An Introduction to the Millennium From A Wesleyan Perspective
And the toxic residue of amillennialism on the pages of history
In regards to the Church’s teaching about the future world, I would suspect most of us have been coddled with messages like, “we don’t know what heaven is going to be like, but we know it is going to be far beyond our wildest expectations and we just need to trust God and try and live as best we can here and now to love him and serve others.” After which instructors will select a few verses from Revelation about streets of gold to read and then proceed to tell stories about departed loved ones we will all be reunited with. That’s especially true if you grew up in a mainline Christian church.
So today, before I launch out into even more difficult information, I am going to demonstrate what our particular father (in Methodist circles) John Wesley thought and taught about this subject. Let me say this about John Wesley; I am here serving in the United Methodist Church mainly because of John Wesley and Asbury Theological Seminary. I have never been here for the institution. In fact, those of us from Asbury Seminary for years have liked to distinguish ourselves from “United Methodist Institutionalism” by saying “I’m really more Wesleyan than I am Methodist.”
Even that distinction isn’t for me about identifying with a group. I’m not a chest thumping “Asbury man”. It’s about a motive expressed by John Wesley that many of us of this ilk share. Here is Wesley from the “Preface to Sermons”:
“TO candid, reasonable men, I am not afraid to lay open what have been the inmost thoughts of my heart. I have thought, I am a creature of a day, passing through life as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: just hovering over the great gulf; till, a few moments hence, I am no more seen; I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing,—the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach me the way. For this very end He came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri. Here then I am, far from the busy ways of men. I sit down alone; only God is here. In His presence I open, I read His book; for this end, to find the way to heaven. Is there a doubt concerning the meaning of what I read? Does anything appear dark or intricate? I lift up my heart to the Father of Lights:—“Lord, is it not Thy word, ‘if any man lack wisdom, let him ask of God?’ Thou givest liberally, and upbraidest not. Thou hast said, ‘if any be willing to do Thy will, he shall know.’ I am willing to do, let me know Thy will.” I then search after and consider parallel passages of Scripture, “comparing spiritual things with spiritual.” I meditate thereon with all the attention and earnestness of which my mind is capable. If any doubt still remains, I consult those who are experienced in the things of God: and then the writings whereby, being dead, they yet speak. And what I thus learn, that I teach.”
Wesleyan Methodism is about a methodical pursuit of God’s truth, divorced of any political, economic, social or emotional agendas. We just want the truth as it was intended to be communicated by God through his prophets and apostles in scripture, as it was received by the earliest Christians – what Wesley refers to as “Primitive Christianity”. Because as time moves on, Christianity becomes corrupted and needs to be reformed to its original form. It needs a reset if you will. This has happened many times in history, bringing about a necessary reset back to New Testament Christianity, which might have been lost without the reform. Look at what is written over John Wesley’s grave:
“This Great Light arose (by the singular providence of God) to Enlighten these Nations. and to REVIVE, ENFORCE, AND DEFEND THE PURE APOSTOLIC DOCTRINES AND PRACTICES OF THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH, which he continued to do by his writings and his labors for more than half a century. * * * and lived to see provision made. by the singular grace of God, for their CONTINUANCE AND ESTABLISHMENT, TO THE Joy of Future Generations.”
Church, I cannot think of one single United Methodist Bishop that I admire and am trying to emulate. But this man is a great light and guide for me, and for many others like me who knew what he was about and struggle to find anything outside of scripture more worthy of following.
Now, as I showed you in my previous article, “More Mainline Than Methodist”, what we have covered so far is just basic Christian doctrine. When we talk about the return of Jesus Christ (and this is the historic understanding of the doctrine for the entire church, not just Methodists or Protestants) that means he is returning to the earth. We are resurrected from the dead for life onto the earth for all eternity. That isn’t any more new nor is it any less fundamental than the idea of the virgin birth and incarnation. I’ve tried to simply read the bible and explain that the bible just means what it says. But some of us might require a little more persuasion.
So today I am going to introduce you to a topic that is a little more controversial – the millennium. The millennium, based on Revelation 20 and many other passages from both the Old and New Testaments, posits a literal 1,000 year reign of Jesus Christ on the earth with resurrected saints from the Old and New testaments together. This will occur before the garden of Eden conditions are restored on the entire planet, and the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21, comes down out of heaven onto the earth for the final and eternal age we think of as “heaven”.
This is the topic of the Millennial Reign of Jesus Christ and his resurrected saints.
Any time I speak on this topic, someone needs to bring up television preachers and the Left Behind series. That is a novice comment and evaluation. That paradigm is a certain species of millennialism called “dispensational premillennialism”. It was invented in the late 1800’s and is not based on historic Christian thinking.
In my next article, I am only going to provide you with proof of what John Wesley and the earliest Christian tradition thought about the subject. Then in the following weeks I will show you what the Bible teaches about the subject. Just so you understand, I haven’t added any new verses to the bible that weren’t there for the past 2000 some odd years, and I haven’t come up with some new teaching that hasn’t been present for at least that long either. These verses have always been in all bibles everywhere.
Before we get into that, I feel compelled to address the other major interpretive position held by the majority of academia and those trained therein.
