The Millennium

By Mark Odell, PhD

Revelation 20:1-7 describes an angel binding Satan and casting him into a prison called the abyss to prevent him from deceiving the nations any longer, and the subsequent reigning of the resurrected saints with Christ, for a period of 1,000 years. This has come to be called the Millennium, among Revelation’s most well-known and heavily debated concepts. Like our English word rapture, the term millennium comes from the 5th century Latin Vulgate translation of the Greek Bible, milia (thousand) annorum (years). The original Greek word was chilia, also meaning thousand. Simple and straightforward, right? Well….as with much else in Revelation, maybe not. Maybe a lot not.

Let us zoom out for a moment. We read Revelation today from the vantage point of 21st century America, a culture of unprecedented material comfort and prosperity dominated by a rationalist/materialist Scientism that is oblivious to the reality of a spiritual realm alongside and underneath the physical. Revelation for us is situated in an English language Bible that has been established for hundreds of years and is interpreted through the lens of Protestant evangelicalism—for the vast majority of us—in a variety of translations. We are a part, not the whole, of the universal body of Christ, we typically are not conversant in the NT’s original Greek, we may have little understanding of history, both biblical and Christian, and we may have never been exposed to the peculiarities of apocalyptic literature or the various hermeneutic approaches to it. Further, our perspective on time, numbers, and measurement is influenced by a post-Enlightenment precision, such that we uncritically default to an assumption that these concepts are to be thought of as sequential, literal and exact, something comparatively new in history. Appreciating this context means that our confidence in understanding the specifics of Revelation should be held loosely.

It is a second critically important point of context to appreciate that the early church uniformly expected Jesus’ return to be imminent. As well, there was no established NT yet, with Revelation being likely the last book written sometime between 65 and 95 AD, and among the very last to be accepted, something about which there was debate for over 300 years, and even periodically after that up until the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s. In other words, Revelation was not seen as finally authoritative for a very long time after it had been written, and it continued to be one of the Bible’s books repeatedly subject to debate, mostly because its language was and is so difficult to penetrate. The first believers never expected so much time to go by without Jesus coming back, and they did not have Revelation initially to mine for understanding what was happening, and once they did, it was anything but clear. They were living in conditions of persecution that ebbed and flowed, but being a believer was costly, and it was not hard to believe that Jesus would return soon to overthrow his enemies and the enemies of his people, establish true and permanent justice and peace, and consummate his kingdom that was going to be different from any kingdom that had gone before. But as it became apparent that Jesus was not coming back as quickly as anticipated, and with time the world changed around the church, the church needed to develop a new understanding, not just of the end and Christ’s return, but most everything about the new faith called the Way.

So, what is the Millennium? The answer depends on when, where and from whom the answer is given. Since the earliest decades of the church, interpretations about the Millennium have been offered, but consensus has not been reached because the expectations generated by them have not been met. This has led to different hermeneutic approaches to interpreting the text, and over the centuries, major positions have developed, such that at present it is generally recognized that there are 4 different schools of thought arrayed across the breadth of Christendom. They are of varying degrees of specificity, and there is some overlap between them and variations within them, but they all agree that Jesus has not yet returned but will, that there will be a final resurrection and judgment of all of humanity, and that there will be the close of history into eternity, all of which are in the future. I will present them in this article as they have appeared in history.

At Jesus’ ascension (c. 30 AD), the first believers were told he would return as he had left (Acts 1:11), right after he had simply left unanswered a specific question they asked about the future restoration of the kingdom to Israel. Other than his method of returning, they did not have much new to work with regarding eschatology, as Jesus during his ministry had spent comparatively little time discussing his return or the time of the end. In his famous Olivet Discourse, which was recorded in writing several decades later in Mt. 24, Mk. 13, Lk. 21 (it is curious as to why it is not included in John’s Gospel account, especially if he was the writer of Revelation), Jesus even when asked specifically about it does not mention anything remotely like the Millennium. And again, there was no written established NT yet at all. All that the Christians had for the first couple of decades were the oral teachings of the apostles and other recognized leaders, and their protégés. There also was a growing body of apostolic writing (and other writing; the vast majority of which did not end up in the NT) about a host of topics, most of which addressed weightier theological and practical issues about the Law, the Gospel, and living it out faithfully. There were some comments about eschatology in Peter’s and Paul’s epistles, but nothing that sounds like a description of the Millennium.

