The Honor Of God

In “The Devil’s Dictionary,” that indispensable treasury of acidic wisdom, Ambrose Bierce defined the Millennium as “The period of a thousand years when the lid is to be screwed down with all the reformers on the under side.” This terse formulation is actually not much different from the term’s ordinary significance in popular American apocalyptic (see Rev. 20:1-3). In that context, the term refers to a future paradisiacal stage of history, when such constants of human experience as war, death and poverty will no longer exist. Although the earth will continue to exist in something like its familiar form, this future age will be discontinuous from secular history. It will be inaugurated by a period of natural and social disasters, culminating in the Second Coming of Christ. The biblical verse on which this view is primarily based is Rev. 20:4, which says in part:

“And I saw thrones, and men sat upon them and judgment was given to them. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of the word of God, and who did not worship the beast or his image, and did not accept his mark upon their heads or upon their hands. And they came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years…”

A good argument can be made that this view of the final stage of history was also that of primitive Christianity. Certainly it was the view of St. Irenaeus of the second century, who likened the Millennium to the Sabbath of a historical “week” that consisted of “days” of a thousand years each. This view is often called “millenarian,” and many observers have noted that it is an essentially revolutionary way of viewing history. From Montanus in second century Phrygia to David Koresh in twentieth century Texas, millenarians have tended to form sects that are separatist, often antinomian and sometimes violently insurgent. As a general matter, of course, persons and groups with millenarian beliefs live undramatic lives in harmony with their wider societies. However, millenarianism does lend itself to outbreaks of apocalyptic anxiety when historical events chime with one or another of the apocalyptic texts of the Bible. Millenarians are notorious for setting dates for the end of the world and then setting new ones when doomsday fails to materialize.

A point that often escapes American commentators on popular eschatology is that the official theology of the Roman Catholic Church, by far the largest segment of Christianity and the largest denomination even in the United States, is resolutely antimillenarian. The recently-issued “Catechism of the Catholic Church” provides a useful summary of traditional doctrine:

Par. 676 “The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the ‘intrinsically perverse’ political form of secular messianism.”

This section contains a reference to the encyclical “Divini Redemptoris” by Pius XI, which condemned the “false mysticism” of the “counterfeit of the redemption of the lowly.” The school of sociologically-informed Catholic social theory known loosely as “liberation theology” has fallen more and more into official disfavor during the pontificate of John Paul II largely because the Vatican sees it as just this sort of counterfeit, one that comes close to equating leftist politics with the creation of the Kingdom of God. Another problem with liberation theology, ironically, is that it has not proven popular with the poor whom it was intended to serve. Its chief effect so far, in fact, seems to have been to drive millions of Latin Americans into Protestant churches. (For a CIA assessment, see Patrick E. Kennon’s “The Twilight of Democracy,” Doubleday, N.Y., 1995, pp. 196-197.)

Read the essay at : http://www.johnreilly.info/catmil.htm