Thursday, February 29, 2024

Robert Sungenis on The Majority of Earliest Christians Holding to a Pre-Millennial Eschatology

  

The lack of room in Scripture to fit a mass conversion of Jews before Christ returns has always been a problem for its advocates and consequently it has always been the death knell for this particular brand of amillennial eschatology.

 

Interestingly enough, the very early Fathers, many of whom believed in premillennial eschatology, did not have this problem. They had plenty of room and plenty of time because their premillennialism held that the “one thousand years” of Apocalypse 20:1-6 is speaking of a future millennial kingdom in which Christ, at his Second coming, will descend to Jerusalem and reign over the world for one thousand literal years. After the one thousand years, the eternal state begins. Some of our most famous Fathers believed in premillennialism (e.g, Papias, Tertullian, Lactantius, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, possibly Polycarp).

 

In premillennial eschatology it was believed that the last generation of Jews would convert, en masse. Accordingly, the most accommodating part of their eschatology for these future converted Jews was that there would be an adequate time and place for them to be converted. The time was the “one thousand years” and the place was the millennial kingdom on earth. Everything fit like a glove. The only problem was that the scriptural exegesis behind premillennialism was full of false assumptions and loaded with out-of-context conclusions. For example, they misinterpreted Malachi 4:5 . . . failing to see that the refence to “Elijah” was pointing to John the Baptist, not the actual Elijah. . . . By the time of Chrysostom, Augustine and Jerome, the eschatology of the Catholic Church changed drastically. It made a dramatic shift from premillennialism to amillennialism. Whereas the Premils believed the 1000-year period of Apocalypse 20 was describing a future millennial period on earth in which Christ would rule from Jerusalem; the Amils believed the 1000-years was a symbolic time and place, encompassing the time from the First coming of Christ to the Second coming. Although there were seeds of amillennial eschatology in the early patristics (e.g., Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria, Dionysius, Cyprian, Apollinarius, Athenagorus), it reached its flower with Augustine, Jerome, and Chrysostom since they discovered that the binding of Satan about which Jesus often remarked (cf., Jn 12:31; 16:11; Mt 12:29; Mk 3:27; Ep 4:8; Hb 2:14) was not something that was going to occur right before the Second coming of Christ but at the First coming; whereas the early Fathers who promoted a 1,000-year kingdom on earth for the Jews believed the binding of Satan would occur at the Second coming, after which the millennial kingdom on earth would begin. (Robert Sungenis, Why There Will Not Be a Mass Conversion of the Jews: A Critique of “If You Believed Moses” [State Lina, Pa.: Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2023], 11-12)

 

One only need look at the early Fathers of the Church (E.g., Papias [who claims to have received his interpretation of the Millennium from St. John the Apostle], Ignatius, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Lactantius, et al) who were mostly devout premillennialists, that is, believers in a literal 1,000 year reign of Christ on earth after the Second coming, at which time Stan would be literally bound. They based this opinion on a scrupulously literal interpretation of Apocalypse 20:1-6 . . . The Church eventually abandoned this hyper-literal interpretation and adopted the eschatology popularized by Augustine, Jerome, and Chrysostom called “amillennialism,” that is, that there was no future millennium; only an indefinite period from the First to the Second coming of Christ wherein Satan was spiritually bound so that the Gospel could go forth to the nations. This view was given credence by a brief statement at the Council of Ephesus that the binding of Satan occurred at the cross. (Denzinger ¶140) The point here is that the early Fathers and Doctors of the Church had two diametrically opposed interpretations of the mysterious language of the Apocalypse, neither of which has been officially dogmatized. (Robert Sungenis, Supersessionism is Irrevocable: Facing the Ambiguities, Compromises, and Heresies in Recent Catholic Documents Regarding the “Old Covenant” [State Lina, Pa.: Catholic Apologetics International Publishing, Inc., 2024], 365, 266)

 

Amillennialism was held, partially or fully, by a number of early Fathers and a few apocryphal epistles form the second to fourth centuries but became the official position of the Catholic Church following a number [of] Fathers and medieval from the fifth century onward. (Ibid., 461)