Pre-Wrath Prevarications

Yet another quote from the Pre-Wrath website:

Since a view of a literal thousand-year kingdom on earth holds that there is still a future kingdom for the Jews, and that God has not rejected the nation of Israel and yet will fulfill His covenants with them, this view came to be rejected in this growing anti-Jewish church culture.

There are two mixed up notions here which the pre-wrath advocates can't seem to understand in their materials. On one hand they want to present their view as the historically accepted view in the Earliest Church days. As one of their sources writes:

In contrast to this “great cloud of witnesses” for the chiliastic (one thousand year kingdom) view of the early church, there are virtually no early church documents prior to AD 325 which support a different view.

On the other they have this notion that the 1000 year reign of Christ on the Earth somehow relates to genetic descendants of Jacob/Israel.

What did the Early Pre-Millennialists believe?
The early Premillennialists believed that Christ was going to return to the Earth for a reign of 1000 years after which there would be a general resurrection of the dead. They did not equate this 1000 year time period for National Israel. They did not see "the church age as a parenthesis" as the Pre-Wrath and other Dispensational variants see it.

In other words, the early church had a completely different view of the purpose and peopling of the 1000 year reign of Christ than the Pre-Wrathers do today. Not only was the purpose different, but the people who inhabit the time are different. Ask yourself, who rules and reigns with Christ during that 1000 years according to the book of Revelation? Is it Israel or is it the Church?

The bottom line is that their view is sadly mistaken and the notion of a future for Israel is a separate question from the 1000 year reign which they have mixed up due to their own Dispensational leanings. Most, if not all, of the early church did not see this 1000 years as focused on Israel. They saw it as the church age. No wonder Amillennialism arose, since it was a natural continuation of this same theme, not some new radical teaching.

This is an important point and refutes the central notion of Pre-Wrathism, namely their claim of historical connection to the Early Church's view on Pre-millennialism. The only thing their view has in common with the Early Church is the return of Christ at the start of the 1000 year period. Everything else about their view is different. The Early Church writers did not see a need for the Millennium to fulfill some Old Covenant promises to Israel. They realized that the New Covenant was now the controlling document and that the Old Covenant had died with the destruction of the temple in 70 AD as the final evidence of the ending of that Covenant (with the cross being the very real beginning of the end).

Wikipedia article on the differences between the Historical Pre-millennialism and the Dispensational Pre-millennialism.

Was Early Amillennialism a Result of Anti-Semitism?
Or were there other reasons for the rise. I suggest above why it made perfect sense when a couple of hundred years passed to assume that since Jesus who was already reigning from Heaven they were in the millennium. After all, there are no texts which show Jesus returning to the Earth prior to the Millennium without making assumptions brought into particular texts. Check it out, it's true!

Also, there were many Pre-millennial authors who were anti-semitic by today's standards. It's not necessary to go beyond the New Testament itself to find materials which people have claimed is anti-Semitic. The recent hoopla over the movie "The Passion of the Christ" demonstrates that content directly out of the Gospels appears to some as anti-semitic.

It is important for Christians to understand the work of Christ that was done by His death and resurrection from the dead. Once we really understand that we can proclaim to all of our neighbors, Jew and Gentile alike, that Jesus really is the Savior of the entire world.

For a good short article on the Orthodox view, see this page.