Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Anthony R. Cross on the Growth of Allegorical Interpretation of the Millennium in Revelation 20


Commenting on some factors that lead to a growth in an allegorical interpretation of the millennium in Rev 20 in third and fourth-century Christianity, Anthony R. Cross wrote:

[A] number of factors have been suggested that contributed to a major reaction against apocalypticism in general and millennialism in particular. For over two and a half centuries the Roman empire had been viewed in a very negative light, as is reflected in the book of Revelation itself (Rev. 14.8; 16.19; 17.5; 18.2, 10, 21), but with the ‘conversion’ of the emperor Constantine in 312 this inevitably had to change. From this point onwards, the life of the Church and the Roman state seemed inextricably linked. Further, a literal-historical reading of apocalypticism seemed to many to be too ‘Jewish’. Jerome believed that ‘to take John’s Apocalypse to the letter is to Judaize’. No longer was Revelation to be read as a prophecy of the events of the end, nor as revealing its timetable, for such was excluded by Acts 1.7’s ‘It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set.’ Rather, Revelation was to be read as an allegory of the Church, and particularly its struggle with good and evil. In the third century, Origen (c. 185-c. 254) had attacked the literal historicizing of apocalyptic in favour of an allegorical and spiritual interpretation (Origen, On First Principles 2.11.2-3), and in this he was followed by the great historian of the early Church, Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 263-c. 339), and Methodius of Olympus (d.c. 311) (Methodius, Symposium 9.1). But the problem with this was allegory’s ahistorical nature. This fact was recognized by Tyconius (c. 330-c. 390) and Augustine of Hippo (354-430). Paula Fredricksen writes:

Many earlier theologians had either allegorized any historical and temporal reference out of John’s prophecy or repudiated the text altogether. Other Christians, and most especially those in North Africa, had on the authority of the Apocalypse asserted an enthusiastic and socially disruptive millenarianism. Against these two extremes, Tyconius and following him, Augustine introduced in the late fourth and earthly fifth centuries a reading of John that affirmed its historical realism while liberating it from the embarrassments of a literal interpretation. (Paula Fredriksen, ‘Tyconius and Augustine’, p. 21)

In order to avoid a literal millennium on the one hand and ahistorical allegory on the other, Tyconius pioneered a typological reading of Revelation which did not deny its historical significance, yet permitted him to assert that the time of the end and the identity of the saved could not be known. This dual approach was important, as he was trying to correct his fellow Donatists, who had adopted a separatist ecclesiology coupled with a millennial expectation of the end within a hundred years (for details, see Fredricksen, pp. 21-24). To this end he developed seven rules that he believed were ‘the compositional principles of Scripture, encoded in the text itself, which conceal or obscure its meaning’ (Fredriksen, p. 26). Tyconius was an anti-apocalypticist; and his seven rules, which complicated the biblical text, enabled him to preserve the historical significance of some of the most apocalyptic and millennialist passages of Scripture, while obscuring their eschatological important. For instance, his fifth rule enabled him to interpret the numbers and dates o Revelation, including the thousand-year millennium, as symbolic and indicative of spiritual truths, rather than literally (Fredricksen, p. 27-28). (Anthony R. Cross, “The Bible, the Trinity and History: Apocalypticism and Millennialism in the Theology of Joachim of Fiore” in Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs, Faith in the Millennium [Roehampton Papers 7; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001], 260-97, here, pp. 264-65)