The Myth of a Better World, and What We Should Believe Instead - Jaran Miller & Marlin Sommers

We believe that the latter days will be characterized by general lawlessness and departure from the faith, and on the part of the world iniquity shall abound and evil men shall wax worse and worse, and further that present conditions indicate that we are now living in these perilous times. And so it's written in 1921, and they say present conditions indicate. You know, in that 105 years since this confession, I mean, there's massive movement to Christ, um, coming out of Islamic areas. You know, if you bring that 105 years forward, it'd be interesting to talk to somebody that wrote that. You know, what would they think of the modern world?

All right, so Jarren, you're one of the co-founders of Anabaptist Perspectives. Marlon, you're the current director of Anabaptist Perspectives. And we want to do an episode on an interesting topic that you will commonly hear people say something along the lines of lamenting how the world is getting worse and worse. And we want to dig into that. Where does that come from? What do you guys think of that perspective? And some other details as well. So first question, what do you think of that perspective? The world is just getting worse and worse. Talk to me about that.

When I hear somebody mention that perspective, it does not surprise me at all. It is a perspective that I've come to expect, and I think it is congruent with the consensus, at least in many places, um, for our view on eschatology and what we expect from the trajectory of the world.

I want to quote from the 1921 Garden City Confession of Faith as a representative of that perspective. And so for perspective, the 1921, that would be used by quite a lot of Mennonite churches, you're saying? Many conservative Mennonites use it. Still popular, yes. Yes, widely in use.

I will read Article 14 from the 1921 Christian Fundamentals. We believe that the latter days will be characterized by general lawlessness and departure from the faith, and on the part of the world iniquity shall abound and evil men shall wax worse and worse.

On that, the part of the church there will be a falling away, and the love of many shall wax cold. That false teachers shall abound, both deceiving and being deceived, and further that present conditions indicate that we are now living in these perilous times.

And then there is a series of scripture references from the New Testament. So this is a pretty common phrasing that I've heard quite a lot by many people, and it's almost so common, I wonder, at least for myself, didn't even think about it. Yeah, yeah, of course, the world's getting worse. I mean, just look around. You know, that's been seems like a very common way of describing it and saying it, and nobody really second guesses or thinks beyond necessarily that phrase, maybe, in a lot of cases, or at least not for me, maybe. Maybe I shouldn't put that on other people. More context you want to add, Marlon, or anything you want to add there, Jarren, on this sentiment?

So it's written in 1921, and they say present conditions indicate. I mean, which always gets you into, you know, Jesus said no man knows the day or the hour when the Son of Man returns. This is not setting a date for Jesus' return, but it's they were doing something similar in saying, well, we can tell where we're at on the calendar here. We're in this last days thing.

So you can think about, well, how has that statement aged, as we say now? Like, okay, we're 105 years past then. What has happened to the world and to the Christian church in the last 105 years? Has Christianity grown or shrank? How have those trends happened?

I mean, so just a few really macro-level things that have happened with the church since that confession was written. In 1921, one of the big concerns for Christians, American Christians, American conservative Christians especially, was the rise of theological modernism, which was, let's keep Christian language, but no, we don't actually believe that Jesus rose from the dead or the virgin birth or whatever. Just kind of a Christianity is our way of talking about human progress or something. That kind of real liberalism.

And that's still around, and I'm sure that that's had to be something on the minds of somebody framing that confession, like this rise of just completely vacuous Christian language that uses Christian language, doesn't believe in anything. That language is still around, but what we know since then is, well, it turns out modernist groups don't survive because they can't really pass on their beliefs to their descendants, right?

Their descendants either come back to Orthodox Christianity or shed the Christianity altogether. So you've definitely seen a big rise in evangelical Christianity since then. But also to think about at a worldwide scale, yeah, the church in America and Europe doesn't look great 105 years after that.

But I don't think anybody anticipated the fruits of missionary work in 1921. Like, if you would have told them in 1921 that, hey, 100 years from now, like, the center of the church is going to be Africa, and they're going to be the ones holding the line for Christian Orthodoxy against their parent bodies in North America, like, I don't think they would have seen that coming.

