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

Comments

[pgepps]

Wanna play guilt by association one-upsmanship? (I don't recommend it, but that seems to be the way you Calvinists play the game)

How about this: go back through Boyd's count, and tally the belief in baptismal regeneration in. Should give you a rough index of the corruption y'all base your appeals to [tainted] authority in.

Geez, can we get off it, already? Mac overshot. 'nuff said.

Cheers,
PGE

[pgepps]

You would, of course, have to start with your star quarterback Augustine "my mortally ill buddy was baptized while unconscious and recovered, therefore baptism is salvation . . . oh, he died a couple weeks later" of Hippo.

Good grief,
PGE

[Rey]

Jolly, I appreciate your tone, man. I was reading through some of the rhetoric of other blogers and I've stopped reading about this stuff on their sites. Honestly, I wonder if anyone will quote Sproul Jr.'s dispensationalism is the devil's doctrine bit and raise it as their defense at this point.

[cavman]

PGE,
What's the problem? Dave's doing a good job looking into the historical development of the doctrine. Nay, great job. And he is not playing any guilt by association games, which he could. But that is not the issue, nor very productive.
Some Calvinists play that game (and some Arminians, and Dispensationalists and..... hey, maybe it is a human problem instead of a derivative of a particular theological system).

Good job of being fair and balanced, not trying to use the material to say too much. I think it fosters conversation on the issue.

[pgepps]

cavman, look at the logic of the "what you MUST affirm" nonsense (of course I don't have to affirm whatever SOMEONE OR OTHER can construe as a follow-on to THEIR intepretation of my teaching) and the "not fully Christian because it resembles some pre-Christian Jewish thought" (*imagine* that!) argument, and you should see where the "guilt by association" comes from. And, yes, everyone does play it. My point was that for JollyBlogger to be playing it against a MacArthur position was an intra-Calvinist eschato-snobbery contest.

I do not think this post is *at all* a good historical treatment of these matters. It is a pastiche of low-quality with high-quality research, leading to an impression which does not take into account that a head-count of "the fathers" mixes together at least three basic tendencies in hermeneutics, and does not account for the fact that well before Nicea the Latin theological strain was *seriously* tainted.

It's like reading Sproul; anachronistic plugging-in of selective but unsystematic readings of the fathers, designed to play a "the antecedents of your interpretation are screwier than mine" game. A game I do not think those whose theological genesis is inextricably tied up with *baptismal regeneration* should be playing!

The "Emeril" post was right on. The "Shaq" post identified the problem and the appropriate response well. Even the discussion of the "offer to Israel" was a helpful discussion starter.

MacArthur tried to tilt the eschato-snobbery game in favor of premillennialism, joining the club of the Reformed who regularly and habitually use the sneer as their tool for ending eschatological discussion and dissent (and, yes, the same pride has different symptoms in other camps). He should not have done so. Identifying that mistake so we can slow the cycle was good work. Playing the game back at him is bad.

Be well,
PGE

[JohnH]

Never understood why the reformation is limited to certain doctrines. If there had to be a reformation in the doctrine of justification, why not in eschatology?

Do appreciate the tone here as well.

[Jim Vellenga]

PGE, you seem to be reading a different post than I am. Any snobbery I have been reading here is in the comments, not in the post itself. Dave thanks for the post.

[Catez]

I think you're out of line Peter.
But I still like you :)

[Joseph]

Some other comments by the "Church Fathers"

"The Early Church Fathers
I Never Saw"

“Our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that there would be strife for the office of bishop. For this reason, therefore, having received perfect foreknowledge, they appointed those who have already been mentioned, and afterwards added the further provision that, if they should die, other approved men should succeed to their ministry."
St. Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians, 44:1-2, c. AD 80

"You must follow the bishop as Jesus Christ follows the Father, and the presbytery as you would the Apostles. Reverence the deacons as you would the command of God. Let no one do anything of concern to the Church without the bishop. Let that be considered a valid Eucharist which is celebrated by the bishop, or by one whom he appoints. Wherever the bishop appears, let the people be there, just as wherever Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church."
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 8:1-2, AD 107

"The Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although she is disseminated throughout the whole world, yet guarded it, as if she occupied but one house. She likewise believes these things 'just as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart and harmoniously she proclaims them and teaches them and hands them down, as if she possessed but one mouth. For, while the languages of the world are diverse, nevertheless, the authority of the Tradition is one and the same."
St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1, 10, 2, c. AD 190

"They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, Flesh which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His goodness, raised up again."
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans, 7:1, AD 107

