# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Juni 1858_S177
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Testimonies of the Church Fathers against Chiliasm. 177

-bles, which they call traditions, a golden Jerusalem coming down from heaven, and are unwilling in turn to suffer the wound of circumcision, nor to offer sacrifices of bulls and rams, nor to dream of a sabbath rest — as many of our own writers, and in particular the book of Tertullian entitled "On the Hope of Believers," the seventh book of the Institutes of Lactantius, the repeated presentations of Victorinus of Pettau, more recently our own Severus in the dialogue he has called Gallus, and — to name Greeks as well, and to add the first and the last — Irenaeus and Apollinaris, promise.

Epiphanius (Bishop of Salamis on Cyprus, † 403), Haereses 28, and Philastrius (Bishop of Brescia, † 390), Haereses 59, count the Chiliasts among the heretics. Augustine does the same, Haereses 8.

The Roman bishop Damasus condemned the error of the Chiliasts at the Synod of Rome in the year 373.

Augustine († 430), De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus, says — and after him Gennadius of Marseille († 495) and Rabanus Maurus (Archbishop of Mainz, † February 4, 856): "Let us expect in the divine promises of grace nothing earthly, nothing transitory, as the Meletians hope; not marital fellowship, as Cerinthus and Marcion rave; not what pertains to food and drink, in which, following the lead of Papias, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Lactantius content themselves; nor let us hope that after the resurrection there will be, for a thousand years, a kingdom of Christ on earth, and that the saints will reign with him in pleasures, as Nepos taught, who invented a first resurrection of the righteous and a second of the ungodly, and that between these two resurrections the peoples who do not know God would be kept in the flesh in the corners of the lands — who, after the thousand-year reign of the righteous on earth, would be incited by the devil to war against the reigning righteous, and would be subdued by the Lord, who fights for the righteous, with a rain of fire, and, having thus died, would together with the rest who died in ungodliness be raised again to eternal punishments with imperishable flesh."

To this may also be reckoned the statements of the church fathers: 1) in which they say that Christ's kingdom is not an earthly and worldly one; 2) in which they connect the resurrection, the Last Judgment, and the glorification of believers directly with the second coming of Christ; 3) in which they describe the condition of believers after the resurrection as heavenly and spiritual; 4) in which they say that rest and deliverance from suffering in this world does not fall to believers' lot. Of this kind are the following passages:

Origen († 254), Homily 5 on Psalm 36: "The hoped-for future promise, grace, and inheritance will be of such a kind that the mouth of the righteous will not be filled with food and drink, nor with pleasures and sensual delights,

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