Or the rise of Christianity in Islam. I mean, we went for centuries before that time period with almost no, from what we can tell, almost no Christians coming from Islam. And, you know, in that 105 years since this confession, I mean, there's massive movement to Christ coming out of Islamic areas.

Now, if you bring that 105 years forward, it'd be interesting to talk to somebody that wrote that. You know, what would they think of the modern world? And I think you could certainly look at North America and Europe and say, okay, yeah, this trajectory has continued to some extent.

But if you look at the rest of the world, I think you'd get a very different picture. Like, the church has grown massively since 1921. So I think it's interesting to note that some of the people we've interviewed, actually, on this podcast have noted this in various contexts, maybe not universally, but maybe in a specific case, hey, it seems like the world's getting worse, you know, or oh, this is not good, those kinds of things. And so that was one of the reasons, like, well, let's dig into this a bit. Let's do some data mining here. Jarren, I think you came to this podcast with a fair amount of data on this question. Is the world getting worse?

I'd love to hear what you have. So yeah, what did you find in your research? So we plan to represent the perspective of both some Christian optimists, at least a particular type of Christian optimism, but also starting with some secular optimists, which is what these books are doing here.

We have Factfulness by Hans Rosling that we intend to look at a little bit. Also, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Stephen Pinker. Stephen Pinker, certainly secular. I don't think he's a Christian at all. Do you know about Hans Rosling? Agnostic. This is a book you recommended to me as a representative of a certain type of optimism. Yeah, it would be very secular. I mean, agnostic. So like, well, I'm not sure if God is real or not, but you know, I believe this about the world, etc.

Well, something that is characteristic of both of these books is they are full of data and charts and graphs. They love data and love charts and graphs. And we're going to look at some of those as we talk about some of the data that they look at as a basis for their optimism.

The first chart I want to look at is Figure 3-3: Homicide Rates in Five Western European Regions, 1300 to 2000. So what we see is a chart that looks at homicide per 100,000 people per year for Italy, England, Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland, and Scandinavia.

So on the far left side, we have the year 1200. Homicide per 100,000 people for Italy and England and Netherlands then were between 10 and 100 people. So rather high. As you go forward in time towards the right, the lines all drop significantly to the point at the year 2000, they show homicide rates for all those all five of those countries around one per 100,000.

So over that 800-year period, we see homicide almost going away in these European countries. And we should note on this graphic that vertical scale is a logarithmic scale. Yes. So, you know, it's hard to compare slopes, but the top is 100 times a third of the way up. So you're seeing a drop to about 1% at the bottom of what the peak was. Yes.

Yeah, thank you for pointing that out. The next graph is Figure 4-10. And again, this is from Pinker's, The Better Angels of Our Nature, as was the first one we looked at. This graph shows literacy in England starting in 1635. We have two different lines, one for women, one for men. In 1625, the literacy rate for women was at about zero. The literacy rate for men was between 25 and 50%. You know, maybe that's at about 30. Then as we proceed right across the graph, which follows the time up to 1925, the literacy rate in England for both men and women reaches somewhere near 100%. So this is a graph that's the opposite of the one that we just looked at.

Homicide rates have gone down. Literacy rates have gone up. For Pinker, this is part of the humanitarian revolution that he sees as a feature in an improving world, a world that's been on a trajectory for the better in many different ways.

So I'm sure a critic will immediately point out, well, England is like a minuscule portion of global population, and those European countries is a very small percentile of the entire globe. So what if they would just say, well, this is just a regional phenomenon, but across the globe it's getting worse?

Yeah, I cannot represent Pinker very well on that point. He has lots of charts and graphs, and he probably has some charts and graphs that represent that. He loves data. This is representative of the type of optimism that he has. So I think if optimism is for the entire world, I don't know how he would address that particular concern.

But that is his case. Like, humanity is on a, or the world is on an upward trajectory of improvement, at least from the data that he's able to pull, which we should note, it's like an 800-page book with enormous amounts of footnotes and graphs and, you know, obviously. So there's a lot more there we could get into, but yeah, okay.

