In this essay, I examine the historical diversity of Christian eschatology, challenging the notion of a monolithic tradition by tracing its evolution from early premillennialism (chiliasm) in figures like Justin Martyr and Irenaeus to the shift toward amillennialism in later centuries, influenced by Tyconius’ and Augustine’s symbolic interpretations. I highlight persistent futurist readings of the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24–25), which deferred tribulation signs to an ever-receding future, fueling end-times hysteria from the first millennium AD through Protestant reformations and the rise of dispensational premillennialism via the Scofield Bible. I identify profound ironies: while speculative futurist identifications (e.g., modern “Antichrists”) are tolerated, interpretations of first-century fulfillment provoke hostility, revealing an asymmetry in reception. Advocating intellectual hospitality, I argue for reclaiming a first-century horizon in the Discourse, honoring scriptural clarity and Jesus’ trustworthiness without diminishing ultimate hope.
1. Introduction
For two millennia, most Christians have been told their tradition is a monolith. The historical record tells a very different story. Even within the boundaries of what the Church has always called “orthodoxy,” the range of belief—on matters many today treat as untouchable dogmas—has been astonishingly, sometimes shockingly, wide. Tradition’s clarity and precision, by contrast, is often quite vague and remarkably lacking. What follows is a brief tour of one doctrinal theme with that description.
2. Early Eschatology
Eschatology—the study of “last things” concerning divine judgment and the destiny of human beings—stands out as a category of Christian tradition with notable doctrinal diversity. In the early post-apostolic era (AD 100–300), one seemingly popular view was the expectation of a future, earthly reign of Christ for a literal thousand-year period following Christ’s future “coming” in judgment to make all things new. Taken from the Greek adjective for a “thousand” years in Revelation 20:4 (χίλια, chilia), this view is referred to by scholars as chiliasm or premillennialism,[1] differentiating it from other varieties of premillennialism that would arise after the Protestant Reformation. Scholars generally agree that a premillennial view existed for nearly two hundred years and is attested in the writings of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus of Lyons, Tertullian of Carthage, Victorinus of Petovium, and Lactantius, among others.[2]
Justin Martyr’s input in this regard is particularly interesting, for he is one of the earliest proponents of premillennialism (he lived in the mid-second century), and he is highly specific about what “true Christians” believe. Remarkably, Justin himself acknowledges that some “pure and pious” Christians do not share his premillennial hope, yet he still considers it to be the majority view of Christianity and the one most consistent with a plain reading of the prophets.[3] Justin not only believes Jesus will return and reign for a literal thousand years, but he also believes that Jesus will reign “in Jerusalem” for those years. Furthermore, Justin believes that during his future earthly reign, Jesus will literally build up, adorn, and enlarge the city of Jerusalem anew as “the prophets” declared. In defense of this, he appeals to the visions of Ezekiel, Isaiah, “and others” as descriptions of promises yet to be fulfilled for a thousand literal years after Christ returns to “end” the world-order as we know it, which culminates in universal and everlasting resurrection and judgment.[4]
The premillennial expectation of Christ’s earthly reign was already a well-established tradition long before AD 300; it first took root in Asia Minor and spread from there through a clear line of literary dependence. Justin Martyr articulated it with particular clarity in Asia Minor itself; Irenaeus, who had heard Polycarp in Smyrna and quotes Justin by name, transmitted and defended it in the late second century; Tertullian repeatedly cites Irenaeus and develops the same doctrine in the early third century; Victorinus (late third century) shows heavy dependence on Irenaeus; and Lactantius (early fourth century), while residing in Nicomedia, explicitly draws on Tertullian for his own emphatically chiliastic eschatology. Victorinus and Lactantius were the last major Latin fathers to defend premillennialism before a significant shift in empire-wide eschatology. By the time they wrote, the doctrine had behind it a continuous century-and-a-half-long chain of authoritative witness originating in the churches of Asia Minor.
