Believe it or not, but a person’s eschatology affects their political views.

If you are amillennial, you recognize that the “Kingdom of Heaven is at hand,” so the affairs of your particular nation take a rightful backseat, since you belong to a greater kingdom, have a certain reigning King, and you are concerned with the expanse of that kingdom’s borders more so than you are your nation’s business. You also anticipate the Lord’s coming and destruction of the Universe by fire, so you handle all the world’s issues with a loose grip.

A postmillennial mindset it similar, viewing the spread of the gospel through the world with optimism, ultimately leading to a peaceful world under the influence of the gospel. Like amillennialism, post-mil concerns itself with the spread of the kingdom more than temporal kingdoms or nations. This view was held by many prior to the World Wars.

Premillennialism, on the other hand, believes in a future, earthly Kingdom of Christ. In that perspective, Christ isn’t actually reigning the same way an a-mil person believes He reigns. The Kingdom isn’t at hand. It will come at some point in the future, perhaps even partially brought about sooner or later depending on political issues. Suddenly, the affairs of a nation become extremely important, with every event, war, scandal, or conspiracy being of the utmost ecclesiological and eschatological importance. For a good example of this, recall last year the viral Facebook posts about how vaccines would secretly contain a microchip which would be the Mark of the Beast. People were scared to death of that – all for no reason. It wasn’t true.

In the US today, a variation of premillennialism called Dispensationalism is the common view. If the premillennialist is overly concerned with secular affairs, the Dispensationalist is fourfold as concerned! Everything – and I mean everything – is interpreted as the big “it” from Revelation.

Eschatology isn’t something Christians should fight over. I’m sure we’ll all ultimately get a lot of our “end times” thoughts wrong. The fulfilment of prophecy is difficult to accurately predict before hand. But we should also understand the effects a person’s eschatology has on their perspective of current affairs.

By the way, I am an optimistic amillennialist. 🙂