Position · 426

Amillennialism

The view that the thousand years of Revelation 20 are symbolic and describe the present age, in which Christ already reigns, between his first coming and his return.

History

Roots

The earliest Christian writers who discuss the thousand years mostly read them literally. Justin Martyr expected the saints to reign with Christ in a rebuilt Jerusalem, but he admitted that “many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise” (Dialogue with Trypho 80, c. 155, New Advent). Irenaeus defended an earthly kingdom against those who allegorised the prophecies (Against Heresies 5.32–36, c. 180, New Advent). This early literal reading, called chiliasm from the Greek for “thousand”, is the ancestor of Premillennialism.

Opposition came first from Alexandria. Origen mocked those who looked for the promises “in bodily pleasure and luxury” and expected to eat and drink after the resurrection (On First Principles 2.11.2, c. 220, New Advent). His allegorical method made a spiritual reading of Revelation possible. The decisive step was taken in North Africa by Tyconius, a Donatist lay theologian, whose lost commentary on Revelation (c. 380) read the book as a picture of the church’s life in the present age. Tyconius’s surviving Book of Rules set out the interpretive keys, and Augustine praised them in On Christian Doctrine 3.30–37.

Causes

Augustine gave the view its classic form in Book 20 of The City of God, completed around 426 (New Advent). He wrote it after the sack of Rome in 410, when pagans blamed Christianity for the empire’s troubles and Christians were tempted to tie God’s kingdom to Rome’s fortunes. His answer was to separate the two cities: the kingdom of God is present now in the church, mixed with the world until the judgment.

He admits that he once held a version of chiliasm, picturing a spiritual Sabbath-rest of the saints after six thousand years of history: “for I myself, too, once held this opinion” (20.7). What turned him was the form it took in popular preaching, with risen saints enjoying “immoderate carnal banquets”, which he judged could “be believed only by the carnal.” He then reads Revelation 20 as a description of the present. The first resurrection is the new birth of the soul; the binding of Satan is Christ’s victory over the devil, so that he can no longer stop the nations from being gathered into the church; the reign of the saints is the rule of the church and of the faithful departed with Christ. “Therefore the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ, and the kingdom of heaven” (20.9).

Influence

Augustine’s reading became the settled view of the Western church for over a thousand years. The medieval church kept it, though the round number and the end of the first Christian millennium did produce speculation around the year 1000. The Eastern churches never developed a single doctrine of the millennium, and Revelation is not read in the Orthodox liturgy, but they rejected chiliasm and share the view in practice. Modern Catholic teaching still rejects it: the Catechism says the church “has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism” (para. 676, Vatican), and a 1944 decree of the Holy Office said that even a mitigated millenarianism “cannot be taught safely” (cited by title only; I have not checked the original decree).

At the Reformation the magisterial Reformers kept Augustine’s view, partly in reaction to radical Anabaptists such as those who seized Münster in 1534 to set up a kingdom of the saints. The Augsburg Confession (1530) condemns those “now spreading certain Jewish opinions, that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world” (art. 17, Book of Concord). The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) condemns “Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment” (ch. 11, CCEL). Martin Luther and John Calvin both treated the earthly-kingdom hope as an error, and Calvin dismissed the chiliasts’ thousand years as “too puerile to need or to deserve refutation” (Institutes 3.25.5, CCEL). So this view became the default of the Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican traditions, though later Puritans often moved to Postmillennialism.

The name itself is modern. “Amillennial” (no millennium) appeared in the early twentieth century as a label used largely in contrast with the premillennial and postmillennial positions, and its defenders have never liked it, since they do believe in a millennium, only not a future one. Jay Adams proposed “realized millennialism” in The Time Is at Hand (1966), and Anthony Hoekema used that phrase as more accurate. The modern revival came in Reformed circles that were answering dispensational premillennialism, which began with John Nelson Darby and spread through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) and the Bible conference movement.

Key ideas and contributors

The millennium is now. The thousand years run from Christ’s first coming to his second. The number is symbolic, as numbers in Revelation usually are: ten cubed signals completeness, a long and full period chosen by God. Christ reigns now from heaven (Matthew 28:18, Ephesians 1:20–22), and the souls of departed believers reign with him while they await the resurrection.

Satan is bound in a limited sense. The binding in Revelation 20:1–3 does not mean evil has stopped. It means Satan cannot “deceive the nations” any longer, so that the gospel goes out to every people. Amillennialists connect it with Jesus binding “the strong man” (Matthew 12:29) and with Satan falling when the gospel advanced (Luke 10:18).

