Max R. King is the founder of the school of thought known as "transmillennialism". King was a minister in the Churches of Christ for 40 years before developing Transmillennialism. King pioneered a field of theology that he termed "covenant eschatology." Within fundamentalist and conservative Evangelical contexts, he contended that Biblical eschatology was not related to the end of the space-time universe, but to the transition of the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. King offered a unique interpretation concerning the millennium as found in Revelation 20 as pertaining to the forty-year period from 30-70 AD. He called this time "the transition period" from Old Covenant to New Covenant. In King's view, this transition opened the way for the full presence of God to dwell with all of humanity. To describe this relationship, King coined the phrase "Comprehensive Grace." King's transmillennialism emerged in the late 1990s as an alternative to dispensational premillennialism, amillennialism or postmillennialism. It differentiated itself from Reformed preterism and Christian reconstructionism in view of postmodern issues facing the emerging church and the need to forward its scholarship in the context of historical Jesus studies. In King's view, the covenantal transformation of the first century serves as a model for personal, organizational and societal transformation today. King's first major book, The Spirit of Prophecy, was published in 1971. He published a monthly print journal, The Living Presence, for 15 years; it is currently available in electronic format. King's annual "Covenant Eschatology Seminar" spanned the 1990s and continued through the early 2000s as the "Transmillennial" national conference. Some of King's other major works include Old Covenant Israel and New Covenant Salvation and The Cross and The Parousia of Christ. His work has now attracted the attention of Spiral Dynamics practitioners like Don Edward Beck, interspiritual pioneers like Kurt Johnson, and Integral theorists like Ken Wilber. Max's final manuscript, a study of Romans 9-11 that purports to do for realized soteriology what his previous works did for realized eschatology, is due in late 2017. King's "full preterist" position has been widely criticized by churchmen, including R. C. Sproul, for denying hope of bodily resurrection of the dead, or indeed any hope for those living after AD70. King lives in Dacula, Georgia, USA. His organization is Presence International. His son, Doug King, is President of Presence International.
