Amillennialism

Amillennialism reads Revelation 20:1-6’s thousand-year reign as a description of Christ’s present, heavenly session during the church age between his first and second comings, not a future earthly kingdom. On this reading, believers who die “live and reign with Christ” (Rev. 20:4) now, in heaven, while Christ returns once, at the end of the present age, to raise all the dead and execute a single, final judgment. It differs from premillennialism, which places a literal thousand-year reign between Christ’s return and the last judgment, and from postmillennialism, which places that return only after a long period of gospel-driven conversion.

Confessional Contrast

The question of when and how a millennium fits into the last things is a live, disputed one within confessional Reformed Baptist Christianity itself, not a question the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession settles one way or another. Its chapter “Of the State of Man after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead” states plainly that “at the last day such of the Saints as are found alive shall not sleep but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the self same bodies… which shall be united again to their Souls forever.”¹ Its following chapter, “Of the Last Judgment,” likewise speaks of a single appointed day on which “not only the Apostate Angels shall be judged; but likewise all persons that have lived upon the Earth, shall appear before the Tribunal of Christ.”² Neither chapter uses the word “millennium” or engages Revelation 20 by name, and the confession does not say whether or how its language of one resurrection and one day of judgment bears on the later amillennial, premillennial, and postmillennial debate.

Arguments

Amillennialism’s case rests on how Revelation 20 itself is read. Believers have long taken the chapter’s “thousand-year binding of Satan” and its martyrs “living and ruling with Christ” as clear, literal language for an earthly reign still to come. Herman Bavinck argues that this reading, “though it is in accord with the analogy of apocryphal literature, is not in accord with the analogy of Scripture.”³ Nothing in the chapter’s own wording points to earth rather than heaven: the angel who binds Satan comes down from heaven (Rev. 20:1), the thrones John sees are the same thrones located in heaven elsewhere in the book (Rev. 4:4; 11:16), and the souls of the martyrs (Rev. 20:4) are the same souls seen in heaven throughout Revelation (Rev. 6:9; 7:9, 14-15). On this reading, the passage says the martyrs “lived and reigned” with Christ, not that they “arose” or “were resurrected,” which places the scene alongside Revelation’s earlier promises to those who “conquer” (Rev. 2:7, 17, 26, 28; 3:5, 12, 20, 21) rather than describing a future bodily resurrection at all.⁴

Bavinck also argues that Revelation’s own visions do not run in strict chronological order: the letters to the seven churches, and the seven seals, trumpets, and bowls that follow, run parallel to one another rather than in sequence, each reaching its own vision of the end. On this pattern, chapter 20 need not narrate events that come after chapter 19 in time; it can instead run alongside it, and “the thousand years, as is generally recognized today, are symbolic,” contrasting the brief period of the church’s earthly suffering with the eternal glory still to come (Rev. 12:17; 22:5).⁵

Historical Development

Patristic period

Two readings of Revelation 20 circulated in the early church. Papias, the earliest witness outside Revelation itself, taught on the authority of oral tradition that Christ would rule on the earth for a thousand years after the resurrection of the dead, and Irenaeus, who had heard Papias’s own companion Polycarp, preserved and developed the same teaching, describing the thousand years as a time in which the saints would be “disciplin[ed] for incorruption” before the world’s final renewal.⁶ Justin Martyr and Tertullian held similar views, and Hippolytus and the author of the Epistle of Barnabas connected the thousand years to the seven days of creation, reckoned as seven thousand years of world history with the millennium as its closing Sabbath.⁷

Others in the early church denied that Revelation 20 described a future earthly reign at all. Origen “ridicule[d] those who think the Bible depicts a millennium of sensual indulgence,” judging a literal reading tied to the earthy fertility imagery some chiliasts drew from Jewish apocalyptic sources to be spiritually careless.⁸ His disciple Dionysius, bishop of Alexandria, argued at length against an Egyptian bishop named Nepos who had read Revelation literally, holding that “the book of Revelation cannot be interpreted literally.”⁹ In the Latin West the reign was normally read figuratively: Ambrose connected the “first resurrection” to the immediate blessedness of the righteous at death, and Tyconius, writing in North Africa in the fifth century, read the thousand years as “the time between the death and resurrection of Christ and his second coming,” with the first resurrection occurring at baptism.¹⁰

Augustine’s shift

Augustine, bishop of Hippo in the fifth century, had at first spoken of the millennium in terms resembling the seven-thousand-year reckoning, as a future period of rest for a purified church still to come. Roughly four years before his death, however, in The City of God, he adopted an interpretation resembling Tyconius’s, reading the reign as the church’s own present life between Christ’s first and second comings.¹¹ Recounting his own earlier view, Augustine wrote:

