(mil·LEN·ni·AL·ism). The teaching that following the second coming of Jesus of Nazareth he will establish the Kingdom of God and rule on earth from Jerusalem for a 1,000 year period.

Seventeenth-century Puritan belief that Jesus Christ would return to Earth and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and prosperity, as prophesied in the New Testament.

A Christian belief in the literal thousand-year period of peace and well-being in the end times associated with the reign of Christ and the binding of Satan, based on Revelation 20:1-5. Various Christian groups debate whether Christ's coming will inaugurate the thousand-year reign (premillennialists) or conclude it (postmillennialists; the first coming was the one that the New Testament recounts). Still other Christians do not take the thousand-year reign literally (amillennialists).