Philip Melanchthon on the millennium & Christ's return
Amillennial — the millennium is the present church age
They condemn others also, who now scatter Jewish opinions, that, before the resurrection of the dead, the godly shall occupy the kingdom of the world, the wicked being every where suppressed.
THE POSITION
Augsburg XVII rejects chiliasm explicitly, and the rejection is unusually specific: those who teach that before the resurrection of the dead the godly will take over the kingdom of this world and suppress the wicked are condemned as spreading 'Jewish opinions'. What the article puts in its place is one return at the consummation, one general resurrection, one judgment — the structure the later vocabulary calls amillennial.
6 OTHERS HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
Luther's colleague at Wittenberg and the Reformation's systematizer. He wrote the first Protestant systematic theology (Loci Communes, 1521), drafted the Augsburg Confession (1530) and its Apology (1531), and then revised his own work far enough that the Formula of Concord condemned the later version seventeen years after his death. This entry rests on the Augsburg Confession read in Latin and English — Part I less Articles VI-VIII and XIV-XVI, plus Part II Articles XXII-XXIV and XXVIII — on the opening articles of the Apology in English, and on the successive editions of the Loci through Latin sentences preserved by Schaff and Bente; no edition of the Loci itself was read.
Cite this page
"Philip Melanchthon on the millennium & Christ's return", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/melanchthon/millennium (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/melanchthon/millennium).