The following is something I wrote in and around 2007; I was still a dyed-in-the-wool dispensationalist when I wrote this. But I was attempting to be as a critical as I possibly could be towards a hermeneutical system, and biblical eschatological position, that I had always been told was heretical and even antisemitic. I was told, by dispensationalism’s best teachers, that amillennialists engaged in a purely allegorical and idealistic interpretation of Holy Scripture; especially when it came to the theology and book of Revelation. And yet as I continued to study and press in further this simply was not the case whatsoever. Maybe some within the amil camp operated or operate that way, but that is not the majority report among amillennial exegetes; nor is it the historic position amongst amillennialists. I might qualify a little bit of what I wrote so many years ago (but not in substance). I turned amil publicly probably fourteen years ago now, and for many exegetical reasons (especially with the help of Richard Bauckham’s work on the book and theology of Revelation).

Some in my old church circles label anything that is not their hard classical dispensationalism—pretrib-premil—as ‘replacement theology,’ or more technically it has been called supersessionism. This is the idea that all the promises made to ethnic Israel, once Christ came and the church was established, were taken over by the church spiritually; and of course this would be antisemitic, and thus antiChrist and heretical (since Jesus is the forever son of David, the forever Man from Nazareth). But this is not what historic amillennialism has entailed; at least not in the Protestant appropriation of it.

Let me add one qualification before I reshare what I wrote years ago: I take the Bible, in principle, to be intensively and radically about Jesus Christ (the One for the many); so did Jesus in His teachings found in John 5 and Luke 24, respectively. As such, the whole point of ethnic Israel’s existence (just as the whole point of creation’s reality in general) is in fact to mediate Christ to and for the world. To elevate human history to a level that makes Jesus an abstraction vis-a-vis ethnic Israel completely inverts the whole inner reality of everything; that makes the nation of Israel the point of salvation and creational history, and not the triune God in the scandal and particularity of Jesus Christ is to end up in another form of replacement theology, another type of supersessionism wherein the nation of Israel replaces the person of Jesus Christ as the reason and being for all of history. It is a false dilemma dispensationalists offer when they assert that it is either all about the nation of Israel or the person of the Christ. It is a false dilemma because Jesus is continuously the Jew, and thus the fulfillment and reality of what it means to be Jewish before God in an ultimate way. The Christ is the second and greater Adam, which entails the notion that to be in the eternal and heavenly Adam, come to earth, is to be participants in an elevated and life of primacy which is Christ’s for the world. In other words, was Adam an ethnic Jew; was Abraham even an ethnic Jew (see Rom 4)? God’s purposes are ultimately creational/re-creational; they are cosmic, not sectarian; they are concrete, not abstract and dualistic; they are to see this time and God’s time (“eternity”) as coterminous through the analogy and reality of the hypostatic union of God and humanity in the Logos ensarkos (the Word [of God] enfleshed).

Here is how I described amillennialism so many years ago now:

Monergism.com, some years back, picked up a little summary description I wrote somewhere (on-line) on what Amillennialism entails as an interpretive system. Here’s what I wrote:

The Amillennialist affirms that the people of Israel have not been cast off or replaced, but rather, that the Gentiles have now been included among the Jews in God’s Covenantal promises. In other words, not replacement but expansion. God’s redemptive plan, as first promised to Abraham, was that “all nations” would be blessed through him. Israel is, and always has been, saved the same as any other nation: by the promises to the seed, Christ. Amillennialists, do not believe in a literal 1000 year reign of Christ on earth after His second coming. Rather, they affirm that when Christ returns, the resurrection of both the righteous and wicked will take place simultaneously (see John 5), followed by judgment and and the eternal state where heaven and earth merge and Christ reigns forever.

Strong points of Amillennialism

1) It is highly Christocentric: it makes Christ the center of all the biblical covenants (even the “Land” covenant or Sinaitic)
2) It notes the universal scope of the Abrahamic Covenant (as key) to interpreting the rest of the biblical covenants
3) It sees salvation history oriented to a person (Christ), instead of a people (the nation of Israel)
4) It emphasizes continuity between the “people of God” (Israel and the Church are one in Christ Eph. 2:11ff)
5) It provides an ethic that is rooted in creation, and “re-creation” (continuity between God’s redemptive work now, carried over into the eternal state then)
6) It emphasizes a trinitarian view of God as it elevates the “person”, Christ Jesus, the second person of the trinity as the point and mediator of all history
7) It flows from a hermeneutic that takes seriously the literary character of the Scriptures (esp. the book of Revelation) [see the quote at Monergism.com here]

One more point of clarification: I am not, of course, your normal Covenantal theology amillennialist. Mongerism [dot] com is. I am “Barthian covenantal,” which is a completely different creature; particularly as that is funded by Barth’s reformulated doctrine of predestination (election-reprobation).