Premillennialism and Church History

As I continue to process this whole MacArthur "calvinists should be premillennialists" matter I wanted to offer a few thoughts on the notion that the early church was clearly premillennial.

Before I do I thought I would point out a couple of other exceptional posts dealing with the whole issue.

Words, a few more won't hurt and Pastor's Resources are keeping a good running tally  of blog posts reacting to and interacting with MacArthur.

Maybe I should do a post on this subject in and of itself, but I'll just say it short and sweet here that most of our eschatology, whatever camp we find ourselves in, is not based on pure exegesis, it is based on logical inference.  Also, the rhetoric which follows is based on logical inference - i.e. amillennialism leads to the infiltration of the trappings of Judaism in the church and damages our witness to the Jews. 

Along those lines, Justin Taylor points to a post on problems with premillennialism by Sam Storms and points out some problematic things you must believe if you are a premillennialist.

Having pointed out those things I want to discuss for just a few minutes premillennialism and church history.

Regarding whether or not the early church was premillennial, Kim Riddlebarger answers MacArthur's fifth question (were the early Christians amil?) as follows:

As far as question five goes, anyone who claims that the church fathers were unanimous in their commitment to premillennialism, needs to read Charles Hill's book (Click here:  Amazon.com: Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early  Christianity: Books: Charles E. Hill) which will quickly put an end to that pernicious myth.

I have an older copy of Hill's book and I haven't done the exact math on it, but at the end he has a chart listing several major writers and writings from the early church.  For each one he designates whether the individual or book was clearly chiliastic (an older term for premillennialism), clearly not chiliastic, or unable to tell.  There is no clear majority on it, except to say that when you combine the non-chiliasts and the ones we can't tell it is clearly more than the chiliasts.

At this site, the authors contend that, of 31 early church fathers, up to and including Augustine, only 10 could be shown to be clearly premillennial.  Also, only 5 could be shown to be amillennial, the rest seem to be unable to classify.  But the point is that it is too much to say that the early church was premillennial.

Of particular interest in all of this is the 1977 Dallas Seminary Masters Thesis of Alan Boyd titled "A Dispensational Premillennial Analysis of the Eschatology of the Post-Apostolic Fathers (Until the Death of Justin Martyr."  In that thesis Boyd found that the majority of early church fathers clearly identified Israel and the church. 

This, coupled with the work of Charles Hill offers to important blows to the notion that the early church was premil.  The first is that it contradicts the contention of Phillip Schaff (quoted by MacArthur) and modern premils that a clear majority of early church fathers were premil.  Secondly, it shows that the seeds of a full blown amillennialism were overwhelmingly present in the early church.

I don't want to overstate my own case.  In arguing as I have I am not saying that the early church was clearly amil, just saying that a dominant eschatological view can't be indentified, so all of us ought to be at least a little hesitant in appealing to the early church for support, even though I believe amils, postmils and historic premils can legitimately claim that the seeds for their views were present in the early church with it's clear support for the identification of Israel and the church.

Also, in that vein, I think it is worthwhile to caution us non-dispensationalists to not make more of Boyd's work than we should.  Boyd's thesis has become a kind of silver bullet argument that many of us have used against premils in general and dispensationalists in particular.  Even though I would disagree with this, we owe Boyd the courtesy of not making him say more than he intended to say.  Boyd believes he proved that the early church was premillennial, just not dispensational.  Tommy Ice has a good article interacting with Boyd on this and I would recommend that we all read it so we can quote him accurately.

Having said that, I do want to dig a bit further.  One of the things Boyd does say is that he believes the eschatology of the early church quickly degraded when it moved to premillennialism and a rejection of the Israel-Church distinction.  Going back to Chuck Hill, we see a very different perspective.

