# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S86
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

86 A Testimony of Dr. Hengstenberg against Chiliasm.

In the closing of the peace of the Church, therefore, regard must be had not only to which chief articles of Christian doctrine it is absolutely necessary for all to believe, such that one may not be unacquainted with them without prejudice to faith and salvation, but also to the doctrine that has been entrusted to the Church, so that God may beget and rear and nourish spiritual sons in the faith, and to whose defense and preservation from error and corruption she is obligated. But she is bound, as said above, to the protection and preservation of the whole of Christian doctrine. It therefore remains firm and unshakeable that syncretism, or a sinful and unlawful peace of the Church, is one which is concluded while discord concerning Christian doctrine still persists — even though people may agree among themselves on some parts of it, namely those which can suffice for the salvation of the simpler and uneducated folk."

A Testimony of Dr. Hengstenberg against Chiliasm.

The deeper the chiliastic error has now penetrated into recent theology, the more welcome it is, by contrast, to meet with a decided testimony against it in the very writings of a Hengstenberg. He published a commentary on the Revelation of St. John in the year 1850. Since this is probably in the hands of only a few of our esteemed readers, it may not be unwelcome to many if we here communicate from it a passage concerning chiliasm. It is as follows:

We have the thousand-year kingdom already behind us, and stand at C. 21:7–9, at Satan's release from his prison after the end of the thousand years, and his going out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth, to gather them together for battle; this conviction expressed by us has, as we foresaw — because it stands in open contradiction to the traditional and prevailing views — found little favor, astonished many, and even given offense to some.

The astonishment at the view here set forth would in any case have been much less had one remembered that the view now current, and commonly held without further ado to be the properly churchly one — according to which the thousand-year kingdom is still to come in the future — was first put into circulation by Bengel and adopted by Pietism. Schröckh, in his Biographies of Famous Scholars, vol. 3, p. 98, says: "Since Bengel, the aversion to chiliasm, which was formerly a mark of orthodoxy in our Church, has vanished among many." Bengel himself concedes, in quite a number of passages, that he