One frequent topic of discussion in American heterodox (Protestant) religious history is the millennium. I stopped in a Protestant bookstore in a small town near us, and there was a foldable plastic reference chart for sale, explaining the different varieties of premillennialism, amillennialism, and postmillennialism in American Protestantism.

But this Protestant concern with a potential utopian divine reign of 1,000 years on earth prior to the Final Judgment has also influenced the development of spinoffs of premillennialism in modern secular techno-paganism in the so-called “Global West.” The prominent disparate “mix and match” families of these false utopian beliefs (with precedence in early Anabaptism and Puritanism) have proliferated today to include not only Freemasonry and Marxism, but strains of New Thought and New Age and Perennialist syncretic occultism, with neopagan options such as Wiccan, and techno-gnostic and Neoliberal Progressive-Pantheism on both the Right and Left socially, and in usury-fueled corporate and administrative-state establishment centers.

These all partake of what the Church identifies as the heresy of chiliasm, tracing back to misinterpretation of Revelation 20 and a faulty sense of ecclesiology involving false ecumenism in the past century and today. These errors permeate the modern Global West’s techno-paganism, a kind of vague umbrella spirituality for all of the above heresies, traceable back again to Deism, Unitarianism, Universalism, and Pantheism, all re-packaged today into what the Lord God’s vision to the Prophet Jeremiah highlighted as the people’s invention each of their own idolatrous gods. The resulting delusional spiritual “buffet” ends in the type of atomization of souls that leads to a new techno-totalitarianism in our current age. Together these related heresies remind us of the warning to the Apostle John the Evangelist in Revelation about the “synagogue of Satan” in the letter to the Church at Philadelphia. Many Church Fathers interpret that letter as particularly to the era of the Church penultimate to the Last Judgment, relevant to the roots of our own age, in these latter days.

Orthodox Christian teaching sometimes is described as amillennialist. But Orthodoxy really participates in or reacts to none of the Protestant schools of thought, but stands grounded as always on continuing apostolic tradition, in the Truth of our Lord Jesus Christ, Who is Truth. As the American traditional Orthodox biblical teacher Fr. John Whiteford (my own honored instructor in Scriptural Studies at the ROCOR Pastoral School) put it, the premillennialist tradition wrongly presupposes a release of Satan after the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which contradicts the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of the Church, and runs counter to the Church’s understanding of the Gospel of our Lord.

In looking to Orthodox Christian teaching on Revelation 20, helpful modern sources that compile Church Tradition are Archbishop Averky’s book now published as The Epistles and the Apocalypse by Holy Trinity Publications in Jordanville NY, and formerly just as The Apocalypse: In the Teachings of Ancient Christianity, a collection of essays by the Archbishop, of blessed memory, first compiled by Father Seraphim Rose of blessed memory. This volume is based on the commentary on the Apocalypse (Revelation) by St. Andrew of Caesarea in the seventh century. In addition, the five-volume series of commentary by Archimandrite Athanasios Mitilinaois, is also a guide to Revelation in Orthodox Tradition. For this short commentary, I’ll be relying on the third of these modern English-language traditional commentaries, Explanation of the Apocalypse by Priest-Martyr Daniel Sysoev, although all three, drawing on Church Tradition, agree in their commentary on Revelation 20.

Priest-Martyr Daniel writes of the “more correct interpretation” vs. that of chiliaism “severely condemned by the Church” (and countered in the Nicene Creed by the phrase “His kingdom shall have no end”):

“…there is a Kingdom of God, th ekingdom of the martyrs, and its existence betan at the moment when Satan was bound (at the descent of Christ into hades). And only at the very end of time will he be freed–during the rule of the antichrist on earth. The Lord bound Satan to prevent him from deceiving the people, and bound him not by any external forces, but by the preaching of the apostles and the blood of the martyrs. A person who suffers for Christ’s sake, who battles fo rthe name of Christ, actually bridles the powers of evil. And the bloo dof the martyrs extinguishes the altars of the idols, in the literal sense of the word…” (p. 270)

Priest-Martyr Daniel quotes St. Andrew of Caesarea as indicating that the number “one thousand years” is meant to indicate “a great many or perfection,” similar to other references in Holy Scripture (such as Ps. 104:8). This indicates perfection because of Christians being called into “perfect manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Thus, St. Andrew concludes, this is “the time from [the year of] the Incarnaiton of the Lord until the coming of the Antichrist…. [left] to God alone, who knows to what extent His forbearance is expedient for us,” as with the duration of life. “After which [one thousand years] the Antichrist will disturb the entire world, containing in himself the activity of the Originator of Evil, and pouring out the crop of his poisonous wickedness among people, since he sees the unalterability of his own punishment.”

Priest-Martyr Daniel notes that the biblical phrase, “After that he must be loosed a little season” (Rev. 20:3) “refers to the freeing of the devil during the reign of the antichrist, when Satan will delude all the nations without restraint, in accordance with the will of God. Why is this the will of God? In order to reveal what is actually taking place in the hearts of men, and to eveal who will remain with Christ and who will not receive Him.” (p. 272)

Although Revelation 19 refers at its end to the overthrow and defeat of the beast (the Antichrist) and false prophet, Revelation 20 is understood in Church Tradition as referring to the period following the Gospel era of the Pentecost-inspired Church fulfilling Israel, for a “thousand years,” a number that is a mystery in God’s time but nonetheless present in history. It tells of the freeing of Satan at the time of the reign of Antichrist earlier, and the ultimate triumph of our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ at the end of time. It is not an invitation to human will and the utopianism of gobalization, which but open up an apostate Christendom to the temporary but terrible reign of Antichrist.

To the work of the above authors is added the voices of many other traditional Orthodox hierarchs, fathers, and teachers. Three others in particular, in addition to the article by Fr. John Whiteford already referenced, were featured in a very helpful four-part series explicating the heresy of chiliasm and the Orthodox teaching on Rev. 20, putblished on the Orthodox Christian (orthochristian.com) website edited by Jesse Dominick, a former Pennsylvanian now in Moscow. Bishop Alexander (Mileant) of blessed memory adds that, “In the 20th chapter of Revelation, St. John consoles the faithful with the thought that those who were killed for Christ did not perish. Instead, they reign in Heaven with their Savior. Archimandrite Cleopa (Ille) notes that chiliasm would involve a “third resurrection” contrary to the Gospels. The other article in the four-part series, by Father Michael Pomazansky, also includes an Orthodox critique of the “rapture,” a 19th-century doctrine that has become part of false Protestant beliefs of a chiliastic nature, but conflicts with the Gospel: “It is based on a misinterpretation of 1 Thess. 4:17, which teaches that at the very end of the world believers will be ‘caught up in the clouds,’ together with the resurrected dead, ‘to meet the Lord’ Who is coming for judgment and the opening of the eternal Kingdom of Heaven. The Scripture is quite clear that even the elect will suffer on earth during the ‘tribulation’ period, and that for their sake this period will be shortened” (Matt. 24:21-22).

Of the “thousand years,” and of all the prophecies of Revelation, the Orthodox Church offers from illumined saints and elders in the Body of Christ across centuries the ark of safe interpretation, without prying into the secrets of time and manner known only to God. Revelation ultimately is a book of hope, and Orthodox Christians need to approach it with prayer, and with the guidance of the Church Fathers and Tradition. The three currently published English-language volumes mentioned above are indispensable guides to us in the Orthodox mission to American for our reading of Revelation, which because of its mysteries was not included in regular liturgical readings of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church, but does hold an important place in our canonical Scripture, as the final book of the Orthodox Bible.