Position · 1700

Postmillennialism

The view that Christ will return after a long era of peace and righteousness, brought about as the gospel spreads and most of the world turns to Christ.

History

Roots

Postmillennialism grew out of the older reading of the thousand years in Revelation 20:1–6 that Augustine made standard in the West: the millennium is the present age of the church, not a future reign after Christ returns. That reading, now called Amillennialism, gave no reason to expect the world to get better before the end. What changed in the seventeenth century was hope. English and Scottish Puritans, reading Romans 11 on the future of Israel and the prophets on the nations streaming to Zion, came to expect a coming age in which the gospel would win most of the world, the Jews would be converted, and the papacy would fall. The Cambridge Puritan Thomas Brightman’s commentary on Revelation, published after his death in 1609 (Schaff-Herzog), is often named as an early source of this hope: it looked for a gradual Christianisation of the world and the restoration of the Jews (CDAMM, secondary).

The hope reached a confession in the Congregationalist Savoy Declaration (1658), which added to the Westminster text on the church: “we expect that in the latter days, antichrist being destroyed, the Jews called,” Christ’s churches will be enlarged and enjoy a more peaceful and glorious condition in this world (ch. 26.5). John Owen, one of its framers, shared that outlook. Iain Murray’s The Puritan Hope (Banner of Truth, 1971) remains the standard account of this period.

Causes

The view got its systematic form from Daniel Whitby, an Anglican and an Arminian, in his Paraphrase and Commentary on the New Testament (1700), whose appended “New Hypothesis” laid out the sequence: the gospel overthrows Islam and the papacy, the Jews are converted, a thousand years of righteousness and peace follow, then a brief apostasy, then Christ returns (summary, secondary). The irony that a Calvinist hope was systematised by an Arminian has been noted ever since.

Revival gave it energy. Jonathan Edwards read the Great Awakening as a possible first light of the latter-day glory, and his Humble Attempt (1747) called Christians to a union of prayer for the outpouring of the Spirit that would bring it in. His History of the Work of Redemption (preached 1739, published 1774) told all of history as moving toward that triumph. A copy of the Humble Attempt sent from Scotland in 1784 moved Northamptonshire Particular Baptists to issue a call to monthly prayer for revival and the spread of the gospel, and John Sutcliff reprinted the book in 1789 to encourage it; that prayer movement led to the Baptist Missionary Society of 1792, which sent out William Carey in 1793 (Haykin, secondary).

Influence

Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries postmillennialism was close to the default among American Reformed and Evangelical Protestants. It fed the modern missionary movement, and it gave moral weight to reform: if the kingdom was meant to grow in history, abolition, temperance and Sabbath laws were part of its advance. In the Second Great Awakening some preachers expected the millennium within years (overview, secondary). At Princeton, Charles Hodge taught a sober version in his Systematic Theology (vol. 3, 1872, CCEL), and B. B. Warfield later argued that the gospel would win nearly the whole world before the end.

Two things undid that dominance. The first was rivalry from Premillennialism, especially the dispensational form taught by John Nelson Darby, which spread through prophecy conferences and the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) and read the age as one of decline. The second was the confident liberal version of the hope, the Social Gospel, which kept the language of a kingdom built in history while dropping the miraculous. Walter Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) is the classic text. The First World War broke the optimism of both, and by the 1920s the view had largely vanished from popular evangelicalism.

It returned in the second half of the twentieth century in a more combative form. Loraine Boettner’s The Millennium (1957; revised 1984) restated the classic case. Christian Reconstructionism, founded mainly by R. J. Rushdoony, Greg Bahnsen and Gary North, tied postmillennialism to theonomy, the view that the civil laws of Moses still bind nations, with Rushdoony’s The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973) as its founding text (overview, secondary). Kenneth Gentry’s He Shall Have Dominion (1992) became its standard defence. Keith Mathison’s Postmillennialism: An Eschatology of Hope (1999) argued for the view without theonomy.