In my estimation, one of the most intriguing contributions of early premillennial fathers is their attempt to fully integrate the Olivet Discourse into a timeline of these future “end times” events, presenting the whole framework as normative for Christians: they viewed the abomination of desolation mentioned in Matthew 24:15, the great tribulation in Matthew 24:21, and the cosmic signs of judgment in Matthew 24:29–31 as futuristic events expected before Christ’s “coming,” after which the saints would reign with him in the millennial kingdom.[5]
As previously noted, premillennialism was not the only eschatological position in the early Church, yet it remained a largely uncontested view among influential figures into the third century. Significant opposition did not emerge until the early fourth century, when the writings of Origen of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea—both resolute critics of premillennial interpretation—began to exert decisive influence. By the dawn of the fifth century, the longstanding premillennial consensus had undergone a dramatic reversal, led principally by the works of Jerome and Augustine of Hippo. While Jerome’s considerable authority derived in large part from his deep indebtedness to Origen and Eusebius, it was Augustine who proved the more transformative figure in overturning the premillennial view. Rather than following Origen or Eusebius directly, Augustine drew inspiration from the North African lay theologian Tyconius, whose commentary on the book of Revelation applied a set of “mystical” rules that, according to Francis Gumerlock, “shaped the Latin reception and interpretation of the Apocalypse for the next eight hundred years.”[6]
Of particular interest is Augustine’s description of those mystical rules as being “quite helpful in penetrating the obscure parts of the divine writings.”[7] Augustine used Tyconius’ rules to reinterpret the millennium symbolically as the present age of the church between the first and second comings of Christ, a view generally labeled today as amillennialism or postmillennialism.[8] Augustine’s immense authority across Christendom ensured that views of a symbolic millennium became the dominant paradigm of Western (and eventually Eastern) Christianity for centuries. With the binding of Satan (Rev 20:1–3) identified as Christ’s victory at the cross and the thousand years (20:4) understood mystically, the entire complex of events associated with a future great tribulation, abomination of desolation, and personal “Antichrist” was necessarily relocated to the remote future, functioning as signs immediately preceding the return of Christ.[9]
3. The Persistence of Futurist Interpretations
Crucially, therefore, both the early premillennial tradition and the later amillennial tradition of interpreting John’s apocalyptic vision (despite the irreconcilable differences on the millennium itself) shared a common thread of influence across history: they both had a futuristic reading of the tribulation signs contained in the Olivet Discourse. The “coming” of Christ that had been widely expected in the near term by second- and third-century believers became systematically deferred according to Augustine’s amillennialism, creating the default futuristic horizon that most Christians have inherited ever since. It seems that every generation of Christians since the dawn of the fifth century has eagerly expected Christ’s “coming” nearer its own day than our own, yet every generation has been wrong.[10] This error in judgment is not a modern evangelical quirk; it is the perennial fruit of a strictly futurist horizon imagined within the Olivet Discourse.
It’s not surprising to learn that nine hundred years after Christ’s resurrection, as the first literal millennium of Christendom drew to a close, the fruits of futurism were everywhere, pining to see if Christ would return in judgment in their generation. Historian Tom Holland notes that shortly before the year 1000, it was all too clear among dutiful Christians that “great calamities” and “the fruits of divine judgment” were “everywhere increasing, heralding the end of the age of men.” Holland continues to describe the general feeling of this time period, saying,
Not since the earliest days of the Church, when the return of Christ had been hourly expected, had a sense of the imminence of the end of days so utterly possessed the ranks of the faithful. That the world was hurling towards the fiery ruin so long prophesied for it appeared to most Christians, amid all the violent tribulations of the century, self-evident.…Nine hundred years and more had passed since the blessed feet of Christ had walked the earth; and now the thousandth was drawing near.[11]
End-times hysteria did not subside after the year 1000 passed even though pontifications of prophetic fulfillment continued to fail. Describing the twelfth century through the sixteenth century, historian Norman Cohn observes that,
Generation after generation lived in constant expectation of…lawless chaos…the prelude to the longed-for consummation, the Second Coming and the Kingdom of the Saints. People were always on the watch for the “signs” which, according to the prophetic tradition, were to herald and accompany the final “time of troubles”; and since the “signs” included bad rulers, civil discord, war, drought, famine, plague, comets, sudden deaths of prominent persons and an increase in general sinfulness, there was never any difficulty about finding them.[12]
This pattern of Christian tradition is unmistakable: every generation, convinced that “signs” are uniquely fulfilled in their own day, has lived in the same excruciating tension that characterized the first-century church, only with the added bitterness of repeated disappointment. Shortly after Christians imbibed the vividly concrete, almost cinematic imagination of second-century chiliasm and its assumptions about unfulfilled prophecy, tradition never recovered from its addiction to “end times” obsession. Augustine’s spiritualized interpretations only adjusted the dosage, not the drug.
