# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S336
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

336 Against Chiliasm etc.

and so forth, still desired to have a second Christ. But it is
precisely in this matter that we find him as firm and as clear as
diamond.

If, according to Löhe's presentation, Paul had not rightly let go of
the old, then he had also laid hold of the new but poorly. Paul says,
indeed, often and clearly enough, that Christianity was to him his true
citizenship among a people (Phil. 3:20; Eph. 2:19; Heb. 12:22f.), his
true circumcision, and all wisdom and perfection, all of which he had
through Christ, so that, by contrast, all the rest of Jewish existence
was loss to him; but Löhe holds: the greatest inherited distinctions of
his life, together with all those acquired by effort and diligence
(among them the one chief distinction, of having so bravely persecuted
the church) — these he throws away, and now he accepts Christ! Löhe
adds further: this is the way; he knows no other; there is no second
one. Gently now! A second, indeed not; but this is simply not the
first either, for this, with respect, is no way at all. — What, then,
does it mean to accept Christ and his blood? It surely does not mean
accepting something on the side, as it were, and hanging some
additional thing about oneself — not even learning something, the way
one learns geography or orthography, astronomy or economy; but rather
receiving him as one's innermost life, so that he, this Jesus, God's
Son and true God, is my true self before God, and indeed in eternal,
truest reality, so much so that he even bears my sins and is my
righteousness — and then also wisdom and blessedness: thus he gives
himself in the Word, and thus I receive him in faith. But if I receive
him in this way, then I never had, beforehand, any great — let alone
the greatest — inherited distinctions, nor any distinctions of my life
acquired by effort and diligence, to throw away or to sacrifice;
rather, whatever in me was previously of any worth, he too was that
(but in prophecy) — and whatever he was not, that, viewed by divine
light, was in truth, without any polite excuses or back doors, simply
loss and dirt, whatever it claims to be, and must be discarded as such,
or else one can never truly become glad of this Christ, for he will
never enter into a double marriage with souls. Jewish nationality, and
every nationality, must be discarded, insofar as it wishes to boast of
itself at all, and indeed Jewish nationality before all other
nationalities, because it has been transfigured into Christendom and,
as an earthly nation, has nothing more to seek on earth; it has become
too much of something higher: the eternal, heavenly nation of all the
children of God, just as Abraham's family is an eternal, heavenly
family, and he the father of many Gentiles, namely of all believers.

Insofar as Jewish nationality still wishes to exist, it is the specter
of the Wandering Jew: it wants, in stubborn fashion, to be a nation,
and yet can never again bring this about. God had, after all, long
since prepared this through the deportations and continual
dispersions, so that Israel ceased to be a particular people among
many; it ceased to be so in spirit when they cried out: We have no
king but Caesar, crucify this man! — and outwardly with the destruction
of Jerusalem. But the true Israel is the one people of God of all