Puritan Eschatology

Thanks to Liam Beadle for drawing my attention to the existence of The Puritan Hope by Iain Murray. It’s a stimulating book, showing that the Puritans, as well as Reformers such as Calvin and evangelical leaders of the eighteenth century held to an optimistic view of the future, in which prior to the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, the church would enjoy a blessed state on earth, the nations would be converted to Christ, and the earth would be filled with the knowledge of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. In the main, the belief appears to have been held that abundant gospel blessing for the world would come as a result of the Jews as a race being converted to Christ. They appeal to texts in Romans 11, and I am unconvinced by their arguments. Such an advance of Christ’s kingdom among the nations of the world would come as a result of the work of the Holy Spirit by the preaching of the gospel. Murray believes that this will take the form of a series of revivals; whether the Puritans actually believed that is unclear from his quotations: there may be a degree of imposition of revivalism on the gospel optimism of the Puritans. While we do pray for revival and we believe that God has worked and can work through general revivals, we don’t want bursts of conversions followed by stagnant periods. While we long for revival, we want the fruit of any such activity to include the instruction of the next generation, that they might tell their children, and so that they would set their hope in God (cf. Psalm 78.5-7), and we want such dynastic work to begin now. Murray demonstrates that the fruit of the Puritan optimism that the nations of the world would bow before Jesus Christ as their Saviour and Lord was world mission. Their view that this was a way off in the future in no way diverted their focus from the ultimate hope of Christ’s return and their resurrection from the dead. They did not feel it necessary to believe that Christ could come at any moment.

Murray then introduces us to the premillennialists (among whose ranks even J. C. Ryle could be found, and who could work out what Spurgeon thought?), who believed that things would get worse and worse until Christ returned (and that could happen any day), raised the dead believers and reigned with them on the earth for a thousand years, before the judgment. The fruit of this was a lack of long-term gospel investment. What mattered was saving souls now, not building missionary schools that would be their in two hundred years’ time. No longer was the work valued like the explorations of David Livingstone, in preparation for future missions. Murray doesn’t deal with the amillennialist position for whatever reason, although it should be clear that the general pessimistic outlook and the belief in the potential for Christ’s imminent return are common to both and they do have similar fruit, with the lack of planning for the long term and a tendency to a lack of appreciation of anything that isn’t directed to the immediate salvation of souls. “What’s the point of X? It’ll burn anyway.” But what about building an inheritance for our children and our children’s children? We have departed from the hope of the Puritans, a hope which had such a wide and deep impact.