In The Church and the Last Things, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, a South Wales native who became what some believe to be “possibly the greatest British preacher of the twentieth century,” describes the difference between the preterist and the futurist views of biblical prophecies. Preterists believe the prophecies have now been fulfilled; futurists believe they are still to unfold in the future.

Controversy over the Millennium

One of the major points contested within theological schools is what the Bible teaches about the millennium, meaning “the thousand- year reign of Christ” that many find in Revelation 20. In the church at large, there are three major divisions of thinking regarding how prophecy about the millennium is to be interpreted.

Amillennialism

Also known as nunc millennialism, or no millennium, amillennialism holds that the thousand-year reign of Christ is figurative, not to be taken as referring to a literal thousand-year period. The reign of the church as the body of Christ is seen as the symbolical or spiritual millennium, which has already exceeded two literal millennia; this opinion also includes that the church is the earthly, spiritual expression of the Kingdom of God. Though some people believe in the relative inactivity of satanic forces in areas of the world where the church is influential, as opposed to those areas where paganism still prevails, amillennialists believe the church and the forces of evil will coexist throughout the reign of Christ as head of the church. With some variations, amillennialism is the traditional eschatology of the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinist (Presbyterian, Reformed), Anglican, and Methodist Churches.

Premillennialism

Premillennialism teaches that the Second Coming of Christ will occur before the millennium, which will be a literal thousand-year reign on earth of the conquering Prince of Peace. In the United States and in the parts of the world where missionaries are primarily American evangelicals, premillennialism is by far the most widely held view among Baptists, Pentecostals, and most other evangelicals. Though advocates see a belief in premillennialism reaching back to early church history, it has had its greatest growth since the dispensational system introduced by John Nelson Darby (1800–1882).

Postmillennialism

Postmillennialism teaches that the Second Coming will occur after the millennium, and therefore, like the amillennialists, they believe that the thousand-year reign of Christ is figurative, in and through the church, not literal, as from an earthly throne. The postmillennial emphasis is on purifying the church and, through the church, defeating and binding Satan in the world, and bringing about the peace of the Prince of Peace. In this way the postmillennialists hope to purify the world in order to make it ready to meet Christ as his bride. Postmillenialism is often characterized as triumphalism, pushing for the victory of the church in the present age. No major denominations are identified as postmillennial, but individuals like the late R. J. Rushdoony, Gary North, and Greg Bahnsen, and their movements (theonomy, reconstructionism) advocate it.

Dispensationalism

Dispensationalism, which is traced to a pietistic movement in England in the 1820s called Plymouth Brethren, interprets the whole Bible in terms of particular ways God interacts with his people under different covenants and time periods. So something true of one group of believers in one dispensation, meaning believers of a specific time period and under a specific set of covenants, may not apply to or be required of other believers in another dispensation. And there can be more than one dispensation at the same time, according to some dispensationalists. Followers of this approach think that God interacts simultaneously with the Jewish people under one dispensation, and with Christians under another.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the system ends up asserting that the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels are entirely for the Jewish people, and that only the teachings of Paul and part of the book of Acts are for the church. The Scofield Study Bible (1909) formalized dispensationalist teaching in some detail, and this system's major academic defense has come from Dallas Theological Seminary. For all Christians, at its simplest, the Old Covenant and the New Covenant (synonymous with the Old Testament and the New Testament) have at least two dispensations, but adding other modes of interaction between God and his people (beside the two basic ones — Old and New Testaments) becomes dispensationalism.

Chiliasm

Strongly committed amillennialists equate premillennialism with chiliasm (from the Greek, chiliasmos, meaning “a thousand years”), which the church condemned as a heresy at the second Ecumenical Council in 381. Critics of premillennialism say that the words in the Nicene Creed, “he shall come again, with glory, to judge the living and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end” were specifically intended to oppose the teaching that Christ's reign would be for a specific thousand-year period, as chiliasm taught and contemporary premillennialists also teach.

Anabaptists in 1533 established the German city of Munster as the New Jerusalem, in fulfillment of the chiliast belief in the establishment of a physical kingdom of God on earth. According to Owen Chadwick in The Reformation, the “radical reformers” (mostly Anabaptists) banned all who refused to be baptized, and they proclaimed John of Leyden the king of New Zion. They interpreted Old Testament teachings as permitting polygamy, and some of their men took multiple wives.

The “kingdom” declared war on the rest of the world, calling for the annihilation of all the ungodly. Only after two years, when some saner minds in the city conspired against their leaders and opened the gates to outside troops, who had been sent to quell their revolution, was the insurrection put down.

The Kingdom of Munster revolution has remained infamous in church history as the saddest instance of Reformation fever gone wild. Luther was apparently chagrined that his declarations of independence from the Pope had been taken to such extremes. This disaster encouraged Luther and Calvin to speak and write against chiliasm and any efforts to establish a literal Kingdom of God in the temporal world. The Lutheran Augsburg Confession and the Reformed Second Helvetic (Swiss) Confession specifically condemn chiliasm.