Four Views of the Millennial Kingdom

[Soulfyre]

Leave it to a group of essentially Reformed theologues (or so I surmise based on their statement of faith) to utilize MediaWiki, the open source "wiki engine" (i.e. the database software used to develop Wikipedia and the other "Wiki" pages), to develop Theopedia, which they describe as "an open-content encyclopedia on Biblical Christianity." Nevertheless, their detailed descriptions of the primary Millennial theologies of the church (Dispensational Premillennialism, Classic or Historic Premillennialism, Postmillennialism, and Amillennialism) found on their webpage End Times, are excellent. These are essentially compiled from Blue Letter Bible webpage, Four Views on the Millennium.

One minor quibble, however, is that both Dispensational Premillennialism and Classic, or Historical, Premillennialism lay claim to the grammatico-historical method of Biblical interpretation.

God bless and keep you,

Matthew (soulfyre)

[rgrove]

Hadn't followed the links until now. I don't think their hermeneutical points are very accurate either. For example, I have most major postmill work in the last 100 years and I've never heard of a "covenental-historical" hermeneutic. Current postmills of the partial-preterist variety (the mojority report these day, but not required by postmillennialism itself) consider theirs to be a grammatico-historical (GH) approach. Now idealist postmills would fall more into an idealist amillennial "redemptive-historical" (RH) hermeneutic. But there are more and more partial preterist amills out there that aren't easily categorized like this. I wouldn't characterize dispensationalism as "stict-literal" either. The "literal" concept really only comes into play with the Church/Israel dichotomy. I believe that Vern Poythress in his book "Understanding Dispensationalism" demonstrates rather conclusively that this is a poor way to look at dispensational hermeneutic. In practice they preach on the OT passages and apply their application to the church in much the same way as covenentalists do.

I have more criticisms of their effort, but I have to go to one of our facilities and actually do some work now. I'd stick to the Blue Letter Bible pages myself. It flows better in the format they have. When the theopedia guys tried to format it into a comparative chart, it just doesn't flow properly and ends up giving a fairly imbalanced view (like the absence of the rapture in postmillennialism which would be the same as the amill view really).

And whoever thought John Murray was an amill needs to reread his Romans commentary on Ch 11 to dispel this misunderstanding. He was a postmill to be sure.