Postmillennialism

After the gospel has filled the earth

‘Postmillennial’ means that Christ's return comes after the millennium. The view starts from Jesus' parables of the kingdom growing until it changes the world.

He told them still another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and mixed into three measures of flour, until all of it was leavened.”

Matthew 13:33

God promised the Messiah, "I will make the nations Your inheritance" (Psalm 2:8), and Isaiah foresaw that "the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the sea is full of water" (Isaiah 11:9). The risen Christ, to whom "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given" (Matthew 28:18), sent his disciples to all nations, and Paul says, "He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet" (1 Corinthians 15:25). From such texts postmillennialists expect that the Spirit, through the gospel, prayer and the church, will turn many nations to Christ and deeply reshape the world before Christ returns. They read the binding of Satan and the reign of the saints in Revelation 20 as pictures of this triumph of the gospel.

This hope is not confidence in human progress but in God, who will do by his Spirit what he has promised. Matthew Henry's commentary voices it on Revelation 20: "We may expect that a thousand years will follow the destruction of the antichristian, idolatrous, persecuting powers, during which pure Christianity, in doctrine, worship, and holiness, will be made known over all the earth." Matthew Henry

A history of the hope

Many seventeenth-century Puritans looked for a day when the Jews and the nations would turn to Christ in great numbers, and in the eighteenth century Jonathan Edwards hoped that revival would usher in a glorious age of the church. In the nineteenth century many British and American evangelicals held this hope, and it fuelled missions and social reform. The American Presbyterian Charles Hodge taught that before Christ's return the gospel would be preached to all nations and there would be a great ingathering Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology. After the two world wars the view declined sharply, though some still hold it.

In conversation with other views

Postmillennialism shares with amillennialism a thousand years that come before the return, and one general resurrection and judgment when Christ comes. The two differ over how much the gospel will transform the world before the end. Premillennialists and amillennialists question this optimism, pointing to Jesus' words, "when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?" (Luke 18:8), and to warnings of persecution and falling away until the end. Postmillennialists answer that such texts describe the struggles the church faces even as the gospel advances, or, on some readings, events of the first century; and they point to the promise that the gospel "will be preached in all the world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come" (Matthew 24:14). This is a difference among evangelicals, and the three views are set side by side in the lesson Christ’s return and the millennium and in What are the rapture and the millennium?