The Protestant reformations of the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries did not reduce the dosage much, either. Even a cursory review of the past five centuries discloses striking variations of eschatology that ancient Christian creeds and catechisms leave largely undefined.[13] Among magisterially Reformed documents, the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the Heidelberg Catechism (1563), and the Belgic Confession (1561) offer almost no guidance, dogmatic or otherwise, on the sequence of eschatological events or the character of the millennium, although individual theologians behind such works introduced many creative and controversial perspectives into the mainstream understanding of eschatology.[14]
4. Modern Developments
It was not until the early twentieth century, with the publication and widespread dissemination of the Scofield Reference Bible, that the next major paradigm shift in Christian eschatology took place. Through its extensive marginal notes, Scofield’s Bible became the primary vehicle for the rapid spread of dispensational premillennialism—a system now commonly distinguished from earlier forms of historic premillennialism by the shorthand “dispensationalism.” This new framework proved both revolutionary and remarkably persuasive, and three of its central doctrines, all given prominent place in Scofield’s annotations, have continued to exercise profound influence on large sectors of Christian eschatological thought ever since.
The first of these doctrines is the insistence on a permanent and absolute distinction between Israel and the Church, such that ethnic “Jews” and born-again Christians constitute two entirely separate groups of “chosen” people by God, each with their own eschatological purpose and destiny.[15] According to this scheme, every covenant and kingdom promise originally made to ethnic or national “Israel” remains eternally valid and awaits literal, future fulfillment in a restored kingdom of Israel on earth.[16]
The second distinctive doctrine is the teaching of a secret “rapture” of the Christian Church prior to the promised “great tribulation” of the Olivet Discourse and John’s apocalypse (Matt 24:21; Rev 2:22; 7:14). Whereas almost all pre-Scofield Christian traditions had expected the Church to pass through the great tribulation before Christ’s return, dispensationalism taught that the true Church—Gentile believers in Christ—would be suddenly and secretly removed to heaven before the tribulation period began, only to return to earth with Christ after the tribulation period.
The third doctrine is the expectation of a future, literal, theocratic millennium following Christ’s second coming. In this scenario, Christ returns visibly with his already-raptured saints, binds Satan, and establishes a thousand-year kingdom of Israel headquartered in Jerusalem, complete with a rebuilt temple, reinstituted animal sacrifices, ethnic Jews restored to their land, and the nations of the earth governed by Christ and his “chosen people.”
From the rise of dispensationalism onward—through Hal Lindsey, Tim LaHaye, Harold Camping, and beyond[17]—its most powerful appeal has been the claim that it alone takes prophecy “literally” and refuses to spiritualize what the Bible “plainly” teaches. This is precisely the same confidence Justin Martyr expressed in the mid-second century when he declared that all “pure and pious” Christians expect a literal rebuilding of God’s temple and a literal thousand-year earthly reign. Within two generations of publication, the Scofield Bible made this revived second-century futurism the default view of tens of millions of evangelicals,[18] while older traditions quietly retained their amillennial, postmillennial, or historic premillennial interpretations.
