Let’s explore the fascinating and often complex world of Christian eschatology, unraveling the various interpretations of end times theology. In this episode of "Compass", Ryan leads us through the evolution of eschatological beliefs—from historical premillennialism to amillennialism, postmillennialism, and premillennial dispensationalism.
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In this episode:
[00:00] Deductive vs. Inductive Bible Interpretation
[05:41] "Eschatology: Transition, Not End"
[09:48] Old Testament Eschatology Insights
[13:00] Growing pains of the goodness to come
[14:58] Exploring Christian Millennialism Origins
[20:03] Amillennialism Contrasts Modern End Times
[23:35] Shift from Postmillennialism to Premillennialism
[26:39] Premillennial Dispensationalism and Israel's Role
[29:44] Prophetic Warnings and Beliefs
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This episode posted on April 16, 2025
Episode Transcript:
Ryan Dunn [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to compass, finding spirituality in the everyday, even in the weird wild and wonderful. My name is Ryan Dunn. I'm a fellow spiritual seeker, a companion on the journey to deeper spiritual connection. My day job or side no. Not side job. My full time job is really as a social media manager, and I do this for the United Methodist denomination. And I generally see, like, six kinds of comments on stuff that we post. The most common is a simple amen.
Ryan Dunn [00:00:34]:
People just wanna participate and agree with whatever we're posting up. The second most common type of comment that I see is catfishing. And this often looks like, hey, I followed your profile. They're talking to individual users and, you're so lovely. Let's be friends. Please send me a DM. Or actually the most devious one that I've seen a lot of recently is them saying, you have the same last name as my late wife's maiden name. Let's be friends.
Ryan Dunn [00:01:08]:
DM me. It's kinda awful stuff. The third most common comment that I'm likely to see is that while your denomination is wrong, no matter what, the fourth is a flip side of that. I'm proud to be this denomination again no matter what. Love that stuff. The fifth is the kind of comment that we might have actually requested in the post. So we're actually asking people to reflect on where they've seen Jesus this week or, how they plan on celebrating and worship this weekend, and people respond with that. And then the sixth most common type of comment that I see is something along the lines of, oh my gosh, these are the end times.
Ryan Dunn [00:01:46]:
Look at the government, look at what people are doing and how they're living their lives. We all need to repent. The end is coming soon. Well, one thing is for sure, there are a healthy number of people who believe that we're living in the end times. Are you one of them? Are you ready? Are you excited? Are you afraid? Are you confused? I I am a little bit. So in this episode, we're gonna try to alleviate some of my confusion. We're gonna get into end times in our evolving understandings of eschatology on this episode of Compass. First, let's set the tone for what kind of episode this is gonna be.
Ryan Dunn [00:02:23]:
I'm gonna throw up a flag here that might signal to some people that, well, maybe this episode isn't for them. And it's this, I don't think the Bible speaks with one unified voice about the end times. If you've followed this podcast for a while, not a surprise. On episodes about hell and the afterlife, I shared this viewpoint. In prepping for this episode, I returned to one of my favorite books. It's called In God's Time. It's by professor or doctor Craig Hill. He presented the ideas of inductive and deductive views of the Bible.
Ryan Dunn [00:02:57]:
A deductive view again says that there is God who gives us the Bible. And then the Bible is broken out into different parts and stories like the gospels and the book of Daniel and the creation stories. And each part presents God trying to tell us something. It becomes very difficult to utilize deductive readings for piecing together end times related thoughts in the Bible because one has to assume that God is telling one continuous story. An inductive viewpoint, on the other hand, says that we have these different stories. They're pulled together to form the Bible, which in turn, that tells us about God. So to oversimplify, deductive viewpoints ask, what is God telling us? While inductive viewpoints ask, what is this telling us about God? So let's set the table even further by talking about the very, very beginning, like Genesis beginning. In the beginning was the Garden Of Eden.
