# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S334
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

334 Against Chiliasm etc.

great and noble.” What is one to make of this tiresome talk about
“standpoint”? The Jew's standpoint is in hell! By this manner of
speaking, Satan is, of all beings, most “great and noble.” Did Paul
want to say such things here? Truly the very opposite! Truth is only
One, and morality likewise, and indeed the two are again one, and
neither of the two, nor either taken by itself, falls apart or comes
to ruin, however men may position themselves toward it. What is not
Christian is, in short, immoral. — Paul, after all, wants to show that
a man, for all his mastery of Pharisaic righteousness and for all the
purity of blood of his descent, becomes a persecutor of Christ,
precisely insofar as he still sets store by such things. — And Löhe now
freely and frankly confesses that he sets great store by it. He holds
that there “can also be external distinctions which are of great worth
equally in the judgment of the Christian and in that of the Jew,” and
counts Jewish ancestry among these.

Against this I say: first, a Christian can never, in spiritual matters
— which is, after all, what is at issue here — hold the same judgment
as a Jew who has himself rejected Christ, the eternal truth; and even if
they should sometimes say the very same thing, it would at bottom carry
an opposite sense — and second, external distinctions are never real
distinctions, but always carry their corresponding disadvantages with
them, as for example extraordinary intellectual power, imagination,
wealth, high birth, and the like. God, in his goodness, has in fact,
for all diversity, created everything to a wonderful equality, so that
at bottom no one has any advantage. The worst of it is that Löhe
praises precisely the ancestry of the Jews, and supposes that Paul too
meant to praise it. Löhe thinks that, were he a Jew, his children ought
still to rejoice that Jewish blood flowed in their veins — a joy of
which the Jews of the Old Testament themselves did not think so
highly; indeed God's own leading and the prophecies of the prophets
did not permit it. Israel's glory was never of the kind belonging to a
noble family tree; rather, it was Christ, in the Word — indeed in the
Word and also in the sacrament of prophecy (see 1 Cor. 10:1–4). With
blood, in truth, it was never a matter of much account, as Ishmael and
Esau sufficiently prove. What good does Abraham's blood, or the blood
of the whole world, do us in our veins, since it is altogether sinful
and cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven? We, by contrast, boast of
having Christ's blood, God's blood, flowing in our veins, which helps
the world out of its sins and gives it life. To mention, alongside this
holy, precious blood, some other blood as well, is grave ingratitude.
Löhe holds, however, that the Jewish people will yet play a great,
splendid role in Christendom — the only ones to be pitied being those
Jews who were converted too soon and thereby became absorbed into
Christendom through intermarriage — whereas among the chiliasts it is
the most prolonged obstinacy that receives the greatest triumph, and
God is afterward supposed to unfold, upon Jewish hearts, a power of the
gospel that he had until then held entirely in reserve: genuinely
Calvinist!