# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1857_S387
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

[p. 387]

The Chiliasts' expectation that either a general resurrection of all
believers, or at least of all martyrs, will take place more than 1,000
years before the Last Day thus makes that word of the Lord into a lie. It
is useless to appeal to those exceptions which Holy Scripture expressly
mentions, for these exceptions are miracles performed to confirm the word
and deeds of Christ, not parts of an unfolding of the kingdom of God, as
the Chiliasts imagine the [scriptural] resurrections to be. The order in
which the resurrection takes place is clearly described in 1 Cor.
15:23-24: Christ is the firstfruits; afterward they that are His, at His
coming; then the end — not the thousand-year kingdom! — Finally, we learn
from Heb. 12:25-28 that with the New Testament a dispensation of God has
begun which, unlike the Old Testament one, will not undergo any further
change — "the kingdom which cannot be moved" — out of which believers
pass into eternal life in heaven. The final approach to the holy city, the
new Jerusalem, which is being prepared as a bride adorned for her husband,
is the economy by which we now see the Lord "through a glass, darkly,"
and not yet face to face, 1 Cor. 13:12.

Appendix B.

*Chemnitii Examen decretorum Concilii Tridentini*, general edition, p. 45
[Martin Chemnitz, *Examination of the Council of Trent*].

[Latin, translated:] ...The third question, then, is this: whether those
writings about which doubt existed in the most ancient Church, on account
of some people's contradiction of them — because the testimonies of the
primitive Church did not agree concerning them — whether, I say, the
present-day Church can make those writings canonical, catholic, and equal
to those of the first rank? The papists not only argue that they can do
this, but in fact usurp that authority, entirely doing away with the
distinction — necessary to the primitive and most ancient Church — between
canonical books and apocryphal or merely ecclesiastical ones. But it is
most evident from what we have said that the Church has no such authority
at all; for by the same reasoning she could just as well reject canonical
books or canonize spurious ones. This whole matter, as we have said,
depends on certain testimonies of that Church which existed in the time of
the Apostles, testimonies which the Church that immediately followed
received and preserved in reliable, trustworthy histories. Where, then,
the most certain documents of the primitive and most ancient Church — from
the testimonies of the ancients, who lived not long after the time of the
Apostles — cannot be produced to show that the books in question were,
without contradiction or doubt, accepted and commended to the Church as
legitimate and certain, no human decrees can make up for it. For what
insolent audacity it is to rule as follows: "Granted that the primitive
Church, and the most ancient Church that followed it, doubted concerning
those books because of the contradiction of many churchmen, since
sufficiently sure and firm testimonies of their authority were not extant
— nevertheless, notwithstanding this, we decree that they must be received
as altogether certain, with authority equal to those that have always been
judged legitimate."

...The situation of that Church which existed at the time those books were
first written is different from that of the Church which followed
afterward. For the latter only preserves and transmits to posterity the
testimony of the earliest Church; it neither ought to, nor can, determine
anything about those books for which it lacks sure documentation from the
testimony of the earliest Church.