Millennium Today
Augustine changed his mind—and that of the church in the West for the Next 1,500 years.
by David Wright

 
One of the interesting things about Augustine of Hippo, the famous North African who converted in A.D. 386, is how and why he changed his views during his 45-year writing career as a Christian. Perhaps his most influential change is found in City of God, Augustine's greatest work. Its massive length (about a thousand pages in modern translations) took him a dozen years to complete.

A.D. 425 Augustine finished his City of God. There, in book 22, Augustine sets out his mature understanding of the "thousand years" of Revelation 20:3-6. His new position—which is often called amillennial—became the view of most Christians in the West, including the Reformers, for almost a millennium and a half.

Millennium now
Augustine had previously followed the view of most earlier Christians, which was known as chiliasm (from the Greek word for a thousand years). He translated this into Latin as millenarianism.

Now, in City of God, Augustine viewed the thousand years of Revelation 20 not as some special future time but "the period beginning with Christ's first coming," ...