# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S337
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Against Chiliasm, etc. 337

...times, Christendom.—Circumcision must go, for Christ is no longer in it, since He appeared in the flesh and instituted baptism as something far higher, namely as the fellowship of His atoning and ever newly-begetting death; all pride in any natural, human being, ability, knowledge, or striving must go, or else one cannot grasp Christ. But Löhe now lets Christ be grasped in such a way that the whole of Jewry is thereby held in reserve, and to this very day he still (!) boasts of his Jewish descent. That does the prince of Pharisaic Jewry good, and grieves Christ to the heart.—

Ah, does not everyone see that this Jewish business now coming up stands in the strongest opposition to our Church, which indeed rests on justification by faith alone! And of this nothing is said in the sermon: is it still to pass under a Lutheran title?

III. In keeping with what has been stated, such too are the applications which Löhe makes of his teaching in the third part of his sermon. He rebukes us for not believing in his first resurrection, and finds the root of all corruption in the Church since Constantine the Great in this, that chiliasm has not been pursued with zeal (p. 17), and he scolds thoroughly those who call it enthusiasm, namely the Lutheran Church, whose very name he himself bears. Indeed he mocks the fact that we regard chiliasm as a thing which "disturbs the well-appointed Church in the comfortable enjoyment of her homely faith." Ah, that was too much! — May his illness excuse it! It is indeed only bitter to weep that on Christ's Church one abscess after another must ever break open: and now they even mock "the well-appointed Church"—now, God knows it is lamentable, how she is being torn apart—and now Löhe too joins in? Whom is one to trust any longer? Would to God we stood rightly in the blessed, old-fashioned "homely" childlike faith, and did not seek such lofty arts in the air:—we have no "comfortable enjoyment" to boast of or hope for in this; the world sees to that in a thousand shapes, and now Löhe too! The old homely faith still has more glory of the Spirit in it than all the enthusiasms of the whole world heaped into one, once one truly and earnestly stoops down to it. Löhe indeed supposes that the Lord is now again awakening the voice of the prophets (unfortunately the devil, too, is warming up the old heresies again)—"light falls upon passages long (even to Luther and the whole Lutheran Church) no longer understood": a pity that they are for the most part will-o'-the-wisps, and this time it was only the will-o'-the-wisp of chiliasm.

I would certainly never have mentioned Löhe's sermon, for on the one hand it grieved me sorely, both for his own sake and for the sake of our Church, and on the other hand I hoped that he would later of his own accord return from this path — onto which he had strayed during his illness, when every man is most sorely tempted — ; it was indeed also to be expected that a Bavarian ser-