideas, and for that matter, the lordship of Christ in society. Because if we don't do that, we are not acting out of love of neighbor.
Kendall Lankford (21:17.738)
Yeah, that's good.
Glenn Sunshine (21:19.03)
Yeah, now having said that, there has now been a reaction against worldview and against this kind, this approach to cultural engagement. Cultural engagement can mean a variety of different things, some good, some bad. My idea of cultural engagement is we engage the culture to bring the Lordship of Christ the bear in it, in any area it touches. Okay, that's cultural engagement for me. So when I use the phrase, that's what I'm talking about. The reaction against it, really, it comes from a bunch of different directions. But fundamentally, the idea is that notion of cultural engagement is, and here's the buzz phrase, immanentizing the eschaton. Now, what does that mean? The eschaton is the, well, eschatos in Greek is last. So what we're talking about the eschaton is the final state.
You know, where the kingdom of God is here, where Jesus returns and institutes the kingdom. That's the eschaton. Yeah, new heaven, new earth. And when you immanentize the eschaton, you take that eschaton, the new heavens and new earth, and try to make it real in the here and now. And immanentizing the eschaton doesn't work, you know, because, well, the new heavens and new earth aren't here.
So in other words, the argument is, remember we've got this age and the age to come. The argument is that we are trying to make the age to come in this age and that's not gonna happen. We have in a sense a kind of category confusion that, pardon me?
Kendall Lankford (23:13.622)
Would full preterism fall under that as well? Would full preterism fall under that error as well?
Glenn Sunshine (23:23.158)
Yeah, probably. Yeah, I think so. The full Preterists, I think. I don't know how a full Preterist can say the Apostles' Creed. Because if every prophecy about the return of Christ has already been fulfilled, then how do we know he's coming back?
Kendall Lankford (23:37.1)
Yeah, I know… “For the living and the dead.”
Glenn Sunshine (23:45.934)
Right, I mean, so I just, yeah, that's a whole different rave. But, yeah, so the fundamental idea here is that by attempting to bring the Lordship of Christ, this is where we're beginning to get to the R2K thing. By trying to bring the Lordship of Christ into every area of life, we are immanentizing the eschaton and we are...
The church is not staying in its lane. The church's responsibility is to preach the gospel, to win people to Christ. It's the ministry of word and sacrament, all of those kinds of things. And the assumption is that when we talk about the kingdom, we're talking about the church.
Now at this point I'm going to stop and start giving some critique. We haven't gotten to the full R2K yet, but at this point it's important for us to stop here and take a look at what's going on. First of all, the assumption that the church is the same as the kingdom. I don't think that's really born out in Scripture. I think the church is the vehicle by which the kingdom is present, but the kingdom is not the same thing as the church. Jesus never equates them.
He says, you're Peter and upon this rock I will build my church. But he's constantly talking about the kingdom. He's not talking about the church.
Kendall Lankford (25:13.698)
When he even says, right, the kingdom of God is in your midst before the church is founded.
Glenn Sunshine (25:19.074)
Yeah, some translation difficulties there, but we won't get into that. Okay. Um, so, so that's number one. Number two, we've got to understand what a kingdom is. The Greek word Vasileia, which we translate as kingdom, can mean a territory that's ruled by a king, that's one of the possible meanings, but there's another meaning, which is really...
I think the foundation of that definition. And that's that the kingdom is the exercise of royal authority. So where a king is at, where, when, in whatever circumstance, a king is exercising royal authority, that's the presence of the kingdom. To put it, the analogy I always use, if you're a Roman soldier and you're ordered to cross Hadrian's wall and go into Pictland on a mission, and you're doing this under Caesar, the kingdom is there, even though it's outside the boundaries of the empire, because royal authority is being exercised, it's being recognized, it's being obeyed, it's being carried out. Okay. Okay, so.
Kendall Lankford (26:32.43)
That makes sense.
Glenn Sunshine (26:37.186)
What is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God exists wherever Christ's authority as King of Kings and Lord of Lords is recognized, is exercised, is obeyed. Okay? What is the extent of Jesus's authority? We just did this. What isn't included in all?
So we need to understand what a kingdom is and specifically what the kingdom of God is. The third point is we need to understand what the gospel is. You do find in one or two places in Paul's letters the gospel described as the gospel of salvation. The way Jesus described the gospel is it's the gospel of the kingdom. It's the good news that God's authority is breaking into the world in opposition to Satan.