Some people have assumed that the first resurrection will be a bodily resurrection… This notion would be in some degree tolerable if it were believed that in that Sabbath some delights of a spiritual character were to be available for the saints because of the presence of the Lord. I also entertained this notion at one time. But in fact those people assert that those who have risen again will spend their rest in the most unrestrained material feasts.¹²

The Reformation and Reformed orthodoxy

John Calvin rejected chiliasm in the same terms, calling it a fiction “too puerile to need or to deserve refutation.” He read the thousand years of Revelation 20:4 as referring “not to the eternal blessedness of the Church, but only to the various troubles which await the Church militant in this world,” and warned that limiting the saints’ future inheritance to a thousand years insults Christ’s own kingdom, which is everlasting.¹³ Herman Bavinck traces the same rejection of a literal millennial reign through the Reformed and Lutheran orthodox (Francis Turretin, Johann Gerhard, Johann Andreas Quenstedt, Gisbert Voetius) and into more recent Reformed theology, in Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, B. B. Warfield’s 1904 essay “The Millennium and the Apocalypse,” and Geerhardus Vos’s 1911 essay “The Pauline Eschatology and Chiliasm.”¹⁴

Opposing Views

Premillennialism holds that the nations will not be converted, nor the Jews restored to the church, until Christ’s second coming; that his advent will be personal and visible; that he will establish an earthly kingdom centered on Jerusalem; that the righteous dead, or the martyrs specifically, will be raised to reign with him there; and that only after this thousand-year kingdom will the general resurrection, the final judgment, and the consummation of all things take place.¹⁵ The patristic chiliasts already held an early form of the same reading, and the position has been held continuously “from the days of the Apostles to the present time.”¹⁶ One modern form, dispensational premillennialism, distinguishes Israel from the church as separate objects of God’s promises and traces to the nineteenth-century teaching of John Nelson Darby.¹⁷

Postmillennialism holds, in Loraine Boettner’s own statement of the position, “that view of the last things which holds that the Kingdom of God is now being extended in the world through the preaching of the Gospel and the saving work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of individuals, that the world eventually is to be Christianized, and that the return of Christ is to occur at the close of a long period of righteousness and peace commonly called the ‘Millennium.’”¹⁸ On this view the millennium is this present kingdom of grace brought to its full, worldwide maturity before Christ returns, rather than either a future earthly reign following his return or a present, purely heavenly session.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t describing the martyrs as “living and reigning” with Christ require a bodily resurrection, not merely a heavenly blessedness? Bavinck answers that the same souls John sees reigning in Revelation 20 are the souls he had already seen in heaven, not yet bodily raised, in Revelation 6:9, and that the passage never says they “arose” but only that they “lived and reigned,” language that matches the promises given earlier to those who “conquer” (Rev. 2:10; 3:21) rather than describing a future bodily event. On this reading, John is telling his readers, who are about to face persecution, that those who die faithful are blessed immediately: “blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on” (Rev. 14:13).⁴

Doesn’t Scripture teach two distinct future resurrections, one for believers before the millennium and one for unbelievers after it? Charles Hodge answers that this reading is “inconsistent with the Scriptures, inasmuch as it teaches that believers only are to rise from the dead when Christ comes; whereas the Bible declares that when He appears all who are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation” (John 5:28-29), a single resurrection “hour” for both, not two resurrections separated by a thousand years.¹⁹

Isn’t reading “a thousand years” figuratively an arbitrary departure from a consistently literal hermeneutic? Bavinck answers that Revelation’s own visions, including the seven seals, trumpets, and bowls, already run in recapitulating cycles rather than strict chronological or literal sequence, so a symbolic reading of chapter 20’s numbers is not a special exception made only where the text becomes inconvenient.⁵ Hodge presses the same point against premillennialism itself, arguing that its own advocates apply a consistently literal hermeneutic no more successfully: they read the prophecies of Israel’s restoration and worldwide dominion literally, but abandon literalism when the same prophetic texts describe all nations going up to Jerusalem “from Sabbath to Sabbath,” and read figuratively rather than literally when Peter describes the heavens and earth being destroyed by fire (2 Pet. 3:10).²⁰

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 2, text as reproduced by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc31.htm. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1, https://www.ccel.org/creeds/bcf/bcfc32.htm. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩
Bavinck, chap. 24. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 24. ↩ ↩²
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 15, “And They Came to Life and Reigned with Christ a Thousand Years,” 166-172. ↩
Heine, 173. ↩
Heine, 174-175. ↩
Heine, 175. ↩
Heine, 175-176. ↩
Heine, 176. ↩
Heine, 176-177, quoting Augustine, City of God 20.7, trans. H. Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1986), 906-7. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 3, chap. 25, sec. 5, 266. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 24. ↩
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 858-859. ↩
Hodge, 858. ↩
Bavinck, chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Millennium, rev. ed. (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1957), 4. ↩
Hodge, 859. ↩
Hodge, 862-863. ↩