“We call this food Eucharist; and no one else is permitted to partake of it, except one who believes our teaching to be true and who has been washed in the washing which is for the remission of sins and for regeneration, and is thereby living as Christ has enjoined. For not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but since Jesus Christ our Savior was made incarnate by the word of God and had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so too, as we have been taught, the food which has been made into the Eucharist by the Eucharistic prayer set down by Him, and by the change of which our blood and flesh is nurtured, is both the flesh and the blood of that incarnated Jesus.”
St. Justin Martyr, First Apology 66, A.D. 151

“Owing to the sudden and repeated calamities and misfortunes which have befallen us, we must acknowledge that we have been somewhat tardy in turning our attention to the matters in dispute among you, beloved…Accept our counsel, and you will have nothing to regret…If anyone disobey the things which have been said by Him through us, let them know that they will involve themselves in transgression and in no small danger…You will afford us joy and gladness if, being obedient to the things which we have written through the Holy Spirit, you will root out the wicked passion of jealousy.”
St. Clement of Rome, Letter to the Corinthians, 1: 58–59, 63, A.D. 80

“Ignatius…to the church also which holds the presidency in the place of the country of the Romans, worthy of God, worthy of honor, worthy of blessing, worthy of praise, worthy of success, worthy of sanctification, and, because you hold the presidency in love, named after Christ and named after the Father.”
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Romans, 1:1, A.D. 110

"It is possible, then, for every Church, who may wish to know the truth, to contemplate the tradition of the Apostles which has been made known throughout the whole world. And we are in a position to enumerate those who were instituted bishops by the Apostles, and their successors to our own times…But since it would be too long to enumerate in such a volume as this the successions of all the Churches, we shall confound all those who, in whatever manner, whether through self-satisfaction or vainglory, or through blindness and wicked opinion, assemble other than where it is proper, by pointing out here the successions of the bishops of the greatest and most ancient Church known to all, founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles, Peter and Paul, that Church which has the tradition and the faith which comes down to us after having been announced to men by the Apostles. For with this Church, because of its superior origin, all Churches must agree, that is, all the faithful in the whole world; and it is in her that the faithful everywhere have maintained the Apostolic tradition."
St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3, 3, 1-2, c. AD 190

“The Lord says to Peter: ‘I say to you,’ He says, ‘that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church’…On him He builds the Church, and to him He gives the command to feed the sheep; and although He assigns a like power to all the Apostles, yet He founded a single chair, and He established by His own authority a source and an intrinsic reason for that unity. Indeed, the others were that also which Peter was; but a primacy is given to Peter, whereby it is made clear that there is but one Church and one chair. So too, all are shepherds, and the flock is shown to be one, fed by all the Apostles in single-minded accord. If someone does not hold fast to this unity of Peter, can he imagine that he still holds the faith? If he desert the chair of Peter upon whom the Church was built, can he still be confident that he is in the Church?”
St. Cyprian of Carthage, The Unity of the Catholic Church, 1st edition, A.D. 251

“(T)hey have not the succession of Peter, who hold not the chair of Peter, which they rend by wicked schism; and this, too, they do, wickedly denying that sins can be forgiven even in the Church, whereas it was said to Peter: “I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatsoever thou shall loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven.” And the vessel of divine election himself said: “If ye have forgiven anything to any one, I forgive also, for what I have forgiven I have done it for your sakes in the person of Christ.”
St. Ambrose of Milan, On Penance, Book One, Ch. VII, v. 33, c. A.D. 390.

“For as many as are of God and of Jesus Christ are also with the bishop. And as many as shall, in the exercise of repentance, return into the unity of the Church, these, too, shall belong to God, that they may live according to Jesus Christ. Do not err, my brethren. If any man follows him that makes a schism in the Church, he shall not inherit the kingdom of God. If any one walks according to a strange opinion, he agrees not with the passion of Christ.”
St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Philadelphians, 3.2, ca. A.D. 110

“There is nothing more serious than the sacrilege of schism because there is no just cause for severing the unity of the Church.”
St. Augustine, Treatise On Baptism Against the Donatists, Bk 5, Ch. 1, A.D. 400

[TomA]

Schaff also points out, "The Jewish chiliasm rested on a carnal misapprehension of the Messianic kingdom, a literal interpretation of prophetic figures, and an overestimate of the importance of the Jewish people and the holy city as the centre of that kingdom. It was developed shortly before and after Christ in the apocalyptic literature, ... . It was adopted by the heretical sect of the Ebionites, and the Gnostic Cerinthus."

This view of events matches closely with what we see in modern dispensationalism, esp. classic, with Israel rather than the church having prominence in the events leading up to and including the earthly millennium. The restored temple, Levitical priesthood, and and sacrifices all play an important role after Christ's return.

The early premillennialism of the ante-Nicene fathers does not have this "Jewish flavor".