Biblical Perspectives on the Kingdom of God and the Millennium
The kingdom of God is one of the great themes of the Bible. All of human and redemptive history culminates in the future earthly kingdom of Christ, the millennial kingdom or the millennium. Yet many Christians have interpreted the nature of this kingdom differently. There are two other major views of the millennium in addition to premillennialism: postmillennialism and amillennialism.
Premillennialism
Taking the text of Revelation 20 (and the numerous other biblical passages that speak of the earthly kingdom) at face value leads to what is called a premillennial view of eschatology. Premillennialism teaches that Christ will return before the millennium. That is, Christ will return and then establish a literal kingdom on earth, which will last for a thousand years.
Postmillennialism
Postmillennialism is in some ways the opposite of premillennialism. Specifically, premillennialism teaches that Christ will return before the millennium; postmillennialism teaches that He will return at the end of the millennium. One postmillennialist writes, “The millennium to which the postmillennialist looks forward is thus a golden age of prosperity during this present dispensation, that is, during the Church Age.” That golden age, according to postmillennialism, will result from the spread of the gospel throughout the world and the conversion of a majority of the human race to Christianity. Thus “Christ will return to a truly Christianized world.”
The millennial kingdom, according to postmillennialists, will be established by the church, not by the personal intervention of Jesus Christ. Nor will Christ reign personally on earth during the millennium, but rather through His church. In keeping with the generally optimistic views of those eras, postmillennialism flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The impact of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the rapid pace of scientific discovery, and Darwin’s theory of evolution convinced many that society was progressing inevitably toward a utopia. But the numbing horror of the First World War, the moral decadence of the Roaring Twenties, the hard times of the Great Depression, and the worldwide catastrophe of the Second World War brought an end to the naive optimism that had prevailed before World War I. Postmillennialism accordingly also declined in popularity. In recent years, however, there has been a resurgence of postmillennialism in such movements as Liberation Theology, Christian Nationalism, and Theonomy.
Amillennialism
The name amillennialism is somewhat misleading, since it implies that amillennialists do not believe in a millennium. While it is true that they reject the concept of an earthly millennium, and especially one that is actually one thousand years in duration, amillennialists do believe in a kingdom. They believe the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah’s kingdom are being fulfilled now, either by the saints reigning with Christ in heaven, or (spiritually, not literally) by the church on earth. Far from disbelieving in the millennium, amillennialists believe we are in it now, as one advocate states: “As far as the thousand years of Revelation 20 are concerned, we are in the millennium now.” The conclusion of this view is that the one thousand years which Revelation 20:2–7 references six times is merely symbolic for “a long time.”
The Argument for a Literal One Thousand Years
There is absolutely no good exegetical reason to interpret the millennium as anything other than one thousand years. Such is purely an arbitrary act on the part of the interpreter, based on his presuppositions. On the other hand, nonsymbolic usage of numbers is the rule in the book of Revelation. For example:
- The churches, seals, trumpets, and bowls are all literally seven in number.
- The three unclean spirits of 16:13 are actually three in number.
- The seven last plagues amount to exactly seven.
- The twelve apostles and the twelve tribes of Israel are literally twelve (21:12–14).
The fact is that no number in Revelation is verifiably a symbolic number. It requires multiplication of a literal 12,000 by a literal twelve to come up with 144,000 in 7:4–8. Furthermore, the equivalency of 1,260 days and three and a half years necessitate a nonsymbolic understanding of both numbers.