Clearing Up Confusion Over Distinctions #19

Below are more of Zaspel's words on Rev. 20.

“Reigning

Then there is the matter of "reigning" and the consideration that this period has a specific time of duration -- one thousand years. Premillennialists assert that the "reigning" of those of the first resurrection is one that involves rule over the lost. It is an authority exercised over rebellious men. This fits well with Rev.2:25-27, where a "rod of iron" is promised to the faithful when Christ returns (cf. 19:15). An iron rod is necessary only in a world of sin. For the amillennialist, on the other hand, the reigning is a spiritual one only, in either of two senses: 1) in the sense of a heavenly vindication of some kind in the intermediate state, or 2) in the sense of the believer's spiritual reigning "in Christ." Neither idea, however, is allowed by the text. 1) The term translated "they came to life" ( ezesan) is nowhere in the NT used to describe the continued life of the soul in heaven after the death of the body. Never. It speaks of life after death only in resurrection. It indicates the final state, not the intermediate. Furthermore, the picture presented in Rev.6:9-11 of the saints in heaven during the intermediate state is far from that of "reigning": they are crying out to the Lord for vengeance to be executed upon their oppressors still on earth. In response they are told to "rest" and be patient until the number of martyrs is complete. The situation in chapter 20, however, is the answer to this: when Christ comes in His kingdom, only then will they be raised to reign with Him. Finally, now, their time of vindication has come. And 2) while the term is used outside of the book of Revelation in a spiritual sense (e.g., Jn.5:25), we must ask, In what sense can spiritual reigning be said to last only a thousand years? Will that kind of reign not continue forever? And is it not so that we should expect suffering today and reigning only tomorrow (2Tim.2:12)? Again, the amillennialist suggestion seems neither to rise from nor fit the demands of the passage.”

Zaspel’s assumptions here are clear, that the terms “reigning” and “rod of iron” logically indicate the perfect obedience of those being reigned, that those who reign cannot be “crying out to the Lord for vindication”; the two ideas are antithetical, that Amillennialists DON’T consider the millennium to be a “specific time of duration”, that those reigning are saints who have been resurrected into glorified bodies and those who are reigned are unbelievers (those unbelievers over whom they reign are yet in their physical bodies—such an interpretation should raise several questions). As for the nature of spiritual reigning, there is certainly no warrant by biblical or systematic theology to suggest that it must be exactly the same in this age and the age to come. Also, the dichotomy between the “reigning” in Rev. 20 and suffering is falsely imposed.

And in the following section from "John's Use of the OT", he quotes hymnodist and Greek scholar Henry Alfred.

“The famous admonition of Henry Alford concerning arbitrary interpretation in Rev.20 merits repeating here:

‘As regards the text itself, no legitimate treatments of it will extort what is known as the spiritual interpretation now in fashion. If, in a passage where two resurrections are mentioned, where certain psychai ezesan ["souls came to life"] at the first, and the rest of the nekroi ezesan ["dead came to life"] only at the end of a specified period after the first, -- if in such a passage the first resurrection may be understood to mean spiritual rising with Christ, while the second means literal rising from the grave; -- then there is an end of all significance in language, and Scripture is wiped out as a definite testimony to anything.’

Alford's criticism is a valid one. It is demonstrably evident that the interpreter who admits no inter-regnum period prior to the eternal state in Rev.20 approaches the passage with preconceived notions and leaves with the same; he gains from the text "neither the exact sense nor the value."”

I can't help but think that if Alfred's line of reasoning was consistently applied to all the New Testament, then he and Zaspel both would not end up as Calvinists, at least not the variety that espouses particular redemption. Because, at least as one makes a surface reading of certain texts such as 2 Peter 3:9, 1 John 2:2, and others, one could conclude that God intends to save every living soul, but when one begins to place these texts in the greater context of all of revelation, one will soon see that not all persons are saved and he becomes an advocate of a preveinient sort of redemptive grace for "all" or "the whole world", but hopefully, soon after that, when one continues to contextualize the atonement through the testaments, one becomes an advocate of particular redemption, but not through what Alfred would call a "legitimate treatment". Again, we see that our interpretations come directly from our operating assumptions; how we reason through scripture texts. And at least at the point of Rev. 20, both Alfred and Zaspel refuse to admit that their interpretation is tied to any assumption about how to come to a conclusion regarding scripture.

At this point I plan to pause in my critique of Zaspel's essay and discuss in more depth, the hermeneutical assumptions of Premillenialist and Covenant Theologians.

Thus it can be said of Zaspel’s conclusions in general (as laid out in his essay, “The Kingdom The Millennium, and The Eschaton”, that he does just what he has repeatedly accused the Amillennialist of, reading the text in light of assumptions, but his own Premillennial grid of assumptions causes interpretations which have their own difficulties to which he is blinded because he appears unwilling to admit to the existence of and examine those hermeneutical operating assumptions from which his interpretations flow.