John Owen on the millennium & Christ's return
Postmillennial — the gospel triumphs before Christ returns
Meet him in his general design of casting down all combined opposition to the kingdom of his Son; that God in his appointed time will bring forth the kingdom of the Lord Christ unto more glory and power than in former days, I presume you are persuaded. Whatever will be more, these six things are clearly promised:— 1st. Fulness of peace unto the gospel and the professors thereof... 3dly. Multitudes of converts, many persons, yea, nations... 5thly. Professed subjection of the nations throughout the whole world unto the Lord Christ... the kingdoms become the kingdoms of our Lord and his Christ.
THE POSITION
Owen expects Christ's kingdom to triumph visibly within history, before the end and by ordinary providence: he tells Parliament that God "will bring forth the kingdom of the Lord Christ unto more glory and power than in former days" and lists six things "clearly promised" — peace, purity of worship, multitudes of converts, the casting out of will-worship, the professed subjection of the nations, and the breaking of all who resist. In the modern taxonomy that is postmillennial. The tier is contested rather than researched because Owen is a seventeenth-century historicist reading Daniel, Haggai and Revelation as a single unfolding prophecy, and does not use the amillennial/postmillennial/premillennial grid at all.
44 In the days of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will shatter all these kingdoms and bring them to an end, but will itself stand forever.
1 OTHER HOLD THIS
ABOUT THIS FIGURE
The most formidable English Puritan theologian: Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford under Cromwell, later a nonconformist pastor in London. This entry rests on The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (1647), The Doctrine of Justification by Faith (1677), Pneumatologia and the Discourse of Spiritual Gifts (1674), and the Two Short Catechisms (1645), read in the Goold edition of the Works.
Cite this page
"John Owen on the millennium & Christ's return", Examined Doctrine, July 2026 edition, https://examineddoctrine.com/position/owen/millennium (archived at https://examineddoctrine.com/editions/2026-07/position/owen/millennium).