Praising Amillennialism

Over the years, people have asked me from time to time why I've remained in the Churches of Christ. To their eyes, I don't seem like a good fit for the tradition. 

There are many reasons I love and embrace being a member of my tribe, and one of the little appreciated reasons is amillennialism.

It may be difficult to overstate the degree to which pre-millennial and post-millennial theology has twisted and distorted evangelical political theology.

Two obvious things jump out at me.

First, End Times expectations concerning the state of Israel have caused evangelicals to look upon Israeli-Palestinian relations and conflicts through an eschatological filter. This filter has had a distorting and over-simplifying effect upon how evangelicals perceive the very complex and tragic history still unfolding in the Middle East. 

Growing up as I did in an amillennial tradition, where Israel had no End Times role to play in ushering in the Second Coming of Christ, I was raised to view the Middle East as a troubled part of the world not significantly different from other troubled parts of the world. I've appreciated how my faith tradition has allowed me to approach news from the Middle East with more critical distance and nuance than what you find in evangelical spaces. 

(A comment about recent events in Israel and Gaza. As regular readers know, most of my posts are written a few months out. So this post wasn't written to comment about recent events. But the topic is timely. I'm not trying here to tell anyone what to think about Palestinian-Israeli relations. I'm simply expressing gratitude for an amillennial tradition that allows me to look upon a troubled world without dragging into my newsfeed End Times fever dreams. A compassionate, informed, thoughtful and critical understanding of history and current events is hard enough as it is without dragging the Antichrist into the mix.)

Second, growing up in an amillennial tradition gives you some immunity to conspiratorial thinking. I didn't grow up reading Revelation as a code to be cracked, or become fretful about "signs of the end times" playing out in daily news events. Politics, for us, lacked apocalyptic intensity. I recall absolutely zero political conversations or drama during election years in my church growing up. Presidents came and presidents went, and it never mattered all that much to the people I sat beside in the pews. And my church was very bi-racial. My youth group was half White and half Black. Much of the political equanimity and sanity I experienced in my church was due to our amillennialism. 

As I look back, these ways of seeing the world were the political gifts of amillennialism. Gifts I cherish when I look at the political pathologies within evangelical churches.