AMILLENNIALISM
Meaning, there is no literal millennium. The term “a thousand years” is just used as a figure of speech in the bible and it isn’t to be taken literally. Most believe it is just a figure of speech referring to this current church age from which Christ is ruling the earth from heaven right now through the church (Revelation 20).
This view still has Jesus returning to the earth, living and ruling here with resurrected believers from the Old and New Testaments, but there will be no intermediate time frame from this current age to the final state. God is just going to wave his magic wand over the planet like a great fairy God-mother and re-create the new heaven and new earth in an instant for us to passively enjoy forever. This view has little to no continuity between this age and the next.
Departing from the majority view of the earliest church fathers, this view was first promoted to prominence by the Roman Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Church somewhere between 300-500AD. It was a theology useful to justify human church leaders grasping for and exercising political authority here and now on the earth, leading to the practice of occupying and colonizing foreign lands as a form of “missions”. It figures, Christ is already literally reigning right now from heaven on earth through the church. We are already in the millennium, it is a figurative period of time, and of course God chose us men (the clergy) to be his representatives sitting on man-made thrones to exercise power and privilege over others. But if you know anything at all about church history, this didn’t go well at all and it certainly did not reflect God’s kingdom or values.
Then there were the first protestant reformers in Europe. Millennialism speaks of a reconstituted literal kingdom of God on earth, centered in Jerusalem with resurrected Jews and saints together. This theology has continuity with the Old Testament, so the Jewish people and Jewish motifs do play a critical role. Jesus was, is, and will always be a Jewish man, so that makes sense. But that is inconvenient for a group of men who are overtly antisemitic (See Luther’s antisemitism and John Calvin’s antisemitism). Antisemitism in Germany didn’t start with Adolf Hitler. If you get a chance, visit the holocaust museum in Houston, TX. It documents this as an undeniable fact, going back to Martin Luther and the other reformers associated with that movement. This is why amillennialism was so popular and promoted amongst that group as it teaches God has wiped his hands of the Jewish people and Jewish state, it has been replaced by the New Testament church through which God is currently ruling the world. It also justified the practice of mingling political rulership with the church together, leading to an official state church in most European countries. There was no separation of church and state for the same reason the Catholics used to justify grasping political power. After hundreds of years of non-stop wars between competing political/religious factions in Europe, the founding fathers of the United States decided this ideology didn’t work. We must have a separation of Church and state in order to live peacefully with one another.
Our Father, John Wesley, is considered to be one of the last of the reformers (he won the argument with the Calvinists among the Methodists, Calvinism being the root of the reformers other erroneous theology). The reformation was delayed in Great Britain because of King Henry and a faux reformation leading to the Anglican Church. Roman Catholicism light.
John Wesley studied the works of the other reformers and improved upon them. He was actually saved listening to Martin Luther’s commentary on Romans. The topic of the millennium is one area amongst several where Wesley considered the evidence, divorced from any political or emotional agendas, and arrived at a different conclusion from both Catholics and the other Reformers. Wesley concluded that both the Bible and the early Christian fathers very clearly taught premillennialism.
In the United States, premillennialism has become popular, the flavor of the day if you will, because we have a distinct separation of Church and state. Our founding fathers set it up that way because as history played itself out, the church running the state wasn’t working all that well. It ruined both the exercise of political power and religion all at the same time. We very clearly did not have the kingdom of heaven on earth working through these theological/political frameworks, so it was necessary to construct something different. Believe it or not, we still don’t now in the United States either, especially as we have entered into a “post-Christian” era. In fact we are witnessing right before our eyes our country, the great experiment of man that it was, coming under the judgment of God and being given over to a depraved mind.
It is for that reason, in popular Christianity especially, many have grown to expect a literal political kingdom to return to the earth from heaven establishing the Old Testament messianic vision on the earth. The Old Testament was not wrong in its messianic expectations for a deliverance of a literal city, Jerusalem (Zion), from fallen sinful oppressors, and then becoming promoted to the center of global governance.
The False Left/Right dichotomy
Much of the conflict in our current denomination stems from two differing sets of priorities stemming from the two commandments of Jesus. Those who focus more on the first commandment, to love God, and those who focus more on the second commandment, to love people. American United Methodism, in keeping with mainline protestant social gospel thinking, has tended to focus more on the second commandment. This is true even amongst more “traditional” churches.
Theological/Political Right – Those who want to focus primarily on evangelism and discipleship in scripture. They tend to think we need less government if any at all.
Theological/Political Left – Those who want to focus primarily on political activism and good deeds in order to bring about a fair and just life for everyone. They believe people are basically good and just need more secular education or vocational training as well as intervention from our government in creating equal opportunity.
The message of the kingdom and John Wesley is that both are vital in order to give expression to what we typically refer to as “heaven”. Although John Wesley would advise his preachers on the clear order of priority based on Jesus teaching in Matthew 22:37:
“You have nothing to do but to save souls. Therefore spend and be spent in this work. And go not only to those that need you, but to those that need you most. It is not your business to preach so many times, and to take care of this or that society; but to save as many souls as you can; to bring as many sinners as you possibly can to repentance.” (Works p. 219)
So lets strip ourselves of all of that biased baggage, and let’s look at the thinking of Wesley, as he understood the earliest Christians to have received it from the Apostles in form of biblical content. We’ll look into that in our next article.