# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_November 1858_S339
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Against Chiliasm, etc. 339

-m, to preach neither wholly for it nor wholly against it. Has now such an agreement ever existed (which I neither know nor ask after, since my own agreement rests solely in the Book of Concord), then it has been wrong; — strangely enough we kept to it nonetheless, for we nowhere attacked the creeping chiliasm — until it now, breaking its own compact, sought through the synodal vote to draw the noose about our neck. Well, he has reckoned without his host; of this we are quite confident, and it is a thing to thank God for, that the matter has now for once come to be discussed. — We shall surely come to an understanding yet, once we first shake hands without Löhe and the Saxon school-paper, and come out quite openly with plain speech.

My position in the matter is this: that I hold the old homely faith of our Church to be alone rich in spirit and comfort, and that I will ever again grasp and embrace the poor gospel of the forgiveness of sins through the blood of Christ as the highest and eternal wisdom and beauty. To the Jews I gladly leave their glory, if they will have it no other way. If things go on as they have long since begun, then we shall not convert the world; rather it will convert us, and sad to say it already triumphs far and wide. Were we but brave and diligent on the field where it counts — and not so overly clever — we should have no cause to complain of boredom, nor to invent new gospels: but the poor present does not please us, the poverty, the cross in it does not please us — we let it go and snatch at the blue nothing. God will demand this of us in earnest. — Since it has come up among Lutheran scholars to see a contradiction to His full divine majesty in Christ's incarnation and humiliation, it cannot surprise us to find chiliasm among them and their friends. If they can no longer grasp, in Christ Himself, His cross, torment, and death as a demonstration of His eternal and, beyond all else, infinitely exalted majesty — namely as a demonstration of that highest love which wholly comprehends omnipotence, omniscience, and wisdom within itself — then they must surely seek His majesty and glory somewhere else — and the same thing will repeat itself in the doctrine of the Church. The wretched handmaid does not please lofty minds. Therefore one must come in the clouds, and indeed long before they have fully learned the mystery of the cross. The glory of Christ's poor Church in the wilderness, fasting and praying among the wild beasts, seems to them too ideal and airy, because they cannot relish the saving power of the cross and of poverty, which alone make that appearance, and know how to cleverly steer clear of it. Instead they wish to help Christ's kingdom and His glory to greater tangibility in the clouds — with lofty but empty words. Help us, God, to go out from ourselves, that we may first understand Christ's glory at the cross.