Hill wrote an article several years ago for Modern Reformation called "Why the Early Church Finally Rejected Premillennialism."  (Note, the only electronic copy of this article that I could find is on the Preterist Archive, a website holding to a position I am opposed to).  In this article Hill offers the following reasons the early church rejected premillennialism:

1. First, critics of chiliasm point out that Christian chiliasts got their chiliasm not so much from the apostles as from non-Christian Jewish sources.

2. Second, we now know that early chiliast and non-chiliast Christian eschatologies had to do with more than an expectation of a temporary, earthly kingdom, or lack thereof. They encompassed other beliefs about eschatology. It may seem curious to us today, but the ancient Christian chiliasts defended a view of the afterlife in which the souls of the righteous did not go immediately to God's presence in heaven at the time of death, but went instead to a subterranean Hades.

3. Finally, the chiliastic alternative on the intermediate state of the Christian soul between death and the resurrection was a problem which in itself could have led to chiliasm's demise. But there was another problem which, when clearly exposed, had the potential of being downright scandalous. It was recognized by Origen and has been seen by non-chiliasts down to the present day.20 It is the realization that the "literal," nationalistic interpretation of the prophets was the standard that Jesus, in the eyes of his opponents, did not live up to, and therefore was the basis of their rejection of his messiahship.

(Note from David - in reading the above the astute reader will remember that (per Challies) MacArthur said that amillennialism can lead to the infiltration of Jewish trappings into the church.  Yet, per Hill the early church rejected premillennialism largely because of it's Jewish trappings)

Hill summarizes this as follows:

Why did the Church reject chiliasm? Essentially because chiliasm was judged not to be a fully Christian phenomenon. We have organized three faults of chiliasm around the theme of its so-called "Jewish" character. These faults include its sources; holding out an attenuated hope of blessing for the Christian after death, for it was based in a pre-Christian system which as yet lacked a Savior who had raised humanity to heaven; and clinging to an interpretation of Old Testament prophecies which did not comport with the Christian approach but which could be used to justify the crucifixion. Instead the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus the Messiah had effected a momentous change which Jewish chiliasm was not well-adapted to accommodate.

But it was not these "faults" alone that fatally injured chiliasm. It might have lasted longer if there had not always existed in the Church another, more fully "Christian," eschatology sustaining the Church throughout the whole period. That eschatology, revealed in the New Testament writings, proclaimed Jesus Christ's present reign over all things from heaven, where his saints were "with him" (Luke 23:42-43; John 14:2-4; 17:24; Phil. 1:22-23; 2 Cor. 5:6-8). It saw the culmination of that reign not in a future, limited, and provisional kingdom on earth where perfection mingled once again with imperfection, but rather in the full arrival of the perfect (Rom. 8:21; 1 Cor. 13:10) and the replacement of the present heaven and earth with a heaven and earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Pet. 3:13; Rev. 21-22). Evidence of this eschatology runs throughout the post ­New Testament period, from Clement of Rome to Augustine.

In summary, what can we learn from all of this.

1. There was no clear majority position among the earliest church fathers on eschatology.

2. There was a clear majority position among the earliest church fathers on the relationship of Israel to the church.  That position was that Israel was to be identified with the church and this position is the seed of amillennialism, as well as postmillennialism and historic premillennialism.

3. A later generation of fathers didn't suddenly reverse course on eschatology.  I haven't heard this from Boyd or MacArthur, but I have heard others say that Augustine was the first to formulate some kind of amil position.  That may be true, just as he was the first one to clearly formulate a position on justification by grace.  But if it is true that Augustine did first formulate this position, he was not reversing an earlier position of the church, he was keeping with it's trajectory.

Finally, those early church fathers upon whom Hill relies may have been totally off base.  But I hope it is apparent that they didn't operate in a willy-nilly fashion.  Their rejection of premillennialism was based on strong exegetical and theological reasoning. 

Related Tags: Religion, Theology, Christian, Christianity, John MacArthur, Shepherd's Conference, Eschatology, Premillennial, Premillennialism, Amillennial, Amillennialism