The Kingdom: When?

Essay by M. James Sawyer |

This is the a copy of the transcript of my presentation at a virtual (zoom) men’s conference in June 2020

Several weeks ago, my wife, Kay, was sitting on the sofa reading in the gospels. She looked up at me and said “Listen to this” she proceeded to read me several verses quoting Jesus announcing that the Kingdom is now present; not just future as she had been taught throughout her childhood and college years. We spent quite a while talking about different facets of the Kingdom—including the concept that Jesus embodies the Kingdom—where Jesus is the Kingdom is. The Kingdom is not just a future expectation but a present reality—however not in the form that most believers expect.

As you know our topic for the weekend is the Kingdom of God. When we speak of the kingdom, we are in the area of what theologians called Eschatology. The term eschatology is foreign to many. Yet if we use the word prophecy, everyone knows what that means: that which has been foretold of future event(s). The term eschatology comes from the Greek word eschatos which means last, so the term eschatology is properly, “the study of last things.” While this is not a term that we use every day in our spiritual studies, the content of the studies is very much in the minds of many many believers. I have good friends who are convinced that the co-vid virus is opening the door for one world government and the rise of the anti-Christ. This apocalyptic expectation is not new.

In the late 1960s and early 70s we saw the beginnings of what came to be known as the Jesus Movement. The movement was born out of Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa California, which became the Movement’s unofficial center and out of which came a lot of the praise music that we still sing in our churches today. But more importantly for our purposes here, key to the Jesus Movement was the expectation that Jesus was returning soon. These were the days of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth, movies such as Left Behind with its accompanying 16 novels. Christian music as well picked up themes of the impending tribulation and return of Christ to set up his kingdom. During this time I was attending Biola College, located about 20 miles from the epicenter of the Jesus movement. Clearly the Spirit of God was working, untold thousands were converted: the expectation of the return of Jesus was in the air. We were all certain that we were in the last days, and that Jesus was going to come soon and rapture us out of the world and take us with him to heaven while God poured out his wrath upon the earth during the seven year tribulation.

It is over 50 years later, and our expectations of being imminently raptured were obviously not fulfilled. So, what does this have to do with the topic of the kingdom: much in every way. Scripture speaks much about the kingdom, but it does not speak unambiguously about the kingdom; how or when it will be ushered in and what it will look like.
Both the Old and New Testament speak about a future kingdom that is ruled over personally by the Messiah. But, any more than that simple assertion has been the basis of great debate over the centuries. Throughout the centuries the church has always affirmed the reality of the kingdom, but what that reality has been imagined to be is in no way uniform. By and large the term millennium, which speaks of a thousand years of peace on earth, has been equated with the idea of the future establishment of the kingdom of God on earth ruled over personally by our Resurrected Lord.

Anticipation of the Kingdom or Millennial hopes/expectations are seen from the very earliest days of the church. Just before Jesus ascended the disciples asked: “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” This question was not out of left field—not that long before at Caesarea Philippi, Peter had recognized Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. ” But now Jesus’s answer to the question of restoring the kingdom must have taken the wind out of their sails, “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” What was coming was far different than what they expected.

I need to make an important point here as well as define some terms:
Context (both literary and historical) determines our understanding of the meaning and significance of events. This is true as we interpret Scripture and it is true in history—context gives not just the what, but the why and the how. It is particularly true in discussions about the kingdom. As we will see, the status of the Church in the world has reflected in large measure its understanding of the nature of the Kingdom. Specifically, what the church is experiencing at the time greatly influences its kingdom understanding and expectations.

Over the centuries there have been 4 major understandings of the time and nature of the Kingdom (as well as a couple of more minor ones):
millennialism; millenarianism (Lat. mille + annus, “thousand years”). Also called “chiliasm” (Gk. chilios, “thousand”). The belief that Christ will return and reign on earth for a thousand years. Some who hold a millenarian view of the end of history believe that the “thousand years” should be understood symbolically rather than literally, for example, as a symbol of the church age.

There are three prominent millenarian views: (1) amillennialism—the kingdom reign of Christ is within the heart of a believer and in the collective church; (2) postmillennialism—the return of Christ will come after the millennium, which will be inaugurated by efforts of the church to Christianize culture; (3) premillennialism—Christ’s return will precede and precipitate the establishment of the millennial kingdom. (Within premillennialism there are two different understandings.)

Amillennial : Amillennialism—the kingdom reign of Christ is within the heart of a believer and in the collective church.

Pre-millennialism

1: Historic Premillennialism: Christ’s return will precede and precipitate the establishment of the millennial kingdom.

2: Dispensational Premillennialism the church will be raptured before the Great Tribulation.

