ABSTRACT
This chapter explores three Latin writers whose works mark the shift from the original, apostolic millennial eschatology, to an amillennialism directly attributable to the political phenomenon of the birth of Constantine's Christendom. Eusebius, a well-known Church historian and bishop of Caesarea, was a staunch opponent of millenarian eschatology, and is the father of "Imperial ecclesiology". The chapter gives a modest summary of Augustine's eschatology in order to point out the shift that occurred from the chiliasm of the apostolic Church to the amillennialism that took root in the fourth and fifth centuries. In his reinterpretation of Revelation 20, Augustine drew a one-to-one correspondence between the Church and the messianic reign of Jesus. A significant shift occurred in the Latin West with the thought of Eusebius of Caesarea and Augustine of Hippo, insofar as the "Thousand Years Reign" of Christ and the eschatological kingdom of God was re-construed to refer to the present era of the Roman Catholic Church.
