The millennium and the resurrection of the flesh: is the thousand years on a renewed earth apostolic teaching or an embarrassment the Church rightly dropped?

Irenaeus of Lyons, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Irenaeus of Lyons answers

The flesh comes first, because the kingdom follows from it and is no separate curiosity. Those who draw their opinions from heretical discourses are ignorant both of God's dispensations and of the mystery of the resurrection of the just, and of the earthly kingdom, which is the commencement of incorruption, in which those who are worthy grow accustomed, little by little, to partake of the divine nature.¹

It is just that the righteous first receive the inheritance promised to the fathers and reign in it when they rise to behold God in this creation renewed, and that the judgment come afterwards. In the very creation where they toiled and were afflicted and slain for love of God, they should be revived and receive their reward; in the creation where they endured servitude, they should reign.¹

A God who has fed this flesh and tried it in suffering has not made it for the worm. Whether the Church did well to drop this I cannot grant, because I did not receive it as an opinion to be kept or dropped. The apostle makes it plain in Romans: the creature waits for the manifestation of the sons of God, and the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into their glorious liberty.¹

Then there is Abraham. God said to him, All the earth which thou seest I will give to thee and to thy seed for ever, and yet he did not receive a footstep of it, but was always a stranger and a pilgrim there.² Either the promise stands firm, and he receives it in the flesh on the earth made new, or God has spoken and not performed. Those who turn the promises into allegories cannot say what they are allegories of, and so end by spiritualising the resurrection itself into the heretics' doctrine.

Nor did I make this up. The presbyters, the disciples of the apostles, handed down the gradation of the saved: some will be taken up into the heavens, some will dwell in paradise, some will possess the splendour of the city, and for this reason the Lord said, In My Father's house are many mansions.³ They say that the saved ascend through the Spirit to the Son and through the Son to the Father, and that in due time the Son yields up His work to the Father, that God may be all in all.³

In the times of the kingdom the righteous man upon the earth shall forget to die.³ I heard Polycarp in my youth, and he taught always what he had received from the apostles and what the Church has handed down; I hold the kingdom among those things, and I will not strike out of the deposit what the elders put into it.⁴ The kingdom is one stage on a road whose end is the Father, and the same Spirit who raises the body, as the Demonstration says, brings it into the kingdom of God.⁵

I ask you to hold that road whole: the same flesh that dies in the Lord rises, reigns in the creation where it suffered, and goes on to see God.

The position in brief

This flesh rises, the same flesh that is nourished now by the body and blood of the Lord; what the Eucharist feeds is not left in the grave.⁶⁷ The heretics who promise a salvation of souls alone despise the Maker and deny the Lord's own flesh. After the Antichrist and the first resurrection the just will reign with Christ on the earth made new, in the kingdom the prophets promised and the Lord promised when he said he would drink the fruit of the vine new with his disciples; then the general resurrection, the judgment, the new heaven and new earth, and the degrees of dwelling the Father prepares.⁸ The promises are not to be allegorised away, for the God who makes flesh keeps his word to it.⁹¹⁰

Sources

the [earthly] kingdom which is the commencement of incorruption, by means of which kingdom those who shall be worthy are accustomed gradually to partake of the divine nature
Against Heresies, Book V
all the earth which thou seest, I will give to thee and to thy seed, even for ever... [yet] he did not receive an inheritance in it, not even a footstep, but was always a stranger and a pilgrim therein.
Against Heresies, Book V
The presbyters, the disciples of the apostles, affirm that this is the gradation and arrangement of those who are saved, and that they advance through steps of this nature
Against Heresies, Book V
having always taught the things which he had learned from the apostles, and which the Church has handed down, and which alone are true.
Against Heresies, Book III
the body receiving the soul again, and along with it, by the power of the Holy Spirit, being raised up and entering into the kingdom of God.
The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching
Remember, therefore, my beloved friend, that thou hast been redeemed by the flesh of our Lord, re-established by His blood; and "holding the Head, from which the whole body of the Church, having been fitted together, takes increase" --that is, acknowledging the advent in the flesh of the Son of God, and [His] divinity (deum), and looking forward with constancy to His human nature Chapter XV.--Proofs of the…
Against Heresies, Book V
But how can they be consistent with themselves, [when they say] that the bread over which thanks have been given is the body of their Lord, and the cup His blood, if they do not call Himself the Son of the Creator of the world, that is, His Word, through whom the wood fructifies, and the fountains gush forth, and the earth gives "first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear." 5.
Against Heresies, Book IV
For the new flesh which rises again is the same which also received the new cup. And He cannot by any means be understood as drinking of the fruit of the vine when settled down with his [disciples] above in a super-celestial place; nor, again, are they who drink it devoid of flesh, for to drink of that which flows from the vine pertains to flesh, and not spirit. 2.
Against Heresies, Book V
For blood can only come from veins and flesh, and whatsoever else makes up the substance of man, such as the Word of God was actually made.
Against Heresies, Book V
For thus He said: "Lift up thine eyes, and look from this place where now thou art, towards the north and south, and east and west.
Against Heresies, Book V

Where the argument is made

Against Heresies V.1-14 on the resurrection of this flesh from Paul
V.2.2-3 on the Eucharist as the pledge that the flesh nourished by Christ's body and blood is capable of incorruption
V.25-30 on the Antichrist and the number of the beast
V.31-36 on the earthly kingdom of the just, the renewed creation, the vine with ten thousand branches that Papias heard from John, and the degrees of the final state
Demonstration 41-42

How the argument was received

The teaching later readers tried to leave out of his book, and which he regarded as the plain sense of the prophets and the Lord's own words, inseparable from the goodness of the flesh he defended everywhere else.