Augustinian Eschatology

Below is a bit of an outline of how the false eschatology of amillennialism came about.

Augustine (who also gave the world the false doctrine of original sin) gave Christendom this false doctrine too.

He seems to have had a warped  view of Revelation 20.

Augustine also at one time had believed in chiliasm (belief that the prophecies unfold over time down to the end culminating with the millennium) which Papias, a disciple of John, espoused clear back in the early days of the Church.

But apparently 'ole Augustine felt some of too "crass" for him.

Sounds like Augustine was full of himself. I guess he felt he knew more than the clear reading of Revelation 20 or John's disciple Papias.

(Today, a simplified version of the erroneous eschatology of amilleniallism is that all the prophecies of Daniel & Revelation occurred during the Roman Empire, such as Antiochus Epiphanes being the little horn of Daniel and Nero the beast of Revelation. Also, that the millennium is symbolic of time stretching from the cross to the 2nd advent.)

Chart of the false Augustinian doctrine of Amillennialism

"ONE OF THE INTERESTING THINGS about Augustine of Hippo, the famous North African who converted in A.D. 386, is how and why he changed his views during his 45-year writing career as a Christian. Perhaps his most influential change is found in City of God, Augustine’s greatest work. Its massive length (about a thousand pages in modern translations) took him a dozen years to complete. There, in book 22, Augustine sets out his mature understanding of the “thousand years” of Revelation 20:3—6. His new position—which is often called amillennial—became the view of most Christians in the West,....Augustine had previously followed the view of most earlier Christians, which was known as chiliasm (from the Greek word for a thousand years). He translated this into Latin as millenarianism."

***So Augustine decided to single-handily change doctrine?***

"Now, in City of God, Augustine viewed the thousand years of Revelation 20 not as some special future time but “the period beginning with Christ’s first coming,” that is, the age of the Christian church. Throughout this age, the saints reign with Christ—not in the fullness of the coming kingdom

prepared for those blessed by God the Father.....So what about the evil that people experience in Christ’s kingdom? Augustine said, “The devil is bound throughout the whole period, from the first coming of Christ to the end of the world, which will be Christ’s second coming.” This does not mean the devil is incapable of enticing Christians away from Christ, but rather that “he is not permitted to exert his whole power of temptation, either by force or by guile to seduce people. . . . ”
Augustine said the “first resurrection” of which John speaks is a spiritual resurrection, and it takes place throughout the church’s history as the spiritually dead “hear the voice of the Son of God and pass from death to life.” They continue hereafter “in this condition of new life.” Those who have not come to new life in this era will, at the second resurrection, pass into the second death with their bodies. Augustine never left a problem unsolved if he could help it. He took the thrones of Revelation 20:4 as “the seats of the authorities by whom the church is now governed.”
First, Augustine owed a lot to an African Christian writer named Tyconius, who died around A.D. 400. We know too little about him, but enough to be sure that his writings shaped Augustine’s beliefs.
Second, Augustine increasingly focused on the life of heaven, both now and hereafter. The idea of a literal Millennium on earth after Christ’s return was, to him, too crass.
Third, Augustine was wrestling with reactions to the sack of the “eternal city” of Rome by the Goths in 410. Too many Christians, in his view, had invested too much spiritual capital in the permanence of the Roman Empire-and hence had been distraught when the city fell. Augustine wanted to cut all secular history down to size. All that mattered was the story of the City of God.
Fourth, Augustine had come to see the whole period between the first coming of Christ and his second coming as a single era—uniform and uninterrupted by any special events initiating new eras in salvation—history." DoctrinesUnite-DavidWright

Apparently Augustine failed to grasp a specific time frame after a specific event:

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection:

on such the second death hath no power,

but they shall be priests of God and of Christ,

and shall reign with him a thousand years.

Revelation 20:6

 

Or a specific event at the end of the timeframe:

And when the thousand years are expired,

Satan shall be loosed out of his prison,

Revelation 20:7