Scriptural Mormonism: Gerald Hiestand on Irenaeus' Theology of the Millennium

Monday, December 30, 2024

Gerald Hiestand on Irenaeus' Theology of the Millennium

There is debate about the extent to which Irenaeus maintained a literal thousand year reign. A number of recent interpreters of Irenaeus have attempted to distance Irenaeus from traditional chiliastic thought by arguing that Irenaeus makes no mention of a literal thousand years in Haer. 5.32-36 (or elsewhere). See Wingren, Man and Incarnation, 190-92; Steenberg, Irenaeus on Creation, 52-53. For the definitive treatment on this perspective, see Smith, ‘Chiliasm and Recapitulation in the Theology of Irenaeus’, 313-20. This claim is only narrowly accurate. While Irenaeus does not use the term ‘millennium’ or ‘thousand’ in the Latin text of these chapters, he is clearly working within the constraints of the events and timeline found in Revelation 20-21. For Irenaeus the ‘kingdom’ has a beginning and an end, and is marked on both sides by the first and second resurrections (Rev 20:4 and 20:12, respectively). Thus Irenaeus’ many references to the ‘kingdom’ throughout Haer. 5.32-36 are most naturally understood as a reference to the millennial kingdom of Rev 20:1-10. (Even Wingren notes this point, stating that ‘the regnum is not described as being of a thousand years’ duration, but in fact corresponds to the millennium of the Book of Revelation’, Man and Incarnation, 191). Further, it is clear that Irenaeus believes himself to be faithfully transmitting the chiliasm of Papias, who clearly maintained a literal thousand years (see Haer. 5.33.4). Likewise, Eusebius believes Irenaeus to be transmitting Papias, see Hist. eccl. 3.39.13. Even more convincingly, Minns (as recently as 2010) has shown that the 1910 Armenian text of Adversus haereses, does indeed include an explicit reference to the ‘thousand’ years of Rev 20:1-10. The relevant passage occurs in the last paragraph of the last chapter of the last book of the Armenian Adversus haereses, where we find a reference to ‘the seventh thousand years of the kingdom of the just’, after which kingdom follows the new heavens and the new earth. See Minns, Irenaeus, 143-44. This corresponds to Irenaeus’ view of the ‘kingdom’ as a Sabbath rest, the final seventh age where God’s people are rewarded. See Haer. 5.33.2, ‘These [earthly rewards are granted] in the times of the kingdom, that is, upon the seventh day’. In any case, whether the kingdom is for Irenaeus a literal thousand years, or more abstractly an extended age of time, is a question largely tangential to my primary concern, namely that Irenaeus conceives of a future earthly kingdom of limited duration preceding the general resurrection of the dead and the eternal age when God will raise the righteous dead to reign with Christ upon a renewed earth. (Gerald Hiestand, “'Passing Beyond the Angels': The Interconnection Between Irenaeus' Account of the Devil and His Doctrine of Creation” [PhD Thesis; University of Reading, October, 2017], 54 n. 71)