Ryan Dunn [00:03:56]:
It's presented as the idyllic setting. Remember, we have this image that everything existed in harmony, that humans were perfectly cared for, that they pair frickly cared for the environs they'd been entrusted with. And God walks in the garden, which we may take to mean that God's presence is really evident and noticeable in this idyllic state. Our picture is that God's presence is evident and God's will is enacted until humans decide to no longer enact God's will. This is exemplified in the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In that story, a serpent famously tricks Eve into eating the tree, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. She then shares the fruit with Adam who partakes even though he knows God said for them not to eat of that fruit. And ever since then, things have been busted.
Ryan Dunn [00:04:53]:
God's presence can still be witnessed in creation, but God's will is not fully enacted on earth. The rest of the Bible, it could be argued is this ongoing tale of humanity struggling to get back to that initial, idyllic state again of God's loving presence being evident in all of creation and God's loving will being perfectly enacted on earth. That's a huge oversimplification there. That's not gonna be my last oversimplification in this episode of promise. There's a lot to encapsulate, you know, like the ultimate fate of the universe. And that's hard to sum up in thirty minutes or less, but here to give it a try. It's gonna take some, simplifications. This whole episode is about the ongoing history of Christian eschatology.
Ryan Dunn [00:05:41]:
Now eschatology is the explanation of the last things. In theological terms, it's forming a system of thoughts around the afterlife, judgment, apocalypse, and so on. I feel like the term is a slight misnomer, however, because Christian eschatology isn't really about the end of the world. It's about the transition of the world from one age into another. Now if you're a fan of Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, you get this as each of those franchises is set in a universe with an incredibly long history, and those histories are broken into ages. In Middle Earth of the Lord of the Rings, the first age is the age of the elves and the Valar, the third age when we skip ahead to that that features the great kingdoms of humans. And that's when we get the war against Sauron and so on. In Christian theology, we might say that there's the age before the fall.
Ryan Dunn [00:06:40]:
There's the age after the fall. And of course, that's when our understandings all kind of break apart because some may say that Jesus ushered in a new age. Others may say that the new age doesn't really begin until Jesus returns again. Anyways, Christian eschatology in whatever age we're currently in is about how we enter into that phase of being where and when God's presence is fully evident and God's love is perfectly enacted on earth. I mentioned that the Bible does not always speak in a unified voice in regards to eschatology. Part of the reason for that is that the word eschatology doesn't appear in the Bible. So any inferences we make about eschatology through the Bible require us to make some assumptions to a degree. We kind of have to overlay our understanding on what was being written and references to the underworld are a clear example of this.
Ryan Dunn [00:07:38]:
In part of the old Testament, the word sheel is used to refer to the state humans enter into after death. It could be an underworld. It could be nothingness. It could be the grave. The word Hades is used in other parts. Hades is the grave in the new Testament. The word Gehenna is sometimes used as a descriptor of a state of being after death. Gehenna was an actual place associated with idolatry and child sacrifice.
Ryan Dunn [00:08:08]:
And it's sought to refer to a separation from God's love in life in God. Do all these words actually refer to the same thing? Well, it's a bit tough to tell. We often try to make connections among them today and their usages, but we have to do research and we have to make assumptions to do so. When the Bible talks about eschatological ideas, we have to do the same process, researching the context and ultimately making some assumptions, which can lead different people to some wildly different places. Therefore, it's not gonna be surprising to learn that there isn't a unified line of eschatology across the Christian world. There are differing schools of thought. I want to explore how we got to these different places of conclusion for end times theology and why some people may say the end times are coming. Others might say that they're here.
Ryan Dunn [00:09:02]:
Others might say that they have been and that they're going to come again. Part one, then the old Testament in the old Testament, the idea seems to be that God has a plan to restore Israel or the people of faith to the idyllic Eden like state. Everything will be set to rights once again, through them. Maybe the most powerful eschatological image is in Isaiah two. It talks about the mountain of the Lord. Isaiah two offers this word picture of God's temple on a mountain that is elevated above everything else. And God's will is going to be enacted from this high point. And all the nations of the world are gonna defer to God's will and war will be no more and people will get along.