1) Chiliasm/Old Premillennialism/Historic Premillennialism/Classic Premillennialism

There was, however, a well-established Jewish eschatology with a specific hermeneutic in place at the time that drew from several texts in the OT, the Talmud, the Apocrypha, and other Rabbinic writings describing an end time state full of peace and justice inaugurated by the Lord. Many believers took this description after Revelation’s dissemination to be the Millennium. It was that very same eschatology that led the Jews to reject Jesus and bring about his crucifixion at the hands of their avowed enemies—the ones to whom the Jewish leaders, without any apparent recognition of the irony, said, “we have no King but Caesar”—because he did not fit their expectations of a military leader that would restore the glory of the Davidic Kingdom to Israel. Additionally, he massively disrupted the Jewish establishment’s traditional understanding and practice of the Law, plus his treatment of women, the Romans, Samaritans and other gentiles and his mind-blowing teaching was all totally contrary to who they thought the Messiah would be. It was this eschatological system that was updated and adapted by the early 2nd century to accommodate Jesus as the promised Messiah, and the OT prophecies were re-interpreted in that light. In addition, in Revelation’s narrative, the Millennium is introduced immediately after ch. 19’s ultimate victory of Christ upon his return. This led many interpreters to conclude that the second coming of Jesus immediately precedes the Millennium, thus the return of Jesus was premillennial.

This eschatological system came to be called Chiliasm. It was the earliest cohesive system present in the church, and it had particular appeal to Hebraic Jewish believers. A number of significant church fathers embraced it, including luminaries such as Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Clement of Rome, even though the content of the NT hadn’t yet been closed. It approached Revelation hermeneutically primarily as a literal and chronologically sequential presentation of the end, while acknowledging the difficult-to-penetrate symbolic imagery and numbers presented consistent with the genre of apocalyptic that was fairly common at that time. Chiliasm was dominant for about 250 years, into the late 4th century, but eventually began to fade from prominence as Jesus delayed, not just for years and decades, but now centuries, and because it also had some serious theological inconsistencies with clear apostolic (and what was later canonical NT) teaching, which accelerated its decline after canonization had been formalized. Later theologians were able to reconcile the specific theological issues, and while Chiliasm itself was dismissed, its major principles never went extinct. However, it clearly was overshadowed until the Reformation period of the 1500s and 1600s, when it “reignited” briefly for a time, and then in tandem with its later premillennial “cousin,” Dispensational Premillennialism (to be discussed below) in the 19th century, regained a degree of popularity, with the name Old/Historic/Classic Premillennialism. Today, it remains the perspective of a relative minority of Protestant evangelicals.

In general (because there are many variations among them), adherents of Historic Premillennialism, following a mostly literal, chronologically and sequential, and future-oriented reading of the book, hold that Christ’s return will come after the (probably) literal 7 year Tribulation and final battle of Armageddon, and will bring about a literal 1,000 years of peace and justice, under the rule of Jesus in Jerusalem and his resurrected followers around the world. The church is the true Israel, and it will have to endure through the Tribulation. During the Millennium, Satan will be bound and cannot influence the world, and then he will be released for a short rebellion, and then will come his final judgment along with the rest of the resurrected dead, as well as those who are alive at the time. Finally, history will close into eternity in the New Heaven and the New Earth.

2) Amillennialism

As history continued to unfold without Jesus’ return, the early church recognized its beliefs about the end had failed to materialize as expected. In fact, there were significant social and political developments within the church and in the empire as the church was spreading that were contrary to Chiliasm’s view, namely a gradual theological relocation away from Jerusalem and toward Rome in the west and, later, Constantinople in the east. Further, while Roman persecution continued, the church nonetheless expanded and exercised a growing influence within the larger Roman world. The major threats to the church now were becoming theological as well as political, and thus were generated the key creedal statements that the early church councils met to formulate: the Apostle’s Creed (200 AD) and the Nicene Creed (325 AD; updated in 381, and again finally in 569). Regarding eschatology, although Chiliasm remained popular, an alternative hermeneutic approach and subsequent interpretation were seen as increasingly necessary; again, the NT had not been canonized yet, and Revelation itself was the subject of continuing debate.

