Augustine of Hippo

During the "thousand years" when the devil is bound, the saints also reign for a "thousand years" and, doubtless, the two periods are identical and mean the span between Christ's first and second coming. For not only in that future kingdom to which Christ referred in the words, "Come, blessed of my Father, take possession of the kingdom prepared for you," but even now those saints reign with him in some authentic though vastly inferior fashion. To them he said, "Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world." … This, to be sure, is the period in which the scribe instructed in the kingdom of heaven brings forth from his storeroom things new and old, as I mentioned above. So, too, the reapers are to gather up out of the church the weeds, which he allows to grow intermixed with the wheat up to the time of harvest.… This certainly cannot be the kingdom that is to be utterly without scandals. The kingdom from which scandals are gathered out, then, must be the church on earth.… The mixed kingdom must be the church, such as she exists in her temporal stage, while the unmixed kingdom is the church such as she will be when she is to contain no evildoer. Consequently the church, even in this world, here and now, is the kingdom of Christ and the kingdom of heaven. Here and now Christ's saints reign with him, although not in the way they are destined to reign hereafter; but the "weeds" do not reign with him, even now, though they grow along with the "wheat" in the church.… Those alone reign with Christ whose presence in his kingdom is such that they themselves are his kingdom.… Now it is of this militant stage of the kingdom, during which there is still war with our enemy, alternating victory over, and defeat before, our evil inclinations, that the Apocalypse speaks. The "thousand years" are to last until we come to that kingdom, free of the foe, where the saints reign in fullest peace.… After mentioning the devil's chaining for a thousand years and his brief interval of freedom to follow, John sums up the activity of and in the church during the "thousand years": "And I saw thrones, and men sat upon them and judgment was given to them." Now there is no question of the last judgment in this verse. The thrones and the enthroned people are the prelates who govern the church here and now. And the judgment is best interpreted as the one contained in the words, "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound also in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed also in heaven."

We are to understand as implied by the words that come further on that these souls of the martyrs "reigned with Christ a thousand years"—of course, not yet reunited with their bodies. For the souls of the faithful departed are not divorced from Christ's kingdom, which is the temporal church. If they were, we should not be mindful of them at God's altar in the communion of the body of Christ; nor would there be any point in hastening one's baptism in time of danger, lest one die unbaptized; nor in seeking reconciliation, when one has been cut off from Christ's body by a sinful conscience or by the church's penitential discipline. Why do we go to all this trouble if the faithful departed are not still Christ's members? We may be sure, then, that their souls reign with him, just as their bodies will in time to come, even while the thousand years are rolling on.… We conclude, therefore, that even now, in time, the church reigns with Christ both in its living and departed members. "For to this end Christ died," says Paul, "and rose again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living." If John mentions only the souls of the martyrs, that is because they who have battled for the truth unto death reign in death with a special splendor. But as the part is here used for the whole, we know that the words apply to the remaining faithful who belong to the same church, which is Christ's kingdom.

This verse should be applied to both the living and the dead.… As to the identity of the beast in question, there is need of very careful study. Nevertheless, consistently with sound faith, one may take it to be the godless city as opposed to the city of God, men and women without faith as opposed to those who believe. The beast's "image," I think, is his deception as found, for example, in such people as profess the faith yet live like pagans. For they pretend to be what, in fact, they are not, and are called Christians, not because of full faith but of false face. The beast possesses, in addition to the openly avowed enemies of Christ's name and of his glorious city, the "weeds" that are marked for uprooting from his kingdom, the church, at the end of the world. Those who do not follow the beast or his image are surely those who follow Paul's admonition: "Do not bear the yoke with unbelievers." Their not worshiping means their not agreeing with, their not becoming subjects to, unbelievers. Their not accepting his "mark" upon their "foreheads" and "hands" means that they refuse the stigma of false faith and bad morals. Such people, alive or dead, keep themselves aloof from such evils and so reign with Christ, even now, in a fashion befitting the passage of time, throughout this whole era indicated by the "thousand years."