And so what does Jesus do when he's preaching? He's not just proclaiming the kingdom. He's healing the sick, raising the dead, cleansing lepers, casting out demons. Oh, and by the way, when he sends out the 12 and the 70 on their preaching missions, what does he tell them to do? Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons and tell them that the kingdom is at hand. In other words, the commission that Jesus gave his evangelists, the people who were going out to spread the kingdom, the mission that he gave them is the same mission that he himself was exercising. I like to summarize this as show and tell. Show them what the kingdom looks like and tell them about it.
So that's what the gospel of the kingdom is. And if the church's mission is to advance the gospel, one would hope it's the gospel of the kingdom. One would hope it's equipping people to go out and, well, heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, and cast out demons. Or, at the very least, to demonstrate what the lordship of Christ and the kingdom of God looks like in all places where his authority extends, which is everywhere.
Kendall Lankford (29:16.298)
everywhere. Does not the word euangelizo come out of Roman culture with the heralds that would proclaim the rule of Caesar through town to town, especially if a Caesar was born, that the heralds would be sent out? And that is sort of what the word come to mean as political authority has now been born onto the earth and now you are under that.
Glenn Sunshine (29:40.918)
Yeah, well, let's add to that. The fundamental Christian confession is Jesus is Lord. That's the first and earliest Christian confession. That is an inescapably political statement in the Roman Empire, because what they would say, they're de facto Cretas Caesar is Lord. So the proclamation of the gospel automatically has political overtones. It's another side of this. But the kingdom is bigger than politics as well.
and it extends into all of life. That's my critique of the critiques of my ideas of the way I would define cultural engagement. It has to do with loving your neighbor, and it has to do fundamentally with the nature of the kingdom and the nature of the gospel as a result.
Kendall Lankford (30:28.822)
Yeah. So if I were to summarize, the incoming of the kingdom of God is that God's authority comes into every sphere of life. So as Christians, discipleship is coming under the Lordship of Christ in every area of our lives. Amen.
Glenn Sunshine (30:44.341)
Yes.
Okay, now from there, we, you know, from this critique of, again, cultural engagement can mean different things, but using it the way I've been using it. This critique of the idea of cultural engagement, that it's immanentizing the eschaton, that it's doing all of these other things. Well, first of all, I should note that immanentizing the eschaton is less of a problem for postmodernists, not postmodernists, excuse me, postmillennialists, bleh. Oh, where did... that one come from?
Okay, so less of a problem for post-millennialists because of their understanding of eschatology that the church is going to succeed in its mission and that success is going to transform all cultures and all societies and so on under the Lordship of Christ. Yeah, so now you know this, but I might as well come clean I'm not exactly a post-millennial. I have sympathies with the position. But, you know, what, I think it was Hodge said that the historic position of the church is simultaneous, an eschatology, is that the world is gonna simultaneously get worse and the church is going to advance, both. It's gonna go in both directions. It's gonna become, in a sense, more polarized.
Kendall Lankford (31:49.302)
Right. Which is why I wanted you to be on. I think that would be more or less where I would land in terms of my eschatology. And my question, it lands me pretty much in a form of Amillennialism. And where this leads, by the way, in terms of the question that I would have is, yes, scripture does not envision the church failing in its mission. What exactly is the church's mission, however? You gotta define that.
Kendall Lankford (32:52.081)
What's victory look like?
Glenn Sunshine (32:53.614)
Yeah, so that's the kind of question I would raise in a post-millennial context. I've got great sympathy. I do believe the church will succeed in what God has called it to do. It's not going to be a failure. And the church is not God's plan B. So
Kendall Lankford (33:05.539)
Hmm. Would you brand yourself and this is all the titles and stuff or sometimes they can be meaningless but would you brand yourself sort of an optimistic all millennial? I've heard that phrase a lot. I've heard people say they're optimistic all millennial or they're you know whatever. Would you go that direction?
Glenn Sunshine (33:26.179)
I don't really like the labels and in fact I think the entire emphasis on millennialism is a mistake. Why do we categorize our entire eschatology around one verse in the most symbolic book in the Bible? I mean it just doesn't make sense to me. So anyway. All right, well...
Kendall Lankford (33:43.787)
Agreed.
Glenn Sunshine (33:49.134)
In any event, from this foundation where we were, from this foundation of this critique of the cultural engagement model of the gospel, there are some people who take the next step and will argue that Christians should not be involved in any way in politics. That in fact, this world is, it's corrupt, the early church didn't get involved in political stuff.
Jesus didn't get involved in political stuff. His kingdom is not of this world. Our citizenship is in heaven. It's not in this world. We shouldn't be involved in politics. We shouldn't interfere with that. If we're called to be in the field of politics, yeah, we should approach it, bringing our Christian faith in as our sort of personal morality and things like that. But it's not something that we should be trying to, we shouldn't be trying to base law or policy around biblical principles because that's the church's job. It's not the state's job. And when you cross those lines, it's gonna cause problems. You know, you're making a fundamental mistake and compromising the kingdom.