Clement of Alexandria, Egypt, and his successor Origen, one of the church’s most notable early theologians, popularized by the mid-200s another pre-existing hermeneutic approach that read Revelation as much more allegorical and recapitulative (i.e., describing the same event multiple times from different angles, yet in a consecutive-sounding order) than literal and sequential. According to this view, the imagery presented did not point to specifically identifiable entities, and numbers were not literal. For example, the antichrist was not necessarily Rome or Babylon, but rather the world’s evil systems that were opposed to God and his Christ. Likewise, the Millennium wasn’t literally a thousand years, but a number of completion and perfection of a very long time, for all believers with the church as the new Israel. This interpretive approach came to be called Idealism, and it gained some traction for a time, especially among Hellenist Jew and Gentile believers.

The 4th century was a time of tremendous upheaval in the Roman empire and in the church. While the NT canon would be considered formally closed in 367 AD, Revelation was among a few books about which there remained some ambivalence. With the Edict of Milan in 313 AD, Emperor Constantine, a convert a year earlier, made Christianity legal, although vicious persecution continued in some places for another decade. In 325, he called for the church’s leaders across the empire to meet in Nicaea, a city in modern day northwest Turkey (not far from where Rev. 2 and 3’s churches were located), where the Nicene Creed was produced. It addressed the nature of Jesus and the Trinity against a resistant heresy called Arianism and other Gnostic beliefs plaguing the church since the Apostolic period. Eschatologically, it made no statement or even implied comment about the Millennium, merely affirming Christ’s return and final judgment. In 330, Constantine renamed the city of Byzantium, also in modern day Turkey, Constantinople and made it the new capital of the Roman Empire, where Christianity’s status was elevated much more quickly than it was in the west. The final political split with Rome, such that there was a western empire and an eastern empire, occurred in 395, but the empire as a whole by then was “officially” Christian, with the faith proclaimed as the empire’s recognized religion in 387.

This dealt a heavy blow to Chiliasm because its antichrist of Rome and the empire’s pagan polytheism was defeated and the empire Christianized without Jesus’ return. Origen’s Idealism fit well with this development because among his beliefs was the idea that the church would overcome the world, something that modern Postmillennialists agree with, to be discussed in more detail shortly. In addition, the eastern church received Revelation with more hesitation than the western (European) and southern (north African) church and did not make regular use of it in preaching or liturgy, something that remains to this day. In the west, however, after Chiliasm’s dismissal Revelation continued to receive interpretational attention. Idealism too ultimately receded.

However, Origen’s hermeneutic was a key ingredient in the eschatological development of arguably the greatest and most prolific theologian of the first 5 centuries of the faith, Augustine, Bishop of Hippo in north Africa. Augustine was initially sympathetic to elements of both Chiliasm and Idealism, but as his own faith developed within the context of a rapidly changed and changing Roman empire, he rejected them both, and articulated in the early 400s a more middle path of hermeneutic analysis, called the symbolic or Augustinian view, which later came to be known as Postmillennialism. It received the title we have now as Amillennialism only in the 20th century. Importantly, too, is that the church to this point had not experienced any major schisms within it—it was Christianity and the universal (aka “catholic”) church, albeit with a varying degree of Roman flavor in hierarchical organization, and teaching and practice tradition.

Amillennialism proved persuasive to a very large swath of the church and became the dominant eschatological view from the late 4th/early 5th century through the early 19th century, with some competition developing for some during the Protestant Reformation in the west. (The eastern church did not experience the Reformation, having become Eastern Orthodoxy pursuant to an official mutual excommunication with Rome in 1054, while the southern church had been absorbed into Roman Catholicism while it was being driven out by Islam across northern Africa in the period from the 7th century into the Middle Ages and the Crusades.) Amillennialism’s hermeneutic was primarily symbolic and recapitulative, but unlike Idealism, there are several elements that are understood literally, especially regarding the future. Augustine believed that while the kingdom of God was eternal and spiritual, it had literal physical manifestations in this world that God’s justice would address at some point in time.

