Millennialism

Millennialism (from Latin mille 'thousand', annus 'year' and -ism) or chiliasm (from the Greek equivalent) is a belief which is held by some religious denominations. According to this belief, a Messianic Age (the so-called Christian Millennium) will be established on Earth prior to the Last Judgment and the future permanent state of eternity. Christianity and Judaism have both produced messianic movements which featured millennialist teachings—such as the notion that an earthly kingdom of God was at hand. These millenarian movements often led to considerable social unrest. Similarities to millennialism also exist in Zoroastrianism, which identified successive thousand-year periods, each of which will end in a cataclysm of heresy and destruction, until the final destruction of evil and the final destruction of the spirit of evil by a triumphant king of peace at the end of the final millennial age. Jewish and then Christian interpretations built on Zoroastrianism and on Babylonian astrology, resulting in the construction of a schema of a sequence of seven successive thousand-year periods ("millennia") of earthly human existence. Scholars have linked various social and political movements, both religious and secular, to millennialist metaphors.