Ryan Dunn [00:09:48]:
It's that return to Eden. Eschatology in the Old Testament, actually, this is probably true of the entire Bible, but especially visible in the old Testament. Eschatology here is expressed as a reaction to and hope in light of historical realities. So when the nation of Israel is threatened by outside forces, there's an expectation of a leader that's going to come to lead the people safely through the challenges of international politics. When domestic forces are threatening, there's an expectation of God's divine judgment taking care of the wicked and rewarding the righteous. When the people were in exile, there was an eschatological hope of the return to Israel and the nation becoming a shining example of God's presence, which may be what we're looking at in Isaiah two. For the most part, Old Testament eschatology is about the thriving of the Israel nation state and the Jewish people. It's not so much about an individual living on in perpetuity.
Ryan Dunn [00:10:51]:
It's about God's will being enacted through the Israelites. The New Testament writers make things a bit more personal. Throughout the gospels, Jesus talks about the inbreaking or the advent of the kingdom of God. In reading today, we start to get a sense that the kingdom was not always a material place, but was sometimes an inward state of being that would manifest in the world through the actions of faithful people. We live into the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is not hoisted upon us. We choose it. In the old Testament, the center of God's presence on earth was the temple, a physical material place.
Ryan Dunn [00:11:33]:
In the new Testament, the center of God's presence though, is Jesus. And then Jesus promises to share this presence through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. So the body of believers becomes the new temple. The temple was sometimes related to eschatological hopes in the Old Testament. And in the new, Jesus borrows on these ideas to suggest that he is the temple. So when we were looking for the shining sign of God's presence on a mountain top, one through which wars and strife are gonna be ended, that presence is seen in Jesus. Here's the weird part when it comes to Jesus though. God's dominion, the kingdom of God, the state in which God's loving will is enacted was both present and future.
Ryan Dunn [00:12:17]:
So it was evident in the here and now for Jesus and his contemporaries, but there was more of it to come. And Jesus makes clear that no one knows when it's going to be fully realized. Not even Jesus knows What Jesus does make clear is that some kind of judgment will accompany the full realization of God's dominion. Maybe the most troubling verses in regards to this are from mark 13 verses five through eight. It says this, Jesus said to them, watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name claiming I am he and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.
Ryan Dunn [00:13:00]:
Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth pains. What we can learn here is that the upsetting of the world's systems is gonna be tumultuous, which actually most of us have realized through our own lived experience and Jesus, the human being was likely thinking of the times in which he lived, where Roman governmental figures claim divine authority and war and famine were ever present threats to human flourishing. His hope was that these threats might not lead people away from the realization of God's dominion in their lives. But instead that they might view these threats and pains as growing pains of the expanding kingdom of God. Jesus also hints at individuals being able to witness the full realization of God's kingdom. In Luke 17 is recorded that Jesus said that the kingdom of God is within us.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:00]:
It's there in the present tense, existing in the souls of those who are picking up what Jesus is laying down, which put most succinctly is loving God and loving neighbors. As we love ourselves, that is the kingdom of God realized. So perhaps we enter a new age when all the peoples of the earth live into an existence of loving God and loving each other completely. Alright then. We have a gray misty idea of what our faithful forebears had in mind when they envisioned the next age of the universe. When it comes to forecasting, how that age will be ushered in and when it will be ushered in is where things start to split apart across the cosmos of Christian beliefs. There are, again, to oversimplify, four main schools of thought in Christian eschatology. And actually, the one that gets the most press in our time is probably the newest school of thought on the scene.
