In his famous work The City of God, Augustine stated: “The church now on earth is both the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven.”

The New Bible Dictionary explains the effect this outlook had on Catholic theology, stating: “In Roman Catholic theology a distinctive feature is the identification of the kingdom of God and the Church in the earthly dispensation, an identification which is principally due to Augustine’s influence. Through the ecclesiastical hierarchy Christ is actualized as King of the kingdom of God. The area of the kingdom is coterminous [having the same boundaries] with the frontiers of the Church’s power and authority. The kingdom of heaven is extended by the mission and advance of the Church in the world.”

This removed all necessity to “keep on the watch” for the sign that would show that God’s Kingdom was near. Writing in The New Encyclopædia Britannica, Professor E. W. Benz confirms this, saying: “He [Augustine] de-emphasized the original imminent expectation by declaring that the Kingdom of God has already begun in this world with the institution of the church; the church is the historical representative of the Kingdom of God on Earth. The first resurrection, according to Augustine, occurs constantly within the church in the form of the sacrament of Baptism, through which the faithful are introduced into the Kingdom of God.”

Augustine was also the one who finalized Christendom’s abandoning the Scriptural hope of Jesus Christ’s Thousand Year Reign during which He will restore Paradise on earth. (Revelation 20:1-3, 6; 21:1-5) The Catholic Encyclopedia admits: “St. Augustine finally held to the conviction that there will be no millennium. . . . The sabbath of one thousand years after the six thousand years of history, is the whole of eternal life; or, in other words, the number one thousand is intended to express perfection.” The Britannica Macropædia (1977) adds: “For him [Augustine] the millennium had become a spiritual state into which the church collectively had entered at Pentecost. . . . No imminent supernatural intervention in history was expected.” Thus, for Catholics, the prayer “your kingdom come” became pointless.

Medieval Darkness

Augustine’s interpretation, we are told, “became standard doctrine in the middle ages.” Christian expectation, therefore, hit an all-time low. We read: “In medieval Christendom, the New Testament eschatology was given its place in a dogmatic system of which the philosophical foundations were at first Platonistic [from Greek philosopher Plato] and, later in the west, Aristotelian [from Greek philosopher Aristotle]. Traditional conceptions about the parousia, resurrection and the like were combined with Greek notions about the soul and its immortality. . . . Medieval Christianity . . . [left] little place for the eschatological passion. This passion, however, was not dead; it lived in certain heretical movements.”​—Encyclopædia Britannica, 1970 edition.

The Roman Catholic Church speaks slightingly of such “heretical movements,” calling them “millennialist sects.” Its historians speak disparagingly of the “Year-1000 Scare.” But whose fault was it that many of the common people were afraid that the world would end in the year 1000? This “scare” was a direct result of Catholic “Saint” Augustine’s theology. He claimed that Satan was bound at the time of Christ’s first advent. Since Revelation 20:3, 7, 8 says that Satan would be bound for 1,000 years and then “released . . . to deceive all the nations” (The Jerusalem Bible), small wonder that some people in the tenth century were fearful of what might happen in the year 1000.

In spite of Augustine’s theology that put an end to Kingdom expectation and the millennial hope for Catholics, the Roman Church’s dogma still includes the Christian duty to keep on the watch for Christ’s return.