Researched by the Ignaria Editorial Team · Published 2026-03-12
Before Augustine, chiliasm — the expectation of a literal thousand-year earthly kingdom following Christ's return — was widespread in the second-century church. Augustine's reinterpretation of Revelation 20 in "The City of God" replaced chiliasm with the view that the millennium refers to the present age of the Church, between Christ's first and second comings. This amillennial reading became the standard Western position and was reinforced by the Protestant Reformers — Calvin and Luther both rejected literal millennialism — until dispensationalism revived premillennial eschatology in the nineteenth century.
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What the primary sources show
"As yet He does not speak of the second resurrection, that is, the resurrection of the body, which shall be in the end, but of the first, which now is... Now this resurrection regards not the body, but the soul" — Augustine's pivotal reinterpretation of the "first resurrection" in Revelation 20 as present spiritual regeneration, collapsing the chiliast two-resurrection scheme into the Church's present reality.
"Chiliasm arose very early in the history of theology. Some of the early Church Fathers distinguished between a first and a second resurrection, and held that there would be an intervening millennial kingdom in which Christ would reign with His saints upon the earth" — Calvin's survey of chiliasm's patristic roots, framing it as an error to be corrected rather than a tradition to be recovered.