Revelation 20:1-10

What are the different views in eschatology?

Four families of view, one chapter they all have to account for, and three questions that sort them out.

Read the passage in the ESV All questions

The question as it came to us

Eschatology is simply the study of last things: death, Christ’s return, the resurrection, the judgment, and the world to come. Most of it is not in dispute at all. The creeds say what the church has confessed from the beginning, that he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and of his kingdom there will be no end, and not one view on this page denies a word of it.

What people usually mean by the question is the argument. And the argument has a vocabulary problem. Amillennial. Postmillennial. Dispensational. Pretribulational. Preterist. The words sound like a diagnosis, and they get used as though everyone already knows them, which is how a reader ends up nodding along to a position nobody has explained to him.

Underneath the jargon are three plain questions. Separate them and the whole map opens up.

1. Where is Christ’s return, relative to the thousand years of Revelation 20? That single question names the families: pre-millennial, post-millennial, a-millennial.

2. When are the prophecies fulfilled: already, across the whole of history, or still ahead of us? This one cuts across the first, so two people can share a millennial view and still read Revelation differently.

3. Where does the seven-year tribulation fit, and does this view even have one? Most of them do not. It belongs to one system, and it is the part most people assume is simply what the Bible says.

So: here are the views, laid side by side. This page does not tell you which one to hold, and that is deliberate, the reason is at the end.

Short answer

Four families, sorted by one question: where does Christ’s return sit, relative to the thousand years of Revelation 20? The prefix in each name is the answer to that, and nothing else.

Premillennial, he returns before the thousand years and reigns on earth through them. It comes in two forms that are further apart than the shared name suggests: historic premillennialism, which has one return at the end of the tribulation with the church having lived through it, and dispensational premillennialism, which separates a rapture of the church from the second coming proper and puts a defined seven years between them. Amillennial, the thousand years is now: Christ reigns from heaven over an age in which the church suffers and preaches, and he returns at its close. Postmillennial, the gospel succeeds so widely that history’s last long age is one of gospel prosperity, and he returns at the end of that.

Cutting across all four is the second question: when is prophecy fulfilled? The preterist says mostly already, in the first century; the historicist says across church history; the futurist says mostly still ahead; the idealist says the visions portray the conflict of every age rather than a datable sequence. A millennial view leans toward one of these, but does not settle it.

The seven-year tribulation is the third question, and it exists inside only one of these systems. It comes from the last of Daniel’s seventy weeks (Daniel 9:27), split into halves by that same verse. The familiar four-way argument: pre-, mid-, pre-wrath, post-tribulational, is entirely an argument about when the church is taken out, and it only arises if you already hold that the rapture is a separate event from the second coming.

What every one of them holds, without exception: Christ will return personally, bodily and visibly; the dead will be raised; every human being will be judged by him; and there will be a new heavens and a new earth. The disagreements are real, and they are downstream of all that. It is worth knowing why they are possible at all: the New Testament nowhere lays these events out on a single timeline. Every chart you have ever seen is an assembly: texts from Daniel, Matthew, 1 and 2 Thessalonians and Revelation set in an order no one book gives, which is exactly why careful readers assemble them differently.

Not a test of fellowship Not salvific, and not a wall. Every view on this page confesses the same returning Christ (bodily, visibly, to judge the living and the dead) and they differ over the order of what follows. Believers who read the same Bible with the same reverence have landed in different places here since the second century, and said so to each other without breaking fellowship.

What is settled, and what is not

The left column is the faith of the whole church, held by every view below. The right column is what Scripture has not given us, and no chart can supply.

Settled, Scripture states it

He will return. Personally, bodily, visibly, and unmistakably: this Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven (Acts 1:11); behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him (Revelation 1:7).
He reigns already. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me (Matthew 28:18); he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet (1 Corinthians 15:25, quoting Psalm 110:1). No view on this page has Christ waiting to become king.
The dead will be raised: all of them. An hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out (John 5:28-29); there will be a resurrection of both the just and the unjust (Acts 24:15).
He will judge every person. We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ (2 Corinthians 5:10); God has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed (Acts 17:31).
The end is a new creation, not an escape from creation. We are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3:13); behold, I am making all things new (Revelation 21:5).
Nobody knows when. Concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only (Matthew 24:36). It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority (Acts 1:7).

