Date:   1/16/2017 7:43:01 AM ( 7 y ago)
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URL:   https://www.curezone.org/forums/fm.asp?i=2350841

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Yes, it's possible to speculate endlessly why Polycarp was a chiliast, and why John didn't put him right on that score. I still maintain it's a stretch to conclude that John was personally the source of Polycarp's chiliasm, beyond what he inferred for himself from his reading of Rev. 20.

Aside from which, I'm with Wm E Cox on this one:

'There is a vast difference between the writings of uninspired men and those of inspired Bible writers. And the proximity of an extra-canonical writer to the first century does not make his writings any more authoritative. We should keep in mind that heresy began even before the death of the apostles, and that it ran rampant immediately after the death of the last apostle.'

Amillennialism Today, p10

So the real question is not: what did some 2ndC fathers believe about a future post-advent earthly kingdom, but rather: what did the writers of the NT believe? Of that there can be no doubt:

FROM the beginning there has been a twofold emphasis in the Christian doctrine of the last things. While stressing the reality and completeness of present salvation, it has pointed believers to certain great eschatological events located in the future. So in the apostolic age, as the New Testament documents reveal, the Church was pervaded with an intense conviction that the hope to which Israel had looked forward yearningly had at last been fulfilled. In the coming of Christ, and in His death and resurrection, God had acted decisively, visiting and redeeming His people. He had 'delivered us out of the power of darkness and translated us into the kingdom of the Son of His love' (Col. 1:13). Christians now shared by anticipation in Christ's risen life through the indwelling of the Spirit, and had already 'tasted ... the powers of the age to come' (Hebr. 6:5).  

In other words, history had reached its c1imax and the reign of God, as so many of our Lord's parables imply, had been effectively inaugurated. Interwoven, however, with this 'realized eschatology' (to use the jargon of modem scholarship) was an equally vivid expectation that the wonderful outpouring of grace so far accomplished was only the beginning and would in due course, indeed shortly, receive its dramatic completion. The Lord Who had been exalted to God's right hand would return on clouds of glory to consummate the new age, the dead would be raised and a final judgment enacted, and the whole created order would be reconciled to God. The Christian hope, as delineated by the Biblical writers, was thus a twofold consciousness of blessedness here and now in this time of waiting, and blessedness yet to come; and the final denouement was conceived realistically as a series of events to be carried out by God on the plane of history.

J N D Kelly Early Christian Doctrines, pp 459-460

I should add that Kelly's work is a standard in its field, and has no eschatalogical axe to grind. He writes purely from the perspective of the historical development of the faith. And, I would respectfully suggest, this was the only eschatology that found a place in the historic creeds of the faith. Whatever this or that church father taught about the millennium from the 2ndC onwards must always be tested against the primary source - the Bible, and especially the NT.

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