Ryan Dunn [00:14:58]:
In part two here, let me describe those schools of thought and where they came from. The oldest school of thought appears to be a form of premillennialism called chiliasm. Now in case you're like, what eulism, let me offer a little definition of millennialism. We're gonna use that word a lot. Now most of us understand that a millennium is one thousand years. In terms of Christian eschatology though, millennium might be a thousand years or it could just be a really, really long time or it could be a proverbial age like the age of Sauron and Lord of the Rings or the age of all drawn. Nevermind in this case, whether or not it's literally one thousand years or a long time or an age millennium is representative of the full establishment of God's full loving peace and justice filled sovereignty being enacted on earth is the age in which everything in creation is gonna be set to rights. It's the age in which God's God's imagination takes hold in the world or the world is as God imagined it should be in historic premillennialism or again, chiliism.
Ryan Dunn [00:16:15]:
The dominant assumption was that the new millennium was imminent. It was gonna start any day. I really liked the idea that a lot of theology is formed in response to the pain points in people's lives. So if you think about the common pain points of believers of, well, the early common area era, like the first century, the coming millennium is gonna address those pain points. It will be marked by a freedom from oppressive regimes. It'll offer an easing of labor because everybody had to work super hard just to survive. God will provide that which humanity needs. In short, it's a return to the paradise pictured in the garden of Eden.
Ryan Dunn [00:16:58]:
Early believers believed this return would come after a period of tribulation, and many believed they were living through the tribulation during their lifetime. They also believed that they would get to see the new age or the millennium during their lifetime. The early Christians and the early church were heavily persecuted. So the early believers took this to mean that the world was pushing back against the end breaking of God's fully realized kingdom on earth. So of course they experienced persecution, right? Because these were the tumultuous growing pains of the birth of God's sovereignty on earth. In many cases, this new millennium looked like a new kingdom being established with Christ at the head, and it would be centered in Jerusalem, but things changed over the years. Christianity spread persecution eased. In fact, with the Roman emperor Constantine's edict of Milan, in which Christianity became officially accepted in the Roman empire, the church was transitioning to the dominant culture instead of a persecuted culture and money came with acceptance and the church started to get a bit affluent and of course, a bit more powerful.
Ryan Dunn [00:18:11]:
It followed then that the pain points of the believers were shifting. So instead of persecution and survival pain points started to look like a fight against things like greed and harmful living for some, but for others, they were feeling pain by not having all the control and all the power. So the predominant viewpoint of eschatology became the school of a millennial ism. Now a millennial ism can be described as a belief that there will be no literal political kingdom of God on this earth. Because again, we can think about the pain points. The Christians were running the things they were running the show, so to speak. So why would they be interested in upsetting the world's political systems with some kind of new reign of Christ? Why give up control instead, the kingdom of God would be totally spiritual. In this state, Christ would rule over the hearts of the believers, and the kingdom of God was already in existence.
Ryan Dunn [00:19:10]:
The new millennium or new age was already being enacted on earth. It wasn't complete though, but it was taking shape and expanding its hold in the a millennial view, which many actually hold to today. Christ's reign began at the resurrection. So this current age, including the times in which we live are the tribulations. Christ is here with us ruling in our hearts. We'll continue suffering with Christ until he comes again for the final judgment. Now in both historical premillennialism and a millennialism, the state of Israel is not a huge deal. It is a little bit in premillennialism, but, yeah, just in in some sex of it, because it's not a huge deal because the viewpoint was that the Christian church was the inheritor of God's covenants.
Ryan Dunn [00:20:03]:
So it's not necessary for there to be a national identity of Israel in this viewpoint. This is actually going to contrast with the modern viewpoint that we're going to talk about in a minute. But with a millennial ism, the church is the fulfillment of God's promises and Jesus is already leading the church. At any point, Jesus could return physically to usher in the full realization of heaven on earth. Also in amillennialism, any talk about the ages of the earth being one thousand years is considered figurative. It's really just a really, really long time. Now I need to set a couple things up here because someone who has heard a relative talk about the end times or someone who read the left behind books or watched any of the movies might be saying something like, well, Ryan, what about the rapture? And where's the antichrist in all of this in these points, neither of those theological notions are present. At least they're not present in how left behind or even the omen movies might paint them in a millennialism.
