Tyconius (d.c.390)
“The millennial kingdom of Rev. 20 [according to Tyconius] is the Church itself, founded at the Resurrection, and the thousand years is a figure referring to the indeterminate historical time span of the Church’s existence … Tyconius dismissed the literal millennium by classifying 1000 as a legitimate [i.e., symbolic] number, not a literal, logical indicator” (Faith Wallis in Bede: Commentary on Revelation, translated with introduction and notes by Faith Wallis [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013], pp. 15-16, 71).
Jerome (c.331-420)
[1] “‘These four great beasts are the four kingdoms which shall arise from the earth. But the saints of the Most High God shall take the kingdom.’ The four kingdoms of which we have spoken above were earthly in character. ‘For everything which is of the earth shall return to earth’ (Ecc. 3:20). But the saints shall never possess an earthly kingdom, but only a heavenly. Away, then, with the fable about a millennium! [Cesset ergo mille annorum fabula.]” (Comm. on Dan. 2:17-18).
[2] “I know how much difference there is among people … about the way in which John’s Apocalypse is to be interpreted. To take it according to the letter is to ‘Judaize'” (Prologue to Comm. on Isa.).
Augustine (354-430)
[1] “Now the thousand years [of Revelation 20] may be understood in two ways, so far as occurs to me: either because these things happen in the sixth thousand of years or sixth millennium (the latter part of which is now passing), as if during the sixth day, which is to be followed by a Sabbath which has no evening, the endless rest of the saints, so that, speaking of a part under the name of the whole, he calls the last part of the millennium—the part, that is, which had yet to expire before the end of the world—a thousand years; or he used the thousand years as an equivalent for the whole duration of this world, employing the number of perfection to mark the fulness of time. For a thousand is the cube of ten. For ten times ten makes a hundred, that is, the square on a plane superficies. But to give this superficies height, and make it a cube, the hundred is again multiplied by ten, which gives a thousand. Besides, if a hundred is sometimes used for totality, as when the Lord said by way of promise to him that left all and followed Him, ‘He shall receive in this world an hundredfold’ [Matt. 19:29]; of which the apostle gives, as it were, an explanation when he says, ‘As having nothing, yet possessing all things’ [II Cor. 6:10]—for even of old it had been said. ‘The whole world is the wealth of a believer’—with how much greater reason is a thousand put for totality since it is the cube, while the other is only the square? And for the same reason we cannot better interpret the words of the psalm, ‘He hath been mindful of His covenant for ever, the word which He commanded to a thousand generations’ [Ps. 105:8], than by understanding it to mean ‘to all generations’” (The City of God 20:7).
[2] “… from the first coming of Christ to the end of the world, when He shall come the second time … which goes by the name of a thousand years” (The City of God 20:8).
[3] “Now the devil was thus bound not only when the Church began to be more and more widely extended among the nations beyond Judea, but is now and shall be bound till the end of the world, when he is to be loosed” (The City of God 20:8).
[4] “But while the devil is bound, the saints reign with Christ during the same thousand years, understood in the same way, that is, of the time of His first coming. For, leaving out of account that kingdom concerning which He shall say in the end, ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father, take possession of the kingdom prepared for you’ [Matt. 25:34] the Church could not now be called His kingdom or the kingdom of heaven unless His saints were even now reigning with Him … Therefore the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ, and the kingdom of heaven. Accordingly, even now His saints reign with Him, though otherwise than as they shall reign hereafter; and yet, though the tares grow in the Church along with the wheat, they do not reign with Him. For they reign with Him who do what the apostle says, ‘If ye be risen with Christ, mind the things which are above, where Christ sitteth at the right hand of God. Seek those things which are above, not the things which are on the earth’ [Col. 3:1-2]. Of such persons he also says that their conversation [or citizenship] is in heaven [Phil. 3:20]. In fine, they reign with Him who are so in His kingdom that they themselves are His kingdom” (The City of God 20:9).
[5] “‘And when the thousand years are finished, Satan shall be loosed from his prison, and shall go out to seduce the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, and shall draw them to battle, whose number is as the sand of the sea.’ This, then, is his purpose in seducing them, to draw them to this battle. For even before this he was wont to use as many and various seductions as he could continue. And the words ‘he shall go out’ mean, he shall burst forth from lurking hatred into open persecution. For this persecution, occurring while the final judgment is imminent, shall be the last which shall be endured by the holy Church throughout the world, the whole city of Christ being assailed by the whole city of the devil, as each exists on earth. For these nations which he names Gog and Magog are not to be understood of some barbarous nations in some part of the world, whether the Getse and Massagetse, as some conclude from the initial letters, or some other foreign nations not under the Roman government For John marks that they are spread over the whole earth, when he says, ‘The nations which are in the four comers of the earth,’ and he added that these are Gog and Magog” (The City of God 20:11).
