What Is the Thousand-Year Reign?

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What Scripture says

The only place the Bible speaks of a thousand-year reign is Revelation 20:1–10. An angel comes down with the key to the abyss. “He seized the dragon, the ancient serpent, which is the Devil or Satan, and tied it up for a thousand years” (Revelation 20:2). Then John sees thrones and the souls of those beheaded for their witness to Jesus, who had not worshiped the beast: “They came to life and they reigned with Christ for a thousand years” (Revelation 20:4). “Blessed and holy is the one who shares in the first resurrection. The second death has no power over these; they will be priests of God and of Christ, and they will reign with him for [the] thousand years” (Revelation 20:6).

Afterward Satan is released, gathers “Gog and Magog,” and surrounds “the camp of the holy ones and the beloved city,” until fire comes down from heaven and the Devil is thrown into the pool of fire (Revelation 20:7–10). Then comes the Last Judgment (Revelation 20:11–15; see the Revelation page). In Revelation numbers are images, and a thousand, ten times ten times ten, is a vast and complete span. The question is what the image means.

What the Fathers said

Some of the earliest Christian writers were millenarians, or chiliasts (from the Greek for “thousand”). Papias of Hierapolis, “the hearer of John, and a companion of Polycarp,” handed on sayings about the fruitfulness of the coming kingdom, as St. Irenaeus reports (Against Heresies 5.33.4). St. Justin Martyr expected “a thousand years in Jerusalem, which will then be built, adorned, and enlarged,” yet he admitted that “many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians, think otherwise” (Dialogue with Trypho 80). St. Irenaeus held that the just ought “first to receive the promise of the inheritance” in the very creation where they had suffered (5.32.1; see St. Irenaeus on the kingdom). St. Victorinus of Pettau held the same, and St. Jerome later revised his commentary to remove it (Victorinus on the thousand years).

These were saints and martyrs, but on this point they were not the voice of the whole Church, as Justin admits. St. Augustine once shared their hope: “for I myself, too, once held this opinion.” Reading Revelation with the Gospels and St. Paul, he came to see that John “used the thousand years as an equivalent for the whole duration of this world” (City of God 20.7). His conclusion became the common reading of the Church: “Therefore the Church even now is the kingdom of Christ, and the kingdom of heaven,” and “even now His saints reign with Him, though otherwise than as they shall reign hereafter” (20.9). The whole of Book XX is read on St. Augustine on the end.

What the Church teaches

The Catechism teaches that Christ already reigns through his Church: the kingdom of Christ is “already present in mystery,” and the Church is “on earth, the seed and the beginning of the kingdom” (CCC 669). The Church “is the Reign of Christ already present in mystery” (CCC 763).

That is why she does not wait for another, earthly kingdom before the end. Speaking of the deception that offers within history the hope that can only be fulfilled beyond it, the Catechism says that “the Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism” (CCC 676). Its note cites Denzinger (DS 3839), and in 1944 the Holy Office judged that even a mitigated millenarianism cannot safely be taught. The Church has not defined how the thousand years must be counted; what she has set aside is the expectation of an earthly messianic reign before the end.

Three phrases, read with the Church

Satan bound

Jesus described his own work this way: “How can anyone enter a strong man's house and steal his property, unless he first ties up the strong man?” (Matthew 12:29). Augustine read Revelation 20:2–3 in that light. The binding does not mean Satan does nothing; it means “his being prevented from the exercise of his whole power to seduce men” (City of God 20.8). He can tempt, but he cannot stop the Gospel from reaching the nations.

The first resurrection

“Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live” (John 5:25). Augustine took the first resurrection as the soul's rising from sin to new life in Christ: “Now this resurrection regards not the body, but the soul” (20.6). Everyone baptized into Christ shares in it now; the resurrection of the body comes at the end (Two resurrections).

Gog and Magog

The names come from Ezekiel 38–39. Augustine refused to map them onto particular peoples: the camp they surround “is nothing else than the Church of Christ extending over the whole world” (20.11). The loosing of Satan is the final trial of the Church, which no one can date (CCC 675–677; see Who is the Antichrist? and What is the great apostasy?).

How to live it

If the thousand years are now, the reign of Christ is not something to wait for idly. It is lived in every Baptism, every Mass, every act of mercy, every martyr's witness, and we share it by prayer, by refusing the beast's “mark” in our own choices, and by loving our neighbor. The question is less “When will Christ reign?” than “Does he reign in me?”

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