# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S339
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— Page 339 —

...passages are God's Word, nor about the necessary fulfillment of
the prophecies contained in them; the Synod believes both. Rather,
the question is whether bright and clear statements of the Lord
himself and his apostles should be the ground of the Christian faith
on which we live and die, or the interpretation of some obscure
prophetic passage, produced by some individual out of his own
private conceit.

The first Christians, too, had built their faith on these clear,
authoritative statements of Scripture, and had kept themselves ready
so that the Day would not overtake them like a snare, and so that
they would not be found to be wicked servants who say, "The Lord is
not coming for a long while yet." When they came upon passages like
Revelation 20 and similar ones, they knew perfectly well that these
were prophetic passages whose sense and meaning would only become
clear through their fulfillment, but which could not possibly carry a
meaning that would cancel out the Lord's own bright statements about
his return, and the earnest exhortations and warnings tied to them —
not to push the Day off into the far distance and grow complacent.
This is exactly what chiliasm does. Besides, they well knew that a
thousand years are before the Lord as one day, and one day as a
thousand years.

That, moreover, such erroneous opinions were by no means widespread
among the first Christians, as the chiliasts claim, but that on the
contrary they had not even thought of such a thing, can be clearly
and plainly seen, among other places, from 2 Peter 3 — where the
subject is unmistakably the return of Christ for the final judgment
and the destruction of the world bound up with it. It was against
this very point — and against the early Christians' generally
vivid, living expectation of it — that the scoffers raised their
mockery, asking: "Where, then, is the promise of his coming? How
futile your hope proves to be! Everything continues just as it has
been since the beginning of creation." Now, had chiliastic teaching
and chiliastic belief been the faith of Christendom — such that no one
could even have conceived of the possibility of the Last Day breaking
in suddenly — how could the scoffers ever have arrived at such
mockery, and how could Peter have answered them as he did?

On the second point, Pastor Schieferdecker was repeatedly reminded:
it is, after all, a recognized principle of scriptural interpretation
that the more obscure passages of Scripture yield to the clear and
bright ones, and are to be interpreted in light of them, and not the
reverse. It is now clear and undeniable that Scripture speaks — and
does so in the very plainest terms, in a way that admits of no other
understanding — of only one still-future, visible return of Christ,
namely for the last judgment on the Last Day, for the conclusion of
his kingdom of grace and for the establishment and revelation, in its
consummation, of his kingdom of glory; that it is precisely for this
coming of the Lord, according to those same clear and bright
statements of Scripture, that every Christian can and should hold
himself ready; that on this all of Christendom on earth has, ever and
always, built its faith and its hope; that this hope of the Lord's
ever-to-be-expected coming, and of the revelation of his glory and
that of his own, has, ever and always, permeated the whole of
Christendom, and has therefore been laid down in its confessions,
textbooks, devotional writings, catechisms, and hymns, and is preached
and confessed today, as in the earliest apostolic times, into all the
world,

[SCAN: as on PDF p. 27, a broad binding shadow runs down the left margin and touches the last seven lines. Every word is still legible on the sheet; no letter was supplied blind.]