He has some explanations for this. Okay. This is just one sample of a book that has lots of explanations. But he says, "The growth of writing and literacy strikes me as the best candidate for an exogenous change that helps set off the humanitarian revolution. The pokey little world of village and clan accessible through the five senses and informed by a single content provider, the church, gave way to a phantasmagoria of people, places, cultures, and ideas. And for several reasons, the expansion of people's minds could have added a dose of humanitarianism to their emotions and their beliefs."

For Pinker, humanitarianism or humanitarian concerns comes in some way in conjunction with opening one's mind through literacy beyond the single content provider of the church. As I understand him, the humanitarian revolution, which is interested in many things such as the decline of war on terrorism, homicide, disease, life expectancy, poverty, sexual assault, racism, abortion, all categories that Pinker looks at in his books.

As those things declined, the church became less of the center point for what was informing people's humanitarian impulses and emotional concerns. So again, this is secular optimism where the church is to blame for the problems that we've thankfully been moving away from. So what I really wish we had, and I don't have anything prepared to bring in here, is an actual historical interrogation of that idea that it was, you know, the decline of the church that led to the things he's talking about.

Because you don't have to be a professional historian to be aware that, you know, Christian revival, Christian renewal also did a lot of that, a lot of concern for whether it was, you know, temperance movement, workers' movement, abolition of slavery, working for literacy.

Like, there were tremendous Christian forces and, you know, Christian revivals that contributed a huge amount of that as well. And so it'd be really interesting to go further into a historian's actual look at Pinker's claims here. Yeah, especially the one I think of as abolition of slavery, you know, and what a force the church was in that and saying, no, this is wrong. You cannot treat other humans made in the image of God this way. This is against Christianity. And that was a huge part of the story where the abolition of slavery in both the UK and, you know, in America as well.

And of course you had the theological defenders who made this case for reading these texts in the Bible and so on. But the energy to energy and moral clarity also came from Christian renewal movements that said, this is not good.

So one of them, one of the things people are going to say is, well, what about war? It seems any time you turn on the news, there's like, well, there's war, terrible things happening around the world, etc. What would these guys say, the secular optimists, I guess we'd say, what would their response be on the rise of war and violence through that means? I mean, you had a chart for homicide, but armed conflict, what do they have on that?

Hans Rosling talks about that a little bit. And let's start by looking at a chart in his book. So Rosling, like Pinker, loves charts and data. He has a chart on page 114 that shows a significant spike in battle deaths per million people in the 1940s. We had 2,000 battle deaths per million people. But then after the 40s, a significant flatlining where battle deaths per million people is very, very low.

I suppose that has to do with World War II. After World War II, battle deaths really dropped off around the world. Here is a piece of commentary that Rosling gives on that trend. "The general trend towards less violence is not just one more improvement. It is the most beautiful trend there is."

That's high praise. "The spread of peace over the last decades has enabled all the other improvements we have seen. We must take care of this fragile gift if we hope to achieve our other noble goals, such as collaboration toward a sustainable future. Without world peace, you can forget about all other global progress."

And that's a significant piece to note. Yeah, go ahead, Mike. Right. But if there's anything we know about, you know, peace versus conflict in the world and so on, is that it's not steady. And there's always some conflict, and then there's periods of relative peace, and sometimes those go on longer than other times, different places over the world. And then you get a 30 Years' War or you get Genghis Khan conquering the world or whatever.

You had, going further back, you know, okay, the Roman Empire waged war and then controlled large sections of the world and kept it peaceful while they maintained control. And eventually that broke down, right? And so you have conflict coming back. So I don't think we have any good reason to think that World War II won't be repeated.

Could look very different. I mean, it's going to look very different in terms of its technologies and all of those things. But I don't see any reason why we would not have another world war. But see, I think his point there is you have these, yeah, really, really bad wars 80 years ago, you know, World War II. But since then, the amount of deaths from armed conflict is minuscule. I mean, it's basically, when you look at the chart, it basically doesn't even show up.

