Last Things

Premillennialism (the house reading)

Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Papias and the second-century church broadly; in modern form J. N. Darby, C. I. Scofield, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Chuck Missler; in a non-dispensational form George Eldon Ladd; and most Pentecostal, Wesleyan-Holiness, Baptist, and evangelical bodies today.

Christ returns to a world in rebellion, defeats it, binds Satan, raises his people, and reigns bodily on the earth for a thousand years from Jerusalem, after which Satan is released, finally defeated, and the last judgment and new creation follow.

• Revelation 20 gives a sequence, and premillennialism follows it without rearranging.
• The unconditional land and throne promises get an actual fulfillment in actual history.
• The prophetic pictures of a healed but not yet deathless world have somewhere to go.
• It was the earliest identifiable position on record, held by writers with the shortest chain back to the apostles.
• It vindicates God's faithfulness in the arena where the promises were made — this earth, this people — rather than transferring them elsewhere.

The honest difficulty: The thousand years appears in exactly one passage, in the most symbolic book in the Bible, and premillennialism carries a great deal of weight on it. It must also explain a genuinely odd feature of its own scheme: mortal people, sin, death, and finally a global rebellion, all occurring after Christ has returned in glory and is personally reigning. Amillennialists press that hard, and it is a fair question. Dispensational premillennialism carries an additional cost — its distinctive framework is modern, and the early chiliasts it appeals to were not dispensationalists.

Amillennialism

Augustine (The City of God, Book XX), and after him the great majority of the church for roughly fifteen centuries; the Reformers — Luther, Calvin, and the confessions they shaped; most Reformed, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox theology; in modern statement, Anthony Hoekema and G. K. Beale.

The thousand years is the present age — the whole span between Christ's first and second comings — during which Satan is bound from deceiving the nations, and the souls of the martyred dead reign with Christ in heaven. There is no earthly millennium; Christ returns once, and the general resurrection, the judgment, and the new creation follow immediately.

• Revelation is not a chronological book, and reading it as one is the mistake amillennialism exists to correct. The book moves in cycles — seven seals, seven trumpets, seven bowls — that each run to the end and then start again, viewing the same period from a new angle. Revelation 20 is not what happens after chapter 19; it is a fresh cycle that begins again at the cross. This is called recapitulation, and it is a literary observation about the book's own structure, not a device invented to avoid a conclusion.
• The binding of Satan is not a premillennial hypothetical; Jesus explains it himself. Asked how he casts out demons, he answers that no one can enter a strong man's house and spoil his goods except he first bind the strong man. He then says the kingdom of God is come unto you. Elsewhere: I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. And at the cross: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. The New Testament repeatedly says the decisive binding already happened. Revelation 20 specifies what Satan is bound from — deceiving the nations — and the fact that the gospel now runs freely through every nation, after centuries in which God suffered all nations to walk in their own ways, is exactly that.
• The New Testament itself spiritualizes the kingdom promises — not as a concession, but as its normal method. Peter says David's throne promise was fulfilled in the resurrection and ascension: God had sworn to set one on his throne, and David spoke of the resurrection of Christ. James, at the Jerusalem council, quotes Amos on the rebuilding of David's fallen tabernacle and applies it to Gentiles coming to faith right then. Paul says the promise to Abraham was that he should be the heir of the world. If the apostles read the promises this way, an interpreter who insists on a purely territorial reading is being more literal than the New Testament.
• Scripture elsewhere describes one return, one resurrection, one judgment, all together. Jesus says the hour is coming in which all that are in the graves — both the good and the evil — shall hear his voice and come forth. Paul says the resurrection and the judgment of the wicked happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven, in the same event. A thousand-year gap has to be inserted into texts that do not have one.
• Numbers in Revelation are symbolic everywhere else — 144,000, seven, twelve, three and a half, ten horns — so treating a thousand as a round symbol for completeness is consistent, not evasive. God owns the cattle upon a thousand hills, and no one counts the hills.
• Augustine's shift was not laziness or Greek philosophy, as it is sometimes portrayed. He had held chiliasm and abandoned it because he came to think its earthly, feasting-and-reigning expectations were carnal, because the recapitulation structure of Revelation persuaded him, and because Christ's kingdom seemed to him already inaugurated and reigning through the church. He gave reasons, and the church found them convincing for well over a thousand years.
• It carries a real pastoral strength: it locates the believer's hope in Christ's return and the new creation rather than in a penultimate stage, and it has never produced a date-setting industry.

