Lecture 14: How the Future Got Lost in History

The lecture, section by section

1. The three views on the table

   Amillennialism holds the millennial kingdom to be spiritual, Christ reigning now in heaven or in the church, with no future earthly reign. Premillennialism expects a literal thousand year kingdom on this earth after Christ returns: in its dispensational form centered on a redeemed national Israel, in its historic form centered on the church. Postmillennialism, beloved of many Puritans, expects the gospel to Christianize the nations until the church itself brings in the millennium before Christ returns. Eschatology is not a gospel level doctrine, Busenitz stresses, but with prophecy occupying perhaps a quarter of the Bible, it is not a trivial one either.

2. The debate is really about hermeneutics

   The lecture's opening move is to let the other side testify. Bavinck: prophecy paints one single picture of the future, either to be taken literally as it presents itself, as premillennialists do, or given a very different interpretation. Masselink: if all prophecy must be interpreted literally, the chiliastic views are correct. Hoekema: many prophecies are to be taken literally, many others not. Goldsworthy: the literalist must be a futurist. Even the postmillennialist Boettner concedes that taken literally, the prophecies foretell Israel restored in her land. A consistent, normal hermeneutic, by the admission of those who decline to apply it to prophecy, yields premillennialism.

3. The fifth question

   To MacArthur's four questions, is the Old Testament amillennial, were the intertestamental Jews, was Christ, is the New Testament, all answered no, the lecture adds a fifth: were the early church fathers? The record answers: for roughly the first two and a half centuries there is no known church leader who taught what we now call amillennialism, and Schaff calls chiliasm the most striking point of ante-Nicene eschatology. The premillennial roster runs from Clement of Rome and Papias through Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus, a list compiled by the scholar Leon Wood and conceded, in the lecture's quotations, by amillennial historians from Grenz to Olson.

4. The disciples of John

   The chain matters: Revelation's most explicit millennial text came through John, and John's own circle read it as written. Irenaeus, disciple of Polycarp, disciple of John, records Papias, another hearer of John, on the coming kingdom's renewed creation, vines of impossible abundance, the curse lifted, echoes of the prophets' own pictures. Justin Martyr tells Trypho plainly: right minded Christians are assured of a resurrection of the dead and a thousand years in Jerusalem, rebuilt and enlarged as Ezekiel and Isaiah declare, and cites John by name, the apostle whose revelation foretold the thousand years followed by the general resurrection and judgment.

5. Irenaeus reads the end like a timeline

   In his own voice Irenaeus lays out the sequence: Antichrist devastates and reigns three and a half years, the second half of Daniel's seventieth week; the Lord comes from heaven in the clouds, consigns him to the lake of fire, and brings the times of the kingdom, the hallowed seventh day, restoring to Abraham the promised inheritance. Many fathers held the day-as-a-thousand-years scheme: six millennial days of history, then the seventh, the kingdom. And Irenaeus adds a warning that lands squarely on later centuries: those who allegorize such prophecies will not be found consistent with themselves.

6. A word on the rapture

   Asked where the fathers stood, Busenitz describes their double conviction: Christ could return at any moment, yet most expected the church to pass through the tribulation, for the simple reason that under Rome's fury they believed they were already in it. One striking exception survives in a sermon attributed to Ephraem of the Assyrian church, its authorship uncertain, which speaks of all the elect gathered and taken to the Lord before the tribulation. He also notes the historical irony that dispensational and covenant systems were both systematized in the same era, centuries before Darby.

7. Factor one: replacement theology

   So where did amillennialism come from? First, from the growing claim that the church had replaced Israel, seeded in the Epistle of Barnabas, itself premillennial, hardened by Jewish-Christian hostility, and seemingly confirmed by current events: after AD 70 and the Bar Kokhba defeat of 135 there simply was no nation of Israel on the map, and after Constantine there was, for the first time, a Christian kingdom on earth. Schaff describes the result: the millennial reign, no longer awaited, began to be dated from Constantine and regarded as realized in the imperial state church, a mantle Rome would later claim for itself. Augustine kept the Jews only as an apologetic exhibit. The lecture notes what those centuries could not know: the nation returned to the map in 1948.

8. Factor two: the allegorical hermeneutic

   Second, Alexandria's method reached eschatology. The chain the course has traced, pagan philosophers allegorizing Homer, Philo's Alexandria, Barnabas, then Clement of Alexandria, the first prominent opponent of a literal millennium, and Origen after him, made the plain sense the least important sense; Augustine even added a fourth, eschatological layer of meaning. Once the material is inferior to the spiritual, an earthly kingdom is not just unnecessary but faintly embarrassing, and the prophecies that promise one must mean something else.

9. Factor three: the embarrassing banquet

   Third, the fathers of the fourth century recoiled from what they took to be premillennialism's carnality, by which they meant not immorality but food, drink, and feasting. Augustine says it himself in the City of God: the opinion might be allowed if it promised only spiritual delights, and we were once of the same opinion ourselves; but since its supporters affirm banquets where joy exceeds modesty and measure, it is fit for none but carnal men to believe, while the truly spiritual call such people chiliasts, from the Greek for thousand. Busenitz's reply is biblical anthropology: God made embodied people for a physical earth, raises believers and unbelievers alike bodily, and Scripture's spirit-versus-flesh language in Galatians 5 is about sin, not a Platonic ranking of matter below spirit.

10. Factor four: Augustine makes it the default

    Augustine took over a symbolic reading of Revelation 20 propounded, as Erickson notes, by Tyconius, a Donatist, though Augustine was the Donatists' great opponent: the first resurrection is regeneration, the saints reign spiritually now, and the millennium is the church age. Reading Revelation that way requires recapitulation, treating chapter 20 as a restart rather than what follows chapter 19; Hoekema himself concedes that read chronologically, the return of Christ in 19 followed by the thousand years in 20 yields premillennialism. Augustine's stature made his view the medieval default, which is why he is called the father of amillennialism: not the first to hold it, but the one who fixed it.

11. Calvin's inconsistency

    The reformers inherited Augustine's eschatology with the millennium's identity revised, Rome now cast as Antichrist rather than kingdom; eschatology, as one scholar quoted in the lecture puts it, was not an issue of the Reformation. The lecture closes on Calvin's hermeneutical split screen: the man who called allegory the source of many evils, Satan's subtlety, and demanded the genuine and simple sense, turns to Amos 9 and explains that the prophets' promises of corn and wine were metaphors accommodated to a rude and weak people, and that Christ's kingdom, being spiritual, abounds only in spiritual blessings. Literal everywhere, Busenitz observes, except where prophecy promises the kingdom. The fathers are not our authority, but it is no small encouragement that the disciples of the apostle John read his Revelation the way we do.

1. Busenitz builds his case largely from scholars who disagree with him. What does that method teach about how to argue a disputed doctrine honestly?

2. Augustine found a feast unspiritual; Scripture promises resurrection bodies on a renewed earth. Where does a false spiritual-versus-physical ranking still shape how Christians picture eternity?

3. The early fathers held Christ's any-moment return while suffering as if in the tribulation. How does living expectantly change conduct, whatever one's position on the details?