What Is the Millennium?

The millennium is the thousand-year period described in Revelation 20:1-10, during which Satan is bound, thrones are set up, and a company of the dead live and reign with Christ. That is the whole of the biblical data on it. Ten verses, near the end of the last book.

Two facts surprise most people who look it up. The word millennium is not in the Bible, and Scripture gives the period no name at all. It is a label readers apply to a passage, in the way that Trinity is a label applied to a doctrine. And Revelation 20 is the only place in the Bible that gives Christ's kingdom a length. Every other prophecy of a coming reign, and there are many, leaves the duration blank.

Where the word came from

Millennium is Latin arithmetic: mille, a thousand, joined to annus, a year. When Jerome translated Revelation 20 into Latin around AD 400 he wrote mille annis, a thousand years, and the compound reached English from there.

The Greek underneath is chilia etē, a thousand years, from chilioi, a thousand. That word gives the older English name for the belief in a coming earthly thousand-year kingdom: chiliasm. When a second-century writer, or a nineteenth-century one, discusses "the chiliasts", the subject is the same one. Millenarian is the Latin-derived equivalent and means the same thing.

So there are three names in circulation for one idea, all of them supplied by translators and historians rather than by John.

What the passage actually says

Here is the core of it, in the King James Version.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years. Revelation 20:4-6

Set beside verses 1 to 3 and 7 to 10, the passage states the following, and it is worth separating what the text says from what readers add.

The right-hand column is not a complaint about John. It is the reason the argument exists. Almost every question a reader arrives with is answered somewhere other than Revelation 20, from a passage the reader has already decided goes with it.

The three positions, and what the prefixes mean

The names are built from one reference point: where the second coming of Christ sits relative to the millennium.

Premillennial means Christ returns before the thousand years. The reign follows the return, so it is still future. This is the oldest named position, held by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus in the second century, and it is what chiliasm originally described.

Postmillennial means Christ returns after the thousand years. The millennium is a long era of gospel success within ordinary history, brought about by preaching rather than by a visible return, and the second coming closes it. Jonathan Edwards is the best known name attached to it.

Amillennial is the odd one out, because the prefix does not follow the same rule. The Greek alpha privative a- means "without", which makes the word look like a denial that there is a millennium at all. Amillennialists do not deny it. They hold that the thousand years is the present age, running from Christ's first coming to his return, with the reign taking place in heaven and the binding of Satan already accomplished. The millennium on this reading is present, not absent.

The label was coined by opponents, and amillennial writers have complained about it ever since. Jay Adams proposed replacing it with realized millennialism in The Time Is at Hand in 1966, on the grounds that it says what the view actually claims. Anthony Hoekema, whose The Bible and the Future of 1979 is the standard modern statement of the position, agreed with the criticism, called the replacement clumsy, and kept using the old word anyway. It stuck.

Notice that on two of the three views the second coming comes after the thousand years, which is why the postmillennial and amillennial positions are often treated as cousins. What separates them is not the order of events but what they expect the world to look like first. The three are compared properly in premillennial, amillennial and postmillennial.

The Old Testament passages people attach to it

Revelation 20 says nothing about wolves, lambs, vineyards or Jerusalem. The pictures most people carry of the millennium come from the Hebrew prophets, and the connection between them and John's ten verses is an interpretive decision, not a stated one.

Four passages do most of the work.

• Isaiah 11:6-9. The wolf dwells with the lamb, a little child leads them, and the earth is full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.
• Isaiah 65:17-25. New heavens and a new earth, houses built and inhabited, and a lifespan so long that a person dying at a hundred counts as a child.
• Zechariah 14. The Lord's feet stand on the Mount of Olives, and he becomes king over all the earth.
• Psalm 72. A king with dominion from sea to sea, in whose days the righteous flourish and there is abundance of peace.

They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. Isaiah 11:9

Whether any of these describes the millennium is itself disputed, and the dispute is not lazy on either side. Amillennial and postmillennial readers point out that the New Testament quotes Isaiah 65:17 for the eternal state, in 2 Peter 3:13 and Revelation 21:1, and never applies it to a thousand-year interval. Premillennial readers point at Isaiah 65:20, where people still die, and ask how a world containing death can be the new creation of Revelation 21:4, where death is gone. That verse is the sharpest single exchange in the whole area, and neither answer has ended it.

Once you see that, the shape of the disagreement becomes clearer. The millennium of popular imagination is Isaiah's picture poured into John's ten verses. Whether the two belong in the same container is the question, and it is decided before anyone reaches Revelation 20.

What the definition does not settle

Knowing what the word means leaves three live questions untouched, and each of them can move a reader from one camp to another on its own.

Whether the thousand is a quantity or a picture of completeness, which is set out in is the thousand years literal. Whether the binding of Satan in verses 1 to 3 has already happened, which is is Satan bound right now. And whether "they lived" in verse 4 describes bodies leaving graves or souls entering heaven, which is what the first resurrection is.

Answer those three the same way and your millennial view is settled without your ever having chosen a label. Most people work in the opposite direction, inheriting the label and reading the verses through it, which is why the conversation so often stalls.

Ten verses, six repetitions of one number, and three positions that have each been held by careful people for centuries. It is a small passage carrying an unusual load, and it repays being read slowly, on its own, before anyone tells you what it means.