Consequently, a dispensational congregation in Dallas, Texas today may regard one’s denial of a pre-tribulation rapture bordering on heresy, while a historic premillennial or amillennial assembly in Bellingham, Washington considers precisely the opposite view essential to fidelity—both communities appealing to the same Scriptures and claiming the same commitment to the trustworthiness and supreme authority of it. Most twenty-first-century Christians today aren’t even aware that the dispensational distinctives that now dominate Christian bookstores and Bible-study curricula are exceptionally innovative and historically unprecedented in many of their particulars. Furthermore, Christians today are dispersed across continents and cultures, yet minimal exposure to shared Bible study, confessional documents, and other digital resources reveals profound interpretive divergences among those who confess the same Lord. The broad Christian tradition is extraordinarily variegated, and that reality persists despite repeated claims that one particular trajectory has always been the “true,” “orthodox,” or “apostolic” position throughout church history.[19]
As numerous scholarly works in recent years have shown, eschatology constitutes one of the most emotionally freighted domains of historical theology.[20] With the advancement of technology, the internet, and virtual communities, this burden is even more evident today than in centuries past. Adherents frequently exhibit tenacious attachment to the particular eschatological model they have inherited, rendering the topic unusually prone to polemical intensity and to a conspicuous deficit in intellectual hospitality far too often.[21] For those whose engagement with Scripture and history remains myopic or superficial, eschatology may appear a secondary concern. Yet a person’s understanding of the evidence inescapably informs both the content of Christian hope and the shape of Christian ethics in the present. Given the breadth of historically attested positions and the narrowness of exposure characteristic of many contemporary contexts, it is entirely predictable that believers will sometimes react with dismay, or even overt hostility, when confronted with interpretations lying outside their cloister of received tradition, even when those interpretations possess impeccable historical pedigree and have simply fallen into obscurity within modern varieties of Christianity.
5. Asymmetry and Irony
Consider the following scenario which I have observed repeatedly in personal and social media discussions. A discussion of the “abomination of desolation” in Matthew 24:15 arises and a participant identifies contemporary figures, whether a Pope, a President, or a prominent technology entrepreneur, as plausible candidates for the “Antichrist.” That same participant proposes a connection between the “mark of the beast” and subcutaneous neural implants linked to satellite networks. All of these are supposedly “signs” of living near the “end” when Christ “comes” again in judgment (Matt 24:3–14). Such speculation typically provokes, at most, mild amusement or gentle demurral. It rarely threatens group cohesion.
By contrast, when another participant suggests that Matthew 24:15 and the entirety of the Olivet Discourse concerns the terminal crisis of the old-covenant order in the first century—the generation that heard him, together with the temple that was essential to its administration—the atmosphere palpably changes. Objections arise swiftly, credentials are invoked, historical assertions are made (e.g., “the church fathers never taught this”), and the discussion is sometimes terminated abruptly. The first-century interpretation is quickly labeled a minority or novel view and even heretical, notwithstanding its consistent presence across variegated systems of “orthodox” Christian interpretation and its revival in serious twentieth-century scholarship.