Not given in this age

The date. Not withheld by accident. Every generation that has set one has been wrong, and Christ said plainly it would not be given.
The order. No book of the Bible sets these events on one timeline. The sequence is the thing being argued about, and it is assembled rather than read off.
Whether the thousand years is a duration or a symbol. It appears in one paragraph of the most figurative book in the canon, alongside numbers that are plainly doing symbolic work. The text does not tell us which kind of number this one is.
Who the man of lawlessness is. Paul could write you know what is restraining him now (2 Thessalonians 2:6) because he had told them in person. He never wrote it down, so the Thessalonians knew and we do not.
How Israel’s future resolves. And in this way all Israel will be saved (Romans 11:26) is read as the conversion of Jews through the age, a great turning at the end, or a national restoration: by careful people, in good faith.
Which signs belong to which event. In the Olivet Discourse the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the age are woven so tightly together that godly readers cannot agree where one stops and the other starts.

The views side by side

Each bar runs left to right, from where the view’s story starts to the new creation. The widths show order, not duration, nobody knows the durations, and a diagram that implied otherwise would be lying to you.

Historic premillennial

Christ returns, and then reigns on earth for the thousand years. The church lives through the tribulation rather than skipping it. This is the premillennialism of the second-century fathers, and of Spurgeon.

This age: gospel and opposition together Great tribulation Christ returns Thousand years on earth Judgment · new creation

Dispensational premillennial

The church is taken out first, a defined seven years runs its course, and then Christ returns in glory to reign from Jerusalem. Israel and the church are kept distinct throughout. This is the view behind most end-times novels, films and prophecy charts.

Church age The rapture Seven-year tribulation Christ returns in glory Thousand-year reign Judgment · new creation

Amillennial

The thousand years is the present age: Christ reigns from heaven, Satan is bound from deceiving the nations, and the church suffers and preaches until the end. One return, one resurrection, one judgment. The reading of Augustine, Calvin and most of the Reformation.

The thousand years: now: Christ reigns, Satan bound from deceiving the nations Christ returns Resurrection of all · judgment · new creation

Postmillennial

The gospel does not merely survive the age; it wins it. Christ’s return closes a long era in which the nations have largely been discipled. Held by many Puritans and by Jonathan Edwards.

This age: the gospel advances The thousand years: an age of gospel prosperity Christ returns Resurrection · judgment · new creation

All three questions at once

View	Christ’s return, relative to the millennium	When the prophecies are fulfilled	The seven-year tribulation
Historic premillennial	Before it. One return, at the end of the tribulation; the reign follows it.	Mainly futurist: the great tribulation is still ahead.	Yes, and the church is in it. No separate rapture: believers are caught up to meet him as he descends (post-tribulational).
Dispensational premillennial	Before it, in two stages: the rapture first, the glorious appearing at the end of the seven years.	Futurist. Daniel’s seventieth week is still future, and most of Revelation with it.	Yes: a defined seven years, and this is the only view in which the rapture-timing argument arises at all.
Amillennial	After it, but the thousand years is the age we are in, so his return ends it.	Mostly idealist, often partly preterist: the visions run through the whole age rather than a final week.	No seven-year programme. The great tribulation is the church’s whole age under pressure, sharpening at the end.
Postmillennial	After it. The millennium is a long age of gospel success that his return brings to a close.	Often partly preterist, much of the Olivet Discourse fulfilled when Jerusalem fell in AD 70.	No future seven-year programme; the tribulation Jesus described is largely behind us.

When the prophecies are fulfilled

The second question is a different axis, and it is the one most often skipped. It asks when the prophecies are fulfilled, and a person’s answer here shapes his reading of Revelation more than his millennial label does.

Preterist: already, mostly The prophecies were largely fulfilled in the first century, at the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Partial preterism holds that the return, the resurrection and the judgment are still future, and is held by orthodox believers. Full preterism says even those are past, which denies a bodily return and resurrection still to come, and so falls outside the creeds and outside this page’s four views.
Historicist: across the centuries The visions map onto the whole span of church history, unfolding from the apostles to now. Most of the Reformers read Revelation this way. It is the least held of the four today, largely because each generation kept identifying the symbols with its own crises.
Futurist: mostly still ahead From Revelation 4 onward the visions describe a period at the very end of the age. Held by both premillennial families, and required by the dispensational one.
Idealist: the pattern of every age The visions portray the conflict between Christ and evil as it runs through all of history, rather than a datable sequence of events. Usually paired with amillennialism, and it does not require that nothing in Revelation is future.

The seven years, if the view has one

This axis exists only inside premillennial systems, and the four-way argument belongs almost entirely to the dispensational one. The seven years is the last of Daniel’s seventy weeks, he shall make a strong covenant with many for one week, and for half of the week he shall put an end to sacrifice and offering (Daniel 9:27), and that verse is also where the halves come from. Revelation counts the second half as forty-two months, or 1,260 days (Revelation 11:2-3; 13:5).