The honest difficulty: The sequence of Revelation 19-20 has to be read against its surface order, and the binding of Satan sits uneasily with the New Testament's other picture of a devil who walks about as a roaring lion and blinds the minds of unbelievers. Amillennialism also has to account for the unconditional territorial promises in a way that does not simply transfer them, and for two resurrections within one chapter that appear to use the same verb.

Postmillennialism

Jonathan Edwards; the Puritan tradition broadly; Charles Hodge and much of nineteenth-century American Protestantism; B. B. Warfield; in modern form Loraine Boettner, and the Christian Reconstructionists in a distinct variant.

The gospel will succeed. Through the ordinary means of preaching, conversion, and the Spirit's work, the nations will be discipled and a long era of righteousness and peace — the millennium — will come on earth. Christ returns at the end of it, to the general resurrection and the judgment.

• It takes the Great Commission's scope as a promise and not merely an assignment: make disciples of all nations, and lo, I am with you alway. Christ's authority is stated as already given, in heaven and in earth.
• The kingdom parables describe growth, not stalemate. The mustard seed becomes the greatest of herbs and the birds lodge in its branches. The leaven works through the whole lump. Neither picture ends with a small remnant hiding.
• The Old Testament's kingdom prophecies read naturally as gradual and global — the knowledge of the LORD covering the earth as the waters cover the sea, nations flowing to the mountain of the LORD's house.
• Christ must reign till he hath put all enemies under his feet — reigning now, subduing now, with the last enemy destroyed at the end.
• The historical case is not trivial. Postmillennialism drove some of the most expansive missionary and reforming effort in Christian history — the modern missions movement, abolition, and vast social reform came largely from people who believed the gospel would actually win.
• It refuses a functional pessimism in which the church expects to lose and therefore stops trying.

The honest difficulty: The New Testament also predicts perilous times in the last days, evil men waxing worse and worse, and a Christ who asks whether he will find faith on the earth when he comes. Postmillennialism's optimism took heavy damage from the twentieth century, and it must explain how a golden age ends in the global rebellion Revelation 20 describes.

Pre-tribulational rapture (the house reading)

J. N. Darby and the Plymouth Brethren; C. I. Scofield's Reference Bible, which carried it across the English-speaking world; Dallas Theological Seminary; Chuck Missler, John Walvoord, Hal Lindsey; most Pentecostal, Baptist, and independent evangelical churches today.

Christ comes in the air for his church before the seven-year tribulation, removing her from the earth; the tribulation then runs its course on a Christ-rejecting world and on Israel; Christ returns visibly to the earth at its end with his saints.

• The church's total absence from Revelation 4-19 is a striking feature of the text, not an argument from silence alone.
• Imminence passages tell believers to expect Christ, not to expect the antichrist first.
• 1 Thessalonians 5:9 removes the church from the appointment to wrath, and the tribulation is explicitly wrath.
• Revelation 3:10 promises keeping from the hour, not merely through it.
• It preserves a clean distinction between God's program for Israel and his program for the church, which is the dispensational reading MannaFest also holds.

The honest difficulty: This is the honest ledger. First, no single verse states a two-stage coming; the position is a synthesis. Second, it is the youngest of the four as a formulated system — it appears in clear systematic form only in the 1830s, and the earlier witnesses appealed to (a line in Pseudo-Ephraem, a passage in Morgan Edwards, a phrase in Increase Mather) are contested and at best isolated. Fifteen centuries of the church, including men who died for the faith under real persecution, did not teach it. Third, it must handle Matthew 24:29-31, where the gathering of the elect is placed explicitly after the tribulation of those days. Fourth, the argument from the absence of the word church is an argument from silence, and Revelation does speak of saints present during the tribulation. None of these is fatal, but a teacher who presents pre-tribulationism as the obvious reading of the plain text is overselling it.

