Millennialism Research Paper

1. The Term Millennialism

The terms millennialism, millenarism, and millenarianism are more or less synonymous, although some writers (Harrison 1979) have sought to distinguish millennialism as scholarly theological concern with prophetic exegesis, and millenarianism as applicable to social movements preaching the imminence of the millennium. This distinction, however, is not observed generally. The term chiliasm (Greek chilioi—a thousand) is also employed in reference to social manifestations of belief in the early outworking of prophecy.

2. Historical Provenance

Millennial ideas arose in Zoroastrianism which exerted an influence on Judaic eschatology in which it became a strong theme. Jewish apocalyptic literature linked the millennium to the expectation of a returning messiah, a king to save his people, and this association informed the expectation among early Christians that Christ would soon return to earth to rule over his kingdom for 1,000 years. The concept gradually has acquired wider application to contexts other than the

Judeo–Christian, and is used loosely to refer to a long period of time rather than specifically to 1,000 years, but it is in Christianity that millennialism is most fully, albeit controversially, articulated.

2.1 Development in Early and Medieval Christianity

In Christian history, an assortment of New Testament texts, especially Revelation 20, have been cited alongside the Old Testament books of Isaiah, Daniel, and Ezekiel to provide both a sequence of events and allegorical reference points as a basis for a chronology for the prophesied millennium. Some early Church fathers and various heretical movements expected an imminent literal outworking of prophecy, and looked forward to indulgences and pleasures which they had hitherto denied themselves. Augustine changed Christian thinking by regarding the contemporary epoch of the Church to be the millennium, at the end of which Christ would return and establish the conditions of eternity. Millennial ideas did not disappear, however, and found expression in the theories of Joachim of Fiore in the twelfth century and in various heretical movements, and they received a new impulse from sects that arose in Reformation times.

3. Pre- and Postmillennialism

For later Christians, Daniel Whitby (1638–1726) formulated the position which became widely accepted, that the advent would occur at the end of the millennium rather than before, thus establishing a distinction between postmillennialists (who believed that the advent would follow the millennium) and premillennialists. Postmillennialists held optimistic beliefs about social progress and the diffusion of the Christian message through missionary activity, thus paving the way for the return of Christ. The designation ‘millennialist’ was henceforth applied to premillennialists, those expecting the imminent second advent of Christ. Among themselves, premillennialists differed about other matters, among which were: whether the tribulation alluded to in I and II Thessalonians would occur before or after the ‘rapture’ of the saints (i.e., their being caught up in the clouds to join Christ); and whether the millennial kingdom would be established on earth (as believed by Jehovah’s Witnesses) or in heaven (as maintained by Seventh-day Adventists). Most millennialists have been ‘mortalists,’ denying that man possessed an immortal soul.

3.1 The Development of Premillennialism

Millennialism has given rise to numerous episodes of fanaticism. After the Reformation, the ‘open Bible’ policy of Protestants gave millennial expectations common currency. Many movements inspired by expectations of the early fulfillment of prophecy have been of short duration, particularly those with adherents who took it upon themselves to take up arms to help bring the advent and the millennium about. Such were the Anabaptists who occupied the city of Munster in Westphalia in 1534, and the Fifth Monarchy Men who challenged the secular authorities in the 1650s in England.

3.2 Dating in Prophetic Exegesis

Millennialists have not depended on the secular calendar in affirming when the millennium would begin, but have often set dates. Only the most proximate dates have inspired active movements. Expected dates have been calculated by the choice of specific past events as the departure point for the outworking of chronology and the application of numerological principles. Those calculations concerning the fulfillment of prophecy generally have not coincided with the completion of the first or second millennia of the western calendar. Not all movements have committed themselves to predicting specific dates, and others have done so guardedly in recollection of the repeated scriptural warnings that Christ would come ‘like a thief in the night.’ Jehovah’s Witnesses have been perhaps the most persistent in setting dates for the fulfillment of prophecy (having, formally or informally, at different times and successively harbored keen expectations of 1874, 1914, 1925, and 1975). The Seventh-day Adventists, after the disappointed hopes of William Miller’s predictions for 1843 and 1844, have abandoned date-setting, while the Christadelphians, although much exercised on the subject and disposed, especially in their early years (1840s and 1850s), to look for signs in contemporary political events to match biblical prophecies, have for a long time disavowed the possibility of acquiring accurate foreknowledge of the time of Christ’s return.

