John Mark Hicks

Peter Jay Martin, following in the footsteps of his father Joseph Lemuel Martin, authored a book that surveyed Revelation. Published by the McQuiddy Company (the Gospel Advocate publisher) in 1913, it was entitled The Mystery Finished, or The New Heavens and the New Earth. Peter’s book is not as well known as his father’s (The Voice of the Seven Thunders), but it was published in Nashville and advertised in Wallace’s Bible Banner as late as the early 1940s. Both Martins read Revelation, like Alexander Campbell, in the continuous-historical tradition, that is, Revelation is a “historfy of the church of Christ from A. D. 98 to its final trimuph” (Mystery, v).

Both were postmillennialists, like Alexander Campbell. They both envisioned a triumphant church upon the earth before the second coming of Christ.When Satan is released at the end of the 1000 years and the nations gather to assault the Church, then Christ will come to defeat Satan, raise the dead and judge humanity.

But they differed on the nature of the “new heavens and new earth.” P. J. identified the new earth with the postmillennial reign of Christ through the church while J. L. believed the new earth is the new creation of God after the first earth was “gone.” J. L. was uncertain whether the new earth would be created out of the materials of the old or out of nothing, but he was convinced that the new material earth would be the eternal dwelling place of God with humanity.

P. J.’s understanding is more political than J. L.’s. The story of the emerging “new earth” is a “political” one where the “everlasting kingdom cut out of the mountain without hands shall fill the whole earth” (Mystery, 9). According to P.J., the present “political conditions” are demonic (Mystery, 174):

A government of the reich, by the rich, and for the rich, in which women and children, little children, slave in the cruelest form, for the most menial wage; exploited without voice, & forever beyond the hope of redress, because the courts of injustice are moved by the rich, and legislation, desired to control and limit exploitation, is, as was understood before the enactment of these laws, held as unconstitutional, or by injunction without law, leaves the poor wage worker in the position of an outlaw; while, in addition to receiving the lowest remuneration(!) for his labor, he is also made to pay the highest price for the poorest quality of all necessities of life.

The postmillennial kingdom of Christ–which is the new heavens and new earth– will involve a “radical change” such that there will be “no exploitation; no separation of parents and children, no foreclosing of mortgages, no sorrow nor crying” (Mystery, 179). P. J. Martin hopes for a political culture governed by the gospel as the church rather than the nations becomes “the political organization” that is “for the uplifting of the poor and needy and that stands for justice between man and man and between the rich and the poor” (Mystery, 180). In this way Christians will “posses the earth” (Mystery, 183) because in that postmillenial reign “the church has absorbed the world” (Mystery, 196).

P. J. has no confidence that the nations as political entities will serve the poor or place others first. Only people transformed by the gospel are able to serve out the self-emptying spirit that energizes the gospel itself. He writes (Mystery, 199):

…when this old world has been gospelized; ‘when every man seeks not his own, but another’s wealth;’ when men do unto others thus; every man seeking the welfare of the other man, thus fulfiling in acts, in actuality, the Golden Rule in doing unto other as you would have the other do to you, the gospel triumphant from the rivers to the ends of the earth, his will done on earth as in heaven, for which the writer ever prays in an absolute faith, then he has as lief to live in Oklahoma as to go to heaven.

When the “whole world,” this world, becomes the “habitation of God” in the postmillennial kingdom, “surely [even] Oklahoma will be good enough for us” (Mystery, 215). This is the “blessed hope of a redeemed earth–‘the new heaven and new earth'” (Mystery, 221).

The millennium–which precedes the second coming of Jesus–is a political embodiment of the gospel. There all the hopes of the prophets are fulfilled in the reign of Christ through the triumphant church. The gospel, in this vision, is both “political” and “religious.”

This entry was posted on March 22, 2013 at 8:22 am and is filed under Stone-Campbell, Theology. Tagged: Bible-Revelation, Christology, Church, Gospel, Kingdom, Millennialism, New Heavens and New Earth, Politics, Postmillennialism, Revelation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.