# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S330
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

330 Against Chiliasm etc.

two, namely first a spiritual one and then a bodily one. Is this now not
supposed to be true in the passage before us? Is Paul supposed to
teach here, in the epistle to the Philippians, that he would gladly
rise a thousand years and something more before the last day? — Even
in the Old Testament, Ezekiel already portrays the renewal of Israel
through faith under the image of a magnificent resurrection.

One must interpret the Revelation of John according to what Scripture
otherwise says; but one must never form a meaning out of it into which
one's own will has first been inserted, and then carry this meaning
into the whole Bible. We ought indeed to be more cautious, seeing that
the Pharisees, according to their understanding of the prophets,
thought they had to reject Jesus of Nazareth for certain. I must
consider it weak reasoning when Löhe, from the expression “meeting”
[entgegenkommen] (Phil. 3:11), wants to conclude that Paul cannot here
mean the resurrection that Christians confess in the third article,
because everyone goes forth to meet that resurrection automatically
along with all other men. If Paul speaks of a meeting, he says, then
he must here have in mind a different resurrection, one to which not
all would come. To be sure, the resurrection comes upon all
automatically; but on the godless it falls like a snare upon the neck,
while the believers hasten to meet it with joy. There is, to be sure,
a resurrection of the godless too; but it is not a desired one, rather
an accursed one. In Scripture, “resurrection” often means as much as
“joyful resurrection” — namely when believers speak of it, and these go
to meet it and never remain apart from it. This is also what Paul
desires for himself.

I must find it wrong when Löhe (p. 7, similarly to Hasert in his most
recent tract) constantly speaks in terms of “We,” while at the same
time meaning precisely to refute this “We.” For in doing so he first
becomes a poor advocate of the “We” — that is, of our church's
doctrine — and afterward has an easy game of it as judge. He complains,
in the name of the church's doctrine, about its lack of clarity
concerning the last things, and supposes this comes from our always
thinking, under Christ's return, immediately of the revelation of his
glory on the last day. Everything he complains of there, and his claim
that according to our doctrine we could certainly not now expect
Christ, amounts to nothing. The church's doctrine is very gloriously
clear; but Löhe's chiliastic matters suffer from insurmountable
contradictions, as we believe we have already shown to some extent in
our tract “Against Chiliasm.” Löhe's sermon expressly displaces the
goal for souls when it teaches: one must not direct oneself toward the
last day as toward [illegible], but rather toward another, first coming
of Christ, a thousand years and something before the last day. This,
he holds, the apostles too had done, as “probably” Paul did in the
passage 1 Thess. 4:13–18 (see pp. 8 and 9). Here Paul taught a
resurrection of the believers who had by then died, alone, and a
transformation of the living; these, caught up together into the air,
would then form that host of many thousands of saints who, with Jesus,
certainly no worldly kingdom,