Is the millennium of Revelation 20:1–7 literal? Also, is it fair to say that none of us will understand the future until it is fulfilled?

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 2008.

You are surely right in saying 'I don't think any of us will understand the future until it is fulfilled'. At the same time, of course, in loyalty to the Lord and to his word, we have to seek in all humility to understand as best we can what he himself has declared in his word.

It is unfortunate that the debates among believers on these matters have produced so much heat that it has divided the Lord's people, as though the particular interpretations belonged to the fundamentals of the faith. We ought, surely, to come to that maturity where we can see the difference between what is fundamental to the gospel and to the deity and humanity of our Lord, and other things which are not fundamental in that same way, and over which the Lord's people have disagreed for centuries, and will presumably go on disagreeing until the Lord comes.

I myself am not convinced by the reformed theologians who teach that there is no millennium in the future; that the millennium should be interpreted spiritually, and is a description of our Lord's present reign in the church. The early church, being Jews, believed in the millennium as the final age in this world's history, and before the end of the world. In more recent centuries one of the firmest expositions of the verses in the Revelation that describe the millennium was given by Dean Alford, who was a Cambridge theologian in the 1800s, and belonged to the Anglican Church. As distinct from the majority view in his Anglican Church, he insisted that the only true exegesis of Revelation 20:1–7 was to the effect that there would be a literal millennial reign of Christ. I mention him because it is good to remember that belief in a literal millennium was not just a private view of a few evangelicals who had no secure understanding of Scripture.

At the same time, Dean Alford remarked that the doctrine of the millennium needed to be saved from its friends. That remains true to this present day, when some who hold in a literal millennium go on to add details that seem to me to contradict the once-and-for-all sacrifice of Christ—though I hasten to add that people like this generally hold these views without realizing they contradict what Scripture elsewhere says.

I personally feel that, while we must unashamedly declare what we ourselves believe when it is appropriate so to do, our Lord would not encourage us to think that our particular view of prophecy is so right that it demands we cannot have fellowship with any of the Lord's people.

Yours very sincerely in Christ,