The Thousand Years of Revelation 20
In early August I shall be speaking at The Providence Theological Seminary Doctrinal Conference at Front Range Alliance Church on Centennial Blvd in Colorado Springs. The presentation is entitled “The Hermeneutics of the Early Church on the Millennium.” It answers the question of whether the anti-millennial church fathers allegorized Revelation 20, as they are often alleged to have done. I answer that they did not allegorize but rather applied the sound interpretive principle of “analogy of faith.”
For a background to the question, Revelation 20 says that Christ and His saints will reign for a thousand years. Some take a literal approach to the thousand years, but I see the thousand years as a figure of speech. Those who take a literal approach to the thousand years often claim that Christians who see the thousand years as a figure of speech are guilty of allegorizing Scripture. The literalists also claim that the reason many early Christian writers rejected a literal reading of the millennium was because they adopted an allegorical method of biblical interpretation. My presentation will show the inaccuracy of their claim. It will demonstrate that the early Christian writers applied the “analogy of faith,” not allegory, to the text of Revelation 20. Analogy of faith is that principle of interpretation which says that clearer passages in Scripture help to interpret more obscure passages.
Revelation 20 raises many questions. The passage speaks of Satan being bound for a thousand years. Was Satan bound by the first coming of Christ or does his binding await a future millennium? The passage mentions a first and a second resurrection. Are these two resurrections bodily resurrections, one of believers that takes place before the millennium and one of unbelievers that takes place after the millennium? Or is there one general bodily resurrection and the other resurrection a spiritual resurrection? Are the thousand years to be interpreted literally or as a figure of speech? To answer these questions, early Christian writers looked at passages in the Gospels and Paul’s epistles and gained insight. Many of them held that Satan was bound at the incarnation and death/resurrection of Christ, not in a future millennium, that the first resurrection is spiritual and the second bodily (no future millennium bounded by two bodily resurrections), and that the thousand years are a figure of speech showing completeness.
I hope you can make it to the presentation. The complete schedule is available on the seminary website ptsco.org. My plan is to turn the transcript into a chapter in a book I have been working on tentatively entitled Amillennialism and the Early Church. For more information on how early Christians interpreted the thousand years of Revelation 20, see the article on this site entitled “Millennialism and the Early Church Councils.”
Have a great day. Frank
