#-992 Will There Be a Millennium?

Dr. craig’s response

Thank you for your kind words, Mike! It has been quite a journey! After assuming a pre-millennial return of Christ virtually all of my Christian life, my study of eschatology in preparation for vol. V of my Systematic Philosophical Theology has caused me increasingly to call into question the literal millennial reign of Christ described by John in Revelation 20.1-6.

John says that he saw Satan bound with a great chain and cast into a bottomless pit, where he was shut in for a thousand years (Rev 20. 1-3). John proceeds,

Although some theologians have interpreted this passage to describe a co-regency of the martyrs with Christ in heaven, such an interpretation does not do justice to John’s language. It is correct that in referring to “the souls” of the martyrs, John is referring to disembodied saints in heaven. But when he says that they “came to life” (ezēsan), in distinction from the rest of the dead who similarly “came to life” (ezēsan) only after the thousand years, and that this is “the first resurrection” (hē anastasis hē prōtē) in distinction from the second, it is clear that he is talking about a reuniting of the soul with the physical body. The same verb is used elsewhere in Revelation to indicate bodily resurrection (1.18; 2.8; 13.14; 20.5). It is the body, not the soul, that comes to life and is raised. John is visualizing a physical resurrection of the martyred dead prior to the general resurrection described in Rev 20.12-13. This resurrection of the martyred dead is, moreover, not simply a return to mortal life, for over them “the second death,” described in Rev 20.14, “has no power.”

The fact that John has a vision of the physical resurrection of the martyrs and their co-regency with Christ for a thousand years does not, however, automatically imply the historical reality of such a resurrection and thousand year reign, any more than his vision of Satan’s being bound with a great chain and imprisoned in a bottomless pit is to be taken literally. The sobering fact is that such a millennial reign of Christ is not attested anywhere else in Scripture, but is, in fact, in contradiction to it. In the New Testament Christ’s return is consistently associated with the general resurrection of the dead, judgement day, and the end of the world, not with an earthly millennium. The obscurity of many of John’s symbolic portrayals of the things he describes justifies a methodological approach to eschatology that requires that we begin, not with Revelation, but with the teachings of Jesus and Paul in order to discern what aspects of Christ’s return are to be taken literally and what aspects figuratively. When we do that, there is no room for a literal millennium.

Some have insisted that the Old Testament prophets envisioned a literal earthly reign of the Messiah, thus providing precedence for a millennial reign of Christ. This is not, however, a good argument, for the messianic reign prophesied in the Old Testament is not temporary but permanent and unending. Its New Testament correlate is the new heavens and the new Earth inhabited by the resurrected saints.

It might be said that the Old Testament prophetic vision of God’s Kingdom is incompatible with the new heavens and the new Earth, for it involves such earthly affairs as Jews’ return to the land, the rebuilding of the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, and the reinstitution of Levitical blood sacrifices. But it would be unthinkable to imagine such a reinstitution of animal sacrifices even during a millennial reign of Christ! Herman Bavinck rightly insists that “either this image is to be taken literally as it presents itself – but then one breaks with Christianity and lapses back into Judaism – or this image calls for a very different interpretation than that attempted by chiliasm.”[1] These motifs are better taken to be familiar images to believers under the old covenant that need not be taken literally, just as Ezekiel’s strange eschatological vision of the restored Jerusalem and the temple with a river flowing from beneath the threshold of its eastern entrance to the Dead Sea, turning its salty waters fresh (Ez 47.1-12), is not intended literally but symbolizes new spiritual life.

It has been suggested that Jewish apocalyptic literature outside the Old Testament (I Enoch 91.12-17; 93.3-10; IV Ezra 7.26-44; 12.31-34; and II Baruch 29.3-30.1; 40.1-4; 72.2-74.3) might provide precedent for a temporary messianic kingdom. The problem is that even if these texts do describe a temporary messianic kingdom, there is no more reason to take these apocalyptic texts literally than there is for Revelation!

Indeed, a literal resurrection and millennium following the return of Christ seems to me hopelessly problematic. Are we to imagine that John thought that there would be during this time immortals possessing resurrection bodies like Christ’s living amongst the rest of ordinary humanity and having concourse with them? Would they have serial marriages with mortal spouses, multiplying sorrow upon sorrow, outliving all their children but the final generation, until the millennium came to an end? Or would their children be likewise immortal? Or would only the marriage of immortals to each other issue in immortal children?

How are we to imagine relations of ordinary sinners with presumably sinless people who possess supernatural, incorruptible, glorious, resurrection bodies? The response of some pre-millennialists that Christ’s concourse with his disciples between his resurrection and ascension shows that this scenario is not absurd is completely unconvincing, for Christ’s fleeting postmortem appearances are not at all comparable to a society in which resurrected saints and ordinary mortals live together.

Do unbelievers persist during the millennium or were they all exterminated, as some premillennialists believe, at Christ’s return (Rev 19.21)? One wonders, then, whence Satan gathers the countless enemies of the saints after the millennium is over to wage war against them? Are we really to imagine that they are the unbelieving children sired during the millennium? And why would the immortals feel threatened by such feeble enemies anyway? They could surely shield their mortal brethren from harm without any need of heavenly deliverance (Rev 20.9). Besides, what happened to Christ the King—did he re-ascend to heaven?

These sorts of questions are as absurd as they are unanswerable and probably never occurred to John. His apocalypse is so suffused with obscure symbolism that we cannot confidently say that he postulated a literal millennial reign of Christ. Francis Turretin does not exaggerate when he pronounces the relevant passage “symbolic, obscure, controverted, liable to various interpretations.”[2] The purpose of the passage about the millennium is to reassure and strengthen believers who endure persecution for their faith. We need not know exactly what Christ’s millennial reign is intended to symbolize in order to be reasonably confident that it is not a literal reality.