# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S338
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— Page 338 —

[continuing Pastor Gruber's letter] "...He no longer wishes to assert
that Christ will appear 'visibly' to establish the thousand-year
kingdom. He complains that this hope, grounded in Christ's own word,
is turned into heresy and condemned under the name of chiliasm; that
this makes Christ himself a heretic, along with all the first
Christians who, according to Revelation 20, believed and hoped the
same thing, turning them into chiliasts."

Regarding the word "chiliasm," which Pastor Gruber had taken amiss,
the Synod replied: this word is used, in agreement with the whole
Church, to designate the false interpretation of prophetic passages
and the false doctrine built on it of a still-impending thousand-year
kingdom — just as, for example, the in-itself glorious name
"catholic" is now used for the papists, or the word "evangelical" for
the Unionists. By "chiliasts," then, one means those people who take
and interpret the thousand years of Revelation in such a way that
they thereby contradict other clear passages and plain statements of
Holy Scripture, violate the analogy of faith, injure important
articles of faith, and thus plainly set up false doctrine. The first
Christians were simply not chiliasts. That everything they found in
Scripture as prophecy would have its fulfillment, they certainly
believed; the "how and when" they left to the Lord. But in their
faith and their hope of an ever-to-be-expected return of Christ for
the final judgment, they held to the plain statements of the Lord and
his holy apostles. For it is not of every coming of the Lord — also
in other ways, such as through death, etc. — but precisely of this,
his return in glory, that it is expressly said to all: Watch.

In the course of the discussion that followed, Pastor Schieferdecker
maintained:

1. The first Christians must, according to Revelation 20, have
believed that the return of Christ for the final judgment had to be
deferred for at least a further thousand years.

2. He too must conclude, from the context of the text — particularly
chapters 19 and 20 of Revelation — that the thousand years still lie
ahead, since it speaks there clearly of the prior removal of the
Antichrist and all his being, as well as of all the powers that have
resisted the kingdom.

3. In a Christian heart, waiting and constant readiness for the
coming of Christ can nevertheless well be reconciled. One may wish, in
a Christian way: "Oh, that the Lord would come today!" — one may also
walk as though he were coming today, as the apostle says, "our
citizenship is in heaven" — and yet one must give God's Word the
honor of believing that nothing in it is spoken in vain. Everything,
each and all of it, must be fulfilled.

Since, in the course of the proceedings, Pastor Schieferdecker often
used such and similar turns of phrase in a manner that had to be
taken by the Synod as implying the accusation that it rejected
passages like Revelation 20 outright, and did not believe in the
fulfillment of everything God has spoken in his holy Word, he had to
be repeatedly and earnestly reminded that in doing so he was, in a
disingenuous manner injurious to the Synod, shifting the actual point
at issue in order to evade giving a definite answer to a definite
question. The matter at hand was not at all whether the passages cited