Tribulation

“For then there will be great tribulation, such as has not been from the beginning of the world until now, no, and never will be.”

— Matthew 24:21

The Great Tribulation is the period of intense distress and persecution Jesus foretold in the Olivet Discourse (Matt. 24:21) and John saw the redeemed emerging from in Revelation (Rev. 7:14). Within dispensational premillennialism, it names a future, roughly seven-year period tied to Daniel’s seventieth week, immediately preceding Christ’s visible second coming.¹ Other confessional readings locate the same “great tribulation” not in a future discrete period but in the church’s ongoing experience of persecution across the present age, or in Jerusalem’s fall in AD 70; its timing and nature remain an open, unsettled dispute within Reformed Baptist confessional Christianity.

Confessional Contrast

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession does not name the tribulation or adjudicate its timing. Its chapter “Of the Church” does identify the Antichrist directly, in historicist rather than futurist terms, as an ongoing institution rather than a single future figure: the Pope “is that antichrist, that man of sin, and son of perdition, that exalteth himself in the church against Christ.”² That clause bears on one piece of the tribulation’s traditional furniture, Antichrist’s identity, without addressing the tribulation’s own length, timing, or character.

A second point of tension concerns the confession’s account of the resurrection and judgment, which describes a single event rather than two separated by an interval. “At the last day,” it states, “such of the saints as are found alive, shall not sleep, but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other.”³ The following chapter adds a single appointed day on which “all persons that have lived upon the earth shall appear before the tribunal of Christ.”⁴ This sits in tension with the dispensational scheme’s two-stage second coming, a rapture followed, after the tribulation, by a separate “revelation,” though the confession does not name that specific question or rule on it.

Arguments

Dispensational premillennialism reads Daniel’s prophecy of seventy “weeks” (Dan. 9:24-27) as seventy sets of seven years, the last of which remains future, separated from the first sixty-nine by the present church age. Louis Berkhof, writing from an amillennial position, still summarizes the resulting scheme carefully: the second coming “consists of two separate events, separated from each other by a period of seven years.” The first is the parousia, at which Christ appears in the air, the dead in Christ are raised, and living believers are caught up to meet him, “the rapture.” An interval of seven years follows, “often divided into two parts,” in which the gospel is preached, Israel is converted, and, “in the second half of this period of seven years there will be a time of unequalled tribulation, the length of which is still a subject of debate. Antichrist will be revealed and the vials of God’s wrath will be poured out upon the human race.” Only then does “the revelation” follow, Christ’s visible coming to earth “with” rather than merely “for” his saints.¹

The case rests on reading Matthew 24, 2 Thessalonians 2, and Revelation 6-19 as still-future rather than already fulfilled: the “abomination of desolation” (Matt. 24:15), the “man of sin” revealed at a definite future point (2 Thess. 2:3, 8), and the sequence of seals, trumpets, and bowls poured out on the earth. Charles Hodge, representing the wider non-dispensational Reformed tradition rather than the dispensational scheme specifically, agrees that Scripture teaches a future persecuting power will precede Christ’s return: “there will probably enough remain unchanged in heart to be the germ of that persecuting power which shall bring about those days of tribulation which the Bible seems to teach are to immediately precede the coming of the Lord.”⁵ On the question of Antichrist’s identity, Hodge surveys three views current among interpreters, a general antichristian spirit or power, a single future individual, or the papacy, and notes the last is “the common opinion… among Protestants,” though he does not adjudicate between them in this passage.⁶

Historical Development

The Reformation-era historicist reading

Historicism, the Reformers’ near-universal reading of apocalyptic prophecy, located the tribulation not in a future discrete period but in the church’s ongoing persecution under the papal Antichrist. Hodge states that “the Reformers with one voice pronounced the same judgment,” identifying the papacy as the antichristian power Daniel, Paul, and John predicted.⁷ Calvin and Gill each defended the identification at length. See Historicism for the full case, including the day-year principle historicist interpreters used to calculate the length of the Antichrist’s dominion.

The nineteenth-century dispensational turn

The specific doctrine of a tribulation the church is removed from before it begins, the pretribulation rapture, is considerably younger than the historicist reading it displaced. Even among premillennialists, the doctrine has been contested as a recent development rather than the church’s historic expectation. Berkhof quotes one such premillennialist, Frost: “It is not generally known, and yet it is an indisputable fact that the doctrine of a pretribulation resurrection and rapture is a modern interpretation, I am tempted to say, a modern invention,” dating it “from the day of Irving and Darby.” Berkhof also names Alexander Reese as another premillennialist who argued against the pretribulation scheme as “an unwarranted novelty.”⁸ John Nelson Darby’s nineteenth-century teaching and its popularization through the Scofield Reference Bible (1909) distinguish this dispensational form from the older, non-dispensational premillennialism that continued to expect the church would pass through the tribulation rather than be raptured beforehand.

Opposing Views

Amillennialism. Herman Bavinck reads Jesus’s Olivet Discourse as giving “not a word… not even an allusion” to an interim earthly kingdom or a period during which the church is exempted from persecution. Instead, “in the present aeon his disciples cannot expect anything other than oppression and persecution,” a “cross of persecution and suffering” that marks the whole church age as the “church under the cross,” intensifying toward the end rather than confined to one future seven-year period. Bavinck ties Jesus’s own language directly to Jerusalem’s fall: the fall of that city announces and prepares for “the consummation of the world” in the same discourse.⁹ On this reading, “the great tribulation” of Revelation 20:4, the period the martyrs there “remained faithful” through, describes suffering already undergone, in heaven, rather than an event still ahead.⁹ See Amillennialism.

Preterism. Partial preterism reads Jesus’s statement that “this generation will not pass away until all these things take place” (Matt. 24:34), including the great tribulation of Matt. 24:21, as fulfilled in Rome’s destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, while still affirming a future bodily resurrection and final judgment. Herman Bavinck and Charles Hodge both read the discourse’s “signs” this way while maintaining the parousia itself remains future.¹⁰ See Preterism.

Historicism. The Reformation-era reading, still held by some confessional Protestants, locates the tribulation in the church’s centuries-long persecution under the papal Antichrist rather than in a discrete future period. See Historicism.

Objections and Responses

Doesn’t Scripture teach the church will pass through the tribulation, not be removed from it beforehand? Berkhof lists Matt. 24:22; Luke 21:36; 2 Thess. 2:3; 1 Tim. 4:1-3; 2 Tim. 3:1-5; and Rev. 7:14 as describing the church still present during, rather than absent from, the tribulation, and argues Matt. 24:29-31 places the gathering of the elect “immediately after” the tribulation rather than before it. He also notes this objection is not confined to amillennialists: Frost and Reese, both premillennialists, raised the same argument against the pretribulation scheme from within premillennialism itself.⁸

Doesn’t reading “this generation… all these things” as fulfilled in AD 70 deny that any tribulation remains future at all? Bavinck and Hodge both distinguish the “signs” that precede and announce Christ’s coming, which they read as fulfilled in Jerusalem’s fall, from the parousia itself, which both maintain is still future. On this reading, the Olivet Discourse’s great tribulation names events already fulfilled without thereby settling, or foreshortening, the timing of Christ’s own return.¹⁰

Related Doctrines

References

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (London: Banner of Truth Trust, 1969), 697. ↩ ↩²
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 4. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 2. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 32, “Of the Last Judgment,” para. 1. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Second Advent,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 809. ↩
Hodge, 809-810. ↩
Hodge, 787-834. ↩
Berkhof, 681-682. ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 24, “The Return of Christ.” ↩ ↩²
Hodge, 795-797. ↩ ↩²