Post-tribulational rapture

George Eldon Ladd (The Blessed Hope); Robert Gundry (The Church and the Tribulation); Douglas Moo; the historic premillennial tradition; most of the church before 1830, insofar as it addressed the question; many Reformed and Anglican evangelicals.

There is one return of Christ at the end of the tribulation. The church goes through it, is preserved and purified in it as God's people always have been in persecution, and is caught up to meet the returning Lord and immediately accompany him back to earth.

• Matthew 24:29-31 is the anchor and it deserves full weight. Jesus says immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun is darkened, the sign of the Son of man appears, and he shall send his angels with a great sound of a trumpet, and they shall gather together his elect from the four winds. A trumpet, angels, a gathering of the elect, expressly after the tribulation. If Jesus had wanted to teach a gathering before the tribulation, this was the moment, and he taught the opposite.
• The trumpet matches. Paul's catching-up passage has the trump of God, and 1 Corinthians 15:52 places the resurrection at the last trump. A trumpet described as the last one is difficult to place seven years before the trumpet of Matthew 24.
• The meeting-in-the-air language points the same direction. The Greek word Paul uses for meet the Lord in the air (apantesis) was a technical term for a civic delegation going out of a city to greet an arriving dignitary and escorting him back in. It is used exactly that way when the brethren come out to meet Paul on the road to Rome. It describes going out to receive someone who is on his way here, not being taken away to somewhere else.
• 2 Thessalonians 2 tells a church panicking that the day of the Lord had already come not to be troubled, because that day shall not come except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed. Paul calms them by telling them what must happen before the day. On a pre-tribulational reading, the obvious reassurance was available and unused: you will be gone before any of that.
• Scripture's consistent pattern is preservation in trouble, not extraction from it. Israel was in Egypt during the plagues while God distinguished Goshen. Noah was in the flood in the ark. The three young men were in the furnace. Jesus prayed not that his people be taken out of the world but kept from the evil. And the New Testament tells the church repeatedly that in the world ye shall have tribulation.
• Revelation shows saints on earth during the tribulation, overcoming by the blood of the Lamb, called to patience and faith, and beheaded for the witness of Jesus. Calling these a different group of believers than the church requires an explanation the text does not supply.
• The global church's lived experience weighs here too. Christians in many places have already endured slaughter and famine without being raptured out of it, and a doctrine that assumes the church will be spared severe suffering does not travel well to those congregations.

The honest difficulty: It must explain how Christ's coming can be imminent if identifiable events must precede it, and it must handle 1 Thessalonians 5:9 and Revelation 3:10 on the wrath question — usually by distinguishing God's wrath from man's persecution and Satan's fury, which is a real distinction but not a self-evident one.

Mid-tribulational rapture

Norman Harrison; Gleason Archer in Three Views on the Rapture; a smaller but persistent stream within dispensational premillennialism.

The church is caught up at the midpoint of the seven years, when the covenant is broken and the abomination of desolation is set up — after the first half's troubles, before the great tribulation and the outpouring of God's wrath proper.

• Daniel's seventieth week has a clear and textually marked midpoint: in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease. Both halves are described distinctly, so a division there is not arbitrary.
• The two witnesses of Revelation 11 are killed and then hear a great voice from heaven saying come up hither and ascend to heaven in a cloud — the same phrase used to summon John in chapter 4 — and this occurs at the seventh trumpet, near the middle.
• 1 Corinthians 15:52 says the last trump, and the seventh trumpet is the last of that series, which gives the position a concrete textual hook.
• It preserves the distinction between the tribulation's first half (largely man's and the antichrist's doing) and God's wrath in the second, allowing the church to be exempt from wrath without being exempt from all trouble.

The honest difficulty: It gains some of the strengths of both neighbors and inherits both sets of objections. Imminence is lost, since the covenant and its breaking must come first, and the identification of the seventh trumpet with Paul's last trump is contested.

Pre-wrath rapture

Marvin Rosenthal (The Pre-Wrath Rapture of the Church); Robert Van Kampen; a growing minority within premillennialism.

