Millennial kingdom

“Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! … they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.”

— Revelation 20:6 (ESV)

The millennial kingdom is the thousand-year reign described in Revelation 20:1-6, in which Satan is bound and the saints reign with Christ, traditionally linked to the messianic kingdom the Old Testament prophets anticipated.¹ Christians sharing confessional commitments read this vision differently: the early church itself divided over whether it names a future, bodily reign on earth, and no one was judged heretical solely for the position taken.² Reformed Baptist confessional Christianity likewise has no settled reading. Three principal views circulate, distinguished chiefly by whether the thousand years precede Christ’s return, follow it, or name his present reign from heaven.

Premillennialism

Premillennialism holds that Christ returns before the thousand years described in Revelation 20:1-6, binds Satan, and then reigns personally and visibly on earth with the saints who share in “the first resurrection” (Rev. 20:5-6).³ The position has patristic roots: Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Tertullian each read the chapter, together with Old Testament promises of a renewed earth, as describing an actual future reign of the bodily risen saints with Christ, a doctrine the ancient church called chiliasm.³

Among Particular Baptists, John Gill (1697-1771) held a form of this view. He distinguished Christ’s coming “special, peculiar, glorious, and visible kingdom,” in which Christ “will reign personally on earth,” from his ongoing spiritual kingdom, “which rule he has exercised in the hearts of his people from the beginning of the world,” and held that the saints “will first ‘live,’ that is, live again in their bodies, have a part in the first resurrection, and then reign with Christ, soul and body, a thousand years.”⁴

Modern premillennialism divides chiefly between historic premillennialism, which does not distinguish ethnic Israel from the church as recipients of separate promises, and dispensational premillennialism, built on what one study of the land promise calls dispensationalism’s “sine qua non,” “the distinction between the nation of Israel and the church,” which yields a pretribulational rapture of the church followed by a future, ethnically Jewish phase of the millennial kingdom.⁵

Postmillennialism

Postmillennialism holds that the thousand years names an era, not necessarily a literal count of years, in which the preached gospel gradually subdues the nations before Christ returns.⁶ Boettner reads the rider’s conquest in Revelation 19, and the thousand-year reign that follows it in Revelation 20, as figures of this same gradual victory rather than as future, visible events: “the conquest is wrought by the spoken word, in short, by the preaching of the Gospel… Christ’s Gospel is to conquer the earth; He is to overcome all His enemies.”⁶ On this reading the present age is already advancing toward that goal: “we are living in a period that is relatively golden as compared with the first century of the Christian era, and this progress is to go on until those on this earth shall see a practical fulfillment of the prayer, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.’”⁶

Amillennialism

Amillennialism holds that the thousand years is not a future era but names the whole present age between Christ’s first and second comings, during which Christ reigns and Satan’s power to deceive the nations is restrained.⁷ Bavinck reads Revelation 20 as a vision of that reign in heaven, not a future reign on earth: the “souls” John sees are the same departed martyrs already introduced in Revelation 6:9, who “lived and reigned immediately as kings with Christ a thousand years,” from the moment of their death, so that “those who remain faithful until death immediately live and reign with Christ on his throne in heaven.”⁷ On this reading the vision assures suffering believers that death delivers them at once into Christ’s presence and reign; it finds no place in the text for a future, Jerusalem-centered kingdom or a temporal gap between two bodily resurrections, since the chapter itself says nothing of a rebuilt temple, a returned and converted Israel, or a renewal of the earth.⁷

Related Doctrines

References

Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 15, “And They Came to Life and Reigned with Christ a Thousand Years,” 168. ↩
Heine, 177: “There were faithful Christians in the early church who accepted some form of millennial view based on Revelation 20, and there were others who denied that the chapter indicated anything other than what Christians experience in their present life on this earth. No one ever seems to have been pronounced heretical solely on the basis of his or her understanding of Revelation 20.” ↩
Heine, 169. ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VII, chap. 8, “Of the Millennium, or Personal Reign of Christ with the Saints on the New Earth a Thousand Years.” ↩
Oren Rhea Martin, “Conclusion,” in “Bound for the Kingdom: The Land Promise in God’s Redemptive Plan” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2013), 278. ↩
Loraine Boettner, The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1932), 102-103. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³