Kendall Lankford (35:02.278)
I can see from the Luther and from some of the other definitions of the Reformation how they got there, but how do they get from the view that you just articulated of the gospel? When you said they take the next step, those two things don't seem connected to me.
Glenn Sunshine (35:18.482)
Oh, no, they take the next step beyond the critique of that approach. Now, I don't agree with the critique, and I gave my critique of the critique. They're coming out of that critique that says that the church needs to stay in its lane and not be involved in cultural engagement because its lane is to advance the kingdom, which means to grow the church.
Kendall Lankford (35:42.83)
That makes sense.
Glenn Sunshine (35:44.198)
And then from there, you take the next step and say, at that point, at that earlier point, they will talk about people having callings, particularly, for example, in politics or in other areas. And yeah, you live as Christians in that context. Where this goes further is it takes the next step and says that your faith, if you are involved in politics particularly, your faith shouldn't be shaping. What you think of in terms of legislation and all of those kinds of things. And Christians shouldn't really be trying to influence that stuff, because that's not what the church is about.
Kendall Lankford (36:20.066)
Wow.
How did we get there?
Glenn Sunshine (36:24.75)
Well, actually, the irony is they're Anabaptists. That's why I had to get the Anabaptist view in earlier. They've effectively adopted an Anabaptist view of the relationship of church and state, of the relationship between the sage and the aged to come.
And again, it comes out of this idea, ultimately, that the root of this, in this really extreme form, the root of it is in the critique that cultural engagement is immanentizing the eschaton. And that it is, it's not what the church is supposed to be doing. The church is getting out of its lane.
So from there, you take that to the logical conclusion. I would argue it's actually reductio ad absurdum, but in any event, you take it to the logical conclusion that says that Christians shouldn't be involved in politics.
Kendall Lankford (37:23.746)
So how do you get from a faithful, like I think all millennialism is a faithful view and we have many brothers who and sisters who believe this and you know I critique it in some ways but not like I would dispensationalism. So how do we get from a robust theological view of the end times named all millennialism to this what you're talking about? What's the bridge between those two concepts?
Glenn Sunshine (37:49.338)
Well, I'm not sure that they get there through the lens of eschatology, again, except for the distinction between this age and the age to come. Except for that distinction, they're coming into it from a different route. And I would suggest that rather than their, in this case, rather than their eschatology shaping their theology, their theology may be shaping their eschatology.
Um, yeah, it, I don't find the view at all persuasive. I find it rather baffling. Um, and again, for all of the reasons that I've already articulated, um, I think that, you know, I, I've argued that having a biblical worldview means understanding what the Lordship of Christ means in every area of life. That's my one sentence definition of a biblical worldview.
I was teaching this with Chuck Olson. You know, I've done this in all kinds of places, but that's how I end up summarizing it. And I think that that's correct. You know, what is the point of Jesus saying, "'All authority in heaven and on earth is given to me, "'and therefore go and make disciples of all nations.'" How do you disciple the nations if you're not going to be doing something with their politics?
Now, what does it mean to disciple a nation but to leave its government and its laws completely separate from Christian truth? How do you do that? What does that even look like?
So that, it seems to me, is the fatal flaw in a lot of ways in the R2K version. By the way, R2K is either reformed two kingdoms or radical two kingdoms. People argue back and forth over what it stands for, but it's one or the other. But I would argue you'd have to go radical two kingdoms because there's an earlier reformed two kingdoms coming out of Calvin that's very different from this.
Kendall Lankford (39:59.111)
Right? Yeah, and by radical you just mean that the two kingdoms are so set apart from one another, like a Venn diagram, except they don't touch at all. They're mutually exclusive kingdoms.
Glenn Sunshine (40:07.406)
Right. Yeah. And keep in mind the word radical comes from the Latin word radix, which means root. So at its root, there are two kingdoms that are completely different, you know, or radical in the sense that we're going to take the two kingdoms view and make it, well, in all honesty, pretty extreme.
Kendall Lankford (40:29.31)
Now, in the history of all of this, where does this show up? Like, where does it begin? Where does it inculcate? Where's it at today? Um, you know, who are the proponents?