The church endures the antichrist's persecution during the first part of the seven years but is caught up before God's wrath begins — at the sixth seal, when the sun is darkened and men hide from the wrath of the Lamb, which is the same cosmic sign Jesus placed after the tribulation in Matthew 24.

• It takes seriously that the tribulation has two distinct sources: the antichrist's persecution of the saints, and God's wrath poured out on the world. Scripture promises the church exemption from the second, never from the first.
• It lines up Matthew 24:29-31 with Revelation 6:12-17 — both have the sun darkened, the moon turned to blood, and stars falling, followed by a gathering. That is a strong intertextual match, and it puts the rapture at a point the text itself marks as the arrival of wrath.
• It explains why Revelation shows a great multitude appearing suddenly in heaven, out of great tribulation, immediately after the sixth seal.
• It preserves both the church's exemption from divine wrath and the New Testament's repeated warning that believers will suffer.

The honest difficulty: It surrenders imminence, its timing depends on a particular reading of where wrath begins in Revelation's seal sequence, and it is the newest of the four — younger even than pre-tribulationism.

Everlasting conscious punishment (the house reading)

Augustine; Thomas Aquinas; John Calvin; Jonathan Edwards; John Wesley; Charles Spurgeon; the historic confessions of every major tradition, and the large majority of Christians in every century.

Those who finally reject God exist forever in conscious separation from him under his just judgment. Hell is real, deserved, and without end.

• Matthew 25:46 sets the two destinies in exact grammatical parallel with the same adjective.
• Revelation 20:10 uses explicit language of ongoing torment for ever and ever.
• It takes seriously that sin against an infinite God carries a weight finite creatures cannot measure, and that the God who judges is the one who knows all the evidence.
• It grounds the urgency of the church's mission and the sheer size of what the cross accomplished. A rescue is proportioned to the danger.
• It has been the consistent testimony of the church, which is not decisive but is not nothing.

The honest difficulty: It is morally the hardest thing Christians confess, and honest defenders admit it. The proportion problem is real: how a finite life of sin incurs unending punishment is not obvious, and the usual answers are arguments rather than proofs. Scripture's own vocabulary for the end of the wicked also leans heavily on destruction, perishing, and the second death, which sound like termination and which this view must read as ruin rather than cessation. And the doctrine has been preached with a coldness that misrepresented God — a sin of its defenders, not of the doctrine, but a real one.

Conditional immortality (annihilationism)

Edward Fudge (The Fire That Consumes); John Stott, who held it tentatively and said so in print; Philip Edgcumbe Hughes; John Wenham; Richard Bauckham; and in the early church, arguably Irenaeus and Arnobius.

Immortality is God's gift to the redeemed, not an inherent property of every soul. The unrepentant are truly judged, suffer justly, and are finally destroyed — they cease to exist. Hell is real and terrible, and it has an end because those in it come to an end.

• The Bible's own vocabulary for the fate of the wicked is overwhelmingly the vocabulary of destruction. They shall perish. The wages of sin is death. Broad is the way that leadeth to destruction. Fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Everlasting destruction. The second death. Conditionalists argue they are simply letting these words mean what they normally mean, while the traditional view must render them all as ruined but existing.
• Immortality is presented as something God gives and something we seek, not something we already possess: God only hath immortality; seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life; this mortal must put on immortality. If the soul were naturally deathless, these statements are strange.
• Everlasting can describe a permanent result rather than a permanent process. Jude says Sodom and Gomorrah suffer the vengeance of eternal fire — and those cities are not burning now. The fire's effect is eternal; the burning was not. The same reading applies naturally to everlasting punishment: the punishment is destruction, and its result is forever.
• The unquenchable fire and undying worm of Isaiah 66, which Jesus quotes, describe corpses on a rubbish heap outside Jerusalem — a picture of consuming, not of preserving. Fire in Scripture consumes what is put in it.
• It answers the proportion objection directly: the punishment is severe, just, and final, without requiring endless torment for finite sin.
• It is offered by its defenders explicitly as an exegetical conclusion rather than a sentimental one — Fudge's book is a long argument from the texts, and Stott presented his as tentative precisely because he would not build doctrine on his emotional recoil.

