Is Premillennialism always dispensational?
Although premillennialism is often seen as a dispensational way of understanding Revelation 20, and while many premillennialists are in fact dispensationalists, there is nevertheless nothing about premillennialism in itself that demands dispensationalism. In fact, in early Church history, more than a thousand years before the development of dispensational theology, there was a group called the Chiliasts (from the Greek word for “thousand years”), which held to a premillennial interpretation of Revelation 20. In recent history, there have still been some premillennialists who are not dispensational, most notably George Ladd. Many of these prefer to distance themselves from dispensational theology by using the term “historic premillennialism,” as opposed to “dispensational premillennialism”. The basic difference between historic premillennialism and dispensational premillennialism consists in the latter’s insistence on maintaining a distinction between the nation of Israel and the Church