Key ideas and contributors

The kingdom grows in history. Jesus’ parables of the mustard seed and the leaven (Matthew 13:31–33) describe a kingdom that starts small and fills the world. Postmillennialists read this as a promise about history, not only about the number of the saved at the end.

Christ reigns now, until his enemies are subdued. Christ sits at the Father’s right hand “until I make your enemies your footstool” (Psalm 110:1), and “he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:25). Since he reigns from heaven before he returns, the subduing happens before his return.

The Great Commission will succeed. Jesus claims all authority and sends the church to disciple the nations (Matthew 28:18–20). Postmillennialists take that as a command that carries its own guarantee. The prophets’ pictures of the nations learning God’s law and the earth filled with the knowledge of the Lord (Isaiah 2:2–4, Habakkuk 2:14) describe the result.

The means are spiritual. In the classic form the golden age comes through preaching, prayer and the Spirit’s work in revival, not through politics or force. Christ is not physically present during it. Edwards’s call to concerted prayer is the model. Reconstructionists add that converted nations will reshape their laws, which is where much of the modern dispute lies.

The millennium is not literal in length. Most postmillennialists treat the thousand years as a long, undefined age. They differ on whether it is the whole church age, growing gradually (the view of Warfield and later Boettner), or a future stage of special blessing still to come (closer to Edwards). Most expect a brief apostasy at its end (Revelation 20:7–10); Warfield’s line rejects even that.

Key controversies

Does the New Testament expect decline? This is the main exegetical objection. Jesus foretold persecution and wondered whether the Son of Man would “find faith on earth” (Luke 18:8); Paul warned of “times of difficulty” in the last days (2 Timothy 3:1–5). Premillennialists and amillennialists read these as describing the whole age until Christ comes. Postmillennialists usually answer that many of these texts concern the generation before Jerusalem fell in AD 70, a partial preterism that Gentry in particular defends.

What Revelation 19–20 describe. Jeremy Sexton’s “Postmillennialism: A Biblical Critique” (Themelios 48.3, 2023, TGC) argues that the rider of Revelation 19:11–21 brings judgment, not conversion; that the worldwide deception at the end of Revelation 20 implies a declining world; and that 1 Corinthians 15 places the defeat of Christ’s enemies at the end, all at once, not through a gradual process. He also reads the Great Commission as calling individuals out of every nation, not converting nations as units.

Progress and history. Critics since the 1920s have charged that postmillennialism baptised Victorian ideas of progress, and that the two world wars refuted it. Its defenders reply that their hope rests on Christ’s promise, not on a reading of the news, and that the Puritans held it in worse times than ours. The link with the Social Gospel still makes conservatives wary: once the kingdom is expected in history, it is a short step to treating social improvement as the kingdom itself.

Theonomy and dominion. The modern revival is entangled with Christian Reconstructionism, and much of the criticism it draws is really aimed there. Reformed critics such as Meredith Kline and Michael Horton argued that theonomy confuses Israel’s civil law with the church’s mission and that its talk of dominion leans toward seeking power. Non-theonomic postmillennialists, from Murray to Mathison, insist that the hope does not depend on any political programme.

The place of Israel. Puritan postmillennialism expected a future mass conversion of the Jews from Romans 11, and the Savoy Declaration wrote this into its confession. Many later postmillennialists dropped or softened the expectation, and whether “all Israel will be saved” (Romans 11:26) points to such a future event divides them as it divides other schools.

What remains unresolved

Postmillennialism and Amillennialism agree on almost everything formal: one return of Christ, one resurrection and judgment, the millennium as the present age. The real disagreement is about the shape of history before the end. One side reads the promises of the kingdom’s growth as a forecast of a Christianised world; the other reads them as the gathering of a people through suffering. Each side’s weakness is the other’s strength. Postmillennial optimism can turn into political ambition or a gospel of progress. Its critics can settle for expecting little from the gospel in this world.