Most Christians have a limited view of what constitutes a biblical worldview. I suspect that many believe that the Christian’s earthly life is a holding pattern for heaven. Earth serves as a way station for true living after death. Is this why God created us? We’re born, we live out our lives the best we can, and then we prepare for heaven. In the interim, the Christian’s goal is to evangelize the lost for the world to come.
Some went further by joining isolated religious orders like a monastery or nunnery. One of the most spiritual things a person could do in the Roman Catholic Church was to become a priest or a nun, two religious orders that negated the creation command to be fruitful and multiply.
Protestantism has its own version of the cloistered life masquerading as the spiritual life. Preaching is limited to the personally spiritual. Jesus is transformative for the individual with some impact on the family and life at large but little that would envision something like the General Magic project. But beyond these limited areas of impact, modern-day Christian theology has little to say. Check out Christian publishing companies if you want to be depressed or content with the cloistered life.
John Nelson Darby, the founder of dispensational premillennialism and the pre-tribulational “rapture” of the church doctrine, the basis of The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the multivolume Left Behind prophecy series, taught that “the imminent return of Christ ‘totally forbids all working for earthly objects distant in time.’” (Francis William Newman, Phases of Faith; or, Passages From the History of My Creed (London: George Woodfall and Son, 1850), 35.) This would have included the study of mathematics, medicine, art, music, and the sciences unless there were “immediate spiritual results.” (Newman, Phases of Faith, 37.) Darby would have approved of the printing press because such a device could reproduce the Bible in record numbers and more cheaply. Also, Darby’s own works could be reproduced. But beyond these necessities, the created world and its potentialities were not considered ultimately spiritual.
Considerable literature was put out and numerous sermons were preached in London, in the interest of the colony in Virginia, and much of this, at least—practically all, in fact that we have been able to examine—was provided by men, who used the Geneva Bible, presumably Puritans. The Good Speed to Virginia, written by Robert Gray, in the interest of the enterprise, was published in London, in 1609, and he quotes from the Geneva Bible. Several sermons were preached before the Virginia Company in London, for which service they chose freely, if not uniformly, Puritans. Perhaps the first such sermon was delivered at White Chapel on April 25, 1609, by the Rev. William Symonds, the minister of Saint Saviours in Southwark. He used the Geneva Bible, as his Scripture quotations prove. (P. Marion Simms, The Bible in America: Versions that Have Played Their Part in the Making of the Republic (New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1936), 75–76.)
What was uniformly true in Virginia in 1607 was equally true of the Plymouth colony in 1620. Like the earlier Jamestown settlers, the Pilgrims who had first gone to the Netherlands for refuge, came to the new world with the Geneva Bible in hand.
In his 1630 Model of Christian Charity, John Winthrop (1577/8–1649) offered the following exhortation to those aboard the Arabella as they were about to join the existing Massachusetts Bay Colony:
The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. (John Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity” (1630): Read here.)
In his Of Plymouth Plantation, a first-hand account of the colony, Bradford recounts the tortuous history that brought them to this new world, “Satan hath raised, maintained and continued against the Saints, from time to time, in one sort or other. Sometimes by bloody death and cruel torments; other whiles imprisonments, banishments and other hard usages; as being loath his kingdom should go down, the truth prevail and the churches of God revert to their ancient purity and recover their primitive order, liberty and beauty.” (William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Eliot Morison with notes and introduction (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 3.)
Bradford never considered that these external adversities were signs of an eschatological end or an indifference to the present world. They were challenges. While he never dismissed the historical realities that stared him in the face, he did believe that a faithful and active church, with God’s providential government, could beat them into retreat.
Author: Gary DeMar
Gary—who served as President of American Vision for thirty-five years—is a graduate of Western Michigan University (1973) and earned his M.Div. at Reformed Theological Seminary in 1979. Author of countless essays, news articles, and more than 27 book titles, he has been featured by nearly every major news media outlet. Gary also has hosted The Gary DeMar Show, History Unwrapped, and the Gary DeMar’s Vantage Point Webshow and is a regular contributor to AmericanVision.org. Gary has lived in the Atlanta area since 1979 with his wife, Carol. They have two married sons and are enjoying being grandparents. Gary and Carol are members of Midway Presbyterian Church (PCA).
