Clearing Up Confusion Over Distinctions #11

Below I am continuing to critique Zaspel's essay,"The Kingdom, The Millennium, & The Escaton"

“In the context (19:11ff) our Lord is portrayed as coming to earth in triumphal glory and taking vengeance upon His enemies. That John intends for us to understand this millennium to be following this return seems evident from his repeated use of the chronological kai ("and") used throughout (cf. 19:11, 17, 19; 20:1, 4, etc.).

Whatever details and meanings are involved in the symbolism which John employs, the stated order of events is,

1) Return of Christ in victory (19:11-21)

2) Destruction of the evil triumvirate (the beast, the false

prophet, and Satan) in which Satan is deposed to the abyss

(19:19-20:3)

3) First resurrection (20:4)

4) 1,000 year kingdom ( ebasileusan . . . basileusousin, 20:4-6)

5) Release of Satan and a final rebellion (20:7-9) [I'm not entirely sure why #6 was left out of Zaspel's essay.]

7) Final destruction of Satan, who now is cast into the lake of

fire where the beast and false prophet have been (20:10)

8) Second resurrection & final judgment (20:11-15)”

There are several assumptions that Zaspel makes about these passages: the one which he admitted out front (that his hermeneutical principle of linear chronology is necessary to rightly interpret this passage), and two, that the description in Revelation 19:11-21, a) refers to the Parusia, b) that the armies of Heaven refer to the saints and not angelic beings, and c) that the wrath poured out here is the wrath at the end of the age. These may even be safe conclusions if the primary hermeneutical principle employed to arrive at them was the best one, but the case is that the hermeneutic of liner chronology causes one to jettison the greater principle of the analogy of faith, and to basically ignore (such as often occurs in the application of a dispensational premillennial hermeneutic to the apocryphal literature found in the Canon) the genre of chapter 20 of the Revelation of Christ to John. The former mistaken principle is faulty because it: 1) looses sight of the many texts of scripture which testify to the return of Christ (which is judgment for the wicked and deliverance for the righteous) seemingly being immediately followed by the eternal state, 2) imposes the theological difficulties of having glorified creatures and non-glorified creatures inhabiting the same place, 3) it forces either the judgment at the Parusia to be limited because of the presence of the living God among sinners, or God’s presence to be limited. The obvious problem with that is that the scriptures on a whole don’t allow for persons to be saved after Christ’s return and God is Holy and sin cannot exist in His presence, thus all those who enter the supposed literal 1000 year Earthly reign of Christ as unredeemed must remain unredeemed, un-glorified and sinful in nature. The later mistaken hermeneutical principle over-literalizes the passage by demanding that the 1000 year period represents a period of exactly that amount of time, as time is counted on Earth. On the surface this appears to be a conclusion resulting from a reasonable hermeneutic, but if one takes into account the other uses of numbers in the book, one could quickly see how the consistent application of that hermeneutic would be confusing; take these passages for example:

Rev. 4: “4 Around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and seated on the thrones were twenty-four elders, clothed in white garments, with golden crowns on their heads.”

Rev. 7: “1 After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree… 4 And I heard the number of the sealed, 144,000, sealed from every tribe of the sons of Israel:”

It seems to me that the hermeneutical principles of hyper-literalism and linear chronology are unwarranted, and serve only to confuse the would-be interpreter of Revelation 20 because they are used to trump the greater hermeneutical principle of the analogy of faith.