First half: a covenant made with many

Second half: the covenant broken; the great tribulation

1Pre-tribulational The church is taken before the seven years begin and is absent from all of it. The most common view in popular English-speaking evangelicalism, and the youngest of the four: it dates from the 1830s.
2Mid-tribulational Taken at the midpoint, when the covenant is broken: the church endures the first half and is spared the second.
3Pre-wrath Taken after the midpoint but before the final outpouring of God’s wrath, the church suffers man’s persecution but not God’s judgment.
4Post-tribulational Taken at the very end, as one event with the second coming. This is the historic premillennial position, and it needs no separate rapture at all.

What the text says

The thousand years is one paragraph, and only one Revelation 20:1-7 is the only place in the Bible where a thousand-year reign appears. The words a thousand years occur six times in those seven verses, and nowhere else in the Bible are they attached to a reign of Christ and his saints (Psalm 90:4 and 2 Peter 3:8 use them of God’s patience with time, which is a different thought entirely). Every position on this page is an attempt to fit that one paragraph to the rest of the Bible, which is worth remembering before anyone is called unfaithful for how he does it. And it sits in the most figurative book in the canon, where numbers are already carrying symbolic weight: seven churches, seven spirits, 144,000, forty-two months. So a reader who takes the thousand as a round number is not automatically explaining it away, and one who takes it as a thousand is not automatically being wooden.
Verse 5 is the hinge, and it turns on one verb They came to life and reigned with Christ for a thousand years (20:4), and then the rest of the dead did not come to life until the thousand years were ended. This is the first resurrection (20:5). The same Greek verb governs both sentences. If it means bodily resurrection in verse 4 it should mean bodily resurrection in verse 5, and then there are two resurrections with a thousand years between them, which is the strongest argument premillennialism has. If coming to life means something else in verse 4: souls reigning with Christ, or the new birth: then the one general resurrection of John 5:28-29 stands, which is the amillennial reading. Notice that John has already told us where he is standing: what he sees are the souls of those who had been beheaded (20:4).
One coming, or one coming in two stages? Everything about the seven-year tribulation depends on the rapture being a separate event from the second coming. The passage is 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17: the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive… will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. Caught up is where the word rapture comes from. Read it and notice what is and is not there: the event is loud, public and accompanied by resurrection, which is why most readers identify it with the second coming itself, and why Titus 2:13 can speak of a single blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. Dispensationalism distinguishes them; the other three views do not.
Where the seven years comes from Not from Revelation. From seventy weeks are decreed about your people and your holy city (Daniel 9:24), and specifically from the last of them (9:27). The tribulation period is that seventieth week, read as seven years. The system also requires a gap between the sixty-ninth week and the seventieth, the whole church age, so far two thousand years long, and it is worth being plain that the text does not state a gap. Dispensationalists infer it from the sequence in 9:26, where an anointed one is cut off after the sixty-two weeks and the city is then destroyed. Others read the seventieth week as fulfilled in Christ himself, who confirmed the covenant and by his death put an end to sacrifice and offering.
“This generation” is the hinge of the second question Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place (Matthew 24:34). If this generation means the people Jesus was speaking to, then these things were fulfilled within about forty years, and Jerusalem did fall in AD 70, exactly as he said, with not one stone left on another. That is the preterist case, and it is a serious one. If this generation means the generation that sees the signs begin, the discourse is still ahead of us. Both readings are held by people who believe every word of the chapter.
Texts that seem to know only one end, all at once The other three views lean on passages where the resurrection, the judgment and the renewal look like a single event. The tares are left to grow until the harvest and gathered in one operation at the end of the age (Matthew 13:30, 39-40). All who are in the tombs come out in one hour (John 5:28-29). Peter has the day of the Lord arrive like a thief, and the new heavens and new earth follow directly (2 Peter 3:10-13), with no thousand years in between.
And a text that seems to know intervals Paul’s answer, in the chapter on resurrection: each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end (1 Corinthians 15:23-24). Two thousand years already separate the first stage from the second, so the premillennialist asks why the interval before the third should be assumed to be nothing. The others answer that then comes the end is describing sequence, not duration.
Satan bound: bound from what? He seized the dragon… and bound him for a thousand years, so that he might not deceive the nations any longer (Revelation 20:2-3). The amillennial reading takes that specific restraint as accomplished at the cross: now will the ruler of this world be cast out (John 12:31), and no one can plunder a strong man’s house unless he first binds the strong man (Matthew 12:29), with the nations no longer left in darkness, which is precisely what the missionary centuries look like. The premillennialist replies that a chained devil is a poor fit for one who prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). Both are reading real texts.
Tribulation is promised to the church, whatever else is true In the world you will have tribulation (John 16:33). Through many tribulations we must enter the kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). The great multitude in white are the ones coming out of the great tribulation (Revelation 7:14). Whether the great tribulation is a defined seven years at the end or the whole age of the church under pressure, no view on this page offers the Christian a life exempt from it, and the pre-tribulational hope of being taken out before it is a hope about one particular period, not a promise of comfort now.
Every chart has to stop at the same place Concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only (Matthew 24:36); it is not for you to know times or seasons (Acts 1:7). Jesus did not draw the timeline, and he told us why: what the ignorance is for is watchfulness. Therefore, stay awake, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming (Matthew 24:42).