3.3 The Size of Modern Millennial Movements

Whilst postmillennial orientations stimulated missionary and revivalist activity in the eighteenth century, particularly in North America, the pessimism implicit in premillennialism previously had inspired movements which operated in considerable tension with the state and the wider society, and these hostile movements usually were small and localized. Growth of literacy and improved communications in the nineteenth century allowed sectarian premillennialists to organize much larger, enduring, and widespread movements, some of which, by the end of the twentieth century, had followings counted in millions (e.g., the Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses). As the need for better accommodation with modern society and the agencies of the state grew, so these sects became less aggressive and their insistence on the imminent end of the existing dispensation less strident.

3.4 The Social Constituency of Millennialism

It has been a general assumption that those attracted to millennial sects are not only pessimistic about general social conditions, but are likely to be drawn from disinherited social groups, and the relative deprivation thesis has been frequently invoked to explain their appeal. As a generalization this may be warranted, but by no means all of those attracted to millennialism have formed their views in socially or culturally disadvantaged circumstances. Prominent Protestant thinkers—Joseph Mede, the theologian, and the scientist, Isaac Newton, among them— were devoted to numerological exegeses of biblical prophecy. The initial leaders of the strongly adventist (premillennial) Catholic Apostolic Church included several Anglican priests and Church of Scotland ministers, and all but one of that church’s 12 apostles were either lesser aristocracy or professional men. Several lay supporters were, or became, MPs or higher civil servants. The originators of the contemporaneous movement devoted to premillennialist prophetic exegesis (later known as the Plymouth Brethren), were clerics and ordinands, and local leaders were often men of some substance. Nineteenth century millennialism had an appeal which extended beyond the working class.

4. When Prophecy Fails

Millennial movements all face the prospect of the failure of prophecy, and examination of their history reveals diverse responses to this problem. Gager, following Festinger’s study of a contemporary adventist cult (When Prophecy Fails 1956) has contended that the expansion of early Christianity was attributable, at least in part, to the failure of millennial expectations (Gager 1975). Believers sought to overcome the cognitive dissonance of failed prophecy by persuading others that they were not wrong: the next best thing to being proved right was to persuade others to join you and to accept your rationalizations for the error. The evidence on early Christianity is perhaps too sketchy to substantiate this contention, while Festinger may have studied too small and ephemeral a movement (in which he and his team constituted too influential a group) to warrant the comparison.

4.1 Two Responses to Failure

Even so, some millennialist movements have triumphed over repeated failure of prophecy, and have done so by various different strategies. Perhaps the most successful of contemporary millennial bodies, the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has flourished by cultivating an encompassing program of educational, dietetic, and therapeutic welfare in which to engage members’ energies. This policy originated early in the movement’s history, and has expanded despite the apparent inconsistency of devoting resources to welfare in a world due soon to be overturned by the cataclysmic events supposedly foretold in the Scriptures. In contrast to this many-sided strategy to occupy the faithful, Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose theology teaches that God’s Kingdom is already established but not yet visible, seek to engage their following single-mindedly in the work of recruitment. This is a response to failed prophecy more or less on the Festinger model. By deploying their ‘publishers’ (the movement’s designation of its members) in extensive house-to-house calls, the movement has developed a systematic method not only of winning new adherents but, perhaps more importantly, of involving members in the regular reaffirmation of their own commitment. The primacy of this latter function becomes apparent when it is acknowledged that at least 200 h of canvassing are on average expended by publishers for each additional new convert.

4.2 The Introversionist Response

The Plymouth (Exclusive) Brethren response to hope deferred has been a classic withdrawal from involvement in the wider society into a more introversionist position. The movement has ceased to proselytize: although still undertaking token public proclamation of ‘the truth,’ they are far from exhorting listeners ‘to come and join us’—joining is not an option that is made easy. The Brethren, who regard their assemblies as already a foretaste of heaven, expect the Holy Spirit to guide all sincere Christians to them and their way of life. Maintaining communal purity has become a primary concern, hence the insistence on separation from the inherently evil world, and the diffidence respecting would-be converts. A less extreme example of the same shift of orientation from keen millennialist expectations to a more introverted position is also found among the Christadelphians.

4.3 The Demise of the Catholic Apostolics

Perhaps the most radical resolution of the experience of failed prophecy was that of the Catholic Apostolic Church. The Church confidently expected the advent to occur in the lifetime of its original 12 apostles, who were designated (by members who claimed the gift of prophecy) in the early days of the Church’s formation in c. 1830–5. An apostle died in 1855, and a shocked church acknowledged that there was no brief to replace him. The last of the 12 died in 1901. Thereafter, the Church, according to its own rubrics, lacked legitimacy to ordain ministers. Eventually, in the 1970s, the last minister, ordained by the last apostle, also died. The self-prescribed denial of the competence to make new appointments virtually pre-ordained the demise of the Church if prophecy failed. A schismatic branch in Germany survives, the Neue Apostolische Gemeinde, in which designated prophets took a different view and nominated successors to apostles as they died.

