Millenarianism

Millenarianism. Belief in a future ‘millennium’, i.e. a 1,000-year period of blessedness. The main source of the concept within Christianity is Rev. 20. Some of its adherents hold that it will follow the Second Coming of Christ; others that it will precede the Advent and prepare the way for it.

In the early Church Millenarianism was found mainly among the Gnostics and Montanists, though it was also accepted by some of the early Fathers. In the Middle Ages the chief exponent of millenarian themes was Joachim of Fiore. At the Reformation many Anabaptists, as well as the Bohemian Brethren, were millenarians, and millenarian beliefs were widely held in 16th-and 17th-cent. English Protestantism. In Germany the millenarian view gained currency in the Pietist movement of the 17th and 18th cents. In the 19th cent. new advocates of apocalyptic and millenarian ideas arose in the USA and in Britain, among them the Irvingites, *Plymouth Brethren, and Adventists, these last reviving the idea of a heavenly millennium after the Second Coming. In the 20th cent. the indigenous Churches of Asia, Africa, and South America produced a variety of millenarian beliefs. In 1944 the Holy Office gave a ruling against millenarianism, and the major Christian bodies have treated the subject with reserve.