Post-millennial: Postmillennialism—the return of Christ will come after the millennium, which will be inaugurated by efforts of the church to Christianize culture;

Over the first three centuries after the resurrection, the church spread throughout the Roman empire. Up until the time of Constantine (the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity in AD.313) the expectations of the return of Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom were pre-millennial, i.e. Jesus would return from Heaven to earth and establish his earthly kingdom. Specifically, several of the of the Church Fathers during these early centuries understood that the Lord would return, overthrow the power of Rome, and set up his kingdom on earth. Notable early church leaders including Papias, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactantius all express this expectation.
During the pre-Constantine era Christians endured great hostility from the general Roman population. Both Contemporary pagan and Christian sources preserve accusations levelled against the Christians. These accusations included charges of incest (Christians referred to one another as “brother” “sister” ) and cannibalism, probably resulting from garbled accounts of the rites which Christians celebrated in necessary secrecy: the agape (the ‘love-feast- described in 1 Cor. 11) and the Eucharist/ communion (partaking of the body and blood of Christ).

The first empire-wide persecution occurred under the rule of Nero in 64 AD. A colossal fire broke out in Rome that destroyed much of the city. Rumors abounded that Nero himself was responsible. He certainly took advantage of the resulting devastation of the city, building a lavish private palace on part of the site of the fire.

Perhaps to divert attention from the rumors, Nero ordered that Christians should be rounded up and killed. Some were torn apart by dogs, others burnt alive as human torches in Nero’s gardens.

Pagans were most suspicious of the Christian refusal to sacrifice to the Roman gods. This was an insult to the gods and potentially endangered the security of the empire which they protected. The Christians’ refusal to offer sacrifices to the emperor, a semi-divine monarch, involved a whiff of both sacrilege and treason.

The classic test of a Christian’s faith was to force him or her, on pain of death, to swear by the emperor and offer incense to his images, or to sacrifice to the gods. The refusal of Christians to do so often incurred execution. We have heroic accounts of the martyrdom of several early church leaders.

In the light of these persecutions it is easy to see why the believer’s hope looked for the return of Christ to overthrow the power of Rome and to set up his kingdom.

The persecution of Christians was not a constant in the first three centuries. Rather persecution came in waves: there were 10 major empire wide persecutions up until the year 313. The last was the sponsored by the Emperor Diocletian whose goal was to put an end to Christianity. This final persecution was two-pronged: first, to destroy the sacred books of the Christians and their churches and second declaring all Christians to be outlaws. Christians were apprehended and imprisoned, their homes were confiscated or burned, and many suffered martyrdom, often either by burning at the stake or by drowning. While the persecution was empire wide it was especially violent in the Eastern Empire.

After the death of Diocletian (311) , the Empire was ruled in the East and the West by separate emperors. Constantius, the father of Constantine, was a virtuous pagan whose wife was a Christian. Constantius was the co-ruler of the Western Empire. His co-Emperor was Maxentius a pagan who was dedicated to sorcery. When Constantius died Maxentius claimed the throne of the western empire. Rightfully Constantius’ position would be inherited by his son Constantine who spent much of his early life in Britain. While in York (in Britain) Constantine received news that his father had died. He gathered his troops and marched to Rome, where he would face an army whose troops greatly outnumbered his own.

As Constantine approached Rome, he was facing nearly certain defeat. On the night before the battle with Maxentius’ forces he had a vision: the sun—the object of his own worship—overlain by the figure of a cross. Beneath it was inscribed the simple message in hoc signo vinces, which translates as, “In this sign, conquer.” He recognized the sign as a symbol of Christianity. He ordered his army to paint the sign of the cross on their shields.
In the battle on the following day Constantine’s forces defeated the greater force of Maxentius and he became the undisputed ruler of the western empire. From that time forward Constantine considered himself some kind of Christian.

Constantine, Christianity ( & Amillennialism)

While he was not baptized as a Christian, during his reign he favored the church and hoped it would be the glue that would hold his empire together. It was he who called the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), out of which came the Nicene Creed. About six weeks before his death in May of AD 337 he was finally baptized. From that point forward the Church was free and the favored religion in the empire, and several decades later (A.D. 380) Christianity became the official religion of the Empire.

In the succeeding decades and centuries, the seat of power in the western church was centralized in the Bishop of Rome who ultimately became the preeminent spiritual authority. By the late 4th century, the Bishop of Rome was recognized as the Pope. As the Roman Empire collapsed in AD 476, Europe fragmented into numerous political entities: Spain-France- England etc. The one institution that gave stability in Europe was the Church. Over the following centuries the preeminent position of the Pope in the west became political as well as spiritual.

Ecclesiastical power became centralized in the Bishop of Rome and Christendom became identified as the Kingdom of God. Christ’s Kingdom was present on earth operating through the Catholic Church—hope for a future 1000 year reign of Christ on earth before the final judgment and eternal state was virtually unknown—in a word the church’s eschatology became amillennial (there is no millennial kingdom). At some undetermined future time, Christ would return there will be the final judgment which will usher in the eternal kingdom.

