# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S332
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Against Chiliasm etc. 332

solely from the fact that these forms are still human and afflicted
with sin; but when the Lord himself creates the form for his kingdom
from above, then only his disciples, pure wheat, will be in it, and the
mere chaff must immediately catch fire within itself like rotting hay:
the separation is, after all, necessarily the judgment. — But the whole
misfortune is this, that one fails to recognize the inexpressible
spiritual glory of the church of Christ that is now allotted to us
(see the epistle to the Ephesians): one abandons the church on earth
and snaps hungrily at the air. — —

To be sure, the chiliasts do not like it when their affairs are held
up to clear light; instead they appeal to Scripture, claiming that it
is written there just as they say. But this is a misuse of Scripture,
for in it there stands no chiliasm, but rather a kingdom of the cross
is described, whose field and soil is the world, in which many do not
hear, and three-quarters of the hearers are still vain hearers who
deceive themselves. Nevertheless all peoples are indeed to be made
disciples through baptism and taught, whether then many or few of them
believe, however it may turn out. — The Christians, after all, always
reign together with Christ — and indeed most mightily when, through
their faithfulness in confessing, they compel the world to imprison
and crucify them. — The chiliasts are the ones who first make the
claim, as the sermon in question also expressly asserts, that they set
the last things in a quite different clarity than our church's
doctrine does: well then, their images must also be able to bear the
light of the sun. But they vanish before the ordinary gospel of the
forgiveness of sins and of the justification of the sinner through
faith alone. — If this gospel is certain to us, then chiliasm too is
thereby judged for us. — We ask every impartial reader to go through
the sermon before us, to see whether even a breath of our doctrine of
justification is to be found in it, indeed whether it does not
contradict that doctrine at its deepest foundation. No, it is not the
doctrine in this sermon that is “harmonious” and clear, as it claims to
be; rather it is fantastical and unevangelical, whereas our church's
doctrine appears to us wholly clear, so far as eternity can now be
clear to us. Only one who has beforehand somewhat forgotten the
resurrection of Christ — which we here, in faith, can and should enjoy
to the fullest and unending sufficiency — goes seeking some other first
resurrection. But just as the baptism of the Anabaptists is no real
second baptism, because there is only One, namely the first, which God
himself administers to us when we are baptized by him as children, so
too the chiliasts' “first resurrection” is essentially a denial of the
resurrection that has already, most gloriously, taken place here in
Christ, through which we, as long as we only believe, are constantly
already risen ones, as Paul writes of it in Ephesians 2. — What the
chiliasts seek in the air has long since drawn near, namely the
kingdom of heaven, inexpressibly glorious — but in a poor form — and
the chiliasts are rich people. — O you dear, poor Lord Jesus, remember
us in your glory, that we may not let your holy poverty be talked out
of us by the devil! We once already let ourselves be talked out of
paradise for an apple; preserve us, that we may not now turn away from
you, who from your poverty