How others have answered

Named only where the words were written about this passage. Quoted phrases are theirs; the summary around them is ours.

Justin Martyr (Dialogue with Trypho, 80-81, c. AD 155) The earliest surviving discussion, and it settles two things at once. Justin holds a literal thousand years centred on a rebuilt Jerusalem, premillennialism is not a modern invention. And in the same breath he concedes that many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise. So the disagreement is as old as the second century, and the man arguing hardest for his own view is the first on record to say that those who differ are Christians. That sentence is the reason this page does not pick a side for you.
Irenaeus (Against Heresies V.32-36, c. AD 180) The fullest early premillennial statement: the risen saints reign on a restored earth, and creation itself is renewed rather than discarded. His argument is worth noticing even if you land elsewhere, he is defending the goodness of the material world against the Gnostics, who wanted salvation to be an escape from it. His eschatology is doing doctrinal work, not satisfying curiosity.
Augustine (City of God, XX.7-9, c. AD 426) The turn that shaped the West. Augustine says he once held the literal view himself and gave it up; what remained tolerable in it, he argues, was the hope of spiritual joys, and what was not was the expectation of immoderate carnal banquets. He reads the thousand years as the present age of the church, the binding of Satan as his restraint from deceiving the nations, and the first resurrection as the new birth. Amillennialism is essentially this reading, and it held the field in the West for a thousand years.
Martin Luther (Preface to the Revelation of St. John, 1522 and 1530) Luther is a caution against confidence here. In 1522 he could not find his footing in the book at all, my spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book, and he said plainly that he considered it neither apostolic nor prophetic, ranking it last. By 1530 he had written a long new preface offering a historicist reading of the visions. The Augsburg Confession of that same year, drafted by Melanchthon with Luther’s approval, condemns the teaching that before the resurrection the godly will take possession of an earthly kingdom (Article XVII), so the Lutheran confession rules out the chiliasm of the fathers, while its author had needed eight years to decide what he thought the book was.
John Calvin (Institutes, III.25.5) Calvin rejects the chiliasts outright, and not gently: their fiction, he says, is too puerile to need or to deserve refutation, and he argues that limiting Christ’s reign to a thousand years is not too generous to the saints but insulting to Christ, since it makes the kingdom finite. Two honest notes. First, he is answering the sixteenth-century radicals in front of him, not Irenaeus. Second, and important on this page: Calvin wrote commentaries on almost every book of the Bible, and never wrote one on Revelation. If anyone offers you Calvin’s verse-by- verse exposition of Revelation 20, he is offering you something that does not exist.
The Westminster Confession (1646), chs. 32-33, and the 1689 London Baptist Confession, chs. 31-32 The confessions this site leans on describe the end without a millennium in it: the dead are raised at the last day, the just and the unjust together, and God has appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in righteousness. One resurrection, one judgment, one day. It is worth being exact about what that does and does not do, the confessions do not name premillennialism and do not condemn it; they simply lay out the end without a thousand-year reign between the return and the judgment. Read strictly, that shape is hard to fit a future millennium into. It is also the reason no Presbyterian or Reformed Baptist is required to subscribe to a millennial position by name.
Jonathan Edwards (A History of the Work of Redemption, preached 1739) The best-known postmillennial hope in this tradition: Edwards expected the gospel to advance until the nations were largely converted, and read the revivals of his own day as early rain of it. It is worth being fair to a view now often dismissed, it is not optimism about human nature. It is confidence that the Spirit will do with the preached gospel what Christ promised, before he returns rather than after.
Charles Spurgeon (sermons, incl. “The Restoration and Conversion of the Jews,” 1864) Spurgeon was premillennial, and said so from the pulpit: he expected Christ to return personally and reign, and preached a literal future for Israel from Ezekiel 37. He was not a dispensationalist, the two-stage rapture is not his, and he had no patience for date-setting or prophetic arithmetic. Set that beside Calvin above, and you have the state of the question on this site: two of the three teachers we follow read Revelation 20 differently, neither treated it as a test of fellowship, and the confession Spurgeon himself republished (the 1689) declines to settle it.
J. N. Darby (from the 1830s) and the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) The dispensational system has a traceable beginning, and saying so is not an insult: the pre-tribulational rapture, the church-age parenthesis between Daniel’s sixty-ninth and seventieth weeks, and the sharp separation of Israel from the church were assembled by John Nelson Darby among the Plymouth Brethren, and carried into ordinary English-speaking Christianity by the notes printed alongside the text in Scofield’s Bible. Its defenders answer, reasonably, that a system can be newly articulated and still be biblical, and point to earlier hints. But its own historical claim should be stated accurately, because many readers have met these ideas only as Scripture’s plain sense and have never been told they are a reading with a date.