The honest difficulty: Matthew 25:46's parallel remains the hardest verse against it, since the same adjective must then work differently in two halves of one sentence. Revelation 20:10's tormented day and night for ever and ever is difficult on any annihilationist reading. And the position stands against the near-unanimous testimony of the church.

Universal reconciliation — named, and declined

Origen in the third century (whose view was later condemned); George MacDonald; in modern statement, Robin Parry and David Bentley Hart; and a range of contemporary writers.

God's love and Christ's atonement finally succeed with everyone. Judgment is real and may be long, but it is remedial rather than retributive, and in the end every creature is reconciled to God.

• It appeals to genuinely universal-sounding texts: God will have all men to be saved; as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive; that God may be all in all; the reconciling of all things unto himself.
• It presses hard on the character of God — that a love which finally fails with billions is not the love the New Testament describes, and that a good Father does not create beings he knows will suffer forever.
• It notes that the language of correction and restoration runs through the prophets, where judgment repeatedly serves a purpose beyond itself.

The honest difficulty: MannaFest declines it for three reasons, stated plainly. First, it cannot account for Jesus' own language, which is not merely severe but final — Matthew 25:46 and the gate that is shut. Second, it empties the New Testament's constant urgency of its meaning: the apostles pleaded with people to be reconciled to God now, and Paul said we persuade men knowing the terror of the Lord. Third, it makes the human decision ultimately inconsequential, which the Bible never does; Scripture treats the response of faith as genuinely decisive. We say this without heat. The universalist's underlying instinct — that God's love is vast and his mercy wider than we imagine — is Christian and true. The conclusion drawn from it goes past what has been revealed.

Conscious presence with Christ, awaiting resurrection (the house reading)

The mainstream of Christian teaching East and West; Calvin, who wrote a treatise against soul sleep; Wesley; the Westminster Confession; most evangelical bodies.

At death the believer's spirit goes immediately and consciously to be with Christ, in joy but not yet in the resurrection body; the unrepentant are conscious and await judgment; at Christ's return both are raised.

• 2 Corinthians 5:8 and Philippians 1:23 make no sense as descriptions of unconsciousness — far better requires an experience to be better than.
• Luke 23:43, Revelation 6:9-11, and Luke 16:19-31 all depict conscious existence after death and before resurrection.
• It gives real comfort at real gravesides without overclaiming: the believer who died this morning is with Christ tonight.

The honest difficulty: The honest cost is one of emphasis, and it is a serious one. Popular Christianity has taken this doctrine and made going to heaven the whole point, quietly retiring the resurrection and the new earth — which is not the New Testament's hope but a near-relative of the Greek idea that the body is a problem to be shed. A believer who cannot say why the resurrection matters, given that his loved ones are already with Christ, has absorbed this distortion.

Soul sleep

Some of the early Syriac writers; Martin Luther in several statements; William Tyndale; the Seventh-day Adventist churches; Christadelphians.

The dead are genuinely unconscious — asleep — until the resurrection, at which point they wake. Since the sleeper experiences no interval, the moment of death and the moment of resurrection are subjectively the same instant.

• Scripture's own habitual word for Christian death is sleep — them which sleep in Jesus; our friend Lazarus sleepeth; David fell on sleep. The metaphor is not incidental; it is the standard usage.
• Ecclesiastes says the dead know not any thing, and the Psalms say the dead praise not the LORD, and in that very day his thoughts perish.
• The New Testament consistently places the believer's reward, crown, and gathering at the resurrection and the coming — not at death. Paul expects his crown at that day.
• It keeps the resurrection where the New Testament keeps it: at the center of the hope. Luther's instinct was that a fully satisfying afterlife at death makes the resurrection an anticlimax.
• It is not a comfortless view. For the one who dies, there is no experienced waiting at all.

The honest difficulty: It must read absent from the body, present with the Lord and far better as descriptions of an unconscious state, which strains both phrases. Revelation 6's conscious, speaking souls and the account of Lazarus and the rich man are difficult. And the sleep metaphor most naturally describes the body's appearance to the living rather than the spirit's condition.