According to this view, the Millennium is not a future literal 1,000 years, but rather is now, what has come to be called the Church Age between Jesus’ first and second advents. It is not a literal length of time, but a significant and complete period during which the church, the new, true Israel, will progress and advance in keeping with the Great Commission, even while evil also progresses. The OT prophecies about what were considered when they were received to be the end times (e.g., much of Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel) have been fulfilled already in history or symbolically with Jesus’ initial appearance, or those in the future apply to the church. At the end of the Millennium, Satan will be loosed and will be permitted to deceive the nations with supernatural signs and wonders powerful enough that even many within the church will be deceived and fall away. In addition, he will attack the church with unrestrained fury, for an unspecified but short, complete period of time called the Great Tribulation, which will also drive some to abandon the faith. Lastly, Jesus will return, the resurrection of all will occur along with the rapture of the church, and the final judgment will be accomplished, leading to the New Heaven and New Earth.

3) Postmillennialism

While Chiliasm was declining and Origen’s Idealism held some sway in the early 4th century, and before canonization, another view of the Millennium was offered around the same time by Eusebius of Caesarea based upon the conversion of Constantine, a personal friend. Eusebius, considered the church’s first true historian, wrote a comprehensive record of the church’s first 3+ centuries in which he saw the conversion of the emperor in his own time as a sign of the church overcoming of the world. He rejected Chiliasm and was deeply skeptical of literal eschatological interpretation, and was quite ambivalent about Revelation’s authorship and inspiration. In the Olivet Discourse, Jesus spoke of the signs of his return, among which was the successful propagation of the gospel throughout the world; it was this piece in particular that led Eusebius to believe that the Gospel’s triumph was occurring in the Roman empire, establishing the Kingdom of God on earth. While he recognized that such a process would take time, nonetheless he concluded that Jesus’ return would come after the world eventually came to faith, thus postmillennial. The word, however, was not applied at that time.

Eusebius’ view was eclipsed by Amillennialism until the late 16th century in Protestant England and America, where it gained greater development and popularity, especially among Calvinist and Puritan believers, culminating in the missionary movements of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its popularity since waxed and waned in accordance with various social and political developments, increasing with positives like the abolition of the slave trade, and decreasing with evils like the Civil War. World War I pushed it almost completely off the eschatological stage until the late 1960s, when it began to take hold again among a few believers, and growing slightly afterward. However, by the end of the 20th century, it had faded again, only to be re-energized in the last decade or so largely in response to developments in the United States in particular. It is not a broadly popular view, with most adherents in this country.

Postmillennialists take an optimistic and even aggressive stance toward advancing the kingdom of God, believing that it is the church’s obligation and right to take not only the salvation-specific elements of the Gospel to the unbelieving world, but to impose the church’s moral and social structure as well, not through coercion as much as through conversion. The church’s influence on the state is expected as a part of its establishing Jesus’ kingdom. Postmillennialists believe that Jesus’ second coming will occur after the Millennium, but there is not clear consensus when the Millennium is; some hold that it began with Jesus’ ascension and the Great Commission, others with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD, but the dominant choices are the Christianization of Rome, or the Reformation; all options put it in the past, however. The Millennium’s thousand years is not literal, but rather a period of completion during which the kingdom Jesus established will eventually overtake the whole world. The point is that the Millennium has begun, and the Church will be triumphant gradually (and notably, politically, as it did with Rome) via the Holy Spirit, including accomplishing the salvation of the Jews and increasing dominion over Satan, so that there will be a golden age of the church (believing Jew and Gentile alike) leading to peace on the Earth in a literal, physical way. Then, Satan will be loosed and the Great Tribulation will occur, and then Jesus will return, the final resurrection and judgment will take place, and eternity will begin.

4) Dispensational Premillennialism

After the Protestant Reformation had brought Historic Premillennialism back into the eschatological conversation to a degree over against Amillennialism, later developments within Protestantism in England and America produced fertile soil for a new hermeneutic understanding of Revelation. This perspective stems principally from the theology of John Nelson Darby, an English Anglican priest, although there were other contributors, beginning in the 1830s and developing rapidly for the next several decades, first in England and then in the United States.