Whereas people will have the tendency of saying, there's just so much war in the world right now. And I think one of the points made there is like, well, that is because of the spread of information. So you see it more, but actually on the scale of in relation to history, it's barely a drop in the bucket compared to what it used to be. And it's very hard to remember that that's the case because it seems like every time you pull up your phone and see the news, it's like something blew up somewhere, you know, and it feels really bad when in reality, it's statistically, it's minuscule compared to in the past. War-related death is much greater than battle death.

Yeah, yeah. War-related, you know, starvation-related disease because medical supplies can't get there. All of these things that are war-related or at least conflict-related. So one of the pieces that I'm sure people are going to be asking is like, well, if we're saying the world is getting better in at least some ways, right, especially these guys, again, these secular optimists, let's say that's all true. The charts are all true. Yeah, you know, homicides going down, literacy rates going up, life expectancy, that's another one we could look at. I mean, just a phenomenal increase in life expectancy in the last 150 years. It's unbelievable, really, compared to what it used to be. But they'll, I'm guessing the critics will say to you that, well, how can we say the world is better when the 20th century was by far the most violent and catastrophic in history, at least in terms of war, genocide, and overall societal destruction?

You know, two world wars, invention of nuclear weapons, genocide, you know, Holocaust, the Soviet Union annihilating tens of millions of people in the Gulag, you know, Communist China, millions of people starving there under that regime. So how can we still say the world is improving? Maybe these guys have an answer for that, but I'd be curious how you guys would contextualize those things as well.

I mean, I think that the world improving or getting worse is almost too big of a scope for us to talk about because, well, what part of the world and where in history? So, you know, since the 19th, in the last half century or whatever, starvation and famine going down, very glad for that. That might be part of their reply. Well, you talk about the 20th century, but we're moving away from the 20th century would be their optimism, which I would not, I don't dispute their numbers that a lot of things have gotten better since the middle of the 20th century.

I don't see that that necessarily, I don't think that necessarily means that that trajectory will continue or we can count on it. So if we can get past, we can say, what part of the world are we talking about getting better or worse?

I mean, whether or not you have an overall trend line, I think the details are going to look more like this in different parts of the world. You're going to have things going up and down and affected by a lot of factors, which is incidentally back to the beginning when we started with that, you know, quote from one of our confessions from the earlier 20th century that says, you know, okay, things are going to get worse. The church is going to fall away.

And present times indicate we're in the latter days. It's like, well, I think that the, you know, however you're going to measure bad and worse, I think the graph is so much like this that how would you know what present times indicate? Like, you might be on a downslope right now, but how do you know where that downslope is in all the iterations of history? Anyhow, Jared, you're the one that's trying to represent the secular optimists. Yeah, I'm trying to represent them, but I can't actually represent them well. One thing I notice is in the quote from Rosling, it's like, what a blessing. Things have been better for 80 years, and it's fragile. We need to keep it this way.

So I don't know, but he acknowledges that there were problems. He's also pretty set on pointing out that we've moved away from those problems. He's also clear that it's fragile. So I don't know how, what a comprehensive perspective of secular optimism would be on the problems in the 20th century. But I do hear him keeping his optimism and saying things are different now. Humans are better. Humans have improved. We're more moral, more humanitarian.

And so I would say, yes, it's fragile and it's going to break. We just don't know when. Okay, see, but it's so interesting because that 1921 confession, if you think about when they're writing that, right after World War I, I mean, World War I just shattered the optimism all across Europe. There's a whole, you know, fields of academic study on this, right, about all this optimism for progress and enlightenment, Industrial Revolution. Wow, you know, humans can fix everything. And then actually it turns out humans turned all that ingenuity into how can we kill as many people as possible? And you get the trench warfare of, you know, World War I, which was just unspeakably, ridiculously, absurdly awful.

It's just the amount of people that were shot in that war. It's awful. And so they're coming fresh off of that. I mean, that would have to be ringing in their minds, writing that confession, being like, yeah, the present circumstances do kind of show this is really bad. But then what's interesting is now, in our time, we have not faced something like that. You have all the charts showing a trend in the last 100 years of like, actually, things are pretty good, you know, overall. And so then the secular optimist saying, well, yeah, it's because humans can fix everything. It's kind of the idea I'm getting, isn't that? You can almost see that in Rosling saying like, it's fragile, weak, but we can do this.

