Problematic Feature of Premillennialism

Premillennialism is the eschatological view that Christ second return will precede the millennium. So this view says: Christ returns, and then 1,000 year reign follows. Within this scheme of reading the Bible, there are two major views: Historic Premillennialism (HP) and Dispensational Premillennialism (DP). There are significant differences between the two. But the two schools share the view that Christ returns will be followed by the 1,000 year reign. This is the position that they arrived at when they read a Scripture passage like Rev. 20. In this post, I am going to raise a problematic feature that is common with premillennialism.

But before that, let me lay out the scheme:

1. Christ first coming on earth.

2. Church age began with Pentecost (and we are living in this era now).

3. Church age will conclude as the tribulation breaks out.

4. Jesus will then return, and then the battle of Armageddon ensues  (Rev. 16.16)

5. Jesus will defeat Satan and the latter will be bound for 1000 years; resurrection for the believers.

6. Jesus reigns for 1000 years with the resurrected, including those who survive Armageddon battle.

7. At the end of this 1000 year reign, Satan will be released once more ( Rev. 20.7-8)

8. The battle of Gog and Magog will ensue

9. Jesus will defeat Satan once more, and the latter will be cast into the lake of burning sulphur.

10. Judgement,

11. New heaven & new earth.

Now one may ask the question: Who will Jesus defeat in point no. 9? Answer: Satan and his army (Rev. 8-9). But who all will be in the army? Those people that Satan had deceived.

Here is the problem: when Jesus literally reigns for 1000 years, he probably was a bad ruler and therefore people are unhappy with his reign, and therefore Satan was able to gather them to be part of his army.

This is a very serious theological problem for the premillennial scheme of things. For the amillennial and postmillennial scheme of things, this problem is not there because they interpret Rev. 20 differently.

Why was Revelation Written Using Symbols?

Somehow somewhere at one point I heard that John wrote Revelation using cryptic symbols in order to avoid detection and persecution by the Roman empire. I was led to believe -- I don't know by whom -- that given the persecution Christian community then was facing, John had to make his message difficult to decipher; and only the faithful could read it and decipher, the rest would get lost with all the symbols and the numbers. I was mistaken.

As Jesus finished speaking to the people about the parable of the sower (Matt 13), his disciples came to ask, " why do you speak to the crowd in parables?" Jesus replied, " The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven is given to you all, but not to them". Then he went on to say, drawing from the book of Isaiah, that he spoke in parables because:

"Though seeing, they do not see;

though hearing, they do not hear or understand..."

"But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear."

"He who has ears, let him hear."

This is to mean that Jesus used parables to draw the attention of the listening believers, while leaving the unbelieving listeners clueless as to what he was saying with the parables.

John also used the phrase " he who has ears, let him hear", drawing from Jesus and from the Old Testament writers like Isaiah and Ezekiel. So just as Jesus' use of parable was to obscure the message from the unbelieving listeners, but open up a very vivid dimension of the message for the believing listeners, John used symbols and numbers to "open the eyes of true believers while leaving the hardened unbelievers in deeper darkness" (Beale & Campbell. Revelation: A Shorter Commentary. 2015. p. 16).

So the cryptic symbols in Revelation is not to obscure the message to the readers, but to obscure the message for the hardened heart. The Pharisees listened to the parables of Jesus one after another, yet most of them failed to KNOW Jesus though they understood the parable in certain sense and plotted to kill Jesus. As parables were to Jesus in his communication -- vivid, clear, contextual; symbols were to John in his communication.

Millenarianism and Christian hope

Millenarianism is "the expectation of the universal kingdom of Christ and the saints on earth in the final future of this world, as a kind of this-worldly, historical transition to the new creation at the end of history", writes biblical scholar and theologian Richard Bauckham, emeritus professor at St. Andrews University, Scotland. ¹ Meredith B. McGuire, a sociologist, defines it as “ the expectation of an immenent collapse of the entire social order and its replacement with a perfect new order.” ² This eschatological outlook emerged among the earliest Christians and flourished till 4^th century and then reappeared late after Reformation. 

There are various strands of millenarianism. Common at present are historical premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism. The former commonly espoused by scholars and the latter common among lay Christians. And this latter version is a later development in Christian thinking. This is derived from a passage a Revelation 20, the last book of the New Testament, where it is mentioned that Jesus Christ will reign for a thousand year with the saints on earth. In her book McGuire writes that this term millenarianism “ is derived from occult Christian predictions that the world would end one thousand years after Jesus' birth”. But McGuire assertion is not found in the Bible nor in the history of Christian thought. So I am quite intriqued where from she got this idea! Millenarianism is not about a belief in a thousand year reign after Jesus' birth, but a thousand year reign of Jesus in the future on earth with his saints.

However, this idea of “Jesus reigning on earth for a thousand year” has been interpreted in different ways by Christians throughout its history. There are those Christians, quite many of them, who approach the book of Revelation with a more non-literalistic interpretation. Since the book Revelation is filled with colourful symbolism, such interpretation is a valid one as much as a more literalistic interpretation is valid, if not less.

The kind of future presented in popular novel/movie like Left Behind is the least preferred option among trained Christian theologians. Due to popularity of such view among common Christians, it is possible to project that as the universal Christian understanding. But it is not. I am open to historic premillennialism though at present I prefer ammillenialism. But millennarianism of the kind of dispensational premillenialism is the least preferred position. One strand of meaning system that attempts to locate human lives and events within that millenarian framework is the work of Jürgen Moltmann. Not all Christians agree with everything he says, but he is perhaps the most popular and rigorous contemporary scholar who has written much on the subject.

1. Eschatology in Bible and Theology: Evangelica Esssays at the Dawn of a New Millennium, Eds. Kent E. Brower and Mark W. Elliott ( IVP, 1997)
2. Religion: The Social Context, Meredith B. McGuire( Wadsworth Thomson Learning, 2002)