Irenaeus belonged to a body of Christians, surprisingly large even at the end of the second century, who continued to believe in the imminent coming of the Kingdom of God in a quite literal sense: they believed that at the coming of Christ the earth would be renewed and the just would rise from the dead to dwell with him in his Kingdom for a thousand years…. Half a century later, partly in consequence of the growing influence of Platonism within Christian theology, the ‘spiritual’ interpretation of the coming of the Kingdom had triumphed, and the views on the Kingdom of Irenaeus and other like-minded theologians were derided as naïve or outlandish. - Dennis Minns