Martin Luther on the millennium & Christ's return
Amillennial — the millennium is the present church age
For it is our opinion that this picture... has been put in because of the Turks, and that the thousand years are to begin at the time when this book was written, and that at that time the devil was bound; though the reckoning need not hold out to the very minute.
THE POSITION
In the longer preface to Revelation Luther reads the book as a picture of church history running to the Last Day, and places the thousand years of Revelation 20 in the past: Satan was bound when the book was written, the binding has now expired, and the loosed Gog and Magog are the Turks of his own century. Judgment follows quickly after. There is no future earthly reign anywhere in his sequence — chapter 20 runs straight into judgment and then the eternal state of chapter 21.
7 When the thousand years are complete, Satan will be released from his prison,
6 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Augustinian friar whose protest over indulgences opened the Reformation, and the theologian for whom justification by faith and the bondage of the will are the whole of the gospel. This entry rests on his own writings only — The Bondage of the Will (1525), the Smalcald Articles (1537), the Large and Small Catechisms (1529), Concerning Christian Liberty (1520), the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), the Church Postil and his biblical prefaces — and deliberately excludes the Augsburg Confession and the Formula of Concord, which are not his.
Cite this page
"Martin Luther on the millennium & Christ's return", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/luther/millennium (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/luther/millennium).