# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S338
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

338 Against Chiliasm, etc.

-mon would be little read here in any case. So I also wish that Löhe would not read this critique of his sermon at all, since I do not wish to grieve him now (though I cannot help writing against his sermon), and because I still hope that the otherwise sound Löhe will himself soon set the publisher of the sickness-sermon right. God will surely not forget him for having stood firm in the disgraceful Bavarian retreat affair, when high persons strewed scornful incense before the great dragon in order to secure their "future effectiveness" (good for the church of the future). But what is black cannot be called white, and the wrong was this, that our church paper recommended this sermon to our congregations. Our church paper is a paper of our Prussian Church as a whole, recommended by our Synod and by the Supreme Church Council, so that one is almost bound to take it — and it recommended chiliasm*), so it seems at least — or does it not? Is chiliasm, then, still a matter that ought to be examined in the Church? The learned may go on examining it as often as they please; the Church, however, has rejected it at Augsburg. —

One should not suppose, however, that we picked this quarrel with chiliasm out of a clear sky. No, it was a matter of defending our very life, and that is why we wrote against chiliasm. The story is roughly this. At the last Synod a unionist missionary to the Jews and extreme chiliast listened in on our deliberations. Toward the end of the Synod he submitted a petition to the Synod, in which he asks it to appoint missionaries to the Jews, and openly professes his chiliasm. Then a voice of the Synod recommends — seeing that we indeed had no money for the appointment of missionaries to the Jews — that we nevertheless approve the motives, that is, the underlying views of the petition, that is to say, chiliasm itself. So a vote of the Synod in favor of chiliasm was wanted. This was wrong in many respects, for the Synod has no authority whatsoever to decide or recommend anything in matters of doctrine; that belongs to the teaching estate alone (?) — and secondly, our Church has long since rejected chiliasm. How, indeed, could the Synod now approve chiliasm, when only fourteen days before it had unanimously and with enthusiasm resolved on the printing of Pastor Wolf's synodal sermon, in which the chiliasm rumored among us, though quite briefly, was nonetheless deservedly rejected?"**) — Now, after fourteen days, several at once rose up against the proposal that had been put forward, appealing to our holy confession. Against this it was objected that it had earlier been agreed by protocol in Breslau (of which we knew nothing), in the matter of chilias-

*) If we Lutherans, who since 1517 have borne so much — and we in Prussia, who in more recent times too have taken a good deal upon ourselves, for the sake of pure doctrine alone — now ourselves recommend false doctrine or hold it up for choosing, then we are the most foolish people alive, who rebuild what we ourselves tore down (Gal. 3:3, cf. 2:18). We leave the lofty papacy on account of its false doctrine — and rightly so — and would build in its place a new and yet more wretched one, in which the Jews would be pope and cardinals at once: I hope the devil will not find us so foolish.—

**) It was, incidentally, also wrong that the sermon on which the Synod had unanimously resolved afterward fell into oblivion and was never printed after all.