# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_Januar 1860_S6
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

6    Preface to the 1860 Volume.

...will inevitably follow) into fanaticism and enthusiasm, then they are likewise to be excluded from the fellowship of the Church. But so long as they make their opinion nothing more than their opinion, which they wish to force upon no one, and which they bring into no connection with becoming justified and blessed, so long there is no ground for denying them sacramental fellowship, and whoever nevertheless does so acts in an unchurchly manner." In what follows, Ehlers communicates, as proof that Löhe's Chiliasm is not church-divisive, a statement by the Inspector of the Mission Seminary, Bauer, in Neuendettelsau, in which we read, among other things, as follows: "As for the weight which we place on this doctrine, we freely confess to it, and believe also that we are able to demonstrate, in every respect, what we teach as not standing in contradiction to the doctrine of our Lutheran Church, and as an essential link in the historical development of the Kingdom of God. But we do not place such weight upon it that we would regard it as an article of faith, or attribute to those who held the other view a deficiency of knowledge in some essential part of the revealed counsel and will of God, such as might be necessary to salvation, or such as might be church-divisive. We grant every Lutheran full liberty to follow this view or that according to his conscience, since it is a matter of hope, concerning which in the end only the outcome will decide. Both, however, share one and the same hope: that Christ will present His kingdom, spiritually and bodily perfected, on the new earth. It is merely a matter of accepting or not accepting an intermediate stage and a transitional period, which must, after all, surely be granted as possible and conceivable, unless one imagines something monstrous in order to find it inconceivable*) . . . But if one brands the undeniably (!) biblical view as heresy, as the Missourians did in the case of Schieferdecker, then let those who do so see to it how they will answer for it.**) These are American conditions, which among us, if I see rightly, are in full advance. God preserve us in the pure Lutheran doctrine, but keep us from the deification of Lutheran theology and from the fanaticism of dogmatism and scholasticism and all system-mania." So far Bauer. Ehlers adds: "My misgivings against Chilias-

...of those in error, that they do not represent the acceptance of their errors as necessary to salvation, but only desire toleration of them, and only too gladly make union with the orthodox, as history proves. For in conscience they cannot possibly have the assurance that their delusion is necessary to salvation; only the satanically hardened Antichrist says that, while even he in his own conscience is convinced of the opposite.    L. u. W.

*) As if the question here were what is conceivable! The question is whether it is biblical, and whether it can be biblical, to hope for something whose expectation stands in contradiction with settled Christian articles of faith.    L. u. W.

**) Here all at once the harmless "opinion" becomes an "undeniably biblical view!"    L. u. W.