I Hope you can shed a little light on the Amillennialism view for me. I have been running into a growing number of Sovereign Grace Calvinist’s who are departing from the traditional pre-trib/pre-millennial view. They are also claiming grounds for not having fellowship with those who believe in a literal rebuilding of the Temple and re-instituted animal sacrifices. This doesn’t sound right to me. Can you elaborate where they get this teaching from?
The amillennial view has been defined as the belief that there is no millennium based on the prefix “a” which means no. However those who hold the amillennial view actually do believe in a millennium. They believe the millennium is happening now, during the Church Age, and that the Lord is currently reigning through the Church. However, His reign is not necessarily for a literal 1,000 years and it is entirely spiritual in nature. Therefore they don’t look forward to a literal 1,000 year Messianic reign on Earth the way pre-millennialists do. Since they believe there won’t be a literal future kingdom in Israel, then there’s no prophetic need for Israel to exist, so there won’t be a future Temple and there won’t be a return to animal sacrifice.
Amillennialism has been around a long time, having been organized into a formal set of beliefs in the 4th Century by Augustine. It became the dominant view of the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic churches and was the official view of the Protestant Reformation. The return to a literal interpretation of prophetic Scripture in the 1800’s resulted in the reemergence of the pre-millennial view, which had been widely held in the earliest days of the Church.