# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S333
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Against Chiliasm etc. 333

let yourself be drawn away by all the kingdoms of the world and their
glory. For in this sign alone shall we conquer.

II. Let us turn now to the second part, where in many respects the
gospel is cut still more deeply into the flesh. Löhe treats the
question of how one is to go to meet the (supposed) first resurrection.
He says that this requires letting go and laying hold. Very fine,
if only he had carried it through! But unfortunately, with him, not
much comes of the letting go of the old, and therefore hardly anything
of the laying hold of the new.

At the beginning of the third chapter, Paul rebukes the Pharisaic
Jewish Christians who boasted, over against the Gentile Christians, of
their Jewish descent and circumcision, and thereby wanted to make
Christianity, in effect, into a variant of the old Pharisaism. That
Paul contends so zealously against these people proves that the mere
name “Jesus Christ” does not do it: that name too can be abused, and
one abuses it in the highest and most dangerous degree when one uses
it, after the manner of the Union, to cover over false doctrine and
self-righteousness (which are always one and the same). So those men
did then, and so the chiliasts do today, certainly for the most part
without conscious intent, but all the more dangerously for that. Paul,
then, wants to bring to nothing the Jewish boasting of those people,
and says: after their manner I could boast even better myself
(similarly 2 Cor. 11:21f.), but that would be boasting of the flesh
(v. 4). By this he certainly does not mean to recommend it. He then
says that he too was properly circumcised, a Benjaminite, a genuine
Hebrew, and had become a Pharisee, indeed had attained to such mastery
that he had been a persecutor of the church, a murderer of it, and,
according to the righteousness of the law (of the perverted Jews),
blameless. — Among such people these would be great glories; but, by
way of mockery, he immediately set right underneath them: “persecutor
of the church,” in order to indicate where all this boasting leads: it
is, namely, enmity against Christ — and lest anyone misunderstand him
as though he still attached value, in any sense, to those other
things. In all these matters Löhe now wants to see real national and
moral distinctions, which Paul, he thinks, really means to praise in a
certain respect. Paul means, rather, to set up precisely Judaism — in
so far as it still now wishes to hold fast to its nationality — as
hostile to Christ; likewise if it still wishes to make some religious
use of circumcision, now that the fulfillment of circumcision is
present in baptism (Col. 2:11f. and Phil. 3:2). By no means does he see
in Phariseeism, which he indeed fights to the death, a “moral”
distinction; rather, just like the Lord Christ himself, who must
certainly have known it best (Matt. 23), he sees in it only spiritual
crippling and the deepest moral degeneracy, which makes one a murderer
of the church, just as it already had to murder Christ beforehand.
Löhe goes so far, however, as to hold: “we would indeed now consider it
no high moral distinction to be a persecutor of the church; but that is
simply how it is,” he continues; “one and the same trait of a course of
life can, from the Christian's standpoint, be reprehensible, but from
that of the Jew,