From a theological perspective the influence of Augustine was key in theologically shifting the Church’s understanding from the premillennial expectations of the pre-Constantinian era, to that of amillennialism. One theologian has observed that “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Augustine in the history of theology. Not only did his thinking crystallize the theology which preceded him, but also to a large extent he laid the foundations for both Catholic and Protestant doctrine. He is often understood to have been incomparably the greatest man who lived, between Paul the Apostle and Luther the Reformer, His influence shaped both Catholicism and Protestantism.”

Augustine (354-430) although raised by a Christian mother, rejected her faith and sought for a more intellectually satisfying religion. He was arguably the most brilliant intellect in the history of the church. After his conversion at about age 30 he became intellectually, Augustine the most significant theologian in the history of the Church. He represents the most influential adaptation of the Platonic philosophical tradition with Christian ideas that ever occurred in the Latin Christian world. His writings were so widely read and imitated throughout Latin Christendom that his synthesis of Christian, Roman, and Platonic traditions defined the terms of much later church tradition, theological thinking, ethos and debate.

From at least the time of Augustine, the church’s official understanding regarding the kingdom of God was amillennial. This eschatological understanding did not shift during the Reformation with the return to Pauline perspectives on doctrines surrounding salvation. While the Reformers regularly identified the Roman Catholic Church and especially the papacy with the Antichrist, they still looked to Augustine for the framework of their theological understanding.

Having said this—it does not mean that there were not many speculations about the prophetic declarations in the Bible and many attempts to decipher the images and times of Christ’s return and the kingdom, throughout the middle ages and beyond —Richard Kyle documents these in his excellent book: The Last Days Are Here Again

During the Reformation the Protestant Reformers looked back to Augustine and did not in general challenge his view of eschatology—the significant exception comes from a small number of the Anabaptists who sought to establish the Kingdom by violence during the Reformation period. Other than this anomaly, Protestantism was almost universally amillennial until the 19th century.

Today we find four major positions on the nature of the kingdom among Protestants. These are:

Amillennialism: There is no future earthly kingdom ruled over personally by Christ . At his return Jesus will usher in the eternal kingdom.

Postmillennialism: The return of Christ will come after the millennium, which will be inaugurated by the successful efforts of the church to Christianize culture. — An optimistic postmillennialism emerged that saw the church as advancing the kingdom until the ushering in of a one-thousand-year period of peace and harmony. In fact, this postmillennial view was decidedly the predominant eschatological understanding in America from the time of the Puritans until the mid-nineteenth century.

While most of the Reformed Tradition has been amillennial there have been and are several prominent post-millennial theologians associated with Reformed Theology. During the 20th century, several Reformed theologians adopted a Postmillennial perspective seeing it as an eschatology of hope. Include most well-known among these theologians are B. B. Warfield; Lorraine Boettner and John Jefferson Davis.

Premillennialism: In England premillennial expectations of the kingdom exploded on the scene during the English Civil War (1642-1651). During the period of that war, extremist fringe groups such as the Ranters, Muggletonians, Quakers, Diggers, and Fifth Monarchists fanned the flames of radical apocalyptic expectations. But with the return of the Stuart dynasty to power, this frenzy cooled. After this rage of end-time expectations subsided, serious interpreters of Scripture adopted a more cautious approach. Nevertheless, end-time expectations continued to appeal to the Christian consciousness. Natural disasters and political upheavals were regularly seen as heralding the end times. As premillennialism became a more clearly defined understanding, there was an overriding conviction that the world was getting worse and worse and only the return of Christ could bring about a transformation. But subsided again.

Dispensational Premillennialism:
As the above survey has shown, a Premillennial view of the Kingdom all but disappeared after Augustine with a brief revival during the English Civil War. (From at least the time of Augustine, the church’s common understanding regarding the kingdom of God was amillennial. This eschatological understanding did not shift during the Reformation with the return to Pauline perspectives on doctrines surrounding salvation. In fact, the Reformers regularly identified the Roman Catholic Church and especially the papacy with the Antichrist.)

During the early nineteenth century, both in England and America, apocalyptic movements gained attention and focused expectations on the imminent return of Jesus Christ to establish his kingdom. The premillennialism of this period was characterized by historicism, that is, an attempt to correlate biblical prophecies with contemporary events. This was often accompanied by the prediction of a date for Christ’s return—which always proved erroneous. The most visible example of this phenomenon was the case of William Miller and his followers. As a result of his personal study, Miller became convinced that Christ would return between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. With the failure of this prediction, Miller declared that he had made a computational error and predicted the return of Christ by the following October 22. The failure of this second prediction became known as “the great disappointment.” This failure of Miller and others both in America and on the Continent contributed to the discrediting of this historicism and date setting and resulted in a popular suspicion of the premillennial expectation for the inauguration of the Kingdom. The continuation of premillennial expectation arose from a previously unknown source in the mid-nineteenth century.