This lack of symmetry in reception is instructive. Futurist readings preserve an open horizon of expectation in which the contemporary generation may yet prove to be the final one; every geopolitical crisis and technological advance can be construed as another “birth pain” (Matt 24:8). A robust first-century horizon of fulfillment, however, closes that horizon. The Olivet Discourse ceases to function as a cryptic preview of tomorrow’s headlines and becomes instead a completed verification that God honored the temporal indicators he personally provided (e.g., Jesus saying to his disciples, “and you will hear of wars and rumors of wars,” “then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death,” “so when you see the abomination of desolation,” “when you see all these things, you know that he is near, at the very gates,” “truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place”).[22]
Jesus’ repeated and consistent use of the second-person plural “you” in all of these statements locks the primary audience to the disciples who are physically present with Jesus on the Mount of Olives (Matt 24:3). Jesus is not speaking in vague third-person terms (“when they see…,” “when people see…”) that would naturally point to a distant future generation, nor is he speaking to a generic, all-encompassing, eternally-abiding ethnicity or ethnically-sustained religion.[23] He is responding directly and repeatedly to his disciples who asked him about events near to them (“[w]hen will these things be?” (24:3)). Grammatically, these examples of direct second-person address are presented exactly the same way Jesus speaks to them in the upper room: “You will all fall away…but after I am raised, I will go before you to Galilee” (26:31–32). No first-century reader would have understood him to be addressing people living two thousand years later. It makes most of the specific instructions in Matthew 24 practically meaningless if transferred to a future generation of any kind. Fleeing to the mountains when you see the abomination standing in the holy place (24:15–16); praying that your flight not be on a Sabbath (24:20); not going back to get your cloak (24:18); these are highly-specific, first-century instructions given to disciples living in the terminal generation preceding Jerusalem’s destruction in AD 70. A twenty-first-century person living in Chicago, Tokyo, or London cannot “flee to the mountains” when they see something happening in a Jerusalem temple, they cannot worry about Sabbath travel restrictions that no longer exist for most people, and they cannot realistically leave their cloak on the roof of a flat-roofed Judean house. Jesus’ commands make very good sense if his “you” is the original audience in front of him, living to spread the news to others within that generation about judgment coming soon upon them.
For many believers, this kind of reasoning is not sufficient to persuade them to reconsider their futuristic, monolithic tradition. The loss of prophetic suspense seems more disturbing than the most extravagant speculative identification of the Antichrist because the latter can always be revised, whereas fulfilled prophecy cannot be relocated to the future without impugning either the clarity of Scripture or the total trustworthiness of Jesus himself. The claim that significant elements of Jesus’ Olivet Discourse found historical fulfillment in the events culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 proves, in contemporary Christian contexts, far more contentious than almost any form of futurist speculation, however imaginative. This is especially true among those who regard themselves as conversant with systematic, biblical, and historical theology.[24]
The irony of this is profound. Those most insistent upon “biblical” interpretations of Jesus’ prophetic remarks are frequently the least willing to interpret his explicit temporal statements as either explicit or temporal statements. As the New Testament shows, the earliest Christian generation awaited Christ’s promised “coming” (παρουσία, parousia) with eager imminence yet saw no necessity to postpone all of the warnings of the Olivet Discourse to a distant future, thousands of years beyond their lifetime. Only after the decline of premillennialism and Augustine’s spiritualization of the millennium did the Church develop a systematic practice of deferring the tribulation to an ever-receding future. The Protestant reformations recovered sola fide and the priesthood of all believers but did not restore a first-century horizon to Matthew 24–25. The Council of Trent implemented its own counter-reformation, yet it also did not restore a first-century horizon to the Olivet Discourse. Even the Eastern churches who have attempted to preserve their own traditions apart from western churches have claimed to preserve the authentic meaning of Christ and his apostles. But they too have, at best, perpetuated the flawed paradigms of fifth-century theologians while largely ignoring or downplaying the premillennial heritage of earlier saints.[25] Ultimately, the resulting “tradition,” lacking in clarity and precision, is effectively the same as their western counterparts: it punts the clear, first-century horizon of meaning within the Olivet Discourse into our future.[26]
It should not surprise us, then, to discover that dispensationalism, as an alternative tradition, has so successfully entrenched a rigorously futurist reading among laypeople and armchair theologians around the world. All appeals to eschatological tradition as a monolith failed to persuade zealous students of the Scriptures (who were not always equally zealous students of the Church Fathers). The unfortunate result is that many modern Christians find the suggestion that Jesus fulfilled his word to that generation more scandalous than the implication that he has not yet fulfilled it to ours. Intellectual hospitality is therefore not merely a courtesy in eschatological discussion; it is an indispensable scholarly and spiritual discipline.
With these encounters in mind, it is important that Christians begin to think seriously again about what the disciples of Jesus meant in Matthew 24:1–3 when they asked him, “When will these things be, and what will be the sign of your coming (παρουσία) and of the end of the age?” As I show throughout my book, Reading Matthew, Trusting Jesus, one frequently overlooked factor of interpreting eschatological traditions across Christian history pertains to these questions and the relationship between the disciples’ first question and first-century fulfillment.