Where it lands

It lands on the same person in every column: this Jesus, the one the disciples watched go, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven (Acts 1:11). Bodily. Visibly. Personally. Not as an idea, not as a principle of history, and not privately. Whatever else divides the four views, they are all waiting for him, and none of them is waiting for anything else.

Notice what the New Testament actually does with this doctrine, because it is never what we do with it. After the fullest passage on the return in all of Paul, the application is not a diagram: therefore encourage one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:18). Grace trains us to live self-controlled lives while waiting for our blessed hope (Titus 2:11-13). John’s conclusion from not knowing what we shall be is that everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure (1 John 3:2-3). Peter draws the sharpest one, since it all dissolves, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness (2 Peter 3:11). Comfort, purity, watchfulness. Not one apostle uses the end times to produce a chart, and not one uses it to produce fear.

So this page takes no side, on purpose. Not because the question is uninteresting, it is one of the most interesting in Scripture, and not because truth is unknowable here, but because the Confession’s rule applies: what is necessary to be known, believed, and observed, for salvation is plainly set out in Scripture (WCF 1.7), and the order of the millennium is not among those things. Paul told Timothy to have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies… the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone (2 Timothy 2:23-24). Augustine and Irenaeus disagreed. Calvin and Spurgeon disagreed. Not one of them stopped calling the others brothers, and Justin, arguing his own corner as hard as anyone ever has, said outright that those who differed were true Christians.

Which leaves the reader with real work rather than a verdict. Learn the views well enough to state each one in a form its holders would recognise; read Revelation 20 with the rest of the Bible open; hold what you conclude with both hands and none of your weight on it. And measure any eschatology, including your own, by what the apostles measured it by: stay awake (Matthew 24:42). If a view of the end makes you watchful, holy and comforted, it is doing what Scripture gives it to us to do. If it makes you frightened, or clever, or contemptuous of Christians who read it otherwise, something has gone wrong that no chart can fix.

What the passage does not settle

Nearly everything people most want to know. Whether the thousand years is a duration or a symbol. Whether the rapture and the second coming are one event or two. Who the man of lawlessness is, and what restrains him. Whether Israel’s future is a national restoration or the ingathering of Jews into the church. Which parts of the Olivet Discourse fell in AD 70 and which are still ahead. And the day and the hour, which Christ says the angels do not have and he did not have to give.

It is worth asking why God left it like this, since he plainly could have dictated a timeline in one paragraph and ended the argument. Peter says the delay itself is mercy: God is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish (2 Peter 3:9). And a church that knew the date would prepare for a date. A church that does not know is left with the only posture the New Testament ever commands about the end, which is to be found faithful whenever he comes.

One more honest limit. This page has set out four views as though each were tidy, and none of them is: there are amillennialists who expect a great final ingathering, historic premillennialists who read most of Revelation idealistically, and dispensationalists who have moved a long way from Scofield. Treat the labels as a map, and remember that the map is not the country.

Questions to sit with

For reading this with someone else, a family, a study, or a friend who asked in the first place.

Which of the three questions on this page had you never separated from the others? Does separating them change how you hear someone describe his view?
Paul’s application, after the fullest passage in the Bible on Christ’s return, is encourage one another with these words (1 Thessalonians 4:18). Is that what your view of the end does for you, and for the person you last discussed it with?
Calvin and Spurgeon landed in different places here, and neither broke fellowship over it. Where else are we tempted to build a wall God did not build?
If you knew the chart with certainty tomorrow morning, what would you actually do differently? If the answer is nothing, what is the chart for?
Peter asks what sort of people we ought to be, given how this ends (2 Peter 3:11). Answer him out loud, in your own words, before you argue about the order.