5. Millennialism in Other Religious Traditions

The millennial theme represents a final outworking of history, in which the wicked are punished, and the righteous are saved in a process which is envisaged generally as involving severe tribulations. The term is applied loosely, however, and the constituent elements of millennialism, as manifested in Christian eschatology, are often absent in so-called millennialist movements in other religious traditions. In Judaism, the messianic element is strong, and has stimulated the emergence of messianic claimants. The most celebrated of these was Shabbatei Tzevi (1626–76), a self-styled messiah whose following, and that of his various successors, was widespread throughout the Middle East and Europe, and which persisted even after he recanted and converted to Islam. In Islam, the Shi’ite tradition of a hidden imam, due to return to lead the faithful in some future time, incorporates both messianic and millennial themes, but the rising of the Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed ibn Seyyid, in nineteenthcentury Sudan appears to have been a more explicit admixture of revolutionary political aims and religious fervor. The visions of future salvation, following a period of tribulation, found in the claims made in the Hindu tradition for Kalki, an avatar of Vishnu, and the prospect of the forthcoming troubled age of Mappo, in Mahayana Buddhism, have lacked the power to inspire significant social movements and scarcely qualify to be designated millennialist. The other-worldliness of Indian religion appears to render it inhospitable to millennialist themes. A more explicitly millennialist movement occurred in late nineteenth-century China, in the T’ai‘ping rebellion, but this movement was influenced directly by Christian ideas.

6. Third World Instances

A wide assortment of religious uprisings among tribal peoples are often termed millennialist. Most of these movements are ephemeral. Some are openly militant, proclaiming either the early return of the ancestors and engaging in practices designation as nativistic, or claiming to be the true originators of all the innovative accoutrements of western civilization. Sometimes a messiah is promised as the savior who will usher in the time of prosperity and bliss, and the prophet harbinger of the new era may himself be cast in the role of messiah. The cargo cults of Melanesia exemplify the collective messiahship of the ancestors for whose return votaries practiced ecstatic rituals or sought to dance the new dispensation into being. The Ghost Dance of 1870 among the tribes of California and its more celebrated successor of 1890 proclaimed collective salvation once the ancestors were induced to return to practice the old ways.

6.1 Christian Influences in Third World Cases

Many of these movements were influenced powerfully by Christian millennialism. Christian missionaries were often clergy of fundamentalist persuasion, or were drawn from fundamentalist denominations: millennialism was a stock part of their message. The Kitawala movement in what is today Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi was a radical and semipoliticized millennial cult which owed its inspiration to Watchtower preachers (later designated as Jehovah’s Witnesses) of whom Joseph Booth, a sometime Seventh-day Adventist, was a conspicuously influential figure. Suggestions that the Tupinamba and Tupi–Guaranı tribes in South America who, as early as the mid-sixteenth century, were discovered to embrace a cult which taught that they might dance themselves to weightlessness and be carried off to a promised land of deathlessness in the East, illustrated the possibility of autochthonous millennialism, uninfluenced by Christianity, may be discounted, since those who first reported this phenomenon were Jesuits.

6.2 Mass Magical Movements

Various Third World movements were designated readily as millennial even though all that they promised were miraculous therapies or new means for detecting witches. Such were the various Zionist sects of South Africa; the pocomania cults of Jamaica, which claimed to counteract obiah, so-called black magic; and the Lumpa Church of Alice Lenshina which fell victim to military intervention ordered by the Zambian government in 1964. These cults have operated essentially at the individual level, seeking to play very little part in inducing changes in social consciousness.

6.3 Revolutionist Movements and Social Consciousness

The more avowedly revolutionist movements have often enjoyed greater influence. Such was the case with the Hau-Hau movement among the Maoris which played a role in the Maori Wars; the Maji Maji Rebellion in East Africa; the afore-mentioned Kitawala movement in Central Africa in provoking the Chilembwe uprising; and the collective resistance movement among erstwhile mutually hostile North American tribes under Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee prophet. Millennialism has often served as an unwitting agency in raising the consciousness of tribal or ethnic identity, or of the need to transcend it in a wider cause. This appears to have occurred among Rastafarians in the West Indies, and more effectively among the Mahdists of the Sudan in the formation of a new state. Prospects of salvation as a chosen people in a new millennium caused Paul to declare that Christians were ‘neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free,’ but a new people with a new collective identity.

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