Theopedia

Premillennialism

“They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years… They will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.”

— Revelation 20:4, 6 (ESV)

Definition

Premillennialism is the eschatological position that Christ’s second coming occurs before, not after, a future thousand-year reign of Christ on earth, when martyred believers are raised to reign with him while the rest of the dead await a later resurrection (Rev. 20:4-6). The early church called this teaching chiliasm, from the Greek word for “a thousand.”1 Premillennialism is one of three positions Reformed Baptist confessional Christianity has historically held on the millennium, alongside postmillennialism and amillennialism, and the question of which is correct remains an open, unsettled dispute within that tradition.

Confessional Contrast

Premillennialism is a live dispute within Reformed Baptist confessional Christianity that the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not itself settle; none of its chapters names or adjudicates the millennium of Revelation 20.

The confession’s own account of the resurrection and judgment describes a single event rather than two separated by an interval. “At the last day,” it states, “such of the saints as are found alive, shall not sleep, but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other.”2 Its following chapter adds that on that same day “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.”3 The Westminster Confession states the same picture in its own parallel chapter.4 This description of one resurrection and one day of judgment for all the dead together sits in tension with premillennialism’s reading of Revelation 20, which posits two resurrections separated by a thousand years (Rev. 20:4-5), though neither confession names that specific question or rules on it.

The tension has not kept Reformed theologians from disagreeing among themselves on the point. Herman Bavinck notes that a number of them, including Piscator, Alsted, Cocceius, and Brakel, “tended toward a moderate form of chiliasm” even while operating within confessions that describe the resurrection and judgment as single events.5 Among Particular Baptists, John Gill devoted a full chapter of his own systematic theology to defending a personal, earthly reign of Christ of a thousand years, without treating the question as settled by the confession he otherwise followed closely.6

Arguments

Premillennialists read Revelation 20:1-6 as a chronological sequence rather than a single symbolic image. An angel binds Satan for a thousand years (Rev. 20:1-3); those beheaded for their testimony to Jesus “came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years” in a “first resurrection,” while “the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended” (Rev. 20:4-5). On this reading the passage names two distinct resurrections separated by a literal interval, which requires Christ’s return, since it inaugurates the first resurrection, to precede that interval rather than follow it. Expounding the passage this way, John Gill argued that the “personal reign” it describes is “a special, peculiar, glorious, and visible kingdom” distinct from Christ’s ongoing spiritual reign over the church, one that “will not take place till after the resurrection of the just.”7

Premillennialists also appeal to Paul’s description of the resurrection happening “each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end” (1 Cor. 15:23-24), read as marking an interval between believers’ resurrection at Christ’s coming and “the end” itself. Dispensational premillennialists add Paul’s account of the dead in Christ rising and living believers being “caught up… to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thess. 4:16-17) as a distinct, prior event, the exegetical basis for the doctrine of the rapture; historic premillennialists read the same passage as describing the one, undivided second coming rather than a separate prior event.8

Since Revelation 20 says little about the character of the thousand years beyond the reign of Christ and the first resurrection, premillennialists have typically filled out the picture from Old Testament prophecies of Israel’s promised latter-day glory, particularly Isaiah’s descriptions of a renewed earth (Isa. 11:6-9; 65:17-25), texts that share the phrase “new heavens and a new earth” with Revelation 21:1.9

Historical Development

Patristic chiliasm

The earliest witness to a millennial teaching outside Revelation 20 itself is Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century; his own writings have perished, but Irenaeus reports that Papias claimed to have received, through elders who had known the apostle John, the teaching that Christ would rule on earth with the resurrected righteous for a thousand years.10 Irenaeus, who had heard Polycarp, a companion of Papias, preserved and developed this tradition in his own writing, arguing that the saints who suffered in this world should be rewarded in this same, renewed world during the period.11 Justin Martyr, writing earlier than Irenaeus, held the same teaching and distinguished it from what he considered a heretical denial of any millennial reign.12 Tertullian likewise expected an earthly kingdom of a thousand years following the resurrection.13 Bavinck lists a wider circle holding some form of the doctrine in this period, including Cerinthus, the Ebionites, the author of the Epistle of Barnabas, Hippolytus, Apollinaris, Commodian, Lactantius, and Victorinus.14

Not every early Christian accepted a literal millennial reign. Origen rejected the teaching, criticizing those who read Revelation’s description of the thousand years as implying ordinary eating, drinking, and marrying in the age to come.15 His disciple Dionysius of Alexandria wrote two works against Nepos, an Egyptian bishop who had defended a literal reading, commending Nepos’s faith while rejecting his exegesis.16

Decline, Reformation-era revival, and the dispensational turn

Bavinck traces the doctrine’s decline to the changed situation of the church after Constantine, when it increasingly identified itself with the kingdom of God already present in the world; Augustine “resisted it most vigorously,” and it “gradually” died out in the patristic mainstream.5 It resurfaced before and during the Reformation, when many identified Rome with the harlot of Revelation and the papacy with antichrist, and it revived further among the Anabaptists.5 As already noted, several seventeenth-century Reformed theologians favored a moderate chiliasm of their own, and the Particular Baptist John Gill defended a version of it in 1769.6

Grant Underwood distinguishes the doctrine’s older, Reformation-era form from a “distinctive version of millenarianism known as ‘dispensational premillennialism’… [that] arose” in the nineteenth century and “became the preferred eschatology of many conservative evangelicals” in the twentieth.17 Classic dispensationalism traces to the nineteenth-century teaching of John Nelson Darby and was popularized through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909).17 Dispensationalism reads Israel and the church as distinct peoples with distinct promises, a framework that adds the pretribulation rapture and a future, ethnically Jewish millennial kingdom to the older premillennial position; the earlier form, which lacks these distinctives, continues under the label historic premillennialism.

