Charles Cooper explicates the doctrine of the final eschatological judgments. Amillennialists wrongly ignore specific aspects of the final judgment and end up focusing on generalities. This presentation was given last October in O’Fallon Missouri at an eschatology forum.
Download as MP3
There are a handful of historical reasons why after three hundred years the Church overall shifted away from premillennialism to amillennialism. Historian Richard Kyle encapsulates one of the most significant reasons:
“The rejection of apocalyptic [pre]millennialism [by later church fathers] must be seen in its proper context. Constantine had been converted to Christianity in 312, thus ending the persecution of Christians. The hope for the imminent* return of Christ remained strong as long as Christians were a persecuted minority. But when Christianity became the official religion in the Roman Empire during the fourth century, these [pre]millennial aspirations either declined or took new forms” [particularly amillennialism, which was promulgated by Augustine’s teaching] (The Last Days are Here Again Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Books, 1998, pp. 20, 38-39)
(*By “imminent,” the early Church did not believe in what is popularly known today as the pretribulational sense of the term. That is, pretribulationists believe that Christ’s return cannot be imminent if prophesied events must occur before the rapture. The early Church held to the opposite (and Biblical) sense of the term in that the rapture was only imminent when certain events must occur first, such as the rise of Antichrist and the Great Tribulation—and that is exactly the Prewrath position.)
Click here to download a PDF for an excellent article, which unpacks other historical reasons for the emergence of Amillennialism a few centuries after Christ. It is titled, “Amillennialism: Examining its ‘Origens'” by Gary Vaterlaus. In fact, send the PDF link to your Amillennial friends! I’d liked to really see Vaterlaus’ article circulate out there. His article does not deserve to be packed away in the dusty archives.
Today I was listening to a lecture by a well known Amillennial author and he made the same error that I hear so many times by Amillennialists. He said that the first event of the millennium is the binding of Satan which happened at Christ’s First Coming. This can be found, he said, in the millennial passage in Revelation chapter 20 starting at verse 1 through 6.
This is in error. The literary unit of the passage militates against this interpretation because the event of the binding of Satan is only part of a larger passage which begins back in Revelation 19:11 and includes the destiny of the “three enemies of God” when Christ comes back — the Beast, False prophet, and then the Dragon, Satan. The timing of the destiny of Satan should not be disconnected from the other two enemies of God — but this point is frequently ignored by Amillennialists.
For my discussion on the context read my article here. This will equip you to correct the Amillennialist next time they want to dive right in the middle of this passage without giving consideration of the preceding context. Building brick walls with chapter breaks is not practicing sound exegesis.
The Millennial Maze, pp. 139-41 (To be sure, the author of this “comparison” book is Amill and his bias comes out in various places; nevertheless, Grenz does have a keen, nuanced eye when describing the dynamic between millennial positions.)
Historic premillennialists have attempted to carve out a distinctive position between dispensationalism on the one side, and amillennialism on the other. Over against the distinction between Israel and the church posited by the dispensationalism from which many of them came, these thinkers agree with the amillennial emphasis on the church as the spiritual Israel. They employ a “spiritualizing” hermeneutic that transfers to the experience of the church the prophetic expectations of a future glorious age for Israel.
At the same time, historic premillennialists are unwilling to employ universally the spiritualizing hermeneutic. They do not resign Israel to oblivion, but agree with their dispensationalist cousins that there remains yet some future role for Israel in the divine economy, albeit only as the nation turns to Christ and thereby becomes a vehicle of blessing to the world. And they stubbornly cling to the literalist hermeneutic when the meaning of the thousand years of Revelation 20 is in question. Not all prophecy can be spiritualized, they argue, and not every dimension of the future hope for the people of God may be relegated to the eternal state beyond the culmination of history.
Because they are caught in the middle, as it were, contemporary adherents of historic premillennialism find themselves fighting on two fronts. When engaging in discussions with dispensationalists, especially adherents of its classical expression, they direct their polemic against the literalist hermeneutic and the emphasis on Israel that arises out of it. But they defend a literal approach to the Bible and the physical, earthly dimensions of God’s future purposes when confronting amillennialists.
As a result of the double direction characteristic of their apologetic, critics from both the dispensationalist and the amillennialist persuasions charge historical premillennialists with inconsistency. Both assert, for example, that the historic premillennialist hermeneutic is inconsistent, Dispensationalists complain that they are not consistently literal in approaching Scripture. Amillennialists, in contrast, see them as too literalistic. They wonder why historic premillennialists demand a fulfillment within history of the glorious blessings promised to God’s people.
Critics from both persuasions claim that historic premillennialists are likewise inconsistent in their understanding of Israel. Many amillennialists challenge them to consistency in seeing the church as the spiritual Israel. Historical premillennialists readily apply to the church various Old Testament promises originally given to Israel. Such promises find their fulfillment in the blessings the church will enjoy in the millennial era. But amillennialist critics wonder why these “spiritualized” promises require a future age for their “literal” fulfillment. Dispensationalists, in contrast, wonder why historic premillennialists cannot see that their acknowledgment of some distinction between Israel and the church naturally leads to a greater emphasis on the future fulfillment of God’s promises to the nation.
In short, dispensationalists complain that historic premillennialists have set out on the road to amillennialism. Amillennialists, in turn, encourage them to make the complete break with premillennialism demanded by their rejection of dispensationalism.
