Preterism

History

Roots

The starting point is a sentence that has embarrassed readers for two thousand years. Jesus foretells the temple’s destruction, the darkening of the sun and the Son of Man “coming on the clouds of heaven,” then says: “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matthew 24:29–35). Revelation opens and closes with the same urgency: its events “must soon take place,” and “the time is near” (Revelation 1:1–3). Preterism (from Latin praeter, “past”) takes those time markers at face value and looks for their fulfillment in the generation that heard them.

The early church already read part of the Olivet Discourse this way. Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century, retold the siege of Jerusalem from Josephus and concluded that the calamities matched “the prophecy of our Saviour,” which he called “truly divine and marvellously strange.” He also recorded that the Jerusalem church, warned by a revelation, had fled to Pella before the war (Church History 3.5–3.7). That is a partial preterist reading of the Gospels. It did not extend to Revelation or to the second coming.

Causes

Preterism as a system came out of the Counter-Reformation. Most of the Protestant Reformers adopted the historicist reading: Revelation as a map of church history, with the papacy as its Antichrist (Mathison). The Westminster Confession (1646) says the Pope of Rome “is that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition” (ch. 25.6). Catholic scholars answered by moving the prophecies out of the present. The Jesuit Francisco Ribera pushed most of them into the future (Wikipedia, secondary); his fellow Jesuit Luis de Alcázar (1554–1613) pushed them into the past.

Alcázar’s Vestigatio arcani sensus in Apocalypsi was published at Antwerp in 1614, a year after his death (Archive.org). He read everything in Revelation except the last three chapters as already fulfilled. Preterists and their critics have generally agreed that this was the first systematic preterist exposition, and that it suited Rome’s side of the argument: if Revelation was about the first century, it was not about the pope (Wikipedia, “Preterism” and “Luis de Alcázar”, secondary). The era of this note is 1614 for that reason: the reading of the Olivet Discourse is ancient, but the method applied to the whole of prophecy dates from Alcázar.

Influence

Protestants were slow to accept a Jesuit’s method. Hugo Grotius took it up in the 1640s, partly as common ground with Catholics, and Henry Hammond followed him in England, but historicism stayed dominant for another century. Firmin Abauzit’s Essai sur l’Apocalypse (1730) went further and read the whole of Revelation as the destruction of Judea and Jerusalem (all per Wikipedia, secondary).

The full form arrived in 1878, when the Congregationalist minister J. Stuart Russell anonymously published The Parousia (Archive.org). Working through every New Testament text on Christ’s coming, he concluded that “the whole group of predictions, comprehending the destruction of Jerusalem, the coming of the Lord, the resurrection of the dead, and the rewarding of the faithful, did take place before the passing away of that generation” (p. 548–49). Max King, a minister in the Churches of Christ, systematized that view as “covenant eschatology” in The Spirit of Prophecy (1971; Archive.org, 2002 edition), reading the millennium as the forty years from AD 30 to 70 (Wikipedia, secondary).

The partial form revived in the late twentieth century, mostly among Reformed writers and mostly against the futurism of Dispensationalism. It is common among holders of Postmillennialism and Amillennialism (Wikipedia, secondary). R. C. Sproul’s adoption of it gave it a mass audience: a 1999 Ligonier eschatology conference drew more than 4,000 people, by one attendee’s account (Harden, 1999).

Key ideas and contributors

Time texts mean what they say. “This generation” (Matthew 24:34), “some standing here will not taste death” (16:28) and “the time is near” are read as promises to the first hearers. Sproul’s The Last Days According to Jesus (1998; Archive.org, later edition) framed this as an apologetic problem: critics say Jesus predicted a return that never came, and preterism answers that what he predicted did come (Ligonier lecture, “This Generation”). A futurist critic summarizes Sproul’s argument as holding that Christ’s words failed unless this interpretation is adopted (Price).

