In the so-called Montanistic controversy (c. 160-220) one of the principal issues involved was the continuance of the chiliastic expectations in the churches.
After the Montanistic controversy chiliastic views were more and more discredited in the Greek Church; they were, in fact, stigmatized as "Jewish" and consequently "heretical."
Only we must not form our ideas of the great apocalyptic and chiliastic movement of the first decades of the 16th century from the rabble in Munster.
How millennarianism nevertheless found its way, with the help of apocalyptic mysticism and Anabaptist influences into the churches of the Reformation, chiefly among the Reformed sects, but afterwards also in the Lutheran Church, how it became incorporated with Pietism, how in more recent times an exceedingly mild type of "academic" chiliasm has been developed from a belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible, how finally new sects are still springing up here and there with apocalyptic and chiliastic expectations - these are matters which cannot be fully entered upon here.
The book was first taken in a severely literal sense, and particularly in its chiliastic doctrine.