Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Obama’s Eschataology

A while back, I asked Is Obama a Reconstructionist Postmillenialist? The question was prompted by an Obama speech in which he referred to creating a “Kingdom ... on Earth.” Andrew Sullivan’s posted an excerpt from an interview with Obama, in which the latter explains:

BO: [R]eading Niebuhr, or Tillich or folks like that—those are the people that sustain me. What I believe in is overcoming - but not eliminating - doubt and questioning. I don’t believe in an easy path to salvation. For myself or for the world. I think that it’s hard work, being moral. It’s hard work being ethical. And I think that it requires a series of judgments and choices that we make every single day. And part of what I want to do as president is open up a conversation in which we are honestly considering our obligations - towards each other. And obligations towards the world.

AS: But you don’t think we’re ever going to be saved on this earth do you?

BO: No. I think it’s a ... we’re a constant work in progress. I think God put us here with the intention that we break a sweat trying to be a little better than we were yesterday.

It would have been interesting to see how Obama would have handled the direct question: What’s your position on the eschatology and the millenial reign? It might also have been interesting to hear his answer to the direct question: Do you want/believe it is possible to immanentize the eschaton? Short of that, however, his answers to Andrew’s questions suggest Obama likely subscribes to a fairly standard iberal Christian variant of amillennialism.

How very anticlimactic. It would have been much more interesting if he had turned out to be that rarest of birds--a politically liberal Reconstructionist Postmillenialist.