What did Jesus’ disciples have in mind when asking their first question, “When will these things happen?” In the early centuries of Christianity, influential theologians like Origen of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Jerome, John Chrysostom, and Pseudo-Chrysostom, undoubtedly had first-century events in mind. In fact, all of these theologians saw clear, intentional, first-century fulfillment somewhere within Jesus’ initial responses, too—for example, in Origen’s view, comments about first-century fulfillment extend to Matthew 24:34; for Hilary and Chrysostom, it extends to verse 28; for Jerome, to verse 25; and for Pseudo-Chrysostom, first-century interpretations in the discourse extend to verse 20. Though there is a mix of how to apply first-century fulfillment in particular verses within that range, they all assume that whenever Jesus mentions or alludes to signs fulfilled in the first century, he has his disciples’ first question in mind; their second question—“and what will be the sign of your coming and [the sign] of the end of the age?”—is always assumed to have an attachment to end-of-our-world events, leaving the discourse’s first-century horizon of meaning completely severed from the remainder of Jesus’ concerns. One problem I address in detail in Reading Matthew, Trusting Jesus is that Matthew goes out of his way to show Jesus answering his disciples’ last question first and their first question last. The early Church Fathers never noticed this, and their inverted approach to interpreting the Olivet Discourse—bifurcating the immediate, first-century horizon from its eschatological descriptions—would endure as a foundational paradigm, shaping Christian tradition for centuries to come.
6. Conclusion
In light of the profound ironies woven throughout two thousand years of eschatological reflection—where ancient hopes have been deferred, revived, and reimagined, yet often at the expense of Jesus’ own temporal promises—it becomes clear that the true monolith in Christian tradition is not a singular interpretation but the persistent call to humility before the text. By reclaiming the first-century horizon of the Olivet Discourse, we do not diminish the grandeur of Christ’s ultimate victory; rather, we honor the trustworthiness of his words to that generation, freeing our own to live in vigilant hope without the chains of perpetual deferral. In this asymmetry lies an invitation: to extend intellectual hospitality across traditions, to question inherited horizons, and ultimately to trust Jesus not as a prophet of endless delay, but as the faithful fulfillment of God’s redemptive story.
Jonathan E. Sedlak is a graduate of the Theopolis Institute. He is an independent scholar based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the author of Reading Matthew, Trusting Jesus: Christian Tradition and First-Century Fulfillment within Matthew 24–25.
NOTES
[1] Charles E. Hill, Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity (Eerdmans, 2001), 249, notes, “Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Polycarp, Athenagoras, Melito of Sardis, the martyrs of Scilli in 180 and those of Carthage in 203, the authors of the Ascension of Isaiah, 5 Ezra, the Odes of Solomon, the Epistle to Diognetus, the Martyrdom of Polycarp, the Epistle of Vienne and Lyons, and the Acts of Thomas would not have been at home within the chiliast camp.”
[2] See Justin Martyr, Dialog with Trypho 80, trans. Thomas B. Falls, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Series 6 (The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 276; Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies 5.33–35, trans. Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut (Ex Fontibus Company, 2012), 587–598; Tertullian, Against Marcion 3.25, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3, ed. Alexander Roberts et al., trans. Peter Holmes (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885), 342; Victorinus of Petovium, “Commentary on the Apocalypse” ch. 20, in Latin Commentaries on Revelation, ed. and trans. William C. Weinrich (IVP Academic, 2011), 20; Lactantius, The Divine Institutes 7.19–26, trans. Mary Francis McDonald, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Series 49 (The Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 520–537. See also the two-page chart in Hill, Regnum Caelorum, 271–272, where the teachings of Papias and Commodianus are included as definite chiliasts.
[3] Justin Martyr, Dialog, 276. I think Justin is patently incorrect in this assertion of his. Although there is evidence of premillennial eschatology in the second and third centuries, I am not convinced that Justin’s understanding was the majority position at that time. It may, at best, have been the majority position of Asia Minor in his generation, but more likely in his limited circles of influence within Asia Minor.
