Millennium - Part 2

Book of Revelation, chapter 20, verses 1-6 (King James Version)

"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years."

***

But exactly when will Crist’s “thousand-year reign”—the millennium—arrive? Christians disagree. So millennialism comes in three flavors:

Pre-millennialism, post-millennialism, and amillennialism.

Let’s deal with the last one first. If you’re amillennial you don’t believe in a literal millennium, and you think Christians who do are pretty much wasting a colossal amount of time, intellectual pondering and above all, emotional energy.

But if you like the other two flavors you think amillennials Just Don’t Get It.

Nowadays pre-millennialism is the most typical form of thought among Christians who care about it (mainly evangelicals). It generally consists of a scenario in which, first, good Christians are “raptured.” [The Rapture is a reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:17. The concept originated only in the 19th century but I don’t think it became “a thing” (to use slang) until the publication of William E. Blackstone’s “Jesus is Coming,” published in 1878. Second, the doctrine postulates a seven-year period in which the rest of us get tattooed with the Mark of the Beast and have to contend with the anti-Christ, the spectacle of dogs and cats living together in sin, etc.

But in 19th century America pre-millennialists—who surely interpreted the war as a sign of the imminent coming of the End Times—were a small minority. The dominant view was post-millennialism, and by this reading the Civil War was an act of cleansing violence that would sweep away the remaining evil standing in the way of the Millennium, and the shit would hit the fan only after the Millennium. In other words, the general trajectory of history was that things were getting better and better and with just one more big push, Christ would return.

In other words:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

The third verse makes the case more directly:

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace
shall deal
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel
Since God is marching on.”

Which of course is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with lyrics written by Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910). Howe was an abolitionist and suffragist. The way I heard the story, in 1861 Julia Howe and her husband Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876) visited an army camp and heard soldiers lustily singing “John Brown’s Body,” which personally I think was pretty cool:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave!
His soul’s marching on!

Julia Howe remarked that she liked the melody (which incidentally was ripped off from a hymn entitled “Oh! Brothers,” whose first line was, “Oh! brothers shall we meet you over on the other shore?”) But she didn’t like the lyrics. So she went home and composed better ones.

But there’s another story merely to the effect that she wrote it after meeting Lincoln. Which may be accurate but sucks in comparison to the way I learned it.

The lyrics were published in “Atlantic Monthly” in February 1862. The final verse in Howe’s original manuscript, however, wasn’t published:

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time
His slave, Our God is marching on.

Which is about as millennial as it could possibly be, although I imagine it was omitted not for ideological reasons but rather for reasons of space or because it seemed weaker than the earlier verses or maybe just because the previous stanzas were beating the theme ever more thoroughly to death and the Howe’s original last stanza was just plain overkill.

Not so incidentally, Julia’s husband Samuel Gridley Howe was one of the three members of the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, which examined the current state of freedpeople within Union military lines and offered recommendations about the role the government should (and should not) play in assisting freedpeople. Howe actually authored most of its two reports (preliminary, 1863; and final, 1864) the Commission sent to the Lincoln administration.