Posted on 04/22/2008 6:15:22 AM PDT by xzins
Grrr...
It is good that you accept that premillennialism is the earliest position of the church.
That lends it weight, and since eschatology will NEVER be a certain thing until AFTER the fact, it means we should at a minimum include premillennialism in our list of those possibilities that we should regularly think our way through.
In my case, I think it is the best possibility.
Hey!
Good post. Could you ping me on items like this in the future?
Sure, except I don’t keep a ping list. It’s all memory.
(And I’m getting older every second.... ;>)
I think that dogmatisms on eschatology OR creation can be pretty silly. None of us even knows if we have the CAPACITY to understand either time period, except perhaps in outline form and certainty...
Dr. Bob Cooley, President Emeritus of Gordon-Conwell seminary, whom I had the privilege of sitting under in an adult Sunday school class (as he literally is the best teacher I’ve ever heard), summed up eschatology this way:
All orthodox Christians believe and have believed:
1) Jesus is bodily coming back to reign
2) There will be a bodily resurrection for all people (bodies destined for eternal life with God for believers, bodies destined for eternal separation from God, hell, for non-believers)
3) Every human will be judged by God
All eschatologies have these 3 in common. How it all works out in detail, well, in that Christians do differ.
(Cooley is, btw, a pre-mellennial, pre-trib guy, just NOT dogmatic about it)
There is a gulf of difference between Millennialism and pre-Millennialism. These Christian Fathers were awaiting the fall of the City of Rome for the start of teh Millennium. Rome fell in 476. Constantinople fell 977 years later. The reformation began 1,045 years after the fall of Rome.
So I’m not misunderstood: As Augustine pointed out, the City of Man is forever seperated from the Kingdom of God; I’m not claiming that the legion of vile, petty leaders of Europe from 476 to 1521 were very good representatives of Christ. But AN interpretation of the Millennium is that the Kingdom of God is the Christian church (where valid sacraments exist. This neatly explains how the Millennium (The rule of Christ) can precede the second coming.
That, my friend, is a personal interpretation. You’re entitled to it, but, as a biblical Christian, I’d be hard-pressed to find any way to have it slide into a seamless fit with scripture.
Bump
I’ll ABSOLUTELY assert it’s a personal interpretation. And it’s neither Catholic doctrine, nor any notion I’m strongly attached to. Pre-millennialism also MUST be a personal interpretation, since when the millennium arrives, our condition would change, but scripture cannot change. Thus, interpretations of whether one are pre-millennial will inevitably vary based on when they are made. That was the primary focus of my first post.
Many Christian Fathers presumed the Millennium hadn’t arrived; that says little to prove or disprove the assertions of modern pre-millennialists. I’d be interested to find whether there were any pre-millennialists among theologians from the second half of the first millennium.
Literal Millennialists have certainly existed throughout church history. Around 1000 AD, several groups of people awaited doomsday. Many considered the black plague the end of the millennium, which they counted as having begun with the Edict of Milan. Intriguingly, the black death was spread to Europe by germ warfare practiced by the followers of a man called “the Prophet” who claimed to be greater than Christ (Mohammed), although this link was unknown at the time. And the subsequent population collapse helped lead to the evolution of the middle class, which was a key factor in the spread of Protestantism.
Curiously, Martin Luther and many reformation-era Protestants seemed to hold the notion that the second coming of Jesus was imminent, even holding that specific popes were the anti-Christ. What’s amusing is that they also were millennialists: since Catholic doctrine hadn’t changed abruptly at the time, what suddenly popular heresy could the Great Apostasy be?
The most commonly held interpretation among Catholics seems to be millennialism, that we are now in the Millennium, and have been since the institution of the mass. I suppose that means the Great Apostasy will be the end of the millennium. I certainly suppose there’s no shortage of FReepers who might suppose this IS the Great Apostasy.
>> as a biblical Christian, <<
That’s unnecessary. I’ll give nearly every poster on FR the benefit of the doubt that they are “biblical Christians.”
How ironic that all many of the posters on this forum should try to prove that dispensational premillennialism is right because some of the early church fathers believed it, while consistently denying the unanimous teaching of the fathers on the Eucharist, the teaching of the Church, Bishops, apostolic succession and justification by grace through faith and works among many others. To resort to the fathers when it seems convenient to oneself, and yet suggest that they were pagan and gone off the rails (actually claiming that paganism had entered the Church) when it comes to things one disagrees with seems at best hypocritical to me.
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