Revelation recapitulates. Revelation is read as a series of parallel visions, each covering the whole age between the two comings from a different angle and ending at the final judgment. So chapter 20 does not follow chapter 19 in time; it goes back to the beginning. William Hendriksen called this “progressive parallelism” in More Than Conquerors (1939, Archive.org), and G. K. Beale defended a similar reading at length in his commentary on Revelation (NIGTC, 1999).

One return, one resurrection, one judgment. Christ comes once more, and at that coming the dead are raised, believers and unbelievers together (John 5:28–29), and the final judgment follows at once, bringing in the new heavens and new earth. There is no interim earthly kingdom between the second coming and the eternal state. This simple sequence is the clearest practical difference from Premillennialism.

Already and not yet. Geerhardus Vos, in The Pauline Eschatology (1930), argued that for Paul the age to come has already broken into the present through Christ’s resurrection, while its fullness waits for his return. Hoekema built on this in The Bible and the Future (1979, Eerdmans), which is still the standard Reformed statement of the view, and in his chapter in Robert Clouse’s The Meaning of the Millennium: Four Views (1977). Kim Riddlebarger’s A Case for Amillennialism (2003, expanded 2013, Baker) is the most widely read popular defence.

History ends in conflict, not triumph. Unlike Postmillennialism, the view does not expect the world to be largely converted before Christ returns. Good and evil grow together until the harvest (Matthew 13:24–30), and many amillennialists expect a final rebellion and persecution, the “little season” when Satan is released (Revelation 20:7–9).

Key controversies

The two resurrections. This is the main exegetical objection. In Revelation 20:4–6 the same verb, “came to life”, is used for both groups. Henry Alford, in his Greek Testament (1861), argued that if the first coming to life is spiritual and the second bodily, “there is an end of all significance in language, and Scripture is wiped out as a definite testimony to anything” (quoted at Wikipedia, “Alford’s Law”, secondary). George Eldon Ladd pressed the same point in his premillennial chapter of the Clouse volume. Amillennialists answer in different ways. Augustine took the first resurrection as regeneration; Meredith Kline argued in “The First Resurrection” (Westminster Theological Journal, 1975) that it is the believer’s entrance into heavenly life at death, set against the “second death” of the lost. Others note that the passage never says the first is bodily.

Is Satan really bound? Premillennialists argue that the language of Revelation 20:1–3 (a pit, a chain, a seal) describes something far more complete than the present world shows, where Satan “prowls around like a roaring lion” (1 Peter 5:8). Amillennialists reply that the binding has one stated purpose, that he “might not deceive the nations”, and that the worldwide spread of the church shows it fulfilled.

Sequence of chapters 19 and 20. Premillennialists read Revelation 20 as following the return of Christ in chapter 19, so the millennium must come after the second coming. Amillennialists answer that the battle of 20:7–10 repeats the battle of 19:17–21, both drawn from Ezekiel 38–39, which shows that chapter 20 goes back over the same ground. Whether recapitulation is a feature of the text or imposed on it remains the hinge of the debate.

Israel and the prophets. Dispensationalists such as Charles Ryrie in Dispensationalism Today (1965) charged that amillennialism spiritualises Old Testament promises of land and kingdom that were made to ethnic Israel, and transfers them to the church. Critics call this “replacement theology”. Amillennialists answer that the New Testament itself reads those promises as fulfilled in Christ and his people from every nation (Galatians 3:16, 29), with the new earth as the final fulfilment of the land promise. Many still expect a large future turning of Jews to Christ from Romans 11:25–26, though they read “all Israel” in more than one way.

The witness of the early church. Premillennialists point out, as Alford did, that the earliest fathers were chiliasts, so Augustine’s view looks like a later departure. Amillennialists answer that the early witness was divided, as Justin himself admitted, and that the earliest writers also linked chiliasm to expectations, such as fabulous earthly fertility, that no modern premillennialist holds.

Pessimism. Postmillennialists charge that the view expects too little from the gospel in history and can breed passivity about culture. Amillennialists reply that it promises the church’s survival and growth to the end, not its domination, and that this matches Jesus’ warnings of persecution. The line between the two is blurry: B. B. Warfield, who called himself postmillennial, read the thousand years as the blessed state of departed saints in heaven, a reading most now class as amillennial (“The Millennium and the Apocalypse”, 1904).

What remains unresolved

The debate turns on two questions that no side has settled for the others. The first is how Revelation is built: as a chronological sequence or as repeated visions of one age. The second is how literally its numbers and images should be taken. Amillennialism has the weight of most of church history and a simple account of the end. Its weak point is the plain wording of Revelation 20:4–6, which its defenders have explained in several ways that do not agree with each other.