“and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while.” – Rev 20:3
I came across some helpful points on Revelation 20:3 by someone named Matthew Waymeyer, who is premill but not prewrath; nevertheless, he had some good responses to an amillennial interpretation of this verse that asserts that it “limits the binding of Satan during the New Covenant reign of Christ (i.e. Church era) to his inability to effectually deceive the nations.” Here are some selections of Waymeyer’s response here:
I do indeed take the purpose clause in verse 3 seriously. I wholeheartedly believe that Satan will be unable to deceive the nations during the thousand-year period when he is locked in the abyss, and I wholeheartedly believe that preventing this deception is the primary purpose of Satan’s incarceration. Neither of these presents any problem whatsoever for my premillennial eschatology.
In contrast, the purpose clause in verse 3 presents a significant difficulty for amillennialism. Because the amillennialist believes the thousand-year period of Revelation 20 is taking place now in the present age, he is forced to say that Satan is currently unable to deceive unbelievers (Rev 20:3) even though the NT says that he is currently active in doing just that [2 Cor 4:4, “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.“]
Some amillennialists try to escape this dilemma by saying that the incarceration of Satan in Revelation 20 makes Satan less effective at deceiving the nations in the present age than he was prior to the first coming of Christ….
This same approach is taken by William Hendriksen who says that the binding of Satan is simply a matter of degree: “If during the present N.T. era the devil ‘blinds the minds of unbelievers,’ II Cor. 4:4, that was true even more emphatically during the old dispensation.” The difficulty with this explanation is that Revelation 20:2-3 teaches not that Satan’s ability to deceive was limited, but rather that it was eliminated. In other words, the text does not say that Satan will deceive the nations less effectively than he did in the past–it says that he will deceive the nations “no longer.”
The second clarification concerns my hermeneutical approach to Revelation 20…. [P]art of the grammatical historical method involves determining the meaning of key words in the passage you are studying. This is often referred to as lexical analysis. One of the most important words in this passage is the word “abyss,” because this is the location where Satan is incarcerated during the thousand-year period. If I’m going to understand what it means that Satan is imprisoned in the abyss, I need to know what the abyss is and what it means to be imprisoned there.
Part of lexical analysis involves consulting how the word in question is used elsewhere in Scripture. The “many other passages other than Revelation 20” which I referred to were those verses which also use the word “abyss,” and I consulted these verses not as a way to “deviate from the clear and normal meaning of the text” (as you said), but as a way to help me understand the clear and normal meaning of a key word in the text–the word “abyss.” In consulting these other passages, I discovered that the word translated “abyss” has two possible nuances of meaning. It can refer either to the realm of the dead (as it does in Romans 10:7) or a spirit prison (as it does in Luke 8:31; Rev 9:1-2, 11, 11:7; and 17:8). The context of Revelation 20:1-3–along with the reference to “his prison” in Revelation 20:7–confirms that the word “abyss” has this second meaning in Revelation 20.
In continuing my lexical analysis, I then look more closely at those passages where it refers to a prison for evil spirits, and I come to a significant conclusion: Confinement in the abyss in these other passages (especially see Luke 8:31 and Rev 9) means to be totally cut off from any activity or influence upon the earth. Therefore, when Satan is bound and incarcerated in the abyss during the thousand years according to Revelation 20:1-3, this means he will be totally cut off from any activity or influence upon the earth. In other words, his activity and influence will be eliminated, not merely limited as the amillennialist says. Since the clear and consistent testimony of the NT indicates that Satan is extremely active during the present age (Matt 13:19; Luke 8:12; 22:3, 31; John 8:44; 13:27; Acts 5:3; 26:18; 1 Cor 7:5; 2 Cor 2:11; 4:4; 11:3, 14; 12:7; Eph 2:2; 6:11-12; 1 Thess 2:18; 2 Tim 2:26; 1 Pet 5:8; 1 John 3:8-10; 5:19), this means the thousand years in Revelation 20 must be future.
According to some amillennialists, because Revelation 20 says that Satan is bound in one respect and one respect only–“so that he should not deceive the nations any longer” (v. 3)–he must therefore be free to partake in other activities here on earth. For this reason, according to the amillennialist, the list of Scripture references detailing Satan’s activity in the present age is largely irrelevant….
The use of a purpose clause, however, does not preclude the possibility of other purposes or results of the action of the verb. To illustrate, ‘if a warden says that he is putting a prisoner in solitary confinement in order that he will no longer kill any more prisoners, this does not mean the prisoner is free to steal and do other such activities’ (Powell 2001: 3). In the case of the binding of Satan in Revelation 20, then, the degree of Satan’s restriction is determined not by the purpose clause but by the language of the text itself, which–as demonstrated above–indicates absolute confinement.
As you can see from the greater context of what I wrote, the words “as demonstrated above” refer to my lexical analysis of the word “abyss” and the implications it has for a right understanding of Revelation 20:1-3, not to some kind of Scripture-interprets-Scripture hermeneutic which I abused to import my theology into Revelation 20:1-3. The language of the text itself (“he laid hold of the dragon, the serpent of old, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the abyss, and shut it and sealed it over him”) indicates that Satan’s activity on earth will be completely eliminated during this time, and the purpose clause (“so that he should not deceive the nations any longer”) indicates the primary purpose of this incarceration. But as I wrote above, this does not preclude the possibility of other purposes or results of the action of the verb. You can fight this on theological grounds (i.e., this doesn’t fit with your amillennialism), but not on grammatical grounds.