As the
Theonomists themselves are wont to say, their Postmillennial vision is dead apart
from Dominionist theology, what Kline here calls the rejection of the 'way
through the wilderness'. And I would add the corollary, that Dominionists are de
facto Postmillennialists. Whether they espouse that specific eschatological
scheme they are in effect operating by and under its ethical imperatives as
well as its dangerously flawed understanding of the Kingdom. Their Kingdom paradigm
is correctly identified by Kline as the very thing we are being warned against
in the Apocalypse.
As Kline
concludes his commentary on Zechariah's first vision, he says the following:
Revelation 20 knows nothing of a
political dominion of the church over the earth during this millennial age of
the great commission. That expectation is a delusion of the prophets of
theonomic postmillennialism, who, in their impatience with the way through the
wilderness, have succumbed to carnal cravings for worldly power. It is
revealing that in order to defend their false forecasts they find it necessary
to scorn as losers those whom the Scriptures honor as overcomers, indeed as
"more than conquerors" (cf. Rom 8:35-37), the martyr-witnesses who overcome
Satan "because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their
testimony, and they loved not their life unto death" (Rev 12:11). One
cannot but be appalled at the railing of certain of these reconstructionist
postmillenarians against the Holy Spirit's soteric ministry thus far in the
church age. What has been in the eyes of heaven a triumphant working of the
Spirit of Christ, effecting the salvation of all God's elect in every nation
and every generation without fail, a sovereign fulfilling of the good pleasure of
God's will to the praise of his grace—this is dismissed by the pundits of this postmillennialist
cult as dismal failure and a history of defeat. Nothing betrays more clearly
than this blasphemous contempt for the gospel triumphs of the Spirit how alien
to biblical Christianity is the ideology of theonomic reconstructionism.
Glory In
Our Midst: A Biblical-Theological Reading of Zechariah's Night Visions, pp. 53-54