Glenn Sunshine (40:40.502)
This is actually, again, except for the Anabaptists, this is actually a pretty new idea. It really only goes back as near as I can tell for a few decades. If that, maybe 20 years. I sort of guesstimate I'd have to check the dates, but this is largely an early 21st century phenomenon. It really, again, except for the Anabaptists, I don't really see. any real evidence of this kind of thinking going back through history, except perhaps in the early church. Why the early church? Well let's note what is the situation of the church in the first 300 years? Did they have any opportunity, any chance of influencing policy? Well in one sense, no. But in another sense, yes. How did they do it?
They wrote it by writing works defending Christianity and saying, you know, the persecution of the church is really misguided. We are not the people you claim we are. But what are they trying to do when they do that? They're trying to shape royal policy. They're trying to change imperial policy toward the Christians. But they didn't go any further than that because frankly, they had no opportunity. Once they got opportunity, then they began pushing the church, pushing the state, excuse me, toward. biblical values. So you see within 80 years of the Edict of Milan, you're seeing, I might even be shorter than that, you're seeing Christian writers like some of the Cappadocians arguing against slavery. Didn't happen earlier, but they didn't have any opportunity. Once the opportunity came, people started saying, okay.
What are the implications of the faith now that we're in this situation where maybe we can start influencing things? And in a republic we have a particular responsibility because as citizens in a republic with voting rights We have the opportunity to influence our government And if we really believe Jesus is Lord of all he's lord of washington dc may not look like it
But he is. And so we, as people who exist as his stewards, as his representatives in this world, it's our responsibility to see to it that his interests and his lordship is advanced in any and every area in every way we can, which includes our voting, our lobbying, our letters to the editor, whatever it is we can do to help shape policy. Because Jesus is Lord.
Kendall Lankford (43:31.182)
Right. Now, now would R2K adherent, would they not vote or be isolationist from culture in those ways or how do they, how do they parse that out?
Glenn Sunshine (43:45.151)
I don't know exactly how they do that. I haven't known enough R2K people personally, but I do know people who don't vote. You know, I do know people who say, I'm not a citizen of this world, I'm a citizen of heaven and therefore, even though the United States thinks I'm a citizen, I'm not and I'm not going to vote. I do know people who are like that. They're not necessarily R2K guys, so I don't wanna speak for them because I don't have the direct personal experience with them, I've only read some of their material.
Kendall Lankford (44:13.61)
Right. Now in my mind, I have connections in my head to Escondido, California, which was Westminster Theological Seminary in California. I've also, along the way, attached some of these things to Meredith Klein. I don't know if that's right or not. It's just the connection that's been made in my mind that all the guys that I know who are R2K see Meredith Klein as a mentor. So maybe that's not right. Is that right that theology is sort of coming out of Escondido, is it only just a few professors? Where did, you know, some of that.
Glenn Sunshine (44:49.058)
I don't think it's the majority view there, although I may be wrong. Again, I haven't worked with Westminster West. I know it's not what their main campus is doing. But like I said, I'm not as directly in that world. So I don't think I've ever met anybody personally who graduated from Westminster West. So
You know, without those connections and without the opportunity to really interact with them, I can't be sure of any of that. I do know people who studied under Meredith Klein, though, who take a very, very different view of the relationship of Christians in politics. A good friend of mine, now deceased, John Rankin, would be a prime example of that. He was very influenced by Meredith Klein in his understanding of the Old Testament, but he was emphatically not a, let's say, disengaged from politics.
Matter of fact, he wrote a great deal about why we should be in politics and how we should do it.
Kendall Lankford (45:51.534)
Right. All that's incredible and great. I want to honor your time, brother, but I also want to make sure that we equip every single person with the, how does this, how does this the wheels meet the road sort of thing? How does the rubber meet the road? I mean, how do we live? How do we then now live in this kingdom that the kingdom of Christ that we are in, but yet also living in the world? How do we? How do we bring these two back together instead of pushing them apart as we've talked about?
Glenn Sunshine (46:24.262)
Well, I would actually suggest we take a really close look at Hebrews 11, reading it in context of Hebrews 10. Okay, Hebrews 10, one of the main things that it's doing is you're getting toward the end of the chapter. The Book of Hebrews was written to a bunch, probably, to a group of Jewish Christians who were being tempted to return to Judaism.
And so through the book, you have this series of cycles where Jesus is superior to the angels. So don't leave the faith. Jesus is superior to Moses, so don't leave the faith. Jesus is superior to Aaron, so don't leave the faith. There's this cycle of warnings. And at the end of 10, you're finishing this whole series of warnings, and you're beginning to move into sort of the practical implications of this. But the last part of 10 puts a great deal of emphasis on living in the here and now in light of the there and then. You know, living your life now in light of invisible realities, invisible both in the sense that they are things we cannot discern with our senses, but invisible also in the sense that they are not yet present for us. So you get that in 10, and then when you read 11, where you're talking about the great heroes of the faith, this is the catalog of the heroes of the faith, notice that over and over again, it talks about They're living now in light of what is to come.