[4] Justin Martyr, Dialog, 278.
[5] Michael Svigel, The Fathers on the Future: A 2nd-Century Eschatology for the 21st-Century Church (Hendrickson Publishers, 2024), 82–89; Jeffrey S. Siker, “The Parousia of Jesus in Second and Third Century Christianity,” in The Return of Jesus in Early Christianity by John T. Carroll et al. (Hendrickson Publishers, 2000), 156–160; and Brian E. Daley, The Hope of the Early Church: A Handbook of Patristic Eschatology (Baker Academic, 1991), 20–37.
[6] Tyconius, Exposition of the Apocalypse, trans. Francis X. Gumerlock, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, Series 134 (The Catholic University of America Press, 2017), 4, 6–15.
[7] Tyconius, Apocalypse 4.
[8] Amillennialism explains the “thousand years” in Revelation 20 as a symbol for the entire era of the Church, starting from around Pentecost and lasting until his eventual return at the end of history. Similarly, postmillennialism places the millennium before the expected return of Christ (i.e., Christ will come after the millennium). The key difference between the two lies in their perspectives: amillennialism foresees a lasting period of tribulation and a mix of progress and opposition in the kingdom until the end, while postmillennialism holds a more hopeful outlook on the gospel’s transformative influence on society before Christ’s return.
[9] Christians have meshed together ideas about the “great tribulation” and “abomination of desolation” with a personal “Antichrist.” On that, see Wilhelm Boussett, The Antichrist Legend: A Chapter in Christian and Jewish Folklore, trans. A. H. Keane (Scholars Press, 1999); Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994); Stephen J. Vicchio, The Legend of the Anti-Christ: A History (Wipf and Stock, 2009); R. Gerald Culleton, The Reign of Antichrist: A Sourcebook of Catholic Prophecies about “The Man of Sin” (TAN Books, 1974).
[10] For a fascinating synopsis and timeline of failed prophecy across Christian tradition, see Francis X. Gumerlock, The Day and the Hour: Christianity’s Perennial Fascination with Predicting the End of the World (American Vision, 2000).
[11] Tom Holland, Millennium (Abacus, 2008), 44–45.
[12] Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (Oxford University Press, 1974), 35.
[13] This is not to say that ancient Christian documents are silent on the subject of eschatology. Ancient councils and their creeds highlight the explicit expectation of Christ’s triumphant return, the resurrection of the body, and the promise of eternal life. However, they do not explore specific details such as the sequence of prophetic events, the timing of tribulations, the idea of a thousand-year reign, or other aspects linked to Jesus’ sayings within the Olivet Discourse.
[14] I consider the “Historicist” school of thought to be one of these novel and controversial systems of interpretation. The historicist paradigm interprets the prophecies of Scripture—most notably in the Book of Revelation and its seemingly related content within the Olivet Discourse—as revealing a continuous, symbolic panorama of church history and world history from the apostolic era until the “end” when Christ returns. On that, see Francis Nigel Lee, John’s Revelation Unveiled (Queensland Presbyterian Theological College, 2000); Deroy Hanson, Bible Symbols Decoded: An Historicist View of Daniel and Revelation (Dorrance Publishing Co., 2002); Steve Gregg, ed., Revelation: Four Views: A Parallel Commentary, revised and updated ed. (Thomas Nelson, 2013).
[15] In recent decades scholars have increasingly advocated God’s special favor toward Jewish people or Israel as a nation apart from the Church. On that, see Stanley E. Porter and Alan E. Kurschner, The Future Restoration of Israel: A Response to Supersessionism, McMaster Biblical Studies Series (Pickwick Publications, 2023) and Barry E. Horner, Future Israel: Why Christian Anti-Judaism must be challenged, vol. 1, rev. ed. (self published, 2023). In the Roman Catholic world of academia, their teaching is much healthier insofar as it pushes back against many Protestant novelties. A great representation of healthy Catholic teaching is found in Matthew Levering, Engaging the Doctrine of Israel: A Christian Israelology in Dialogue with Ongoing Judaism (Cascade Books, 2021).
