# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S335
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Against Chiliasm etc. 335

No, Paul now sets absolutely no value on ancestry at all; and indeed, in
remembrance of his former pride, he now calls ancestry, and
circumcision, and the whole business of Phariseeism, dung and dirt —
why? Because it would not really be dirt? — No, because it truly is,
just like the harm of our own time (p. 20), nothing more than that.
This does not mean that, by nature, the ancestry of the Jewish people
is to be despised above that of other peoples, as the rabble does;
rather, insofar as this ancestry was supposed to mean something
religious, that is, something spiritual, and thereby had to come into
conflict with Christ, in whom the law has reached its end (Rom. 10:4;
Matt. 5:17). Therefore those things are not merely dirt, but have also
become pure harm to the soul. It is harm done to Christianity,
therefore, when people now again wish to praise Jewish ancestry, and to
establish Jewish families and congregations with supposedly pure Jewish
blood; it is harm done to Christianity to praise circumcision in any
way now, or even Phariseeism with its greatness and nobility, in bitter,
fleshly zeal. The whole of chiliasm is harm done to Christianity, for
it stands — as Paul demonstrates nowhere more beautifully than precisely
here in the epistle to the Philippians — not with justification by
faith alone. He says: if one wants to be found in Christ, and truly to
bear his righteousness upon oneself, if one wants to know the power of
his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, and to become
like his holy death, then the old Pharisaic history must be hated by
one not merely superficially, but from the heart. Löhe, however, passes
over this with unbelievable haste in his sermon, without turning to
any real interpretation of this main point; Löhe asks himself: “But why
does Paul speak again so lowly of his high (?) national and yet also
(?) moral (?) distinctions?” — and answers himself: “Because he sets
them in comparison with Christ Jesus (??) — He was an enthusiastic Jew
(indeed, up until Damascus — afterward nothing less, as Phil. 3 shows,
among other things), but when his Lord and Savior Jesus came before
his eyes, then all his distinctions turned for him into mere loss and
refuse.” — What, then, is one to make of this? Who, after all, is our
Savior Jesus? I take him to be the real and the only truth. And did
this truth only occasionally come before Paul's eyes? No, truly — once
he saw Jesus come before his eyes on the road to Damascus, he kept him
ever after continually before his eyes; indeed, not only that, but,
what says far more, continually in his heart as well, so that he lives,
thinks, desires, wishes, and hopes wholly in Christ; and if the sight
of Jesus turns those supposed distinctions into loss and refuse, then
they truly are that — or are they not, and did Jesus wrongly make them
so? What is all this supposed to mean? If Paul had converted in such a
way that later, at times, Jesus, the truth, did not stand before his
eyes, and he again honored what he had, through Christ, recognized as
loss and ruin, then his conversion would not have amounted to much;
then he would have, in his own person, in his nationality, and