Dispensational theology (dispensationalism was a term coined in 1927), like other theologies, was not birthed as a systematic whole, but over time consolidated around a number of fundamental beliefs, many of which were repudiations of both pre- and post-Reformation doctrines. Darby and his fellow Anglican “Dissenters” saw Roman Catholicism as fully apostate, as did many of the Reformers, hence Catholicism and the Pope were seen as the antichrist; curiously, the Reformers were initially sympathetic toward Eastern Orthodoxy, but ultimately rejected it as too much like Catholicism. Moreover, Darby et al., also believed that the Reformation, including their own Anglicanism, had largely failed to set things right, and therefore a further cleansing and clarification of the true faith was necessary.

The way forward was to approach and apply the scripture “plainly,” essentially evaluating earlier church beliefs and practices regardless of their origin through a prism that devalued if not dismissed traditional historical interpretation. The goal was to recapture the pure theological beliefs and recreate the pure practices of the church as lived in the New Testament period, so even the Creeds were under consideration anew, and the writings of the church fathers and theologians could be reevaluated and treated accordingly. It was in this context that Revelation, and all apocalyptic eschatological scripture, and much else, was interpreted, resulting in a considerably novel hermeneutic perspective, that was then also applied to other, non-eschatological doctrine.

Dispensationalism holds that God operates differently with people in different ages, or dispensations of time. In each dispensation, God offers people life with him through a covenant, and humanity initially from Eden and then again after the Flood, and then the Jews from Abraham on, fail the covenant, necessitating another, better one. A core belief is that God has 2 distinct peoples, with 2 distinct but convergent covenants: the nation of Israel, i.e., the Jewish people of the OT who were given both the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants, and the church, including both Jews and Gentiles, who received the new covenant through Jesus. In the future, these two covenants will converge, but that will not occur until after the Millennium.

The assertion that God has two chosen people, Israel and the church, with whom He has different covenants, leads to Dispensational Premillennialism’s insistence that the OT prophecies to the Jews that have not been fulfilled literally are part of the future end times and will be fulfilled literally at some point before the end of history. Thus, Dispensational Premillennialism approaches Revelation from ch. 4 forward as future sequential events and persons that are predominately literal and specific (some symbolism is acknowledged). Among them is the belief in a literal 7 year Great Tribulation and a literal 1,000 year Millennium that Jesus’ return will inaugurate. Within this view, there is still debate on some of the particulars, such as whether the rapture will occur before the tribulation (hence, pretribulation, or “pre-trib”), in the middle at the 3-and-a-half year point (“mid-trib”), or at the end (“post-trib”). It is the dominant eschatological perspective in American Protestant evangelicalism, and for many American Christians, it is the only eschatological hermeneutical system they know. It is also by far the most specific and detailed in its presentation of what is to come.

Parenthetically, in the last 30 years or so, a revision of sorts has emerged, called progressive Dispensational Millennialism. It attempts to reconcile discrepancies between classic Dispensational Theology and Covenantal Theology by addressing OT prophecies and promises to Israel with those made to the Church by softening the separation between the 2 peoples of God, holding that there is a spiritual application common to both, but a physical application still only to Israel. This is seen in the idea, among others, that the millennial kingdom will have the Jewish people again occupying in peace the land of Canaan, in recovery of the Davidic/Solomonic kingdom, likely without Gentiles, but it is perhaps most notable with regard to David’s throne. Jesus is spiritually on David’s throne since his ascension, but will physically be on the throne in Jerusalem during the millennium.

In sum, the Millennium remains a core Christian doctrine, but it is clearly lacking consensus. A troubling reality with the different views is that they cannot all be correct. They could all be wrong, but they cannot all be correct. Because of this, discussions about them among Christians can become quite heated, such that believers at various times and places have split over their points of view. This is unfortunate; the specifics of the Millennium are not of such importance as to cause us to divide from one another, or to lose sight of Revelation’s overarching message: Jesus is the Lord of history—past, present, and future, he will be triumphant over evil, and we need not fear anything if we remain faithful to him no matter what. Let us together hold that truth first and foremost.

Sources

Davidson, Ivor. (2005). A Public Faith: From Constantine to the Medieval World. The Baker History of the Church, Vol. 2. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

Enns, Paul. (2014). The Moody Handbook of Theology. Chicago, IL: Moody.

Hill, Charles. (Jan/Feb 1999). Why the early church finally rejected Premillennialism. Modern Reformation Online.

Hummel, Daniel. (2023). The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.