You know, we can build that sustainable future, however the wording was. Collaborative and sustainable. Yeah, yeah, there you go, right? Anyway, so I'm suspicious. And I have a lot, I'm feeling a lot of our people in our audience to be like, well. Convince us that this is the case.

You know what I'm saying? I don't know if that's the right way of saying it. I'm not trying to convince anybody of that.

So I see you pulled out another reference here you want to use. What do you have there? So here's a song that, interestingly enough, we still sing, but it was written in 1911, so before World War I. And in that mood where there's a lot of optimism, you know, including the kind of post-millennial eschatology, which was the idea that Jesus is coming after the millennium, the church makes progress in society, and the millennium is kind of the culmination of, you know, the growth of the church and God's kingdom coming that way.

So this text, which most of you will recognize, most people in our circles have sung. This is Hymns of the Church, right? This is the Hymns of the Church. Which number? 352. But it's in all of our songbooks, from what most of our songbooks.

Rise up, O men of God, the church for you doth wait, her strength unequal to her task. Rise up and make her great. That was verse three. Let me read verse two, which puts a little more specificity to it, how you're making the church great. What's happening here?

Rise up, O men of God, his kingdom tarries long. Bring in the day of brotherhood and end the night of wrong. Interesting. So very, very different from what we see in that 1921 confession. It's like, okay, men, get your act together here. Bring in God's kingdom and get rid of this night and bring in the day.

And the night of wrong. I've never thought of that. And the night of wrong. Wow. So, I mean, hopefully that happens in some scale in our personal lives in direct effect. But that seems to have been a mood. There definitely was a mood there that this is happening on a world scale at that time period, whatever all this particular author had in mind.

Another text that's in some of our hymnals in Hymns of the Church was in the Mennonite hymnal. And it's actually 1930, so it's after 1921, but it has that same early optimism. And this one has made me squirm for many years now when I hear it sung.

Oh, you have me curious. So what number is this again? This would be 360 in Hymns of the Church. And there's a lot of things about it that are a good prayer. There's a lot of good things to pray in the text.

But the first verse, God of grace and God of glory, on thy people pour thy power, crown thine ancient church's story. Bring her bud to glorious flower. Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour, for the facing of this hour.

You think about the staggering optimism there because the implication is not God's going to bring the bud of the church to flower at the return of Christ. It's, you know, give us your power because we're facing this hour when that bud that's been there for, you know, 1900 years can now burst into flower.

So again, this is a very opposite perspective to the kind of eschatology we started with. That idea, like this is the latter times, things are getting worse and worse. Men are falling away. This is going totally the other direction. Whoa, I've never thought of that before.

Okay, so what type of theological framework would this be coming from? Because this would be a pretty unfamiliar language. I can't imagine someone writing a song like that today. Maybe they would, but it seems like. But we still sing it. Yeah. Oh, yeah. At least in a lot of circles I've been in, we sing it. The way the reason I'm saying that is like everybody I talk to, it seems like, is like, oh, yeah, of course the world is getting worse. Obviously, just look around, you know? So I can't imagine something like that being written today. Maybe it would be, but it seems, yeah, very optimistic is probably the word. But tell me about what framework is this coming from that someone would write that?

Do you know? I do not know exactly on this text. I know that Fosdick was on the very much on the liberal theology side. The author here, was he a full-blown modernist? I don't know. I assume that somebody could find that out pretty quickly. He's a famous enough character. You can probably find him on Wikipedia and similar places and get an idea of the author of this song. But wasn't this part of, I mean, theoretically, of course, maybe not specifically this song, but in general, the idea of post-millennialism? I don't know how far you want to go down that street, but I'd be really curious to hear you talk about that, just to give some, again, some historical framing for some of these things.