The rise of Dispensationalism saved premillennialism by advocating a strict futurism with reference to biblical prophecy — that is, biblical prophecy is not being fulfilled today but will be in the future. Hence, co-relating prophetic events with current happenings was improper.

The Father of Dispensationalism was John Nelson Darby (1800 – 1882), a priest in the Church of Ireland, who abandoned its ranks due to the apostasy he perceived in that church.

Darby then joined the movement later known as the Plymouth Brethren, in which he developed a distinctive ecclesiology (doctrine of the church). He believed that the church was not to be identified with any institution but was a spiritual fellowship. Darby’s ecclesiology became the catalyst for dispensationalism as a system. He posited a radical discontinuity between the church and Israel, asserting that God had two separate peoples and two separate programs he was working out in history. This discontinuity made it incumbent to “rightly divide the Word of truth,” discerning which passages of scripture were addressed to Israel and which to the Church. These features, coupled with a futurist view of biblical prophecy and the doctrine of the pretribulational rapture of the church, gave coherence to incipient dispensationalism.

The Plymouth Brethren, early in their history, developed an emphasis on the responsibility of the laity, which sparked an interest in personal Bible study and devotions and as well generated a large volume of expositional and devotional literature. Early writers included Darby, Benjamin Wills Newton, George Müller, Samuel P. Tregelles, William Kelly, and C. H. Mackintosh.

As the teachings of the Brethren movement spread to North America, due to Darby’s labors as an itinerant preacher as well as the writings of the Brethren leaders, they fell on fertile soil. In England, the focus had been on the local church, but in America with its different religious climate, a different vision arose. Although few believers left their established denominational affiliations, Darby and Brethren expositors and evangelists gained a wide hearing. A key factor in the spread of dispensational was the yearly Niagara Bible Conferences. The Bible Conference movement, the rise of Bible Colleges as well as the rise of new seminaries such as Dallas Seminary, Grace Seminary, Biola College/Talbot Seminary and several others were instrumental in nurturing Dispensational pre-millenarianism.

The Coming of the Kingdom: The Kingdom of Christ

In looking at the various understandings of Kingdom I would be remiss not to include the Kingdom of Christ/the Son. Surprisingly, this theme has been little developed throughout the history of the Church. We do see some recognition of its reality during the Reformation, particularly in the works of Martin Luther.

Martin Luther sees a new Kingdom, which he envisions as a spiritual Kingdom under the everlasting rule which he calls the Kingdom of Christ. This Kingdom has its own peculiar nature and is of a different character than other manifestations of the Kingdom. While Its true nature is both spiritual and invisible, its earthly presence is visible through the existence of the Church. He envisions that righteous kings and princes will tolerate this “New, everlasting Kingdom of Christ, or accept it themselves, promote it, and desire, as Christians, to be in it. Unrighteous rulers who represent the greater part of the kings, princes and lords, hate the new covenant and Kingdom of Christ as poisonously and bitterly as the Jews of Jerusalem. These rulers persecute Christ and his kingdom and would wipe it out, and like the Jews, they go to destruction because of it.”

From one perspective this is not new: it is an aspect of the Kingdom which Christ has shared from eternity with the Father and the Holy Spirit which He will never lay down. On the other hand, it is the Kingdom which He now has, which is the Kingdom of remitting sins and governing His Church. This Kingdom, Christ will lay down at the Last Judgment, for no more will there be sin or death or any calamity or misery. This kingdom is one over which Christ now rules as Man. Ultimately, he will hand over this “Kingdom of Faith” to the Father. This kingdom while now present is both secret and invisible; it is seen only by faith and the Word—this is the nature of Jesus’ present rule. The means of this rule is through the Church. This kingdom, the Kingdom of Christ will be brought to an end when the eternal kingdom is ushered in.

While Jesus Christ now rules along with the Father. The difference between the present and future rule is, that it is now not readily apparent. Rather it is veiled and covered. It is grasped by Faith and in the Word so that we do not see any more of it than Baptism and the Sacrament or hear any more than the external Word. When Christ returns and openly manifests Himself in His Majesty and Power … Then it will be called the Kingdom of God.
Looking at the ways the Church has approached the topic of the Kingdom throughout the centuries is severely deficient. The different positions cannot in any reasonable fashion be harmonized—this makes me very suspicious. None of the positions integrates the persons of the Trinity with their speculations. The position that stands out to me as having the most promise is that of Luther who formally recognized the presence of the Kingdom of Christ as being present among us – In his proposal I see some harmony with the recognition in the Gospels that Jesus’ presence is involved in the presence of the Kingdom—and hints that the giving of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is an indication of the inauguration of the Kingdom of Christ.