# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_M rz 1857_S87
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

A Testimony of Dr. Hengstenberg against Chiliasm. 87

...thousand-year kingdom still to come is well known to be rejected in Article 17 of the Augsburg Confession) against it. So in the Expounded Revelation, p. 672: "The years still to come were, in the Evangelical Church, wherever anyone let himself be seen holding to them, regarded as suspect, and abandoned above all to those who bound themselves to no fixed confession. These took up the matter all the more eagerly, and thereby made it only the more hated."*) The vivid awareness that Satan's power and capacity to deceive had been broken at the moment of Christ's appearing gave rise, in the ancient Church, to the assumption — one that, admittedly, paid no regard at all to the context — that the thousand years were to be counted from the birth of the Savior. Cassiodorus appeals, for this view, which through the authority of Augustine became established throughout the Middle Ages, to the agreement of the fathers (qui tamen consensu patrum a nativitate domini computantur ne credituras gentes libera potestate confunderet — "who nevertheless, by the consensus of the fathers, are reckoned from the Lord's nativity, lest it confound the nations that are to believe, as to their free will").**) On the basis of this interpretation, people were, around the year one thousand,

*) What has been noted, however, applies in its full extent only to the Lutheran Church. In the Reformed Church the opinion of a thousand-year kingdom still to come found a good many adherents even before the Pietist era. Wolf, in the Curae, says: "Mille annos jam praeteriisse, nostratium theologorum communis est sententia. — Secundum sententiam (concerning the futurity of the thousand-year kingdom) ex nostratibus nonnulli, in primis vero illi, qui fanaticis sententiis parum sibi caverunt, nominatim J. G. Petersenius, ex Reformatis vero multi exornandam susceperunt." That is, in German: that the 1000 years have already passed is the general opinion of our theologians. The opinion of the futurity of the thousand-year kingdom has been held by some of our own — especially, however, by those who took little care against enthusiastic opinions, namely Petersen — while among the Reformed many have undertaken to argue a good deal for it.

**) What Cassiodorus says here of the "agreement of the fathers" admittedly needs qualification. In the times when Christian theology was still in the process of formation, there were indeed, with regard to the thousand-year kingdom, some strange notions to be found — cf. Münscher, "The Doctrine of the Thousand-Year Kingdom in the First Three Centuries," in Henke's Magazine, vol. 6. There, people frequently assumed a resurrection of the righteous prior to the general resurrection, a mingling of these risen ones with those not yet dead, an outward restoration of Jerusalem, with a confusion of what is said in the Apocalypse concerning the thousand-year kingdom and what is said concerning the new Jerusalem, under a reversal of the order of Scripture — as, for example, Tertullian says, Adv. Marc. I.3.c.25: "We confess that a kingdom is promised to us on earth before we come into heaven, namely for a thousand years after the resurrection, in the city of Jerusalem created by God, which will descend from heaven." Cf. what Eusebius says in Bk. 3, ch. 28, concerning Cerinthus; Justin, in the Dialogue with Trypho, ch. 80; Irenaeus, Bk. 5, ch. 33ff. But this interpretation of the Apocalypse was never the only prevailing one. Justin says there were many, even among those devoted to the pure doctrine, who did not share this belief — cf., on this remark of Justin's, Semisch, "Justin the Martyr," vol. 2, p. 469: "It is well known that not the slightest trace of chiliastic opinions is to be found either in the letters of Clement of Rome, of Ignatius and Polycarp, or in the apologetic writings of Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch." The fanaticism of the Montanists, who latched onto these notions already present in the Church, strengthened the aversion to them. Through the growing dev-