Where can you find this information regarding what the Catholic Church says? I cannot find anything pertaining to it. I’d be real interested in how they dismiss this.
The number 7 represents completeness. Creation took place in 6 days and God rested on the 7th. The 7th was the Sabbath. Something not scriptural that I believe coincides with scripture is that mankind will be around for 7 more days before the end of mankind. Christ’s 2nd coming will come on the 6th day and he will rest on the 7th. This being 4 days before the birth of Christ and another 2 days until the eventual 2nd coming. The 7th day represents the 1000 year reign of peace with Christ on Earth. Satan will be loosed and the eventual final judgement will take place.
hey, shawn, there is no rapture but at the end ,but of the millennium, it hasn’t been fully resolved, so even though the Church tends to be amillennial, that is not fully official. In personal opinion, after years of meditation and contemplationl, I believe the true meaning of the Millennium is an amalgam of amill, postmill and chiliasm.
Amillies are generally pessimistic and conlcude that, because of the “wheat and tares”, there will always be significant evil in history. hence, they see TWO great ages of sin on either side of the “Millennium”, which they essentially dub the WHOLE Church age, or near whole. Hence, for them, the two great ages of resistance are pagan Rome in the beginning, and the Great Apostasy at the end. They then see the “millennium” as the great intervening period through which Christ is bringing in the Gentiles progressively maturing the good and bad.
POSTmillies are usually strong calvinists who, because of their faulty notions of justification (“Christ has saved me and I couldn’t resist Him if I wanted to”) teach that eventually the whole world will embrace the Gospel, and, from what I understand, many believe that this golden age will PERSEVERE until the Second Coming. Also, from what I understand, they see the Christianization of the world as a gradual process.
You already know chiliasm, which is to take the passage absolutely literally, so that, in their view, there are THREE great ages of sin, Rome in the beginning, the modern time apostasy, and the “Gog and Magog” ordeal after the literal “millennium.”
The problem is, after much study, I’m convinced that no ONE of these positions is completely correct. The solutiion would then in fact be a hybrid of postmill and chiliasm. In this view, there are THREE great ages of sin, like chiliasm, but the Millennium is not FULLY literal, but it’s not fully allegorical either, like amill. In this view, again there’s THREE great ages of sin in the history of the Church: Rome in the beginning, the modern MINOR apostasy and tribulation, and the GREAT apostasy of the end. the Millennium is then the great period of Catholic Restoration and Peace that lies BETWEEN the current minor apostasy, and the one of the end of the world (the great one where the big guy AC comes.) Christ’s Second Coming is then at the END of the Millennium, and what is then also the very end of time. But in this case the Millennium is not literal in the sense of a literal resurrection. It is a resurrection of FAITH, in which the modern apostate world will come back to the Church (after the glorious reunion of Christians), but Christ’s reign is still FIGURATIVE, but is a seventh day rest.
for more info, you might read these on my website, which elaborate considerably:
Historicism and the Seven Days of Creation, the Seven Headed Beast
ECF support for creation/beast historicism
Discourse on the Dragon and Millennium and Woman
all these are long but good (IMHO!
)
Blessings!
scott
