“Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven, holding in his hand the key to the bottomless pit and a great chain. And he seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years, and threw him into the pit, and shut it and sealed it over him, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer, until the thousand years were ended. After that he must be released for a little while. Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom the authority to judge was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for the testimony of Jesus and for the word of God, and those who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for a thousand years.”

Revelation 20:1-6

The expression “thousand years” is only used about this context in one place in the Bible, in Revelation 20. Now it is mentioned six times in the section (vv. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7), but it is confined to this one place nonetheless. The word millennium comes from the Latin words for “thousand” (mille) and “year” (annus), and seems to have first been used in the seventeenth century. Since the Greek equivalent is chilias, those who hold to a literal manifestation of this thousand year period have been called both “millennarians” and “chiliasts.”

Loraine Boettner opens off his book on The Millennium with a much more charitable, helpful explanation of the differences between viewpoints than many of his contemporaries:

“The differences arise, not because of any conscious or intended disloyalty to Scripture, but primarily because of the distinctive method employed by each system in its interpretation of Scripture, and they relate primarily to the time and purpose of Christ’s coming and to the kind of kingdom that is to be set up at His coming.”1

Hopefully we can see now why the subject of the kingdom per se was explored before coming to the millennial debate. This highlights why there is so much confusion for many over the disagreement. Concisely put, it is twofold—timing and nature.2 In other words, the two questions that our three millennial positions attempt to answer are: 1. When will Christ return in relation to the millennium? and 2. What exactly is this millennium? 

Before getting into each view separately, if I could make things as simple as possible for the beginner to this subject: picture all three views on a single image. You would have the second coming of Christ as your focal point at first. So the terms PRE and POST would have reference to that second coming being either before the literal millennial reign of Christ (PRE-MILLENNIALISM) or else after the literal millennial reign of Christ (POST-MILLENNIALISM). So we can see exactly how those prefixes function to give us the time dimension of the question.

But remember, there is the other dimension of the nature of that reign, so we can picture A-MILLENNIALISM as being above the timeline, having the heavenly throne as its focal point, yet also to the left of the vertical line representing the second coming.

We also need to understand that there are variations within each camp. The sharpest division is such a variation that we can hardly treat it as being within the same camp. Dispensational premillennialist and historic premillennialism differ so much on their fundamental presuppositions—and therefore on their methodologies for interpreting Bible passages and for piecing together the doctrine—that we must consider these two separate positions altogether. But even among postmillennialists, there are those who would not insist upon a literal number of one-thousand years, and others who would. “Why then do those who dispense with the literal number not consider themselves amillennialists?” you might ask.

Again, this only focuses on the time question rather than the nature question. It is important to the postmillennialist that there is a real commencement of that period in which the Great Commission finds its universal success before the Lord returns. Likewise, among amillennialists, there is a group that would see the whole period and reign as entirely spiritual, and others that would be closer to the postmillennialists in observing a transforming effect from the seat of that rule in heaven to the church’s whole-world mandate in history. Some will describe this in terms of “optimism” and “pessimism,” but for reasons that I will unpack in the sections describing each view, I find this to be unhelpful language.

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1. Loraine Boettner, The Millennium (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1957), 3.

2. cf. Greg Bahnsen, Victory in Jesus: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism (Nacogdoches, TX: Covenant Media Press, 1999), 23-27; Gentry, He Shall Have Dominion, 67, for a summary of the overlap of these two questions.