Opposing Views

Amillennialism. Amillennialism reads Revelation 20’s “thousand years” figuratively as the whole church age rather than a future earthly reign, and its “first resurrection” as the spiritual new birth of believers, or the heavenly reign of departed martyrs with Christ, rather than a future bodily resurrection distinct from the general resurrection.18 See Amillennialism.

Postmillennialism. Postmillennialism likewise reads the thousand years figuratively, as an extended future age in which the gospel prevails widely across the earth through the Spirit’s work, with Christ’s physical return occurring after, not before, that age.19 See Postmillennialism.

Objections and Responses

Revelation’s imagery is symbolic throughout, so reading “a thousand years” as a literal duration is inconsistent. Bavinck argues that chiliasm “is guilty of the greatest arbitrariness in interpreting prophecy,” taking “one feature of the prophetic picture literally and another ‘spiritually’” without a principled rule for which is which.20 Gill’s own exposition responds to a related version of this objection, that a personal, earthly reign of Christ implies a “gross and carnal” picture of the kingdom, the objection Augustine himself had raised. Gill answers that the objection holds only against a materialistic construal he does not intend: rightly understood, the thousand years is a state of “pure, refined, spiritual pleasures” in which earthly blessing is joined to an outpouring of the Spirit, not indulgence in ordinary bodily appetites.7

Scripture elsewhere describes one resurrection and one judgment for the righteous and the wicked together, not two separated by an interval. This is the picture both the 1689 and Westminster confessions give (see Confessional Contrast above).2 Gill answers from the text of Revelation 20 itself: John states plainly that “the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished,” which Gill takes as Scripture’s own testimony to two resurrections separated by the millennial interval, the first belonging to the righteous and the second, later, to the wicked.21

Chiliasm is a Jewish and Persian import into Christian theology, not a teaching native to it. Bavinck traces the doctrine’s shape to intertestamental Jewish apocalyptic literature, particularly the Talmud’s calculations of a messianic interim kingdom, and judges that “chiliasm is not of Christian but of Jewish and Persian origin.”14 Premillennial advocates point instead to the doctrine’s claimed apostolic transmission: Irenaeus reports that Papias received the teaching from elders who had themselves heard it from the apostle John, tracing its pedigree to firsthand apostolic testimony rather than to a later borrowing.10

Related Doctrines

References

  1. 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,” 166-167. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 2. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 33, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ”: “Even some Reformed theologians—Piscator, Alsted, Cocceius, Brakel, and others—tended toward a moderate form of chiliasm… Augustine resisted it most vigorously, while the changed situation of the church… gradually prompted it to die out completely. It came up again before and during the Reformation… It revived among the Anabaptists, the David-Jorists, and the Socinians.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  6. 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.” ↩ ↩2

  7. Gill, book VII, chap. 8. ↩ ↩2

  8. Grant Underwood, Latter-day Saint Theology among Christian Theologies (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2025), “12. Eschatology: The End of the Age and the Afterlife,” 736-737. ↩

  9. Underwood, “12. Eschatology,” 736. ↩

  10. Heine, chap. 15, 171. ↩ ↩2

  11. Heine, chap. 15, 171-172. ↩

  12. Heine, chap. 15, 172-173. ↩

  13. Heine, chap. 15, 173. ↩

  14. Bavinck, chap. 24: “It surfaced over and over… In the earliest period we encounter it in Cerinthus, in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, in the thought of the Ebionites in the Epistle of Barnabas, and in Papias, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Apollinaris, Commodian, Lactantius, and Victorinus.” ↩ ↩2

  15. Heine, chap. 15, 174-175. ↩

  16. Heine, chap. 15, 175. ↩

  17. Underwood, “12. Eschatology,” 805, note 9: “Dispensationalism is not a monolith. It has varied over time from earlier ‘classic’ dispensationalism rooted in the nineteenth-century teachings of John Nelson Darby and popularized in the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) to the ‘progressive’ dispensationalism promoted at the end of the twentieth century.” ↩ ↩2

  18. Underwood, “12. Eschatology,” 735-736. ↩

  19. Underwood, “12. Eschatology,” 736. ↩

  20. Bavinck, chap. 24: “It cannot even stand before the tribunal of Old Testament prophecy… Chiliasm is guilty of the greatest arbitrariness in interpreting prophecy; it is devoid of all rule and method… It is capricious to take one feature of the prophetic picture literally and another ‘spiritually.’” ↩

  21. Gill, book VII, chap. 8. ↩