Purgatory

The Roman Catholic Church, defined at the Councils of Florence and Trent; anticipated in Augustine and Gregory the Great; the Orthodox hold a related but distinct view of the soul's continuing purification and decline the Western definition.

Those who die in God's grace but still imperfectly purified undergo a final purification before entering heaven. It is not a second chance and not hell; everyone in it is saved and will arrive.

• It takes seriously that nothing unclean shall enter the city and that without holiness no man shall see the Lord, while acknowledging that most believers die visibly unfinished. Something must account for the gap between the deathbed and the perfected saint.
• 1 Corinthians 3:13-15 describes each man's work tried by fire, with some suffering loss yet being saved, yet so as by fire — the passage from which much of the doctrine was drawn.
• It has ancient roots in the church's practice of praying for the dead, which is attested very early in inscriptions and liturgies.

The honest difficulty: MannaFest does not hold it. Its primary proof text from 2 Maccabees comes from a book outside the 66 — a valuable historical source, and a labeled study resource here, but not Scripture. 1 Corinthians 3 is about the testing of ministry work, not the purging of persons. And it sits poorly with the completeness of Christ's atoning work and with the thief entering paradise the same day, unpurged.

A future national turning of Israel (the house reading)

The dispensational tradition broadly; also many who are not dispensational at all — John Murray, Charles Hodge, and Charles Spurgeon all expected a future conversion of the Jewish people, as did many Puritans.

Israel's hardening is temporary. At the end of the present age the Jewish people will turn in large numbers to Jesus as Messiah, and the covenant promises will be fulfilled to them.

• Romans 11:25-27 reads most naturally as a future event, with until marking the turn.
• The olive tree image expects the natural branches to be grafted back in.
• The gifts and calling of God are without repentance is stated as a principle, not a poetic flourish.
• It is not merely a dispensational position, which matters: Reformed interpreters with no stake in a separate program for Israel have read Romans 11 the same way.

The honest difficulty: All Israel could mean the full number of elect Jews gathered across all of history rather than a generation at the end, and the word rendered so (houtos) normally means in this manner rather than then. Both are genuine grammatical possibilities, and the house reading has to argue for its sense rather than assume it.

All Israel means the elect of Israel throughout history

A widely held Reformed reading; argued by many careful commentators on Romans.

Paul is describing God's method, not a final event: through the ingathering of the Gentiles, Jewish people are provoked to jealousy and saved in every generation, and when the last of them is gathered, all Israel — the complete elect remnant of the nation — will have been saved.

• The word houtos means in this manner. Paul has just described a mechanism, and this reading lets and so name the mechanism rather than announce a new event.
• Paul offers himself as the evidence in the same chapter: I also am an Israelite. Even so then at this present time also there is a remnant according to the election of grace. The present tense is doing real work.
• It avoids importing a distinct end-time program into a passage that never mentions the land, a temple, or a kingdom.

The honest difficulty: The until clause implies a change of state at a point, and the chapter's rhythm — fall, then fulness; casting away, then receiving — reads like a reversal rather than a steady trickle.

All Israel means the whole church, Jew and Gentile

John Calvin, who took this reading explicitly; a portion of the Reformed tradition after him.

Having spent the chapter redefining the people of God around faith rather than descent, Paul uses Israel in verse 26 for the complete company of the redeemed from both groups — the one olive tree, entire.

• Paul has already argued that they are not all Israel which are of Israel, and that he is a Jew who is one inwardly — so a redefined use of the word in the climax would be consistent, not sudden.
• The single olive tree is the chapter's controlling image, and one tree suits one people.
• Galatians speaks of the Israel of God in a letter arguing that descent settles nothing.
• It fits Paul's larger argument that in Christ the middle wall of partition is broken down.

The honest difficulty: Paul uses Israel about eleven times in Romans 9-11 and everywhere else it means ethnic Israel — including in the same sentence, where blindness in part is happened to Israel plainly means the Jewish people. Switching senses mid-verse is a heavy lift, and most interpreters, including many Reformed ones, decline it.