So since we're talking about fancy terms like post-millennialism, we should probably define a few of those terms. The millennium there, obviously coming from the end of Revelation, this description of Satan is bound for a thousand years. At the end of that, he's let out and so on.

And so you have a pre-millennial viewpoint would say Jesus, the return of Christ, and then the millennium. And amillennial, so the return of Christ is pre, before the millennium.

Post-millennial is more like, well, let's get the world ready for Jesus to return. His return will be at the end of the millennium. Oh, so like we could improve the world to the point that we could usher in the millennium now? Like, is that correct? Yeah. So I don't know that this is Fosdick's particular thing, but yeah, the idea would be now that the church's bud finally comes to glorious flower, there's the millennium and Christ returns at the end of that. How about that? And even, again, I don't know the particular details, you know, the author of Rise Up, O Men of God, but that text that says his kingdom tarries long, bring in the day of brotherhood and end the night of wrong, that feels like a very much that mentality.

The church is going to bring this to that place. You know, another hymn from the period that sometimes sung came in through the Mennonite hymnal, is still here in Hymns of the Church, 363. O Holy City, scene of John, so looking to Revelation and describing that, and then addresses the church, O shame to us who rest content, while lust and greed for gain in street and shop entenement ring gold from human pain.

So in other words, why are we oblivious to the evils around us? And then says, Give us, O God, the strength to build the city that has stood too long a dream, whose laws are love, whose ways are brotherhood, and where the sun that shineth is God's grace for human good.

Wow. So it's like inexplicitly taking the city of God from Revelation and saying, okay, the church should actually build this. And this is coming out of the same time period. This is 1909. Wow. So this is the opposite eschatology for sure. This is, I mean, totally back, totally flipped of the 1921 confession that we opened this whole podcast with. Right. But I mean, that's obvious. I mean, wow. So the preface to the 1921 confession says, okay, we have to address issues that, you know, weren't such a big deal when the other previous confessions were written. Yeah. I mean, it's clearly aimed at this kind of optimism thing and saying, no, we don't buy this optimism.

And this, you know, these are the church ones. There's also a line in the 1921 confession. I don't know which article it is, but it says, It is the duty of the church to keep herself aloof from all movements that seek the reformation of society, basically independent of the gospel, or independent of conversion or whatever.

And so that's targeting, saying, hey, we can't join in these movements that are trying to bring in a secular, secular optimism or a change of society independent of a change of people. This is so interesting to compare the different ways of viewing these things, all in the roughly the same era from what you're pulling out. I've never thought to look at those hymns in that way. I think I'm going to pay a little more attention to the hymns in church a little more. You know, like, when was this written? Oh, wow, they're saying that, you know, and seeing it is a reflection of what was in the air, I guess you could say, at the time.

Maybe. I don't know. Yeah. It'd be interesting studying the history of those more. So we looked at secular optimism. You've given us a bit of a historical look at Christian optimism. But Jared, let's look at Christian optimism today. I think you got some notes on that. I'd be really curious. Like, we're looking at stuff from 100 years ago, right? These hymns. But what about right now, Christian optimism now, maybe in contrast in some ways to some of these secularists? I find the website Rival Nations to be interesting as a representative of a particular type of Christian optimism. If you peruse the website, you'll see some strong Anabaptist-ish impulses. You also find some very optimistic impulses.

He is interested, I think his name is Peter, the guy who writes the website, is interested in many of the same charts and graphs and data points that Pinker and Rosling are interested in. But rather than seeing the church to blame for the problems that we've moved away from in many ways, he sees the church and the victory of Jesus to be recipients of the credit for the same good things that Rosling and Pinker observe.

So in the course of one of his articles where he's talking about the world getting better, he says this, Jesus told us that he would sit on his throne at the renewal of all things. Matthew 19:28. Jesus is on his throne now. Hebrews 10:12. If he was indeed victorious over Satan, sin, and death, we should be seeing fruits of that. If you read or watch the news, you'll likely think the world is falling to pieces. But there's another story, a story the news doesn't often report. This story is backed by data.