Apocalyptic language describes judgment within history. The darkened sun and falling stars are the stock imagery the Hebrew prophets used for the fall of Babylon or Edom. The Son of Man “coming on the clouds” is read through Daniel 7, as his vindication and enthronement, with the fall of the temple as its public sign. N.T. Wright argues this at length in Jesus and the Victory of God (1996, Fortress). Wright still affirms a future return of Christ, but Michael Bird calls his reading of the Olivet Discourse as exclusively about AD 70 “a preterist reading of the passage” (Bird, 2024).

Josephus is the commentary. Preterists rely on Josephus’s Jewish War as the record of fulfillment: famine, a false prophet who led people to their deaths on the temple, the temple burned on the tenth of Ab “upon which it was formerly burnt by the king of Babylon,” and portents such as the voice in the temple saying “Let us remove hence” (Book 6, Gutenberg).

Revelation was written before AD 70. Applying preterism to Revelation requires an early date, with the beast as Nero and Babylon often as apostate Jerusalem. Kenneth Gentry made the scholarly case in Before Jerusalem Fell (1989, Archive.org). Hank Hanegraaff’s The Apocalypse Code (2007) brought a similar reading to a popular audience, aimed largely at dispensational bestsellers; the amillennial reviewer Kim Riddlebarger judged that it “adopts the partial preterist interpretation” (review). Keith Mathison of Ligonier calls his own approach “essentially preterist”: many, if not most, of Revelation’s prophecies fulfilled, with Revelation 20:7–22:21 still future (Mathison, 2012).

Partial and full. Partial (or “orthodox”) preterists hold that AD 70 fulfilled the judgment on Jerusalem but that the bodily return of Christ, the general resurrection and the last judgment are still future. Sproul taught this form (Garland, a critic). Full preterists, who sometimes call their view “consistent preterism,” hold that the second coming, the resurrection and the judgment all happened in AD 70, so no future return is to be expected. That is Russell’s and King’s position.

Key controversies

Full preterism and the creeds. The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds confess that Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead, and look for the resurrection of the body. Full preterism denies both as future events, which is why churches that hold the creeds, and leading partial preterists, reject it as heresy. Critics point to Paul’s rebuke of Hymenaeus and Philetus, “saying that the resurrection has already happened” (2 Timothy 2:17–18). The standard Reformed reply is When Shall These Things Be? A Reformed Response to Hyper-Preterism (2004, ed. Keith Mathison, Archive.org). Gentry, himself a partial preterist, has written repeatedly against what he calls “hyper-preterism” (example, 2018). Full preterists answer that partial preterists accept the time texts selectively.

The date of Revelation. Irenaeus says John’s vision “was seen no very long time since, but almost in our day, towards the end of Domitian’s reign,” around AD 95 (Against Heresies 5.30.3). If he is right, Revelation cannot be a prophecy of AD 70. Futurists press this point hardest; Randall Price adds internal evidence from the state of the seven churches (Price). Riddlebarger, who accepts a largely preterist Olivet Discourse, still thinks the evidence points to a date after AD 70 and that preterism forces its holders to “prove” an early date rather than weigh the evidence (review). Gentry answers Irenaeus at length in Before Jerusalem Fell. The two sides debated it in The Great Tribulation: Past or Future? (1999, Thomas Ice and Kenneth Gentry, Archive.org).

What “this generation” means. Futurists, including dispensationalists, read the discourse as about the tribulation and second coming, and take “this generation” as the generation alive when the signs begin. The common middle reading, held across much of Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant exegesis, takes Jesus to answer two questions at once, with AD 70 as a type of the final judgment; R. T. France placed the hinge at Matthew 24:36. Preterists reply that both readings soften words that plainly refer to the hearers.

Is Revelation only about the past? Mathison names the most serious objection himself: that preterism “robs the book of any contemporary significance.” He quotes John Walvoord, for whom the preterist view makes Revelation “a literary curiosity with little prophetic meaning,” and Leon Morris, for whom it makes the book “meaningless for all subsequent readers” (Mathison). Idealist readers, who see Revelation as symbols of the church’s conflict in every age, share that worry; Mathison answers that the idealist approach in turn “tends to ignore the historic specificity” of a letter sent to seven real churches.