End times

“…waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

— Titus 2:13

Eschatology, from the Greek eschatos (“last”), is the doctrine of the church’s final hope: Christ’s return, the resurrection of the dead, the final judgment, and the eternal state that follows. Scripture presents these “last things” as already begun in Christ’s first coming, death, and resurrection, yet not yet fully arrived until his return, so that the kingdom of God “has come and is coming.”¹ “End times” narrows this wider doctrine to the events surrounding Christ’s return specifically, and it is this narrower question, not the doctrine as a whole, that Reformed Christians who share the same confession still divide over.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states plainly that “God hath appointed a day wherein he will judge the world in righteousness, by Jesus Christ.”² The confession devotes a chapter to this final judgment but does not adjudicate the order or nature of the events leading up to it: it says nothing about a millennium, a rapture, or the relationship between Christ’s return and the intermediate state. That silence is not an oversight to be filled in by inference; it reflects a real, ongoing disagreement among Reformed Baptists, covered below, about matters the confession itself leaves open.

Biblical Basis

The angels at the ascension promise a visible, personal return: “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11). Paul describes that return in physical terms, the dead in Christ raised and living believers gathered to meet him (1 Thess. 4:16-17), and elsewhere grounds the whole resurrection hope in Christ’s own resurrection as its “firstfruits” (1 Cor. 15:20-23). Peter describes a coming “day of the Lord” in which the created order itself will be remade (2 Pet. 3:10-13), and John describes a final judgment before God’s throne, “books were opened,” followed by a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 20:11-15; 21:1). Revelation 20:1-6, describing a thousand-year reign of Christ, is the single passage most responsible for the disagreement, among Reformed Christians and not only against outside traditions, over whether it names a future earthly reign, describes the present church age figuratively, or refers to something else again.

Historical Development

Bavinck traces a recurring pattern he calls chiliasm: reading Old Testament prophecy’s earthly, this-worldly language about the messianic kingdom with strict literalism, then having to posit two future returns of Christ and two resurrections to make room for both an earthly reign and a final heavenly state.³ He locates its origin outside the church, “not of Christian but of Jewish and Persian origin,” surfacing in Jewish apocalyptic writing before Christian theologians including Cerinthus, Papias, and Irenaeus adopted forms of it in the early centuries.³ Augustine “resisted it most vigorously,” and as the church’s own situation changed, chiliasm largely died out, only to revive during the Reformation era among radical groups who identified the papacy with the Antichrist of Revelation, and again in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries amid political upheaval.³ Bavinck’s central objection is interpretive: chiliasm “is guilty of the greatest arbitrariness in interpreting prophecy,” taking one feature of a prophetic picture literally and another “spiritually” with no consistent rule.³ Old Testament prophecy itself, he argues, “does not make a temporal distinction between the rule of Christ and the rule of God,” treating the messianic kingdom not as a temporary way-station but as continuous with God’s own eternal reign.³

Opposing Views

Reformed Baptists confessing the same 1689 LBCF hold more than one position on the millennium described in Revelation 20, and the confession’s own silence on the question is part of why. Premillennialism reads the thousand years as a future, visible reign of Christ on earth following his return, preceded by the Rapture of the church in some (though not all) premillennial schemes. Postmillennialism reads the millennium as a period of gospel triumph and cultural flourishing prior to Christ’s return, which then ushers in the eternal state directly. Amillennialism, the view Bavinck’s own historical argument tends toward, reads the thousand years figuratively, as the present reign of Christ and the saints between his first and second comings, with no distinct future earthly kingdom between his return and the eternal state.³ Each position claims to read Revelation 20 and the wider prophetic material most consistently, and each states its full exegetical case at Millennial kingdom.

Objections and Responses

If Christ’s kingdom has already come, why does Scripture keep describing it as something still to arrive? Bavinck’s answer is that both are true at once rather than in tension: “the kingdom of God has come and is coming,” a present reality in Christ’s own reign and a future consummation not yet realized.¹ Inaugurated eschatology treats this already/not-yet structure directly and at length. The appearance of contradiction dissolves once the kingdom is understood as a reign that begins in one sense at Christ’s first coming and completes in another at his second, not as a single event Scripture gives two incompatible dates for.

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