Ryan Dunn [00:21:07]:
The antichrist is a force of opposition to the will of God. And it's something we've seen manifested in any number of ways, a rival political system or apostasies, or wherever the movement or the power opposes the movement of Christ. By the late Middle Ages. Now, new ideas were beginning to take hold. And I want to note that many of these new ideas were actually driven by the church. In the beginning, The church was the engine driving education and scholarship and things like plant breeding were being advanced by the church as a means for bettering our human condition. It's important to note this so that the rise of the next ism makes sense. And I need to note that the terms I'm using here are modern inventions.
Ryan Dunn [00:21:54]:
So in the seventeen hundreds per se, nobody was saying we've moved from the predominantly a millennial age to a post millennial age, but post millennialism is our next stage. And for me, this one's a little bit hard to understand. I think it's pretty lucid. And I think that is in part because it's applied to a broad range of beliefs. But here's what I've distilled as some core beliefs of postmillennialism. And this is painting again with a really broad brush. So please excuse the fact that I'm not covering everything in detail, but first there will be a one thousand year ish reign of Christ that comes after the age in which we currently live. Christ will return when the gospel overtakes the world.
Ryan Dunn [00:22:43]:
Remember, this is an age of rapid human advancement. It's the age of science and industry and lives are improving for many in the Western world. This improvement is linked to the advancement of the church. So we get some really nice movements born of the church, which are aimed at the betterment of humanity. The anti slavery and abolitionist movements are good examples. Medical missions and hospitals are good examples, but this is also taken to an extreme and it's manifested in colonialism and ideas like the, American idea of manifest destiny. It's this idea pulled out of Genesis one where God commands Adam to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. The historical link between postmillennialism and intellectualism appears to be really strong.
Ryan Dunn [00:23:35]:
So during the time of postmillennialism's dominance, Christian seminaries and universities started to become very scientific in pedagogy to the extent that everything supernatural in scripture was beginning to be de emphasized or explained away. And then the world blows up in war. World War one happened and we get a big move towards something called premillennial dispensationalism. In reaction to the trauma of world war one and the Spanish flu epidemic that came shortly after, a fair number of Christian people said, well, look where all this intellectualism and science got us. What we need is return to faith as recorded in the Bible and a new era of biblical literalism began. And with that came a new ism, which actually was linked to our first ism because you see this new ism returned to premillennialism, but with a few added ideas just before world war one, a Texas man named Cyrus Scofield published a version of the Bible, which included, commentary alongside the biblical texts. Now, this is pretty common today, but it was revolutionary at the time. And this version of the Bible became really popular.
Ryan Dunn [00:24:50]:
Scofield was a big fan of the writings of John Nelson Darby. Darby was a strict literalist, and he tried to apply that literalism to eschatology or end times writings in the Bible. And in so doing, he proposed that the people of God would be removed from the earth before the time of tribulation. In other words, there would be here we go a rapture as many of us would come to understand the word rapture. Darby also proposed that there were seven ages discussed in scripture, and these ages became known as dispensations. They were as follows. Number one, innocence, also known as paradise. That's the age of the garden of Eden and Adam and Eve before the fall age two or dispensation two is conscience.
Ryan Dunn [00:25:42]:
That's after the expulsion from Eden and up through Noah and the great flood, the third dispensation is human government. This was Noah post flood and the rise of human nation states. The fourth dispensation was that of promise, which started with Abraham being called by God to parent a great nation and lasted through Abraham's descendants fleeing slavery in Egypt, which we have come to know as the Exodus. Then the fifth dispensation is the dispensation of law, which picks up with the delivery of the 10 commandments to Moses and lasted until the death of Christ. The sixth dispensation is the dispensation of grace. And that began with the resurrection of Jesus. And it continues through today. Near the end of this dispensation, the faithful will be raptured, then seven years of tribulation will ensue.
