Millennialism from the Renaissance to the modern world

The Taborites were perhaps the most important millennial group of the late Middle Ages and represent a transition to the new age of millennial movements in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Borrowing themes from the English Reformer John Wycliffe, Czech preachers advocated a radical, antipapal reform. Jan Hus, the most prominent of these men, was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance in 1415, which strengthened the hand of the most radical and millennial Taborites, who targeted 1420 as the date of the End. For two decades the region was plagued with wars that inspired the social and revolutionary elements of millennialism and that led to the establishment of a national church centred in Prague.

The approach of the year 7000 am I (ad 1500) brought with it a number of millennial currents. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 not only removed the last remnant of the Roman Empire but also introduced the West to the secret knowledge of works such as the Hermetic writings, which reinvigorated the Joachite tradition with Gnostic elements concerning the transformation of the world. Among the enthusiasts of the proliferation of prophecy and knowledge was the explorer Christopher Columbus. At this point, aided by the newly invented printing press, various millennial prophecies spread throughout Europe. These new strains, linked to the Gnostic search for knowledge that could change nature, had important implications for the emergence of modern science. The Renaissance, with its belief in a new world in the making and its eagerness to embrace any new form of thinking, may represent the first “New Age” movement—i.e., the first secular millennial movement on record.

From the Renaissance onward European culture developed an ever-more secular strain of millennialism. In a sense, the longer God tarried, the more humans took over his job of bringing about the perfect kingdom. Utopian and scientific traditions and radical democratic movements such as the French Revolution, radical socialism, and Marxism, as well as Nazism and, in a modified form, Zionism, can all be seen as secular millennial movements. In a sense, totalitarianism may have resulted from millennial movements that seized power, failed in their millennial hopes, and therefore “forced” the perfection of mankind.

Popular millennial movements, however, returned in strength with the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Although not a millennial thinker, Martin Luther used powerful apocalyptic rhetoric and repeatedly called the pope the Antichrist. In so doing, he unleashed a wave of millennialism that ranged from the revolutionary German Peasants’ Revolt, led by Thomas Müntzer in 1524–25, and the Anabaptists, who met a violent end in Münster (Germany) in 1535, to the peaceful Hutterite and Mennonite groups that grew out of the Anabaptist movement. But the period’s most powerful form of millennialism emerged in the British Isles after Henry VIII introduced Protestantism as the official religion in 1534. Puritanism, in both England and Scotland, had strong millennial elements that eventually burst forth during the English Civil Wars (1642–51), unleashing a panoply of new millennial movements—the Levelers, Diggers, Ranters, Quakers, and Muggletonians. Nor was the 17th century limited to Christian millennialism: in 1666 the most widespread millennial movement in the history of Judaism climaxed with the career of Shabbetai Tzevi, whose messianic message ignited Jewish communities in both Muslim and Christian lands.

The Puritan millennial strain came to North America with the Pilgrims and has, essentially, marked American religiousness ever since. The Great Awakening (c. 1720–1740s) and the Second Great Awakening (c. 1795–1835) were both inspired by millennial fervour sparked by the teachings of Jonathan Edwards. Both the theological underpinnings of the Great Awakenings and their emphasis on collective penitence, public weeping, and hymn singing reflect the characteristics of earlier millennial movements. According to some historians, the enthusiasm of the Great Awakening was redirected into the militant patriotism of the American Revolution, whose religious rhetoric was steeped in millennial themes. In addition to its more mainstream manifestation in the Great Awakenings, American millennialism gave birth to a wide range of new religious movements, including those of the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

American millennialism split into two traditions: premillennialism (the belief that Jesus will come before the millennium and inaugurate it) and postmillennialism (the belief that Jesus will come after the millennium inaugurated by an inspired mankind). The former tends to be catastrophic. According to premillennialism, the seven years before the advent of Jesus will be marked by the Rapture (the rescue of the living “saints” by the Lord), war, disease, famine, and the coming of the Antichrist. Postmillennialism, on the other hand, tends to be progressive and gradualist, suggesting that things are getting better all the time. Premillennialism also tends to be apolitical (only personal repentance and purification can prepare one for the End); postmillennialism is activist (through reform the kingdom can be created). In the late 19th century premillennialism gained the upper hand in much American millennial thinking, only to be overtaken by postmillennialist reformism in the early decades of the 20th century. The evangelical and fundamentalist reaction that developed c. 1910–30 was premillennial and grounded in dispensationalism (the notion that God has dealt differently with humanity during various dispensations, or periods when humankind is tested regarding specific revelations of God’s will). Inspired by the work of John Darby and the Scofield Bible, dispensationalism was committed to reversing the secularizing tendencies of reformist postmillennialism.

Premillennialism has remained extremely popular in Protestant circles in the United States. It reappeared in the 1970s with the publication of Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) and the Rapture film Thief in the Night (1972). Edgar Whisenant’s pamphlet 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988 (1988) initiated a range of Rapture predictions that appeared throughout the 1990s. Also in the ’90s the Y2K virus (a computer software problem that makes computers interpret the year 2000 as 1900) triggered a new wave of apocalyptic thinking among premillennial preachers such as Chuck Missler, Jack Van Impe, and Jerry Falwell and became the great ecumenical apocalyptic prophecy of the age.