[16] Although far-removed from dispensationalism in principle, a few notable Eastern Orthodox fathers in modern times such as Saint Seraphim of Serov have toyed with this idea of Israel’s restoration as a nation in 1948 as being a “sign” of prophecy that we are living in the “end times” of the world. On that, see Dennis E. Engleman, Ultimate Things: An Orthodox Christian Perspective on the End Times (Conciliar Press, 1995), 47–56.
[17] Hal Lindsey with C. C. Carlson, The Late Great Planet Earth (Zondervan, 1970); Harold Camping, Time has an End: A Biblical History of the World 11,013 BC – AD 2011 (Vantage Press, 2005). Tim LaHaye is an American evangelical pastor and author, famous for his contribution to the Left Behind series, which is one of the best-selling Christian fiction series of all time.
[18] See Daniel G. Hummel, The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle over the End Times Shaped a Nation (Eerdmans, 2023). Hummel convincingly shows that dispensationalism peaked mid-twentieth century and has been in steady retreat among younger evangelicals and in the academy since the 1980s, especially after various forms of dispensationalism significantly modified or abandoned Scofield’s original distinctives. Another helpful book is Brian P. Irwin with Tim Perry, After Dispensationalism: Reading the Bible for the End of the World (Lexham Press, 2023).
[19] I find this kind of claim to be most fervently declared among Eastern Orthodox clergy; see, e.g., “The Peculiarities of the True Church” in The Orthodox Doctrine of the Apostolic Eastern Church: A Compendium of Christian Theology (AMS Press, 1969), 135.
[20] Some excellent resources testifying to this include: Paul J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic Tradition (University of California Press, 1985); Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (Columbia University Press, 1979); Kenneth G. C. Newport, Apocalypse & Millennium: Studies in Biblical Exegesis (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman, The Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics, 8 (Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978); Frances Courtney Kneupper, The Empire at the End of Time: Identity and Reform in Late Medieval German Prophecy (Oxford University Press, 2016); Andrew Crome, Christian Zionism and English National Identity, 1600–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Christopher Trigg, To Walk the Earth Again: The Politics of Resurrection in Early America (Oxford University Press, 2016).
[21] “Intellectual hospitality” is a term used by Gavin Ortlund. On the usefulness of this phrase and more of what I mean by it, see Gavin Ortlund, Finding The Right Hills To Die On: The Case for Theological Triage (Crossway, 2020); The Art of Disagreeing: How to Keep Calm and Stay Friends in Hard Conversations (The Good Book Company, 2025).
[22] Unless noted otherwise, all scripture citations are from the ESV.
[23] This kind of claim permeates the work of Horner, Future Israel.
[24] See Jeremy Sexton, “Is Modern Postmillennialism Confessional?,” Ad Fontes, September 11, 2024, where preterist interpretations of biblical prophecy—like treating the Olivet Discourse as being fulfilled in our past—are treated as eroding the New Testament’s hope. For similar tensions in rhetoric, see Thomas D. Ice, “The Unscriptural Theologies of Amillennialism and Postmillennialism,” Pre-Trib Research Center Article Archives, Liberty University, May 2009, and Larry D. Pettegrew, “Interpretive Flaws in the Olivet Discourse,” The Master’s Seminary Journal 13, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 173–190.
[25] For example, see Gerasimos of Abydos, At the End of Time: The Eschatological Expectations of the Church (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004), 15–16.
[26] On this, see Constantine Callinicos, Beyond the Grave: An Orthodox Theology of Eschatology (The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., 1969), 107, 116–117; Gerasimos of Abydos, At the End of Time, 11-12; Sergius Bulgakov, The Sophiology of Death: Essays on Eschatology: Personal, Political, Universal, trans. Roberto J. De La Noval (Cascade Books, 2021), 164–170.