Jonathan Brentner: The Unbiblical Basis Of Amillennialism

THE UNBIBLICAL BASIS OF AMILLENNIALISM

Jonathan Brentner

I know my title sounds a bit theological. Why even bring up the topic of amillennialism?

I do so because a great many pastors today subscribe to some form of this errant teaching that denies the prophesied restoration of a kingdom for Israel as well as the biblical promise of Jesus’ millennial reign before the eternal state.

Amillennialism dominated the church during the dark ages and persisted long after the Reformation. The reason for this rests with three factors that fueled this teaching for well over a thousand years and remain in place today, at least to some degree.

It’s vital to our faith that we understand the errant foundation of amillennialism so we can recognize the error and defend the integrity of Scripture when others seek to lead us astray.

ALLEGORY

Apart from the allegorization of Scripture, amillennialism would not exist. Rather than interpret prophecy according to the intent of biblical author, those who apply this method to prophecy retrofit biblical texts with meanings that do not match the words nor the intent of the authors.

The practice of allegorizing biblical texts began with Philo, an Alexandrian Jew who lived during the time of Christ. He admired Greek philosophy and used allegory as a means to make the Old Testament agreeable with Greek.

In the second century AD, Clement and Origen adopted Philo’s allegorical approach to God’s word. Clement (AD 150-215) “embraced Greek philosophy and maintained that Scripture must be understood allegorically so as not to contradict it.”[i] Origen (AD 185-254) used allegory to make biblical prophecy comply with Plato’s dualism, which stated that only the spiritual, immaterial realm was good.

The church Council of Nicea, which met in in AD 325, condemned the teachings of Origen and affirmed the place of the book of Revelation in the New Testament in direct contradiction to Origen’s rejection of Jesus’ thousand-year reign as described in Revelation 20:1-10.[ii]

At the beginning of the fifth century AD, a much more capable theologian named Augustine utilized Origen’s allegorical approach to biblical prophecy and steered the church away from its premillennial footing in favor of amillennialism. During the dark ages, theologians extended Augustine’s allegorization of prophetic texts to passages in the New Testament, which led to the contamination of the doctrine of justification by faith.

We see this same pattern happening today; the practice of allegorizing Bible prophecy invariably leads, over time, to an undermining of the purity of the Gospel and an acceptance of immoral cultural norms for behavior. Allegory never remains confined to biblical passages dealing with prophecy; it always spreads. Always.

THE BIBLICAL RESPONSE: WORDS MATTER

Words matter in Scripture.

Notice the words of the apostle Peter in 2 Peter 1:20-21, “. . . knowing this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture comes from someone's own interpretation. For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” Just as the prophets of old did not speak from their own understanding, in the same way we must not apply our own private “interpretations” to what they wrote; we must let the words speak for themselves.

The Greek word for “spoke” in verse 21 is laleo. According to Trench in in his book Synonyms of the New Testament, the “prominent notion” of this verb is “the fact of uttering articulated speech. . . it is the words uttered, and that these correspond to reasonable thoughts . . . .”[iii] Biblical prophets, in both the Old and New Testament, expressed truths in words as God moved them through the Holy Spirit (see also 2 Tim. 3:16; Proverbs 2:6).

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