They think of themselves as strangers and aliens in this world. They're looking for a city with foundations whose designer and builder is God. All of these kinds of things. So they're living now in light of eternity. And how did they do that? Well, what does it say? They conquered kingdoms. They did all kinds of things in this world, engaging even in politics. Many of the people, once you get past Moses,
Many of the people that they mention are judges, they're kings, they're all of these kinds of things. And in a summary at the end, he specifically talks about conquering kingdoms and things like that. So these are people who recognize that their citizenship is in heaven. But don't hesitate to work in this world. So that is the pattern. This is on my mind because I'm currently teaching an online Bible study of Hebrews. But this is the pattern that I think provides a really useful picture of what we're supposed to do. You can't just write it off and say, these guys were in the Old Testament. We're in the New Testament, now it works differently. Because the book of Hebrews isn't in the Old Testament. Okay, and the writer of Hebrews is saying, this is the kind of way you should live.
So what I would say is that God places us where we are, both geographically and in time, for a reason. Ephesians 2, 8, 9, everybody's favorite evangelistic verses. But then read verse 10. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared ahead of time for us to do.
which means that we are not living where we are when we are by accident. God's prepared things for us to do. And the things that he has prepared for us to do, I think are very clearly to obey him, number one. And part of that means acting, look at all of Jesus's parables about stewards, pursuing the interests of our master.
in every way that we can. That is our job. And what that means is we vote. It means, you know, this affects how we engage in business, how we do our jobs, how we raise our kids, how we treat our spouse, how we treat our neighbors, what we do in our community, what we do in our church, all of these kinds of things.
The tendency in the modern world, this is an insight from sociologist of knowledge, Peter Berger. The tendency in the modern world is, well, he used factories as an illustration of this. I won't do that, I'll use bookshelves. The tendency in the modern world is to have a box for your family, a box for school.
a box for work, a box for your neighborhood, a box for recreation, a box for health and fitness, a box for church, all of these kinds of things. And we put them all on the shelf. And in principle, you can pull off any box and stick another in its place as long as it's in the same area and it won't matter to anything else.
In other words, we compartmentalize our lives. The problem is that Christianity isn't one of these boxes, it's the bookshelf that holds all of these things together. And that's how we've gotta live. The gospel of the kingdom affects everything that Jesus has authority over, which is all. And so we need to be living that out.
And I can't give you specifics because everybody's different in terms of what they do, who they're with, what their personality is, what their gifts are, all of these kinds of things. But what we need to be doing is to be constantly looking to find ways in which we can live out and embody the Lordship of Christ in everything we touch, because Jesus touches everything we do.
Kendall Lankford (52:30.578)
It reminds me of the tagline out in Moscow, all of Christ, for all of life, for all the world.
Glenn Sunshine (52:39.443)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think that is a great summary of what we're supposed to be doing. And I would say that that's true, whether you're a post-mill, an on-mill, or a pre-mill. It doesn't matter who you are, it doesn't matter what your eschatological view is, your job is the same. So.
Kendall Lankford (53:05.379)
Amen. As we, as we conclude, where can we find you? What are you working on? Are you publishing anything new? I know that you mentioned, uh, break point. I've listened to, uh, I listen every week to break point and the episodes that you're on, uh, as well as the other guests as well, but I always pay attention when you're on great stuff. Uh, what else are you working on that we can, uh, be tuning into?
Glenn Sunshine (53:28.015)
Okay, well I do two breakpoint commentaries per month, sometimes in Extra Hero there. I work for reflections ministries. You won't see my stuff directly there. We were going to be using me to produce my own material there, but...
There are a variety of reasons they decided they really need to focus on Ken Boa, who's the guy who runs that ministry. They really need to focus on his stuff largely because he's got literally thousands of things that he's produced. And they really need to get that organized and out in a coherent way. But reflections.org is a great site. I'm operating in the background there. But then there's also my ministry, which is called Every Square Inch Ministries. and it's the website is esquareinch.org, E-S- And that'll have a lot of videos, a lot of links, things like that there.
Kendall Lankford (54:27.074)
That name ties into this. Yeah, even your name ties into what we've been talking about this whole time. So excellent. Excellent, brother Thank you so much for coming on I can't wait until the next time our paths cross in person and until we see each other again May God richly bless you and thank you for being on the broadcast
Glenn Sunshine (54:47.258)
Well, thank you for having me.