“And since Tychonius and Augustine, the millennium (the thousand year kingdom) of Revelation 20 is no longer understood in terms of the end of history but in terms of the history of the church” (Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966], p. 418).
“Augustine … distanced himself from all forms of literalistic millenarianism. In stressing that the destiny of the two cities [i.e., the city of God and the city of man] will not be resolved until the end of history itself, City of God leaves no room for claiming an interim period on Earth for the resurrected saints. Augustine instead interprets Rev 20:1–10 allegorically (in this respect he remained close to Eusebius), seeing the one thousand years as an allusion to the present age, that is to say, the time between Christ’s first and second coming: ‘[T]herefore, the Church is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven, and so even now the saints reign with him, although not in the same sense in which they will ultimately reign’ (City of God 20.9). In Augustine’s de-dramatized version, the millennium therefore refers to the age of the Christian church” (Jayne Svenungsson, “Millenarianism”).
“It is readily seen to what extent this Augustinian view has become the ordinary amillenarian conception of the last events and consummation of the world” (D. H. Kromminga, Millennium in the Church: Studies in the History of Chiliasm [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1945], p. 111).
Bede (672/673-735)
(Bede: Commentary on Revelation, translated with introduction and notes by Faith Wallis [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013], emphases original)
[1] “AND I SAW THRONES; AND THEY SAT UPON THEM; AND JUDGEMENT WAS GIVEN UNTO THEM; … [Rev. 20:4]
He shows what is to happen in these thousand years in which the devil is bound. For the Church, which will sit with Christ upon twelve thrones to pass judgment, sits already and judges — she who deserved to hear from the King: ‘Whatsoever you shall bind upon earth, it should be bound also in heaven’” (p. 253).
[2] “AND THE SOULS OF THOSE WHO WERE BEHEADED FOR THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS, AND FOR THE WORD OF GOD, … [Rev. 20:4]
This implies what will be said hereafter: They reigned with Christ a thousand years. Therefore the Church reigns with Christ among the living and the dead. As the Apostle says, ‘For to this end Christ died and rose again; that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living’” (p. 253).
[3] “AND WHO HAD NOT WORSHIPPED THE BEAST OR HIS IMAGE, [nor received his mark on their foreheads or in the hands;] AND THEY LIVED, AND REIGNED WITH CHRIST A THOUSAND YEARS. [Rev. 20:4]
We should take this to refer to the living and the dead alike, who either living up to this point in mortal flesh, or dead, reign in Christ even now in a manner appropriate to this [present] time, through the whole interval signified by the number of one thousand years” (p. 254).
[4] “AND SHALL REIGN WITH CHRIST A THOUSAND YEARS. [Rev. 20:6]
When the Spirit wrote this, he related that the Church would reign a thousand years, that is, until the end of the world. How could there be any doubt about this?” (p. 255).
“Bede, and the tradition he drew on, vigorously rejected … the [idea that the] messianic kingdom would be an earthly one, lasting one thousand years … [It refers to] the whole experience of the Church from the Incarnation until the end of time … the chaining of the dragon and the reign of the saints for a thousand years represents the history of the Church from the Incarnation to the final conflict, when the Devil will be released and defeated forever” (Faith Wallis in Bede: Commentary on Revelation, translated with introduction and notes by Faith Wallis [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013], pp. 6, 66).
“Bede’s own exegesis of Rev. 20:3-5 shows the extent of Tyconius’s triumph: Bede quotes verbatim from Primasius (d.c.560), who is quoting verbatim from Augustine, who incorporates fully the concept of legitimate [i.e., symbolic] numbers” (Faith Wallis in Bede: Commentary on Revelation, translated with introduction and notes by Faith Wallis [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013], p. 71).
Augsburg Confession (1530): “They condemn also others who are now spreading certain Jewish opinions, that before the resurrection of the dead the godly shall take possession of the kingdom of the world, the ungodly being everywhere suppressed” (17:5).
“[Martin] Luther [1483-1546] agrees with the [historic] catholic church in its rejection of chiliasm” (Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1966], p. 419).