Ryan Dunn [00:26:39]:
And during that time, the nation of Israel will become God's instrument of righteousness and, all of the promises God establishment of the nation of Israel and its continued existence is a big deal for pre millennial dispensationalists and can be seen as a sign of the coming of the next dispensation, which is the millennium. That's the number seven. And it's when we party like it's 1999. Even if it's not 1999, this will be a one thousand year period of peace with Christ reigning on earth, which sounds cool, but there's still more to come. After one thousand years, Satan will be released and some people will follow Satan into a battle against God. They will be defeated. Of course they will. And then there will be a final judgment in which the old heaven and earth will be destroyed and new eternal heaven and earth will be established.
Ryan Dunn [00:27:41]:
And at this time, there'll be no crying, death shall be no more, and the former things will pass away as beautifully recorded in Revelation 21. Premillennialism, dispenseationalism that is a mouthful. Premillennialism dispensationalism, or premillennial dispensationalism is a popular belief amongst evangelical Christians, although not all evangelical Christians. And it is not officially endorsed or taught really by mainstream Protestant denominations. My traditional or denominational tradition amongst them. I'm a United Methodist and we don't explicitly ascribe to any one single ism in regards to the end times. I will offer that there are no doctrines about the rapture or dispensations in Methodist doctrinal standards. According to my friends at ask the UMC, they say this quote, our focus is less on the second coming of Christ and more on living out the teachings of his first coming.
Ryan Dunn [00:28:44]:
Generally speaking, United Methodists are focused on welcoming his saving grace to work fully in our lives here and now. Prevenient grace that moves us to turn to Christ for salvation, justifying grace that works righteousness in us and trust for salvation, and sanctifying grace that perfects us in lives of love of God and neighbor, end quote, which sounds a bit in line with the post millennial school of thought. But there are some aspects of amillennialism present in the United Methodist church as well, which makes it tough to categorize all this stuff. Because honestly, I struggle to place my own beliefs within one of the ism categories that I've described. And there's an important thing to note here. When it comes to prophecy in the Bible, the motivation is more about influencing the present than it is about foretelling the future. So biblically speaking, prophecy often comes out like this. If you do this, then that will happen.
Ryan Dunn [00:29:44]:
Frequently, this is expressed in a covenant. God says, here are my terms, abide by them, and I will bring blessings on you. But also it exists as warnings. The Old Testament prophets did a lot of this, dear people, if you continue along this path, then harm will come to you. In the old testament prophets, the warning was that if you continue to neglect the neediest and most vulnerable among you, then calamity will befall. The call was to pay attention to the good you can do now, to the injustices you can address now, and to not be consumed by what may or may not happen in the future and and when whatever that is will happen in the future. So where do you fall amidst our four isms? Are you a historic premillennial believing the world is falling apart, but the church is going to overcome it? Are you an, a millennial believing that things are happening in the world? The world's slowly evolving into the world as God imagined. Are, are you a post millennial believing that the world is improving and we participate in that by sharing God's work? Or are you a pre millennial dispensationalist believing that things are soon to get much, much worse? But the good news is the faithful won't have to the worst of it.
Ryan Dunn [00:31:03]:
And while this frolic through end times theology has been brought to you by United Methodist communications, besides producing this podcast, they host our website, which can be found at umc.org/compass. If you're ready for another episode, one that pairs well with this one might be episode one twenty one. It's called Israel end times and interventions of peace, or if you want something completely different, check out episode one forty nine about humor theology, with Aaron Hicks Moon. New episodes of compass come out every other Wednesday. I'm Ryan Dunn. And I'll talk with you again in a couple. In the meantime, stay woke, party down. Peace.