These folks love data. As the influence of Jesus has spread around the world, nearly every aspect of our existence has grown more peaceful, healthy, and loving. So Pinker sees a time when the church was no longer the only dispensary of information. That leads to the Humanitarian Revolution.

Rival Nations looks at the growth of the church that happened in conjunction with the Humanitarian Revolution. So he has a chart on his website that looks at the percentage of the world population that the church comprises. 100 AD, one 360th of the world population was Christian. 1000 AD, one 220th. 1500, one 69th. 1900, one 27th. 2010, one third. Whoa, that's an extraordinary jump between 1900 and 2000. That is an extraordinary jump. That is crazy. And this is percentage of global population. So global population is obviously growing. So this is not, these are like significant numbers.

Very significant numbers. Yes. He says, The number of Christians around the world has nearly quadrupled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million to more than 2.3 billion, representing 33% of the world population. More than 80,000 people are joining God's kingdom daily.

So this is a kind of Christian optimism that looks at the data and gives the credit to Jesus and the church. But this sounds, I'm speculating, and maybe we're speculating a bit on what this guy believes. This strikes me as different than the post-millennial stuff that you were describing about how we need to build the city of God. We need to usher in, I don't know how you want to phrase it maybe, but you know, usher in the second coming of Jesus by bringing the millennium here and now. This guy is just saying, hey, look, the church is growing, and that's fantastic. And that means in some ways we would expect the world to be better in some aspects.

Am I getting that about right? I think so. Right. So, you know, one of, I think, his theological positions that comes through pretty clearly on the website is he understands that Christianity doesn't grow by the sword and taking control of power.

So he does not see these influences coming by imposition. He sees them coming by salt being salt and light being light and affecting the mindset of people around him and so on. But yeah, I would see it as very, I would, from what I can tell, it is different than the kind of triumphal post-millennialism, you know, from the early 1900s where, yes, they talked about peace too, but it was still from that standpoint of, still from a Christendom standpoint, a big Christian social structure evolving. They didn't have the strongs, didn't have that sense of separation from the world and rejection of the exercise of power.

And I think what a C articulated on the Rival Nations website has that sense of the kingdom works through the cross. That organic growth, not big societal or policy changes perhaps, but just individuals and the church is growing through that. And that makes sense though, that you wouldn't really hear about it because it's not big flashy news necessarily. I'm guessing a lot of people listening probably did not realize the extraordinary increase in Christians in the last 125 years, right, from 1900 to today. That is phenomenal. And to be crystal clear, like, not nearly all of that one third of the world population understands the implications of non-resistance and non-violence. But that doesn't mean that there's not Christian love and self-sacrifice at work, even if they don't understand the whole way through.

There's also religiously backed genocide as well. I mean, the whole Rwanda story, for example, one of those worst massacres where Christianity didn't stop ethnic cleansing there or claimed Christianity. So it's certainly not all a rosy picture, even with the church. I want to end the episode with going back to the kinds of verses that inform the, we can see that we're in the end times theology. But before that, I want to go to a hymn from the early 20th century that I think actually gets it right and that I do enthusiastically recommend. And this is 359 in Hymns of the Church.

I'm going to read several verses here. Father eternal, ruler of creation, Spirit of life which moved air form was made, Through the thick darkness covering every nation, Light to man's blindness, O be thou our aid. Thy kingdom come, O Lord, thy will be done.

So that last phrase there is simply becomes the refrain coming straight from the Lord's Prayer. Same of the same observations we saw earlier, even in the, even in that text, O Holy City, scene of John, it says, Races and peoples, lo, we stand divided, And sharing not our griefs, no joys can share.

By wars and tumults, love is mocked, derided. His conquering cross, no kingdom wills to bear. Thy kingdom come, O Lord, thy will be done. I remember reading that when I was younger and being like, well, duh, why did you have to say that no kingdom is willing to bear his cross? We're Anabaptists and we knew that all along.

But the fact that he points that out, it really gets to the heart of it because it is this whole prayer. And I think when we pray, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

I don't think we're just praying for that in the future. I think we're praying that people do God's will now as part of the Lord's Prayer. And that's the prayer here. And it goes through, you know, all these things of war, of poverty because of greed and so on, but pinpoints it there. You know, the nations cannot bring us to the blissful birth because they're not bearing the conquering cross.