John Calvin (1509-1564)
“But a little later there followed the chiliasts, who limited the reign of Christ to a thousand years. Now their fiction is too childish either to need or to be worth a refutation. And the Apocalypse, from which they undoubtedly drew a pretext for their error, does not support them. For the number “one thousand” [Rev. 20:4] does not apply to the eternal blessedness of the church but only to the various disturbances that awaited the church, while still toiling on earth. On the contrary, all Scripture proclaims that there will be no end to the blessedness of the elect or the punishment of the wicked [Matt. 25:41, 46] … Those who assign the children of God a thousand years in which to enjoy the inheritance of the life to come do not realize how much reproach they are casting upon Christ and his Kingdom” (Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. [Philadelphia, PA: The Westminster Press, 1960], 3.25.5).
“Calvin is concerned about the exclusive orientation and concentration of hope on the ultimate appearance and revelation of the Lord for the general resurrection and the last judgment on all. He sees in chiliasm an impoverishment, not to say a destruction, of the Christian hope. In this he agrees with the Lutherans who in the Augsburg Confession—no doubt in view of the increase of sectarian fanaticism—stated: ‘Here we reject the teaching of those Judaizers who visualize that before the resurrection of the dead the proud saints and pious will enjoy a worldly hegemony in which all the godless will be wiped out’ (C. A. 17). The confession of the reformers also adopted this judgment on ecstatic chiliasm … Here he follows the teaching of Augustine—so decisive for the eschatology of the Western church—who, following the example of Ticonius in his commentary on the Revelation of John, made the millennium instead of an eschatological factor merely a period in church history (H. Reuter), since he understood by it the whole time of the church from the epiphany to the parousia … The kingdom of a thousand years is then the spiritual rule of Christ over individual souls in their earthly life until the completion of their course in death and the general resurrection” (Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things, trans. Harold Knight [Richmond, VA: John Knox Press, 1955], pp. 159-160, 161).
Forty-Two Articles of the Church of England (1552/1553: “41. Heretics Called Millenarii. They that go about to renew the fable of heretics called Millenarii, are repugnant to Holy Scripture, and cast themselves headlong into a Jewish dotage” (quoted in James T. Dennison, Jr., Reformed Confessions of the 16th and 17th Centuries in English Translation, vol. 2 [Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2010], p. 12).
Second Helvetic Confession (1556): “We further condemn Jewish dreams that there will be a golden age on earth before the Day of Judgment, and that the pious, having subdued all their godless enemies, will possess all the kingdoms of the earth. For evangelical truth in Matt., chs. 24 and 25, and Luke, ch. 18, and apostolic teaching in II Thess., ch. 2, and II Tim., chs. 3 and 4, present something quite different” (11).
“… the Reformers considered the notion of a universal kingdom before the parousia as rooted in unbiblical Jewish opinion [Augsburg Confession 17:5; Second Helvetic Confession 11]. But not only the Jewish element was the object of criticism: the whole idea of a reign of peace to be expected in this dispensation was considered to be an unreal fallacy. The church generally thought of chiliasm an as something foreign, whose origins and motives were to be sought outside the Christian tradition” (G. C. Berkouwer, The Return of Christ, trans. James Van Oosterom [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1972], p. 294).
Francis Turretin (1623-1687): “The crowning passage usually adduced [by chiliasts] to prove a particular resurrection of the saints and martyrs (Rev. 20:4-6) cannot establish this opinion. (1) The passage is prophetic, symbolic, obscure, controverted, liable to various interpretations. It cannot alone form the basis for an opinion which is at variance with many other plain passages of Scripture. (2) It does not treat of the bodies, but of ‘the souls’ of those slain. John, it is said, saw ‘the souls’ of the slain. He does not say, ‘I saw them that were beheaded raised up in their bodies’ (eidon tous pepelekismenous anastantas); but ‘I saw the souls’ (eidon psychas). Therefore, it is not right to extend these words to the persons and the resurrection of their bodies. For although the soul often by synecdoche signifies the whole man, yet in this place the tropical locution must not be received rashly to establish an uncertain dogma. (3) The maters are not said properly to have lived again, but only to ‘have lived.’ John does not say anezēsan, but simply ezēsan, ‘they lived’ (to wit, a happy and glorious life in heaven, contrary to what the enemies of the church by foolish judgment supposed, for they thought that those whom they had beheaded, perished miserably; but the beheading was life to them and their extermination was their reign with Christ). And if it is said, they will reign with Christ, it must not at once be understood that they will reign on the earth, since it can best be said that they will reign with Christ in heaven” (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 3 [Phillipsburg, NJ; P&R, 1997], p. 580).
