Moody would represent the growing cleavage between the triumphalistic postmillennialists and the pessimistic premillennialists.
In the last quarter of that century, fellow evangelicals Josiah Strong and D. Temperance societies emerged as one of many movements organized around the vision of a Christianized America. In the nineteenth century, most Protestants were optimistic. Needless to say, the confusion of the two kingdoms has yielded the lion’s share of blame for the atrocities committed in the name of God and his Messiah. This is the myth behind the crusades, the Inquisition, and such American institutions as slavery and the doctrine of manifest destiny, which gave narrative justification for the slaughter of Native Americans. And this “one kingdom” of God would grow and spread its unified cult and culture, its worship and its civilization, to the ends of the earth. The whole empire and, in fact, all Christian states, composed the corpus Christianum, the body of Christ. The emperor was a blend of King David (hence, the Holy part of the name) and Caesar (hence, the Roman part).
Throughout the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire often played out its identity as the fulfillment of the Old Testament theocracy, the true Israel of God. While Augustine, Luther, and Calvin were “amillennial” in their eschatology (i.e., non-millenarian), they were still under the sway of the Christendom model.
Like Augustine, both Luther and Calvin defended in theory a two kingdoms approach that they did not always follow in practice. And yet, Augustine reluctantly conceded to the use of the secular sword in suppressing the Donatists, a schismatic group similar to the radical Anabaptists known to the reformers. Augustine sharply distinguished the “two cities,” with their own special origin, purpose, destiny, message, and methods. Millennialism, whatever the prefix, concerns the triumph of “Christendom” from the conversion of Constantine the Great in 313 to the Great War (World War I). Postmillennialism and premillennialism (see definitions on page 46) are the terms most commonly used now to delineate those two distinct approaches. The other was rooted in the disillusionment with society’s gradual improvement that so characterized nineteenth-century Evangelicalism. One was rooted in the triumphalism that marked Anglo-American Protestantism since the Spanish Armada’s defeat in 1588 and produced the courageous confidence of the New England Puritans. Two eschatologies, or views of history and creation’s destiny, clashed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
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