God's kingdom grows and works when we follow the way of that kingdom and when more people follow the way of that kingdom. And yes, God's people are persecuted, but the more people you have who actually do love, the more it changes society. Like salt is salt, light is light while there's still evil.

I also want to highlight the flip side of it. So this says, no kingdom wills to bear Jesus' conquering cross, and a revival does not change that. So you can have a revival, you can have missionary efforts, you can see the massive growth of the church that we saw in the last 100 years. And you know, where those are genuine conversions, the word of God is taught, they bring people bearing the cross.

But then you go through the generations and maybe you have a large percentage of the population embracing Christ in various ways. But what happens there is that cross starts to slip back out. And so you get cultures that are officially Christian, but maybe the Christianity is not a cross. Maybe it's more of an identity marker or whatever, which is why the growth of the Christian population doesn't guarantee this kind of ongoing transformation. Because without a continual revival and discipleship, society goes back to these kingdoms of the world that won't bear the conquering cross.

Like that's actually maybe one of the scary sides of these numbers of the growth of the church. They're wonderful. They're exciting.

But if that vision of the cross and, you know, I would say all the way through of non-resistance, loving your enemies and so on is not taught and maintained and revived in there, well, you're going to see wars and tumults and disasters with the Christian name on them.

I mean, just like we obviously have seen, you know, Europe saw throughout the Middle Ages, early modern period, Americans do this. They bless their wars. There's dramatic images of certain people in the Russian church putting holy water on nuclear submarines and blessing them and whatever.

Like when Christianity goes there, it's not going to have this salt and light effect. It's salt losing its flavor.

There's one part of the moral of the story.

So as we try to tie all these pieces together, then we started with the 1921 statement about the world is getting worse and we're in the latter times, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, obviously. And we can see just from the way the world is that this is true. And my first thought is, huh, that was over 100 years ago. The world hasn't ended yet. And then you go back to the Middle Ages, you read the same thing. You know, yeah, it's getting worse and worse. The world's going to end any day. We're in the last times right now. And it's like 1400 or whatever they're writing this. You see that right out, you know, in the days of Napoleon.

I mean, it looks like he's going to conquer the world. Oh boy, you know, here's the Antichrist. It's the end of the world. That was in the 1800s. We're still here. And so whenever I hear people say that, it feels like I'm almost like numb to it anymore. It just doesn't even register.

Maybe that's why I kind of wanted to do this episode because it's like, we're so, we just hear it all the time. It's just saturated. Oh yeah, the world, of course, yeah, it's just getting worse. And it's like, there has to be more to this story because people have been saying this for like a thousand years that the world's going to end any day. We're in the last times.

And yet we're still here. So how do we go forward now? I guess that's the big question. So I don't know. Yeah, you kind of try to pull the pieces together, both of you, and leave us with some wisdom on that because it's kind of hard to know, I think, in some ways. How do you, how do we, how do we go forward from here?

Yeah. So, okay, I want to go back to the two texts that, two of the texts that inform that the language and the confession. The one is Second Timothy 3. But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.

For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit. And he keeps going, avoid such people, and starts to describe them. So one thing that jumps out is, by all appearances, Paul is actually talking about people that Timothy will encounter in the first century. Oh, but this is also very much then the language that's brought in because the last days language is brought in to the confession. It says, well, yeah, we're in these times.

We see, you know, lovers of self, lovers of money who are arrogant and abusive and ungrateful and heartless and unappeasable and slanderous and brutal and so on. That is quite the list. Is quite the list. Wow. You know, Paul is calling Timothy to be steady when these things are going around and to present a very different kind of example.

So there's kind of the encouragement, you know, live faithfully. I don't think we know how the cycles of history are going to go. You know, as long as there's sin, there's going to be sin. And the other one from Matthew 24, read a section of that, 24 verse 5. For many will come in my name saying, I am the Christ, and they will lead many astray.

And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.

Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name's sake. And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.