Carl Friedrich Keil (1807-1888): “The prophets of the Old Testament know nothing of a thousand years’ kingdom; and a glorification of the earthly Canaan before the end of the world cannot be inferred from the picture of the temple spring, for the simple reason that the resumption of this prophetic figure in Rev. xxii. 1 and 2 shows that this spring belongs to the heavenly Jerusalem of the new earth. Even in Rev. xx. we read nothing about a glorification of Palestine or Jerusalem. This has merely been inferred from the fact that, according to the literal interpretation of the chapter, those who rise from the dead at the second coming of Christ will reign with Christ in the ‘beloved city.’ i.e., Jerusalem; but the question has not been taken into consideration, whether a warlike expedition of the heathen from the four corners of the glorified world against the inhabitants of a glorified city, who are clothed with spiritual bodies, is possible and conceivable, or whether such an assumption does not rather ‘lead to absurdities’” (Commentary on the Old Testament, vol. 9: Ezekiel, Daniel [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, repr. 1988], 2:397-398).
Herman Bavinck (1854-1921)
(Reformed Dogmatics, Vol. 4: Holy Spirit, Church, and New Creation, ed. John Bolt, trans. John Vriend [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2008])
[1] “This is how the doctrine of chiliasm arose. Admittedly, a large part of Jewish apocryphal literature continues to adhere to the future expectations of the Old Testament. But frequently, especially in the Apocalypse of Baruch and 4 Ezra, we find that you that the glory of the messianic kingdom is not the last and the highest. On the contrary, after a specific period of time, often calculated–for example, in the Talmud–at four hundred or a thousand years, this kingdom has to make room for the heavenly blessedness of the kingdom of God. Accordingly, chiliasm is not of Christian but of Jewish and Persian origin. It is always based on a compromise between the expectations of an earthly salvation and those of a heavenly state of blessedness” (p. 655).
[2] “All of these variations constitute as many objections against chiliasm. It cannot even stand before the tribunal of Old Testament prophecy, a court to which it loves to appeal. Aside from the fact that, as stated earlier, the Old Testament does not view the messianic kingdom as provisional and temporary but as the end result of world history, chiliasm is guilty of the greatest arbitrariness in interpreting prophecy. It doubles the return of Christ and the resurrection of the dead, although the Old Testament does not give the slightest warrant for this. It is devoid of all rule and method and arbitrarily calls a halt, depending on the subjective opinion of the interpreter” (p. 658).
[3] “Totally wrong, therefore, is the chiliastic view according to which the New Testament, along with the church composed of Gentiles, is an intermezzo, a detour taken by God because Israel rejected its Messiah, so that the actual continuation and fulfilment of the Old Testament can begin only with Christ’s second coming. The opposite, rather, is true. Not the New Testament but the Old is an intermezzo. The covenant with Israel is temporary; the law has been inserted in between the promise to Abraham and its fulfilment in Christ, that it might increase the trespass and be a disciplinarian leading to Christ (Rom. 5:20; Gal. 3:24ff.) … the New Testament is not an intermezzo or interlude, neither a detour nor a departure from the line of the old covenant, but the long-aimed-for goal, the direct continuation and the genuine fulfilment of the Old Testament. Chiliasm, judging otherwise, comes in conflict with Christianity itself. In principle it is one with Judaism and must get to where it attributes a temporary, passing value to Christianity, the historical person of Christ, and his suffering and death, and it only first expects real salvation from Christ’s second coming, his appearance in glory. Like Judaism, it subordinates the spiritual to material, the ethical to the physical, confirms the Jews in their carnal mindedness, excuses their rejection of the Messiah, reinforces the veil that lies over their minds when they hear the reading of the Old Testament, and promotes the illusion that the physical descendants of Abraham will as such still enjoy an advantage in the kingdom of heaven” (p. 662).
[4] “The thousand years, as is generally recognized today, are symbolic. They contrast with the few days during which the believers who remain faithful are oppressed and persecuted here on earth (12:17), but also with the completed glory that is eternal (22:5). They denote the holy, blessed rest of believers who have died and are in heaven with Christ as well as the longing with which they look for the day when their blood will be avenged (6:10), while on earth the struggles of world empire and the international world against Christ continues … In 19:21 people are slain by the sword of Christ; in 20:9 they are consumed by fire from heaven. But after the world empire, the false prophet, and Satan have been condemned and thrown into the lake of fire (19:20; 20:10), all the dead arise and are judged according to their works (20:11-15)” (p. 684).
