The church needs somebody to do the work of distinguishing between historic postmillennialism and theonomic postmillennialism. Somebody, make postmillennialism great again.
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I’ll stoke the coals a bit.
I’ve long framed it like this. Reconstructionism is to postmillennialism what Leninism is to Marxism.
Marxism is a theory as to how economics will unfold throughput history, whereas Leninism is the ideology which grabs its guns and says, “Let’s make it happen!” The one is concerned with theory and predicting an outcome, the other is concerned with forcing the outcome.
Similarly, postmillennialism theorizes what the gospel will do long term. That as a matter of course, the gospel leaven will eventually come to leaven the whole world, until it touches and overtakes all of human life and activity (Matt. 13:33). Slavery will fall. Institutions will reform. Nations will acknowledge the lordship of Jesus Christ. Reconstructionism hears this, gets excited and fantasizes about the predicted outcome, and then tries to make a beeline for it.
What reconstructionism ignores is that there are no shortcuts to the leavening process. You can’t make a beeline for the outcome. The kingdom of heaven doesn’t come that way (Luke 17:20-21). It grows only through means of the gospel of Christ, and men being saved.
Try to accelerate the leavening process artificially, and before you know it, you’ve strayed from the recipe.
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Perhaps I’m being too charitable. Maybe a distinction between historic and theonomic postmillennialism can’t be maintained.
I don’t fully buy the analogy you made, because historic postmillennialism, if it exists, is more than a theory. It has its means to live out its theory, and radically different are those means from the recon brand’s.
If the distinction doesn’t exist then I’m left convicted the whole theory is an error.
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I disagree with you, speaking as one who used to be postmil (or thought I was). Reconstructionism is very young in church history. If it was required by postmillennial thought the way Leninism followed Marxism, seems like we would have seen it sooner. Perhaps we did and I don’t know about it.
I continue to have respect and admiration for the late Greg Bahnsen, who was a churchman and a scholar. Even if you disagree with him, his godliness, wisdom and love for the church were evident. Rushdoony and North I don’t trust. The fruit from those men proves a rotten tree.
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I remember reading these two articles from this site some years ago. I am not sure how to evaluate it. I offer for consideration.
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Some really good comments on this topic throughout this thread: https://sanity.warhornmedia.com/t/9-marks-misses-the-mark-on-theonomy/2333
See especially this one, this one, this one, and this one. You know what, just read the whole thread 
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These articles were not very helpful to me. Maybe I have to read them again.
Jay Adams’ The Time is At Hand does a good job of distinguishing partial-preterist Amillennialism from Postmillennialism and also Premillennialism.
He actually makes the case that Pre and Post share more in common with each other than either does with Ammillenialism. He says they both suffer from escatalogical diplopia. I’ll leave it to him to defend his own work. The book isn’t long and available on Amazon last I looked.
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There’s so many strains of a-, pre- and postmil that I doubt how useful they are as categories. I haven’t heard a good alternative, but in each of the traditional groups there are folks who are practically far closer to the majority of people in another camp than in their own.
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