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The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1 - Contents
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    III. The Earlier Advent Hope Largely Forgotten

    Augustine begins his epochal treatise, The City of God, with the words:PFF1 489.3

    “The glorious city of God is my theme, ... a city surpassingly glorious, whether we view it as it still lives by faith in this fleeting course of time, and sojourns as a stranger in the midst of the ungodly, or as it shall dwell in the fixed stability of its eternal seat, which it now with patience waits for, expecting until ‘righteousness shall return unto judgment,’ and it obtain, by virtue of its excellence, final victory and perfect peace.” 82Augustine, The City of God, book 1, Preface, in NPNF, 1st series, vol. 2, p. 1.PFF1 489.4

    This idea of the kingdom of God as the church ruling on earth was a sweeping, resplendent vision; but it was un-Biblical, unsound, and misleading. And it veered the church tragically away from her historic course. So long as the tremendous fact was acknowledged that only the second advent, ending forever the present world order, destroying all nations, and removing all the righteous through resurrection and translation, would usher in the visible kingdom of God, just so long was the second advent hope the focal point of Christian expectation and deliverance. But this was pushed into the background when Augustine’s misconceived dream became accepted—the dream of a present spiritual resurrection and a secular millennium introduced through the first advent, together with a spiritualization of the prophecies and the New Jerusalem to accommodate such a picture, and these accompanied by a denial of the earlier views of the prophetic course of events.PFF1 489.5

    Augustine, in his City of God, “did more than all the Fathers to idealize Rome as the Christian Zion.” 83Flick, op. cit., p. 170. It is true that he did not at all foresee the system that would be built upon that concept; neither do voluminous writers today follow out all their premises to ultimate conclusions. But he provided the materials from which in later times was built the medieval theory and policy of the religio-political state church.PFF1 490.1

    How different the history of the church might have been if it had heeded the emphasis which Augustine placed, according to his light, on faith and divine grace, and the inner communion with Christ, without which sacrament and ritual were valueless. But the medieval church left these teachings for Luther, the Augustinian monk, to carry on into the Reformation, and instead seized upon Augustine’s millennial theory and his world-church ideal, which it easily changed from a spiritual to a religio-political empire.PFF1 490.2

    It is not to be supposed that the doctrine of the second advent itself was abandoned or spiritualized away after Augustine’s time. The church always held to the Apostles’ Creed, with its definite declarations of faith in the return of Christ “to judge the quick and the dead,” in the resurrection of the body, the communion of saints, and the life eternal. That much can be assumed for all the writers cited. But they abandoned the idea of the millennium separating the two literal resurrections; and the future, general resurrection and judgment at the second advent were pushed out of range—beyond a “thousand years” of indefinite duration.PFF1 490.3

    Thus Augustine’s millennial theory focused the church’s gaze on the kingdom as a then-present reality on earth. This resulted in a tragic nearsightedness which blurred her vision of the future kingdom of Christ to be inaugurated at the second advent.PFF1 491.1

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