# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_October 1857_S298
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

298

(Submitted by Conrector G. Schick.)

The Chiliasm of Certain Distinguished Church Fathers in the First Centuries.

Since in the Christian church the principle has always held: nullum dogma in ecclesia novum et cum tota antiquitate pugnans esse recipiendum (no article of faith is to be accepted which is new in the church and conflicts with all antiquity), therefore not only the defenders of pure doctrine have always appealed to the utterances of great and recognized teachers of the church in earlier times, and especially in the first centuries after the apostles, but so also have those who set up false views of faith and sought to maintain and establish them over against the confession of the pure doctrine — even though as a rule this is done only in order to impress other Christians who still have respect for the faith of the fathers, or else to silence their own conscience, which points reprovingly to the confession of the church, grounded in God's Word and sealed with the blood of the children of God. This phenomenon has repeated itself so often in the course of church history that we are not surprised when in recent times, too, Christians who have again taken up the chiliasm rejected in our Confession as a Jewish error appeal to sayings of the ancient teachers of the church in order to turn aside from their doctrine the reproach of novelty and of being contrary to the church. This, however, they can do with any appearance of right only so long as one does not read the passages in question in those church fathers themselves. For there one finds chiliastic opinions which, though very diverse and in part more refined, in part cruder, yet in all their representatives take such a form that certainly not a single one of the present-day chiliasts within the Lutheran church would hold them so, much less defend them. But if that is so, then this appeal of our chiliasts to passages of the church fathers is a mere show, and in truth they have no right to it; rather, such passages, in the multiformity of chiliasm and in the contradictions which one representative of it raises against another on important points, together with the silliness of the various opinions, furnish only a patristic proof of the erroneousness and reprehensibility of this false doctrine. In order to convince our readers of the truth of these statements, we here let follow, in faithful translation, the passages from the church fathers of the first centuries in which their chiliastic view is set forth, so far as the originals are accessible to us.

Of Papias (according to Irenaeus a disciple of John, who, by his own statement in Eusebius, merely gathered information from hearers of the apostles, and who is therefore not regarded by Eusebius as a disciple of the apostles; he was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia in the first half of the second century) Eusebius says, Hist. eccl. III, 39: "Other things also